Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

4 Public Management and Administration
school of thought occurs as a result of the rise of an alternative, in this case
public management. As Kuhn argues, ‘the decision to reject one paradigm is
always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading
to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and
with one another’ (1970, p. 77, emphasis in the original). Paradigmatic change
involves the comparison of theories, neither of which work perfectly. If there
are problems with the public management reforms, the response will be further
changes in the managerial direction. Public management is argued to be a new
paradigm.
The emergence of a new approach
By the beginning of the 1990s, a new model of public sector management had
emerged in most advanced countries and many developing ones. Initially, the
new model had several names, including: ‘managerialism’ (Pollitt, 1993); ‘new
public management’ (Hood, 1991); ‘market-based public administration’
(Lan and Rosenbloom, 1992); the ‘post-bureaucratic paradigm’ (Barzelay,
1992) or ‘entrepreneurial government’ (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). Despite
the differing names, they all essentially describe the same phenomenon. The
literature has more or less settled on new public management, often abbreviated
to NPM, a term coined by Hood (1991), a persistent critic. Ten years on
perhaps the time has came to question at what point the ‘new’ should be
dropped from the title.
In the United Kingdom there were reforms in the 1980s, such as the widespread
privatization of public enterprises and cuts to other parts of the public sector
during the Thatcher government. Before long theorists began to see the trend
as being to a new form of management. Rhodes, drawing on Hood (1991), saw
managerialism in Britain as a ‘determined effort to implement the “3Es” of economy,
efficiency and effectiveness at all levels of British government’ (1991, p. 1).
By 1999, Horton would argue ‘during the 1980s and 1990s the civil service
moved from an administered to a managed bureaucracy and from a system of
public administration to one of new public management (NPM)’ (1999, p. 145).
In the United States, a key event was the publication in 1992 of Reinventing
Government by Osborne and Gaebler (1992). Even if simplistic at times with
its use of anecdotal examples and its similarity to other works looking at the
private sector (Peters and Waterman, 1982), Reinventing Government became
a runaway best-seller. The book cover included an endorsement by then presidential
candidate Governor Bill Clinton. It was no surprise that, after his election,
the new president would take an avid interest in reforming government,
giving the task of conducting the National Performance Review to his Vice-
President Al Gore (Gore, 1993). This review was clearly influenced by
Osborne and Gaebler, in the diagnosis of the problem as being too much
bureaucracy, the solutions advanced, and the language of reinvention used. The
Gore Report set out to change the culture of American federal government