Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

270 Public Management and Administration
sector and the universities by that government and anyone who was there at
that time could be forgiven for seeing the entire movement as ideological. In a
later article Pollitt argued (1996, p. 86):
The trajectory of pro-market, anti-state doctrines probably reached its apogee at the end
of the 1980s, during Mrs Thatcher’s third term of office. At that time, resort to market or
market-like solutions to the problems of public administration had begun to seem automatic,
almost ritualistic. The distinctiveness of the public sector was repeatedly minimized,
its particular values ignored or downgraded.
Some of those involved in both the Thatcher and Reagan governments had
a profound distaste for the public service and this was ‘new Right’ ideology.
However, while this may have been an appropriate way of looking at the early
reforms in the United Kingdom, the fervent ideology was not as evident later
and neither was it so evident in other countries.
Public sector reform did not stop after Thatcher; in fact it had barely started.
What happened was that the intensely ideological attack on the role of government
in society was replaced by intensified efforts to improve its management.
In New Zealand and Australia, the most radical of the public service changes
were introduced by Left governments, and the movement was more about management
and responding to economic crisis than new Right ideology. Canadian
and French governments of Left and Right have introduced similar reforms. As
the reform movement has spread any party-political aspect seems harder to
show. It is easy to point to governments that were not ‘New Right’, but still
introduced managerialist reforms of their own. But as the movement towards
public management has proceeded, the ideological element has become far less
visible and new public management ‘seems now to have no evident coupling to
a specific point on the traditional ‘right–left’ political spectrum’ (Jones, Guthrie
and Steane, 2001, p. 3).
Ideology and the old model
It could be argued that opposition to public management reform is itself driven
by ideology. It could be equally ideological even to argue to maintain particular
activities in the public sector. Pollitt and Bouckaert, for example, describe
their stance as ‘sceptically open-minded’ and doubt whether many of the ideas
behind the NPM are ‘quite as new as some of their more enthusiastic proponents
claim’ (2000, p. 15). A few pages on they state (2000, p. 22):
We share several values and beliefs: for example, that the public sector is distinctive, that
public sector (collective) approaches to many social problems are desirable/necessary/
ultimately unavoidable; that the dull stuff of administrative implementation is actually
crucial to the final effects of reforms; that the eventual impacts on citizens is usually the
most powerful (though often fiendishly difficult to execute) test of the ‘success’ or ‘failure’
of a management ‘improvement’. Further, we recognize that language is both rich