Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

276 Public Management and Administration
will begin to eclipse superficial similarities; (3) the term ‘new’ will be viewed as an
inconvenient adjective for emerging themes or objects of inquiry; and (4) political debate
will require a fresh theme to attract attention to and support for the next wave of ideas for
administrative reform. Most of us could write the New Public Management’s post
mortem now.
These claims are contestable. On the first point, political change can overtake
any kind of reform. But what has actually happened in the Westminster systems
Lynn refers to is that changes of government – from Left to Right and back to
the Left again in New Zealand; Right to Left in the UK – have either left the
NPM changes unaltered or even accelerated them. On the second point made
by Lynn, there are differences between countries, but the reform agenda has
been driven by the same underlying theory as discussed earlier. The third and
fourth point need some further examination.
The third point has been discussed earlier where it was argued that ‘new’ is
becoming an inconvenient adjective. Given that more than ten years have
passed since the term ‘new public management’ was first used, at what point
should the ‘new’ be dropped? There is a salutory lesson with the so-called ‘new
public administration’ that started in the United States in the late 1960s
(Frederickson, 1980; Bellone, 1980). It was a reaction to old-style bureaucracy
and put more emphasis on values, equality and the normative side of public
administration, but faded as traditional concerns with efficiency and effectiveness
reappeared. At some point the ‘new’ in new public management will have
to be dropped, but this is relatively unimportant compared to the change from
public administration to public management.
The fourth point of Lynn’s is too obvious to say much about. Of course, there
will need to be a new theme to discuss. Anyone who views the theoretical
world as a succession of paradigms, as discussed here, must acknowledge that
their own paradigm will eventually disappear.
Another argument is over the extent to which the ideas are new; whether
managerialism is something new, or is simply old ideas in a new package. Stark
(2002) argues they are new, even if some of the aspects are not. Hood argues
that the new managerialism is ‘hype’ rather than ‘substance’ and that nothing
has really changed. In his view, new public management has ‘damaged the public
services while being ineffective in its ability to deliver on its central claim
to lower costs’; and also it was ‘a vehicle for particularistic advantage’ to serve
the interests of an elite group of top managers, and could not claim to be as universal
as its advocates suggested (1991, pp. 8–10). Hood (1994, p. 135) later
repeated the criticism arguing it was ‘more that the packaging was new, not the
ideas inside’ and that NPM could be considered a ‘cargo cult’.
In one sense, the ideas are not new. Economics and private management
are hardly new, nor are the principles of managerialism deriving from them.
The history of public administration is replete with failed experiments and
failed techniques, mostly with their own acronyms such as: planning, programming,
budgeting (PPB), zero-based budgeting (ZBB), and management