Abstract
This article draws conclusions from four separate case evaluations from different development programs in Finland and aims to discuss the role of welfare state values in new public management. The study develops a comprehensive picture of the change in public management since 2000. The synthesis of the four case studies follows the critical realism tradition. This article shows that cooperation forms the key mechanism in all public administration projects and in any changes to their structure. The new structure is the postmodern service production sector that still faces many challenges with regard to the traditional welfare state values. One of these is the conflict between the deep-seated moral imperatives of the old welfare state and the goal-attainment priorities of the new public management. While evaluation research has become one of the operations in public administration that fulfills the control function, the value bases of society, management, and evaluations should be balanced together. Also the objectives of public management and evaluations should be more clearly defined in relation to values other than efficiency. An applied science, like evaluation, needs basic social research to formulate, recognize, and conceptualize the new public management structure. Furthermore, there is an urgent requirement to address those values that underpin society as a whole.
Highlights
Science and politics are two separate entities because of the aim of objectivity of the former
The role of the evaluation study in bringing about changes in administration has been criticized in sociological discussions, because the research settings create the fear that the basic values of the traditional welfare society might be undermined
The extensive change in public administration began at the end of the 1980s, and the recession of the 1990s accelerated and expedited cutbacks in public, social, and health services
Summary
The evaluation study is an applied social science by means of which an attempt is made to govern societal development and change. I present the retroduction as what is the fundamental prerequisite of change in public administration, and comparing different theories and abstractions as how the picture transforms when the mechanism is compared with the larger setting of administrative change and the value arrangements therein. Project convinced of the fundamental social feature, which I decided to call the mechanism, did I turn to comparing it with theory In this comparison, I mainly entered into dialogue with realistic evaluation theory and theories of administrational change (Mattei, 2009; Pierre & Peters, 2000; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2000; Rantala & Sulkunen, 2006). Individuals, projects, the administrative organizations, and the scientific community have their own ways of creating theories, and they may be situated in individual mind structures or in the theoretical framework of society None of these levels is to be seen as dictating the others, as the levels of social reality are mingled together. Individual consciousness covers the individual value settings and experience-based knowledge on what things are and how they affect each other
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