New Public Management Era Research Articles

Power dynamics in Australian public sector accounting reform: A Machiavellian interpretation

AbstractDuring the era of New Public Management from the 1970s to the 1990s, government accountability in Australia underwent a significant transformation from compliance to performance evaluation. This change underscores a Machiavellian interpretation presented in this paper, emphasizing the politicized and power‐driven nature of public sector accounting reforms. The Australian Government employed a commercial accounting model to legitimize these reforms, leveraging Machiavellian principles to strengthen political power. Despite the accounting profession's role in legitimizing public sector financial reporting, its control over Australian accounting standard setting diminished. The new public sector accountability framework allowed the shifting of blame to the profession when problems arose. An analysis of the New South Wales Government's journey through the reform, from embracing accrual accounting to rejecting heritage assets measurement and applauding fair value, illustrates the complex interplay between self‐interest and the protection of public interest. The Australian Government strategically enlisted the support of the outer fringe accounting profession and successfully instituted reforms premised on the principle of public accountability and liberty for Australian society. Once the reformer's goals were achieved, the facilitating elites found themselves marginalized from the bureaucratic group and power reclaimed deftly to the Government with CLERP reforms paving the way for the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards. This shift exemplifies Machiavelli's perspective, where liberty is used as a means to garner public support and ultimately attain power, a strategy that continues to hold validity in contemporary political contexts.

Organisational fragility among urban FNOs in the era of New Public Management

AbstractWhile Australian governments generally acknowledge that First Nations organisations (FNOs) have better reach into First Nations communities than mainstream not‐for‐profit (NFP) organisations and governments, as we document in this paper, a survey of community‐controlled FNOs in significant urban areas in New South Wales (NSW) suggests that funding and administrative arrangements in the era of New Public Management (NPM) are at odds, and in some instances, actually undermine the effectiveness of FNOs. To explore and gain an explicit insight into the potential tensions in, contradictions with and constraints of NPM on governments supporting and realising the full potential of FNOs in achieving community outcomes, this paper turns its attention to the results of a survey designed by senior position holders from six community‐controlled FNOs in the Greater Sydney region and three academics. The survey was designed to examine the relationship of the ability of FNOs to act in the interests of their community members with the normalisation of NPM as policy discourse and practice across all layers of government (Federal, State and Local). Urban areas within the state of NSW as its focus, the core findings from the survey suggest that in the NPM era, urban FNOs face numerous difficulties in realising their community mandates and simultaneously guaranteeing their sustainability for the future. The findings suggest that rather than extending the capacity of FNOs and their reach into their communities, NPM policy structures and mandates create increased administrative burdens, precarity and fragility, as well as decreased organisational autonomy and self‐determination.

Striving for Organizational Impact through Individual Impact: A Humanistic Management Approach Involving Social Work Supervisors.

In today's era of new public management, respecting the dignity and worth of social workers in organizational management poses a challenge to social work agencies. This research explores whether individual self-actualization can be integrated with organizational development by using a humanistic management approach. Authors sampled 672 supervisors from Chinese social work agencies. A structural equation model was built and tested to examine the relationships between four latent variables: (1) professional competence (PC), (2) organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), (3) individual impact, and (4) organizational impact, taking into account the moderating effect of professional associations. The results indicate that individual impact is a mediator between supervisors' PC/OCBs and organizational impact. Meanwhile, professional associations play a moderating role in the relationship between supervisors' PC and organizational impact. Findings provide the basis for a humanistic management strategy for social work agencies that focuses on the individual impact of key people to maximize organizational impact. Moreover, professional associations should strengthen the link between individual impact and organizational impact.

Teaching social work in an era of New Public Management: Encouraging emotion, critical reflection, and collectivity as tools of resistance

Educating the next generation of social workers to practice in accordance with the values of the discipline is increasingly complicated in an era of practice shaped by neoliberalism and systems of New Public Management. Based on data drawn from collaborative autoethnographic conversations between two social work educators, this article responds to a sense of disillusionment, anxiety and powerlessness associated with entering today’s field of practice, as witnessed in their classrooms. Located at the intersection of two areas of scholarship – one stressing the importance of accompanying students in developing abilities to attend to emotion in social work practice with vulnerable, marginalised populations and, the other, identifying social work education as a potential site of resistance against the devaluing of social work evident in systems influenced by prevailing neoliberal attitudes – this article proposes considering emotion in the classroom as a means of confronting students’ (and educators’) feelings of disenchantment and powerlessness and inspiring hope for the (re)establishment of social work values in contemporary practice.

Bringing context and educational leadership together: fostering the professional development of school principals

ABSTRACTPolicy makers increasingly acknowledge that problems and challenges arising at the school level should be resolved on site. At the same time, the political expectation to delegate more responsibility to the individual school is rather heavily contrasted with the weak knowledge about how this new public management approach can be translated into successful leadership practices. Thus, considering that there is a close relationship between context and leadership, principal preparation programmes should be guided by a deeper examination of contextual factors. Against this background, we aim to critically examine existing views of practitioners and researchers on the challenge of establishing more context-sensitive school leadership preparation programmes in an era of New Public Management in Education. In doing so, we introduce the Swedish Model of principal preparation as an example for a more context-sensitive leadership preparation program. To that end, we argue that a differentiated perspective about contextual conditions and their role as facilitators or obstacles to effective leadership must be further explored. Moreover, school leaders should be encouraged to consider the relevance of such approaches to their own needs.

Quest for Improving Performance and Quality of Bangladesh Civil Service: Contemporary Practices and Recommendations

Civil Service has a task to secure, support and improve the nation it serves. All over the world, each and every public and civil servant plays a vital role in fulfilling this task and so improving the lives of their corresponding citizens. Over the generations civil service has helped successive governments to overcome exclusive and complex challenges. Hence, performance and quality of civil service is very important. Improving performance quality of civil service is a public personnel management process by which the public organizations determine how effectively the employees are performing the job and improve performance to achieve the ultimate goals. Public sector organizations are playing an increasingly important role towards development of Bangladesh by providing a range of services. Bangladesh started promoting quality of civil service under the rubric of the ‘Structural Adjustment’ in the era of New Public Management. This paper attempts to analyze the present state and limitations of performance management and provide some suggestions to promote quality of civil service in order to improve the overall performance of the Government of Bangladesh.

“Moving from transactional government to enablement” in Indigenous service delivery: The era of New Public Management, service innovation and urban Aboriginal community development

AbstractOver the last 40 years, Aboriginal Community Based Organisations have played a distinctive role in society in relation to urban Aboriginal peoples and their rights to self‐determination and community development in the Australian city of Newcastle. They have proven essential to advocacy, the maintenance of community development, and the creation of new Aboriginal social infrastructure (community organisations, facilities, services, and supporting infrastructure). Autonomy has been empowering for local Aboriginal people. Major reforms to the delivery of government social services, particularly government enablement of a new social service market based on New Public Management principles, threaten this success. This interpretive, qualitative case study illustrates the effects of social service market enablement. It draws on a case study of the effects of social service market enablement on urban Aboriginal Community Based Organisations in Newcastle, showing the antagonistic relationship between social service market enablement and Aboriginal community enablement and development. It ends with a discussion of how Aboriginal community development in this city could be re‐enabled in light of the Prime Minister's arguments in his 2017 Annual Parliamentary Closing the Gap speech providing particular value in the context of policy discussions about moving from transactional government to enablement in Indigenous affairs.

Jämställdhetsintegrering med styrning bortom New Public Management

This article discusses the management control of gender mainstreaming within the policy field of infrastructure and transportation. The strategy of gender mainstreaming has been practiced within the Swedish government for over two decades. It was implemented in the era of New Public Management when quantitative performance measures were much more valid than qualitatively assessed aspects on the effects of the performance. Consequently, the status of gendered power relations was only disclosed by the counting of women and men which hampered the intended results of gender mainstreaming. Time has passed and the Swedish government is now scrutinizing the unintended effects of New Public Management. At the same time, the Swedish Transport Administration has ordered a shift from identification with the building of infrastructure to the broader role as a societal developer. This development has brought about new questions concerning the outcomes of the undertakings. Public Value Management is an alternative which can be interpreted as a concept for management control meeting the challenges that New Public Management never could handle. Three strategic questions are in focus: (i) Is it valuable for the public? (ii) Is it legitimate and politically supported? (iii) Do we have the operational capacity? Effectiveness in Public Value Management concerns the capability of the administration to do the right things in order to reach the policy goals. There is no consensus regarding the definition of Public Value. Such an ambiguity can turn out to be a strength, since there are no ready-made facts to take for granted. Hence the administration needs to listen to and discuss together with various actors before decisions are taken regarding societal changes. If gender awareness is included in the management processes the results can

Mediating and caring: line managers and employee commitment in the voluntary sector

ABSTRACTSince the mid-1980s, New Public Management (NPM) and cuts in social funding have resulted in highly restructured organisations in the voluntary social services. These changes moved front-line supervisors, often referred to as line managers (LMs), away from direct, front-line service and replaced much of their supervision and support with tasks connected to contract compliance, particularly documenting progress on outcome metrics and other performance indicators. This article explores whether, in an era of NPM, LMs are able to apply leadership behaviours that encourage and sustain notions of altruism, care and commitment to the job among care workers in the voluntary social services sector. The article analyses qualitative interview data collected in five case studies in three countries (Australia, New Zealand and the UK) to explore the changing labour process in nonprofit services aimed at supporting society’s most vulnerable people. The article contributes to understandings of changes in work process under austerity policies and adds to theorisations of work in the voluntary social services.

An Overview of the Reformed Local Government in Macedonia

<p class="ber"><span lang="EN-GB">Local government in Westerns Balkans has gone through various public administration reforms resulting from the era of New Public Management (NPM) developments that took place in developed countries. However, such reforms have not yet reached their goal of creating more autonomous (especially financially) local government units that would be efficient and effective enough to provide better services to citizens. Macedonia is perceived a country where fiscal decentralisation has not reached its expected outcome reflected mainly in low shares of finances compared to central government finances. This paper aims to elaborate on the reforms that have shaped the management of local government in Macedonia, as well as its financial position. This is an exploratory study of previous writings about decentralization and local government (mainly) in Macedonia. The paper starts with some theoretical background of NPM and decentralisation that have shaped the local government. Then it follows with a review of the public administration reforms, decentralisation process, and local government finances. The paper is expected to contribute modestly in understanding the nature of local government and its finances along the reforms channelled mainly through the decentralization process. </span></p>

Promoting and Facilitating Public-Private Partnership Projects in the State of Punjab: An Assessment on the Role of Punjab Infrastructure Development Board

In the era of New Public Management (NPM), governance reform and public management reform is seen as strategies to adapt the public sector to meet new challenges post by the market economy and also against the criticisms of inefficient and costly public sectors. The aim is to reorganise the functioning of the public sectors by incorporating private sector values and market principles in the provision of public services and facilities. Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is one of the commonly adopted new forms of development strategy since the adoption of new industrial policy of 1991 in India and the Central as well as State Government introduced PPP models in various sectors of the economy. In Punjab, the Punjab Infrastructure Development Ordinance 1998 that established Punjab Infrastructure Development Board (PIDB) to provide overall development of infrastructure services in the state was repealed in 2002 by enacting the Punjab Infrastructure(Developmentand Regulation) Act, 2002 to providea regulatory framework and guidelines for the private-sector participation in infrastructure development through PPP models. Development of Infrastructure projects by PIDB through PPP includes Road and Bridge, Transport, Technical Education, Hospitals and Tourism Sectors. The present study examined the organisational structure of PIDB as a State PPP nodal agency and also the involvement of external agencies in the provision of public services in the State of Punjab. An attempt has been made to assess the role of PIDB in the implementation and regulating PPP projects across the various infrastructure sectors of the State economy.

Teacher autonomy in the era of New Public Management

This article examines how upper secondary school teachers perceive and respond to the consequences for their professional autonomy of recent school reforms and restructurings. Based on empirical material from interviews of 119 teachers in three studies conducted between 2002 and 2014, the findings indicate that teacher autonomy has been reduced by school reforms and restructurings since the late 1980s. Regardless of their individual aims, these reforms have collectively created a power structure that distributes power to the state, municipalities, principals and the school market, including ‘customers’, that is, students, at the expense of teacher autonomy. Teacher agency follows certain policies at the discourse level, such as decentralisation and management by objectives and results, but in practice seems to be based on individuals’ and groups’ capacities to exploit opportunities for agency in combination with more or less facilitative management and organisation cultures. This development is multifaceted and varies locally, but the overall trend can be described as a shift from occupational to organisational professionalism and from ‘licensed’ to ‘regulated’ autonomy but emphasising the influence of market logics.

Resilient gender order in entrepreneurship: the case of Swedish welfare industries

Purpose– The purpose of this article is to use quantitative empirical data to analyse the degree of resilience, as well as change or reproduction of the gender order, in the era of New Public Management. The propositions are constructed based on liberal- and socialist-feminist perspectives, and discussed in light of the empirical results.Design/methodology/approach– We report from a longitudinal quantitative study of female-dominated welfare industries. Data, available from Statistics Sweden, include the total population of entrepreneurs available on the individual level. However, the level of analysis that was used in the study was in accordance with the industry level. Data were processed from an aggregated level to the most detailed level of classification.Findings– The findings reveal resilience in the prevailing gender order. The order is being reproduced in the entrepreneurship context, in most of the industries that were studied.Practical implications– The results may potentially have profound impact on entrepreneurship policy, equality policy and public sector restructuring.Originality/value– This quantitative longitudinal study shows a complex pattern on the detailed industry level, which can be understood in terms of male gender labelling of entrepreneurship. The results thus support previous qualitative studies that have observed this phenomenon. Methodologically, this paper contributes to the field by showing that without breaking down the analysis into the different female-dominated industries on a five-digit level, the various results of the public sector reforms and the attendant gendered effects would not have been revealed.

Interdisciplinarity in an era of new public management: a case study of graduate business schools

In an era of rapid knowledge transmission and creation spurred on by advances in technology and globalisation, calls for interdisciplinarity to solve ‘wicked’ problems are common. In the same era, universities are increasingly adopting new public management practices. The extent to which these practices affect knowledge production is an underexplored area. Results from a longitudinal study of Australian graduate business school academics are used to examine the impact of government policy and institutional change on engagement in interdisciplinary teaching and research. While disciplinary identity is a common barrier to interdisciplinarity, the nature and culture of graduate business schools were potentially able to overcome this barrier. However, the introduction of a national research measurement exercise and a concomitant strengthening of new public management practices, with subsequent institutional restructuring, revived disciplinary silos. The case study has particular relevance to universities in other countries where new public management is established.

'Public Champions or Protectors of Professional Interests?'Observations on the Performance of Those Bodies Entrusted with the Regulation of the Police Service during the Era of New Public Management

New Public Management was intended to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the Public Sector through the adoption of market-based systems. Whilst the public are generally able to make informed choices on the cost and quality of manufactured goods, thus ensuring producers remain conscious of quality control during the production process, this is more problematic in relation to public services. In these less visible services, quality control is entrusted to regulators with the required expertise and legal authority to check that providers are acting with probity. Such responsibilities would include curbing ‘gaming’ practices or tricks designed to give the false impression of improved performance. This article looks at the response of the various Police Regulators to combat ‘gaming’ practices designed to deceive the public and their elected representatives.

Performance Measurement in an Era of New Public Management

The last two decades have witnessed a proliferation of scholarly discourse on performance management. This discourse evolved out of a number of forces in the early 1990s from the new public management movement, which called for government to show its efficiency in expending public resources as well as prove that substantive results—or outcomes related to a program’s effectiveness—had been generated by its activities. As federal agencies developed performance standards at the program level as well as in the management and administrative functions, state governments and their localities were compelled to adopt the same measures as a method of assessing their activities and enhancing their reporting mechanism under federal programs and mandates. This analysis examines the literature on performance-based management and offers recommendations on how to implement successful performance measurement system. The analysis begins with a historical synopsis. This is followed by a discussion of applications and types of performance measurement, limitations and benefits, and a comparative analysis of performance measurement efforts in the State of Georgia and the City of Kennesaw, Georgia. Additionally, the analysis offers some implementation challenges and solutions.

Les cadres dirigeants dans l’après nouvelle gestion publique

The following article shows the tendencies and the new challenges that face executives after the era of New Public Management, in particular their key role in the fulfilment of new government duties. A reshaping of the administrative model is required, in order to fulfil the double role of these executives as political authority and top managers. The expansion of the administration’s tasks requires a third path: The inclusion of networks and the delegation of responsibilities. However, there are no clear guidelines for this purpose and the present models do not meet the standard of the new responsibilities and tasks.

Introduction: Administrative reforms and mergers in Europe - research questions and empirical challenges

This special issue originated with two workshops held by the Comparative Public Administration Working Group (Groupe Science politique comparée des administrations-SPCA) of the French Political Science Association (AFSP) in April and September 2008. Our workshops focused on a rather under-researched dimension of comparative public administration: namely administrative mergers and bureaucratic reorganizations as a dimension of contemporary reforms. We started from the observation that, in recent years, there has been a rich literature on the role of agencies and other forms of organizational decentralization, but much less on organizational and professional mergers within public administrations. Participants were invited to address a set of linked questions designed to try and elucidate the nature and scope of administrative reorganizations in the European countries under observation. Among these questions were the following: under which conditions and to what extent do mergers and other forms of administrative reorganization have sustainable effects on the state apparatus? How does the multi-level structure of government, especially within federal states (Germany, Belgium), regionalized (Spain) or ‘dual’ states (United Kingdom) influence administrative reforms? What policy narratives are mobilized to justify and legitimize these reorganizations, and especially how important is the discourse of New Public Management (NPM) in that respect? Finally, what are the consequences of such reforms on civil servants’ careers, professional identities and administrative cultures? The issue brings together a range of country-specific articles whose remit is, broadly, to address these questions and to contribute to enriching the comparative and empirically rooted reflection about the dimensions and forms of state reforms in the NPM era.

No Longer So Strange? (Dis)Trust in Municipality—Small Business Relationships

In this article, a trust perspective is applied to the relationship between local government and their alternative service providers in the era of new public management. The importance of category-based (dis)trust is highlighted, as well as the complications occurring when service providers belong to several categories, all of which are in some respect distrusted. More specifically, the article illustrates how gender and professional hierarchies influence municipal trust in service providers. The complexities of trust in public sector outsourcing relationships are highlighted, as the trust that citizens' show in the service providers also affects the trust of the municipality.

Do Australian public sector employees have the type of culture they want in the era of new public management?

New public management theory proposes that public sector organisations should be managed more like private sector organisations. It is therefore expected that public sector managers will have preferences for an organisational culture that will reflect the culture of private sector organisations, with an external rather than internal orientation. The current research investigated the idea that managers' perceptions of ideal organisational culture would be different to the bureaucratic model of culture (internally oriented), which has traditionally been associated with public sector organisations. Responses to a competing values culture inventory were received from 925 public sector employees. Results indicated that the bureaucratic model is still pervasive; however, managers prefer a culture that is more external, and less control focussed, as expected. Lower level employees expressed a desire for a culture that emphasised human relations values.