post-NPM Reforms Research Articles

Ethics and Administrative Reforms

In this article we define and analyze ethics in public organizations taking a broad approach, based on ethical theory and organization theory. The empirical focus is on ethical guidelines in the central civil service in Norway, using data from a large survey of ministries and central agencies in Norway conducted in 2006. We show that the use of ethical guidelines is rather widespread, is a mixture of different basic ethical positions, primarily belonging to post-NPM reform tools, and that there are significant variation among the civil servants regarding their assessment of the importance of ethical guidelines, mainly affected by structural features (position, tasks) and cultural features (efficiency and renewal orientation).

Democracy and administrative policy: contrasting elements of New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM

This article presents an analytical platform for discussing and analyzing administrative reforms in terms of democracy. First, we present the democratic theory positions represented by output democracy and input democracy. These two positions are used to classify different types of reform. The second explanatory approach on democracy and reforms is transformative, and it applies a mixture of external features, domestic administrative culture, and polity features to understand variations in the democratic aspects of public sector reforms. Central issues are whether these reforms can be seen as alternatives or whether they complement each other in terms of layering processes. Third, we take a broad overview of New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM reforms and carry out an in-depth analysis of a new administrative policy report by the Norwegian centre-left government. Finally, we discuss briefly the broader comparative implications of our findings.

Japanese University Reform — Hybridity in Governance and Management

University reforms around the world reflect many of the ideas and measures associated with the New Public Management (NPM) reform wave that emerged in Australia and New Zealand in the early 1980s. However, they also display features of the post-NPM reforms introduced in the last decade. In this article I focus on university reforms in Japan, looking both at historical features of Japanese universities and more specifically at the 2004 reform that established the National University Corporations. I then discuss how the Japanese university reforms compare with the main reform trends at European universities. Finally, I explain Japanese university reforms in terms of three organizational theory perspectives — an instrumental, a cultural and an imitation perspective.

A Health(y) Image in the Post-Managerialist Age

Concomitant with the intensification of private provision of public services, government purchasers are managing third party service providers’ performance through accountability demands. As the excesses of New Public Management (NPM) are superseded by a post-NPM ethos, these purchasers are encouraged to soften those demands and ‘partner’ with providers. However, we argue that post-NPM reforms ignore the role of organisational identity in structuring accountability processes. Organisational identity can be described through image-laden metaphors. This paper explores how negative and positive organisational metaphors affected government purchasers’ demands for accountability from primary health care providers. Notwithstanding standard contractual arrangements, it found that purchasers’ demands for accountability vary according to the providers’ organisational images. Further, these government purchasers used sense-breaking and negative images to force change in providers’ identity.

NPM and beyond — structure, culture and demography

The main research questions in this article are to what degree New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM reform elements have been perceived as relevant or significant in the Norwegian civil service; what have been the most significant reform elements; and how to explain the variation in the perceived significance of different administrative reform tools. How important is leadership relative to other structural factors and to demographic and cultural features? The empirical data used in the analysis are taken mainly from surveys of civil servants in the Norwegian ministries conducted in 1996 and 2006. A general finding is that cultural features make a significant difference, but having a leadership position and task structure also have explanatory power. Generally, we face a combination of robustness and amenability to administrative policy reforms. Points for practitioners This article shows that the perceived significance of different administrative reform tools is high within government ministries in Norway. Four families of reform measures are revealed: performance-management reforms, cultural-managerial reforms, structural reforms and market-related reforms. Reform measures connected to performance management systems generally have high scores, while market-related reforms score low. The administrative reforms show a robust pattern from 1996 to 2006, but new reform tools are added to existing measures and this produces increased complexity. The variations in significance of different reform tools can be traced back to administrative culture, leadership position and main tasks.