i think the criticisms about the NPM is

1). lack of specificity as to what is actually involved in NPM

2). different theories have different lists of NPM charecteristics

3). not only is there no agreed content in NPM

Hi

It is helpful to consider the broader political economy and public policy debates when discussing NPM. This will help you to develop the critique. For example, NPM ( and there are some useful contributions here from Hood, (1991; 1995)  that explain the key components of NPM) . These can be usefully located within the broader neoliberal assumptions about the role of the state with regard to public service provision  (and the assumed inefficiencies of the public sector -- see also Public Choice Theory, Niskanen for a development of this). One argument is that NPM represents the importing of private sector (and therefore, assumed 'superior') private sector management practices. There is also an abundance of empirical evidence to suggest  that the 3 E's (of NPM) are contested; that this merely represents the Taylorisation of public service work and so on.

Hope this helps

Dear colleague

For criticism on NPM I would like to refer to the excellent paper of Diefenbach:

Diefenbach, T. (2009), New Public Management in Public Sector Organizations: the Dark Sides of Managerialistic ‘Enlightenment’, Public Administration, Vol. 87, no.4, pp. 892-909.

See also Also Lapsley's (2009) work:, New Public Management: the cruellest invention of the human spirit?, Abacus, Vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 1-21. 

The further development of NPM is especially NPG; see work of Osborne (2006), but also the text book by Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011)

Osborne, S. (2006), The New Public Governance?, Public Management Review, 8:3, pp. 377-387.

.Pollitt, C. and G. Bouckaert (2011), Public Management Reform. A Comparative Analysis, 3rd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

I hope this helps.

Best wishes,

Jan

I think Christopher Pollitt, NPM scholar,  would be the first to say that the evidence for the success of NPM is patchy to say the least.  Having occupied management and leadership positions within the sector for many years, my experience is that NPM is moving aside to make way for a more collegiate approach to public sector delivery.  The way forward appears to be more collaboration, not just with the private sector, but with the voluntary sector too.  The recent 2015 Civica report, The Changing Landscape for Local Government (2015) on the future of public services in the UK highlighted this as the preferred way forward, and talks about councils "brokering broad, collaborative, integrated services" in partnership with others.  If we are focusing on the criticisms of NPM, I think councils have seen that a default position of private sector practice is no longer sufficient for the complexity of public service delivery.  Complex societal problems require a more considered, collaborative approach.  Osborne (2010) talks about New Public Governance in global terms and adds that "there has been a shift from direct forms of governance to a process of governance exercised through a plurality of actors, sites, spatial scales and processes, with an increasing reliance by governments on informal forms of power and influence rather than on formal authority" (p.25).  This is something I recognise in public sector practice in the UK.  The move is away from the wholesale adoption of NPM towards what I can only describe as a collaborative approach.  As our society becomes ever more complex, so the provision of public service needs greater agility in service delivery, and this does not appear to be adequately answered by sole reliance on the private sector and its practices.

Actually, NPM was never theoretically or conceptually accurate; the fundamental flaws lie in the distinctions between public and private goods, and between customers and  citizens.  Wilson advanced these misconceptions when he claimed one could adopt the practices of the felonious knife-sharpener without becoming a criminal. NPM suffered from these basic problems from Minnowbrook onward.  In my view, I believe that NPM and allied theories are at the root of the rapid drop in citizen trust in government and the financial mess most governments now face.

I think a lot of the critism towards NPM has neglected the call of several (public) management scholars for a "contingency" perspective on (public) management. For instance, my work focuses on rational planning in public organizations:

=> We have found that in Flemish municipalities, the strongest predictor of the quality of plans is the extent to which the planning process was really participatory (both int & ext stakeholders) whereas the analytical nature of the planning process seemed less important.

=> Similarly, we found that in a Flemish educational context performance measurement did not contribute to the quality of strategic decisions because the surveyed agencies focused on pupil wellbeing, which seemed hard to measure with clear performance indicators.

I include a link to the papers for those of you interested.

My point is: Even within the private sector, contingencies matter (can we, for instance compare a start-up with a big bank??); and this will certainly be the case in the public sector. So we need to know how we can adapt (generic) management processes to take into account the contingency of the organization in which these are applied.

That's my 2 cents on the matter, anyway.

Regards,

Bert

Article Strategic-Decision Quality in Public Organizations: An Infor...

Article Strategic decision quality in Flemish municipalities

In the foregoing we could add variable contingency in every cultural context. Different measures have led NPM different effects on each site. In the case of our country and autonomous region in particular they have served the tools used for gatopardismo, ineffectiveness or inefficiency of these tools, and in many cases, have served only to enrich consulting and public managers. In line with the NPM it has been installed as never ineptitude, perversion and misrule in our structures.

Two references give a full account of the phenomenon of NPM;

1) To Hood and Jackson (Administrative argumentation, 1977) the failure lay in the lack of adjustment of doctrines to concrete facts, to make it on abstract metaphors and even fictions that led to a modernization full of rhetoric and use of unreliable elements (which he calls 'nursery toys', 'wrong tools' or 'soft science'). policies of Public Management NPM responded very effectively to the ideological positions of the '80 and its very effective political rhetoric -partisana, but little technical and scientific approaches to organizational management.

2) Tellingly study completed in 2014 on the efficiency and effectiveness of government reforms for more efficient and effective in times of economic crisis made in the COCOPS European project Public Sector, reveals in his summary eloquent data on policies new public Management, such as that outsourcing has not led to a reduction in public sector; general administrative reforms have had limited success; major changes in the public sector over the past five years have been motivated by tax adjustments following the financial crisis. And what is striking is that the strategies to be followed in the next five years have different perspectives on what to do to Public Administration and the University. 

you may read the paper below which discusses traditional bureaucracy, NPM towards the contemporary Public value governance or the New Public Administration. the paper is "Therefore, Is Bureaucracy Dead? Making a Case for Complementarity of Paradigms in Public Administrative Thinking and Discourse" published in International Journal of Public Administration journal

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01900692.2015.1015558