Using Examples from the Uk and Elsewhere, Explain Why “new Public Management” Has Strengths as Well as Weaknesses?
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Using examples from the UK and elsewhere, explain why “new Public Management” has strengths as well as weaknesses?
The content:
Introduction 3
Main body 3 – 6
Differences from private sector 3 – 4
Features of NPM 4
Points of view 4 – 5
NPM today 5 – 6
Conclusion 6 – 7
Sources used 8
Using examples from the UK and elsewhere, explain why “new Public Management” has strengths as well as weaknesses?
Introduction
Ive chosen this question to answer, because the problem of estimating the influence of advantages and disadvantages that new Public Management (catchily abbreviated as NPM) brings, the problem of summing them up and making the final decision, is one of the main issues of modern governments. The problem is that this is a complex issue, it requires comprehensive analysis. Lots of professional politicians, scientists, some other specialists and ordinary researchers poked into this problem and remained stuck in it like in a swamp. Many of them led themselves to the dead end. But some of them succeeded studying the impact of new Public Management reforms. Taking into consideration their work and international experience of countries from all over the world in bringing to life the ideas of NPM I came to some conclusions.
Main body
To begin with, we need to answer some other questions: “What is new Public Management itself? What are the most essential features of NPM? How does it differ from private sector? What are the strong and weak points of new Public Management and why do they appear?” Im going to touch on this topic and many others in my essay.
There are lots of explanations of “new Public Management” term. For example: new Public Management is a management philosophy used by governments since the 1980s to modernise the public sector. New Public management is a broad and very complex term used to describe the wave of public sector reforms throughout the world since the 1980s. The main hypothesis in the NPM-reform wave is that more market orientation in the public sector will lead to greater cost-efficiency for governments, without having negative side effects on other objectives and considerations. This is not the smartest definition, as I think. The definition of NPM that I really liked sounds as “the use of private sector management techniques in the public sector”.
Differences from private sector
Jonathan Boston, one of the first writers of NPM ideas, highlighted the following ways, in which public organizations differ from the private sector. First of all, public sector has the breadth of impact. It is also a subject of public scrutiny. Thirdly, public sector is the subject to political influences. Organizational performance often takes place. Personal characteristics of employees are taken into account. The targets of these organizations are much more difficult to reach, comparing with the private sector, because there is a large variety of objectives, the process of decision-making is complicated by preceding it comprehensive analysis of the situation. Furthermore, there are a lot of legal and formal constraints, such as courts, legislature and hierarchy that make the situation more difficult. Moreover is that degree of market exposure is based on reliance on appropriations. The other distinction is incentives and incentive structures. The author also emphasized the fact that reforms tend to ignore all these differences.
Features of NPM
There are various features of new Public Management. It focuses on economy, efficiency and effectiveness, for instance. It deals with the use of output controls. The often used instruments of NPM are privatization, contracting and divestment. New Public Management usually focuses on performance related pay. The other name of NPM is “devolved management”. The reason why it can be called like that is easily shown on a simple example. If you visualize the picture, the sharing of responsibility system used in the old public management looks like a huge pyramid. That means that all the responsibility was concentrated on the staff of top-echelon. At the same time, junior employees were not responsible at all for the job they are involved. On the other hand, the distribution of responsibility in the new Public Management looks like a system of pyramids. On the top theres the biggest pyramid, which is linked with a number of smaller pyramids, which are in turn connected with smaller ones and so on. This system guarantees that every employee that is involved is responsible for the output, because responsibility was devolved and divided between them.
The development history of Public Management is rather long, but the main thing that was changing is the set of targets, that it was trying to reach. In the 1970s, for example, Public Management was concentrated on decreasing the inputs. In the 1980s, it was concentrated both on decreasing the input and increasing the output. In 1990s – 2000, Public Management was concentrated only on output. That is how it developed, changing targets from economy (input decrease), to efficiency (input decrease + output increase) and then to effectiveness (output increase).
Points of view
Some people say that transition to new Public Management benefited us a lot. They list several arguments for it. For instance, NPM occurred to be really effective at reducing inputs, this is economy, mostly in labour costs. Furthermore, privatization generates huge revenue. Moreover, new Public Management is also effective