The manifold meanings of ‘post-New Public Management’ – a systematic literature review
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852318759736 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Renate Reiter,Tanja Klenk |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
Review of
Administrative
Article
Sciences
International Review of
The manifold meanings
Administrative Sciences
2019, Vol. 85(1) 11–27
!
of ‘post-New Public
The Author(s) 2018
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Management’ –
DOI: 10.1177/0020852318759736
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
a systematic
literature review
Renate Reiter
University of Leipzig, Germany
Tanja Klenk
Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed
Forces Hamburg, Germany
Abstract
For more than 30 years, New Public Management has been the most popular label for
public sector reform. For more than 15 years, however, New Public Management has
also been heavily criticized. There is a growing trend to consider New Public
Management as ‘dead’ and claim the evolution of a new reform trend, called post-
New
Public
Management.
Like
New
Public
Management,
post-New
Public
Management is an umbrella term that is used to prescribe and/or describe different
reform trends. The aim of this article is to give a state of the art of recent post-New
Public Management literature by discerning the manifold meanings of this label. For this
purpose, a systematic review of 84 articles published in peer-reviewed high-quality
journals has been conducted. The article shows that, so far, the post-New Public
Management idea has been very influential as an ‘ideational weapon’ to indicate a
crisis of the New Public Management model. The use of the post-New Public
Management idea as a blueprint for future reform, however, still needs fur-
ther treatment.
Corresponding author:
Renate Reiter, Universit€at Leipzig, Fakult€at fu¨r Sozialwissenschaften und Philosophie, Institut fu¨r
Politikwissenschaft, Beethovenstraße 15, 04107 Leipzig, Germany.
Email: renate.reiter@uni-leipzig.de
12
International Review of Administrative Sciences 85(1)
Points for practitioners
Since the 1980s, New Public Management has served as a toolbox for the reform of
public administrations all over the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development and beyond. In the course of its ‘pick and choose’ application, New
Public Management has become an object of manifold criticism. In order to overcome
the New Public Management ‘leftovers’, reformers of public management have reintro-
duced old concepts or invented new reform tools since the late 1990s. Systematically
reviewing both theoretical and empirical academic works on this ‘post-New Public
Management’ movement, we – inter alia – shed light on the question of whether
‘post-New Public Management’ can be considered a (new) model for practitioners of
public management reform.
Keywords
coordination, efficiency, institutional theory, New Public Management, participation,
‘post-NPM’, public sector reform
Introduction
Over the last 30 years, New Public Management (NPM) has become synonymous
with public sector reform. For more than 15 years, however, NPM has also been
heavily criticized. One of the more important criticisms concerns the strong focus
on output and efficiency, which encourages disregarding the importance of other
public values, such as equity and democratic values. Against this background,
some authors have even called NPM ‘dead’ and have announced the evolution
of a new reform trend: post-NPM.
Since the late 1990s, post-NPM has become an umbrella term (Christensen,
2012: 1) describing reforms that are aimed at either attenuating the negative con-
sequences of New Public Management, for example, increased fragmentation or
inadequate political control of civil servants, or even at replacing such earlier
reforms. While the exact meaning of post-NPM remains controversial, this new
reform trend is often seen to include elements such as coordination improvements,
steering capacity enhancement of the political or politico-administrative centre,
improvement of the network management capabilities of public managers, and
the strengthening of the responsiveness and democratic accountability of public
sector organizations (Christensen and Lægreid, 2007; Lodge and Gill, 2011).
Post-NPM – like NPM – is said to improve public sector performance (Ferlie
et al., 2003: S10), and, indeed, performance improvement has been a major driver of
public management reforms ever since (Kinder, 2012: 405). However, neither prac-
titioners nor academic scholars have a shared definition of ‘performance’, the goals
to be reached or the indicators to be used (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004: 16–17).
Assessing performance gains related to the change of the dominant model of
Reiter and Klenk
13
public management reform thus first requires us to reconstruct the meaning of post-
NPM ‘performance’.
With this article, we attempt to critically assess post-NPM as a reform trend.
For this, we first closely review recent public administration literature to capture
the understanding of post-NPM. Is post-NPM widely referred to as a new concept
of public management reform? In which contexts and in relation to which cases,
countries and sectors is post-NPM studied? Second, we want to determine whether
and how far post-NPM has become ‘institutionalized’, that is, widely accepted
(Abrahamson, 1996; Powell and Bromley, 2015) as a new model of public
administration among academic scholars and practitioners. We furthermore aim
to determine how the relationship between NPM and post-NPM is conceived in
the literature. Ensuing questions are the following: is post-NPM introduced as a
reaction to negative experiences of NPM reforms? Is it introduced to improve or
to replace NPM? How far do we actually observe a shift away from ‘typical’
NPM-related performance goals like efficiency?
To answer these questions, we conducted a systematic literature review (Arksey
and O’Malley, 2005), mapping the main sources and types of evidence available in
this particular area of study since the year 2000. By analysing 84 articles on post-
NPM published in peer-reviewed journals, our aim is to unfold the manifold
meanings of post-NPM, to assess the dissemination and actual acceptance of the
concept among academic scholars and practitioners, and to evaluate the relation-
ship of the post-NPM to the NPM concept.
Institutional theory, which has furthered the understanding of how organiza-
tional models are established as conceptual blueprints and paradigms of public
management reform, serves as the theoretical background for our article. It posits
that concepts have become ‘institutionalized’ when they have gained ‘heightened
legitimacy and enhanced taken-for-grantedness’ (Colyvas and Powell, 2006: 306).
Institutionalized concepts are characterized not only by a high diffusion rate
among both academic scholars and practitioners, but also by a high coherence
regarding goals, instruments and ideas related to the concept. An ideational shift
would thus require that there is a new and shared understanding of the field’s
problems and how to solve them. A core question related to the study of institu-
tionalization here is thus: does declaring the death of NPM lead to the emergence
of a new paradigm, namely, post-NPM?
The article is organized as follows. In the next section, we present our analytical
and methodological framework. In the third section, we describe the extent, the
range and the nature of research activity on post-NPM. The fourth section
describes how ‘post-NPM’ is actually understood and used in the public adminis-
tration literature. Thereby, we particularly shed light on issues of organizational
structure and public (intra- and inter-organizational) governance, on ideas about
the political control and accountability of public sector organizations, and on ideas
about their ‘performance’. In our discussion in the fifth section, we put the relation
between NPM and post-NPM and the question of the institutionalization of
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International Review of Administrative Sciences 85(1)
post-NPM to the fore. In our conclusion in the sixth section, we outline implica-
tions for future research.
Analytical framework and methods
The rise and decay of organizational models: an institutional perspective
The question of why and how organizational models evolve and decline has always
been central for institutionalist research on organizations. Seen from the perspec-
tive of institutional theory, management techniques are a cultural phenomenon,
shaped by norms of rationality and progress (Abrahamson, 1996: 261).
Organizational models diffuse and become established, that is, institutionalized,
in a given organizational field to the extent that they are considered legitimate
(Colyvas and Powell, 2006: 308–309). Legitimacy, in this context, can be defined as
a ‘generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable,
proper or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values,
beliefs and definitions’ (Suchman, 1995: 574).
The legitimacy of an organizational model is not simply given or lacking.
Instead, gaining legitimacy or becoming institutionalized is a process, which can
be differentiated into several stages. Tolbert and Zucker (1996) and Colyvas and
Powell (2006), in their work on the institutionalization of institutional theory,
distinguish between pre-, semi- or full institutionalization (Tolbert and Zucker,
1996: 185) and between low, middle or high degrees of institutionalization
(Colyvas and Powell, 2006: 306), respectively (see Table 1).
During the pre-institutionalization period, there are ongoing discussions within
the scientific community about the core characteristics of a concept, while catego-
ries are still diffuse. There is not one,...
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