Public Management, New - Christopher Hood

1 Reagan and Bush presidencies. Their administrationshelped to make access to the courts a less significanttool for citizen organizations. In response to thesedevelopments, many Public interest lawyers developeda range of alternate strategies; working more directlyin the legislative and administrative processes; filingsuits in state courts; and relying more heavily oncitizen turn of the federal courts in a conservativedirection was matched by increasing sophisticationand resources in the advocacy effort of large corpora-tions. No longer content to rely on the skills of legaladvocates to shape Public policy, corporations drewmore heavily on Public relations professionals. Theyrelied more heavily on political action committees andthe financing of political candidates and campaigns,and on massive advertising campaigns to shape these challenges, Public interest law in theUSA continued to thrive, affecting policy decisions,and providing a measure of balance in the legal are many more law school graduates seekingpublic interest law work than there are jobs; and thereare many situations in which effective Public interestadvocacy, were it available, would lead to better policyoutcomes.

2 The development of Public interest law inother countries holds significant promise for fairprocesses and broader Public participation in criticalpolicy decisions ranging from environmental protec-tion to the protection of racial minorities. Globaliza-tion creates new needs and opportunities for publicinterest lawyers to function in transnational also: Democracy; Discrimination; Equality andInequality: Legal Aspects; Justice and Law; Justice,Access to: Legal Representation of the Poor; Law andDemocracy; Law and Society: Sociolegal Studies; Lawas an Instrument of Social Change; Law: Overview;Political Lawyering; Public Interest; Race and theLawBibliographyAron N 1989 Liberty and Justice for All: Public Interest Law inthe 1980s and Beyond.

3 Westview PressCarson R 1961 Silent SpringCouncil for Public Interest Law 1976 Balancing the Scales ofJustice: Financing Public Interest Law in America. Council forPublic Interest LawMcClymont M, Golub S (eds.) 2000 Many Roads to Justice: TheLaw Related Work of Ford Foundation Grantees Around theWorld. The Ford FoundationNader R 1966 Unsafe at Any SpeedSarat A, Scheingold S (eds.) 1998 Cause Lawyering: PoliticalCommitments and Professional Responsibilities. Oxford Uni-versity PressWeisbrod B A et al. 1978 Public Interest Law: An Economic andInstitutional Analysis. University of California Press, CAC. HalpernPublic management , NewA term coined in the late 1980s to denote a new (orrenewed) stress on the importance of management and production engineering in Public service delivery,often linked to doctrines of economic rationalism (seeHood 1989, Pollitt 1993).

4 The apparent emergence ofa more managerial mood in several (mainly but notexclusively English-speaking) countries at that timecreated a need for a new label. The new term wasintended to denote Public service reform programsthat were not confined to the new right in a narrowsense, but also came from labor and social-democraticparties and in that sense could be considered as part ofwhat was later labeled a third way Public management is sometimes (under-standably) confused with the New Public Adminis-tration movement in the USA of the late 1960s andearly 1970s (cf. Marini 1971). But though there mayhave been some common features, the central themesof the two movements were different.

5 The main thrustof the New Public Administration movement was tobring academic Public administration into line with aradical egalitarian agenda that was influential in USuniversity campuses at that time. By contrast, theemphasis of the New Public management movement adecade or so later was firmly managerial in the sensethat it stressed the difference management could andshould make to the quality and efficiency of publicservices. Its focus on Public service productionfunctions and operational issues contrasted with thefocus on Public accountability, model employer Public service values, due process, and what happensinside Public organizations in conventional publicadministration.

6 That meant New Public Managementdoctrines tended to be opposed to egalitarian ideasof managing without managers, juridical doctrines ofrigidly rule-bound administration and doctrines ofself-government by Public -service professionals liketeachers and , like most divinities, the core of NewPublic management is somewhat mystical in essence,despite or perhaps because of the amount that hasbeen written about its central content. Differentauthors give various lists of its key traits ( , Hood1989, Pollitt 1993). Some have identified differentstyles of Public -sector managerialism over time (seeFerlie et al. 1996). How far the small-governmenteconomic-rationalist agenda that went together withmore stress on Public -sector management in the 1980sand 1990s was integral to those managerial ideas is12553 Public management , Newdebatable (see Barzelay 2000).

7 But it is hard to separatethese elements historically, since the advent of a newgeneration of Public -sector managerialism coincidedwith concern by numerous OECD governments toreduce the power of Public service trade unions,increase regulatory transparency and tackle perceivedinefficiencies of Public enterprises. A commonly-citedview of New Public management s central doctrinalcontent is Aucoin s (1990) argument that it compriseda mixture of ideas drawn from corporate managementand from institutional economics or Public choice. Tothe extent that Aucoin s characterization is accurate, itsuggests New Public management involves a mar-riage, if not exactly of opposites, at least of differentoutlooks, attitudes, and beliefs that are in (1995)

8 Argues that the central doctrinal themeof Public -sector managerialism is the idea of givingthose at the head of Public organizations morediscretionary decision space in exchange for directaccountability for their the label, many of the doctrines commonlyassociated with New Public management are not Bentham s voluminous philosophy of publicadministration developed in the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth century provides thelocus classicusfor many supposedly contemporary ideas, includingtransparent management , pay for performance, publicservice provision by private organizations, and indi-vidual responsibility. The idea that more effectivepublic services could be obtained by judicious appli-cation of private-sector management ideas is also atheme going back at least to the US city-managermovement of the late nineteenth century (cf.)

9 Downsand Larkey 1986). It was advanced early in thetwentieth century by figures like Taylor (1916) andDemitriadi (1921). The idea that Public services can beimproved by giving some autonomy to managersoperating at arms length from political standard-setters was often invoked in the nationalized publicenterprise era. It was central to Beatrice and SydneyWebb s early twentieth-century Fabian idea of theproper way of organizing the social tasks of govern-ment. Some have argued the contemporary doctrineof creating managerial space in Public services harksback to the US Progressive-era doctrine of a politics-administration dichotomy and independent regulators(cf.

10 Overman 1984).Like feminism or environmentalism, New PublicManagement is both a social movement and a subjectof academic study. Indeed, during the 1990s, NewPublic management has become a major academicindustry across the world, filling bookshelves andwebsites with writings and conference proceedingsusing the term in their titles. It has its advocates and itscritics, its analysts, morphologists and epistemolo-gists, its evaluators and case-historians. Advocatesstress the value to citizens and consumers to be gainedby enlightened managers moving beyond what isclaimed to be an outdated bureaucratic paradigm, paying more attention to how to satisfy citizendemands and to service delivery through organizationsother than traditional Public bureaucracies (seeBarzelay and Armajani 1992, Osborne and Gaebler1992, Jones and Thompson 1999).