New Public Management Bachelor Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

New Public Management Bachelor - Essay Example There are primarily two views that are discussed here concerning the significance of NPM as a framework, the argument that there is now a global movement that has resulted in transformed structural changes across the international community and that of adaptive changes across individual nation states, each with a degree of variance depending on cultural and historical traditions and values. In discussing this second view this paper concentrates on the debate surrounding the convergence of NPM across the western capitalized states and does not draw on the models that are emerging throughout the developing nations. NPM reforms started out in Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK, US, and New Zealand and its philosophy has been adopted, to varying degrees, across the developed countries. Comparison of the adoption of NPM within the UK and German Public Sector is put forward to illustrate the extent and variation of changes that have occurred and help to illustrate the usefulness of the fram ework in the field of comparative analysis. Over the past two decades there has been a considerable shift towards from the traditional model of public administration towards what has been termed 'new public management'. The supposed failing of the 'traditional administration' has contributed to the emergence and support of the new thinking. Traditional public administration was based around the framework of bureaucracy. Hughes (2003: 1) provides a useful definition of the characteristics of the traditional model of public administration: Firstly, it was completely linked to Weber's theory of bureaucracy, which advocated the principle of hierarchical and bureaucratic systems. Secondly administrators followed a one way, best way approach that was provided in detailed instruction and did not provide any personal responsibility for results. Thirdly the provision of goods and services was through public sector delivery only. Fourthly there was a separation between the political and administrative decisions and practices, and this took away political accountability of the decision makers. Fifthly, there was an implicit agreement that those working in the public sector did so in the public interest resulting in a strong public sector ethos and set of values. Finally public administration was considered to provide a job for life and this itself created a poor image to those who used the services. Whilst there are those who argue that the reason for the change was simply that the old model was not good enough and there were too many inadequacies (Behn, 2001: 30 cited in Hughes 2003: 5) other such as Rhodes (2003) put forward the demonstrable advantages that the use of a bureaucratic framework can bring to service delivery, for example reliability, direct control, predictability and continuity. However the '3Es' of economic, efficiency and effectiveness were introduced as means to making savings in the huge public sector expenditure, to improve the operational working of the public sector and minimize waste and to increase the chances that any policy implementation would be more effective, therefore indicating that there was evidence to suggest that the traditional Weberian framework could not realize these objectives. The introduction of market competition is also in direct contrast to that of traditional