Front-Line Work in Employment Services after Ten Years of New Public Management Reform: Governance and Activation in Australia, the Netherlands and the UK

This chapter characterizes the overall strategy of public services reform apparent in England after the global financial crisis of 2008 and during the period of the UK’s Coalition government 2010–15. It argues that what can be termed a ‘proto narrative’ of reform, orientated around so-called ‘Big Society’ ideas, emerged around 2010. However, we argue it was trumped in the end by Treasury-led and New Public Management-friendly austerity discourse. The concrete example is taken of the health policy to form new clinical commissioning groups in the primary care sector. They were presented as a mechanism which could promote professional engagement in commissioning. However, they were soon subjected to top-down performance management pressures and systems, including strong attempts to prevent financial deficits from emerging at a local level, which eroded bottom-up and professionally driven innovation. We conclude that the Big Society proto reform narrative failed to consolidate itself.

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The political economy of English public services reform and implications for management knowledges in health care organizations

10.1093/oso/9780198777212.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Ewan Ferlie ◽

Sue Dopson ◽

Chris Bennett ◽

Michael D. Fischer ◽

Jean Ledger ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

Public Management ◽

Public Services ◽

New Public Management ◽

Health Care Organizations ◽

Public Agencies ◽

Political Issue ◽

Management Reform ◽

New Public

This chapter explores, in greater depth, the idea floated in the Introduction that the macro-level political economy of public services reform can exert effects on preferred management knowledges at both national and local levels. We argue that an important series of New Public Management reforms evident since the 1980s have made UK public agencies more ‘firm like’ and receptive to firm-based forms of management knowledge. We characterize key features of the UK’s long-term public management reform strategy, benchmarking it against, and also adding to, Pollitt and Bouckaert’s well-known comparativist typology. We specifically add to their model a consideration of the extent to which public management reform is constructed as a top-level political issue.

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Employment Services

10.1093/oso/9780198785446.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Ian Greer ◽

Karen Breidahl ◽

Matthias Knuth ◽

Flemming Larsen

Keyword(s):

Market Structure ◽

Public Management ◽

Multinational Firms ◽

New Public Management ◽

Paid Work ◽

Market Segments ◽

Employment Services ◽

New Public ◽

Work Assessment ◽

Work Programme

Denmark, Germany, and Britain have marketized their employment services in different ways. This chapter introduces the tasks involved in moving jobless people into, or closer to, paid work (assessment, advice, training, job placement, and the organization of make-work schemes). In Denmark New Public Management and municipalization trends have combined to produce dramatic fluctuations in the volume of work and the rules of the market; marketization has proceeded in three waves since 2005. In Germany, there are diverse market segments reflecting the persistence of three different transaction modes in the wake of the Hartz reforms; marketization was implemented in 2002–5. In Britain, a series of privatization experiments led to the creation of a highly concentrated, centralized, and uncompetitive market, with several multinational firms managing the bulk of the market as Work Programme prime contractors; this market structure was created in 2008–11.

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Hybridity as a Result of the Marketization of Public Services: Catalyst or Obstruction for Sustainable Development? Deductions from a Study of Three Hybrid Waste Management Organizations in The Netherlands

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13010252 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 252

Author(s):

Philip Marcel Karré

Keyword(s):

Sustainable Development ◽

The Netherlands ◽

Waste Management ◽

Public Management ◽

New Public Management ◽

Management Style ◽

Organizational Settings ◽

Entrepreneurial Spirit ◽

Professional Management ◽

New Public

Increasingly, hybridity, i.e., the combination of contrasting and conflicting elements within organizations, is seen as a way to create innovation and synergy in dealing with complex societal questions, leading to more sustainable development. Much research on the subject deals with the phenomenon of social enterprise, but hybridity also takes place in other, more traditional organizational settings. For example, many governments have created hybrid organizations by embracing new public management (NPM) as a way to overcome the perceived shortcomings of traditional, hierarchical forms of public administration, such as inefficiency and the lack of an entrepreneurial spirit. Here, hybridity is often not so much seen as a way to increase sustainability but rather as a way to cut cost and to increase the quality of service provision. This article adds the sustainability dimension to this discussion through a deductive approach, reinterpreting the results from a study on the effects of the hybridity of three municipal waste management organizations in the Netherlands. The main conclusions are that hybridity leads to a more professional management style but also to more attention on output than on outcome. The article discusses what this means in terms of pursuing sustainability and sustainable development.

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