1 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2019
    1. As with neoliberalism more generally, New Public Management is invisible, part of a new “common sense” that has somehow become hegemonic, whereby the “entrepreneurial spirit” has infused the public sector, leading to “businesslike government”. As with the claims of neoliberalism more generally as to its positive outputs in terms of prosperity, NPM has never been shown to have been successful even in its own terms. NPM “introduced punishments and rewards to produce better services with lesser staff. Instead of having freed energies and creativity of employees formerly shackled by their bureaucratic turfs, NPM reforms have bound energies into theatrical audit performances at the cost of work and killed creativity in centralizing resources and hollowing out professional autonomy... Fundamental deprivation of the legitimacy of public employees . . .has traumatized many most-committed employees and driven others toward a Soviet-type double standard.” (Juha Siltala, New Public Management : The evidence-based worst practice?, Administration; Vol. 45, No. 4.; 2013 pp. 468-493) Sekera quotes Christopher Pollitt et al., who “after compiling a database of 518 studies of NPM in Europe, determined that “more than 90% of what are seen by experts as the most significant and relevant studies contain no data at all on outcomes” and that of the 10% that had outcomes information, only 44% of those, or 4% of the total, found any improvements in terms of outcomes.” But in the end, the point of NPM is less that of measureable outcomes, and more that of the ideological victory of turning the public and its good into customers exercising their “choices” (see tax revolt example in Duggan), along of course with the radical disempowering of public administration workers and their unions, instituting “cost savings” by cutting their real income and putting more and more of the public sector’s production directly into the profit-making market.