Reform and Leadership in the Public Sector

Public sector reform under the guise of New Public Management (NPM) has now been under way for more than two decades across the developed world. During this period it has attracted a voluminous literature aimed at explaining not only the origins of this revolution in public administration, but also its guiding principles. Despite this prolonged scholarly scrutiny, the NPM philosophy and its manifestations in real-world civil service systems remain at best partly understood. Various reasons may account for the difficulties experienced by academic writers in the analysis of NPM-inspired public sector reform. Chief among these reasons is the ongoing gap between the abstract theoretical dimensions of NPM and its application to actual civil administrations in industrialized countries. The observed uneven incidence of NPM reform programs between different countries, and in the same country through time, seems to belie any close correspondence between theory and practice. This apparent anomaly has puzzled scholars who have responded by seeking satisfactory explanations from an even broader range of conceptual perspectives drawn from the social sciences.