Is the New Public Management a Paradigm? Does it Matter?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm has been widely used in the social sciences even though its author was not sure about its applicability outside the hard sciences of nature. In the field of public administration and management, the approach known as ‘New Public Management ’ (NPM) has been seen by many as the new paradigm that is replacing the classic bureaucratic or Weberian paradigm of ‘public administration ’ (PA). However, there has been little reflection concerning the validity of using in this way the notion as it was developed by Thomas Kuhn. The question of whether or not NPM is a new paradigm merits attention for a number of reasons. First, does the introduction of ideas borrowed from business management and economics constitute a fruitful transfer or borrowing (Kuhn, 1970: 29) or a spurious one (Bendor, 1976; Ramos, 1978)? Second, the question of paradigms leads us to reflect on the degree of difference between the supposed new paradigm of NPM and the old one of PA. Is it a revolution that challenges the former paradigm and ultimately leads to its replacement? Finally, inquiring into paradigms informs us of the nature of knowledge in NPM and by extension PA. Here we enter into the realm of epistemology and raise a more universal question about social science: Are we really taking part in a ‘conversation that is aware of itself ‘ (McSwite, 1997: 4)? In what follows Kuhn’s theory is recalled, NPM is presented and analyzed in terms of it. In a third section NPM and PA are compared before an overall assessment is attempted in the conclusion. While we claim universality for our theoretical content, the practical difficulties cited, with which the traditional PA paradigm met, are mostly Canadian. Kuhn’s theory of paradigms and its application to the social sciences Kuhn’s theory was inspired by the desire to put order into the study of the external conditions giving rise to scientific discoveries. What emerged was a
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.068 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.054 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".