Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose – When new public management (NPM) emerged in the mid-1980s, most governments such as New Zealand, Australia and Canada embraced it as a better way to provide public services. A more recent assessment of NPM would conclude that its appeal has faded. The purpose of this paper is to assess the serious impediments to NPM-inspired change. Design/methodology/approach – The literature is diffuse, and therefore its insights have been limited by the lack of synthesis. In this paper the authors set out to synthesize the main work already available. Findings – Change, such as breaking up large public sector hierarchies, or developing internal market-like competition and contracting out public services is indeed disruptive. Such change cannot be achieved without shifting decision-making processes, disrupting existing roles and working relationships and leaving some confusion and uncertainty among staff. Many of the changes feature numerous levels of ill-defined processes, ongoing multi-layered and complex decision making, and no easily agreed or clear path to resolution. Originality/value – The terms “wicked problem” and “disruptive innovation” are increasingly familiar to public managers and policy makers. This paper argues that managing NPM-style change represented yet another wicked problem in managing public organizations. The authors set out to synthesize the main work available, and in so doing, frame the various attributes of NPM-inspired change – five basic parts, five types of uncertainty and five fragmenting forces. The conceptual framework suggests hypotheses as the basis for further research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.044 | 0.178 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".