Re-examining the Rhetoric of Public Management Reform from a Critical Management Studies Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public management reform is mostly presented as a rational, technical and objective process in public administration discourse. Driven by the neo-liberal ideological assault on the welfare state and influenced by the “private is better” mantra, it has been claimed, especially by NPM/Managerialism advocates, that there are superior ideas, concepts and models out there which are value free and have universal validity and application. It is also claimed that the adoption and implementation of these ideals can secure the goals of efficiency, efficacy and economy in public organization. Based on an analysis of the critical management literature however, this paper (1) explores the extent to which concepts such as visionary and strategic leadership, teamwork, empowerment and improved organizational culture which are integral to the NPM/Managerialist claims are value free; (2) contests and interrogates their universality of adoption and application; and (3) explores and examines the relevance and theoretical contributions of critical management studies (hereafter CMS) to NPM in particular and public management reform in general.
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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 | 0.027 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".