Public Sector Reforms: Changing Contours on an NPM Landscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous studies suggest that, over the last decades, public-sector accounting has moved from Public Administration (PA) to New Public Management (NPM) ideas, and more recently, towards a New Public Governance (NPG) approach. These systems are presented as mutually exclusive and competing. Through an extensive document analysis, this paper explores whether convincing movement towards NPG ideas can be identified at the level of political debate and to what extent the ideas embedded within PA, NPM and NPG systems show themselves in these discussions. The study focuses on accounting, budgeting and performance measurement changes in the UK central government starting from the 1990s. The findings show little evidence that NPM is a transitory state in the evolution from a regime of traditional PA to NPG, a claim made by some commentators. Furthermore, the UK political debate continues to predominantly utilise NPM arguments, with the three systems viewed as containing complementary, rather than competing, schemes. This has resulted in layering, rather than the replacement of ideas.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".