New Public Management (NPM) has been one of the dominant paradigms in public management since the 1980s. Its various elements have been adopted by many countries around the world in their public sector reforms. This research examines the most influential models of NPM and draws out the recurring elements among them. These elements are then employed to build the theoretical framework of how NPM may be related to the reforms in higher education sectors in two countries with highly contrasting contexts: the United Kingdom and China. The UK is an industrialized country that has been one of the pioneers in implementing NPM reforms in its public sector; whilst China, being a socialist country where its public sector has long been under the tight control of the government, is among the developing countries as one of the "late adopters" of NPM techniques in its public management reforms. The aim of this study is to examine the extent to which NPM reforms in these two countries shared any commonalities and divergences. Multiple cases studies are adopted as the main research method. Four universities are chosen: two in the UK and two in China. A comparative analysis of issues relating to the application of NPM techniques in the reforms in these two countries is provided. The NPM elements adopted during the reform processes in the four case studies are analyzed respectively according to the theoretical framework. The conditions under which various NPM elements have been introduced during the reforms are examined and the extent to which they have been applied in the higher education sector in both countries is explored. Results indicate that there has been a translation of NPM techniques from its original country (the UK) to the Chinese socio-economical and political environment. It has been found that although some of the NPM elements such as delayering and devolution of power are shared by both countries, divergences still exist in many aspects of their organizational changes. Meanwhile, the elite and non-elite group of universities in both countries have chosen different pathways in their reforms, which I have significant impacts on the outcomes. The implications of these case studies for future research on public sector management are discussed in the conclusion.

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This thesis examines the citizen-state relationship in the context of the modernisation of public services as effected by New Public Management (NPM). It explores the extent of the impact of one element of NPM - the shift towards representing service users as consumers or customers - within children’s services in Germany and England. Two qualitative case studies, one of a German and one of an English children’s social service, were conducted. The studies examined conceptions of citizenship in relation to parents who were users of these services by analysing national and local policy documents, local organisational procedures and by conducting semi-structured interviews with managers and social workers, partly based on the use of vignettes. These studies found that in children’s services, the impact of NPM is mainly at the organisational level with regard to elements of NPM other than consumerism. As far as consumerism is concerned, the studies demonstrated that this element of NPM is not central to an understanding of contemporary state-citizen relationships in this field and that the consumerist version of citizenship has had little impact. Rather than being a singular concept, citizenship was revealed as being open to a number of interpretations and formulations. In each country five different conceptions of citizenship were identified. These were ideal-type conceptions that served as discursive resources on which politicians, managers and social workers drew in different combinations, depending on the specific situation and wider context. Although there has been research on the impact of NPM on children’s services, there has previously been little consideration of its consumerist agenda, especially with regard to conceptions of citizenship that come into play in relation to parents as service users, as representations of state-citizen relationships in this field. The conceptions of citizenship that have the most impact on parents as service users derive from different understandings of the family and parenthood in the German and English contexts. Parenthood in Germany is a legal status that includes both the responsibility for the safe upbringing of one’s children and the right to receive support from social services. Parents are perceived by social workers as being the holders of these responsibilities and rights. In contrast, parenthood in England is an identity. In their contact with social services, English parents are perceived solely as their children’s carers, to the extent that they are referred to and addressed directly as ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ by social workers. The thesis concludes that the findings demonstrate that policy initiatives, organisational structures and social work practice impacting on state-citizen relationships are shaped by the wider historical and political context from which they emerge. Accordingly, rather than emerging from consumerism as a dominant paradigm, conceptions of citizenship vary; they are complex, competing and contested conceptions and they combine in a variety of different ways.

The purpose of the research was to assess the implementation and management of the Prolific and Priority Offender (PPO) programme, examining the barriers to and enabling factors for managing in partnership, whilst evaluating the settlement between three management models. The research provides evidence for a newer model of management, better suited to deliver on the shared outcomes government requires from its public programmes. Research has shown that although crime is multi-causal, a range of agencies separately intervene into service users’ lives. Collaborative Public Management joins up these interventions to improve crime reduction. The research was theory driven; it proposed that partnerships would require a particular model of management. The research then went looking for Collaborative Public Management (CPM) in mandated crime partnerships with the aim to ascertain the settlement with two other management models: New Public Management (NPM) and Public Administration (PA). Three cases studies have ensued, involving interviews with eighteen managers from a range of partnership agencies, observation of ten partnership management meetings and an analysis of documentary data. The search for CPM was successful, but there has not been a simple linear shift from one model to the next, features of PA and NPM remain but in weaker forms, revealing shiftingtensions, and the overlaying of management forms resulting in the old and new interacting, creating an institutional fusion. Managers were key to successful policy implementation with a focus on performance, building capacity through resource acquisition and networking and realizing structures and knowledge processes. But competent practitioners, a low crime rate, adequate resourcing and a history of partnership were other principal variables. The result is an original piece of research, where the methodology and findings add conceptually and empirically to the current body of knowledge on public policy implementation and which advances theorizing on CPM, whilst also offering an enhanced understanding to improve management practices under partnership conditions.

Retirement homes in Sweden are­ constantly characterized by new changes. These activities make up a large part of the Swedish welfare society as a result of an increased aging population. The changes in this study are based on the influence of New Public Management (NPM), which in itself has contributed to efficiency and competition in these services. NPM is a model that aims to streamline operations with ideas from the private sector, but there is also criticism of NPM, which says that NPM has caused a weakening in the Swedish welfare sector. With the aim of analyzing how NPM is incorporated in municipal and private retirement homes, interviews have been conducted with unit managers in a medium-sized municipality in Sweden. To understand the work of NPM, the study has been interpreted on the basis of Blomberg's NPM model, which is adapted to municipal elderly care and new institutional theory. From the institutional theory Eriksson-Zetterquist's three forces have been helpful. The results of this survey show that all activities are affected by the different NPM concepts and the forces. There are both similarities and differences regarding how the incorporation of NPM looks and how the working methods in the business is designed accordingly. For the private retirement homes, NPM is perceived more than often obvious when in comparison with the municipal operations. For example, they work more with streamlining, which is NPM's main purpose, they have greater responsibility for the financials. The municipal activities, however, are beginning to show more and more evidence of this development. They emphasize the importance of profiling as they express that it is a competitive situation that has arisen between the special housing accommodations such as retirement homes. Despite the fact that the majority of the municipalities do not say that they have come a long way with the efficiency improvements so far, it is taking place and there is a great idea about how it should be designed and work in the operations. The study also gives the opportunity to interpret it as a change in how municipal and private activities mimic each other, but also that the NPM may not be a deliberate choice of unit managers despite their way of working with the NPM concepts. Retirement homes can be seen as a field. Accordning to how the NPM-concepts are incorporated, we were able to see how the field is homogenized using isorphic forces.

Reforming the UK’s corporation tax code is becoming more of a widespread political concern than the preoccupation of specialists. This functionalist study offers an interpretation, and assesses the arguments. It views the corporation tax code as public law, energised by political values whose meaning and prioritisation are shaped by the prudential logic of effectiveness. The institutions that generate the code, and the challenges of globalisation to the nation state, have highlighted historic tensions between Crown and Parliament, and the latter’s scrutiny of the managerialist governance style that the code’s reform involves. This style is apparent in the ideology of the public interest that reform is designed to promote, a process that involves the skilful balancing of efficiency and fairness. Surprisingly, perhaps, there is little in the conduct of reform that violates the traditions of the UK’s representative democracy. The result is a code that, given its public law status, is a pre-eminent example of political jurisprudence. Its values, their prioritisation, and their change and complexity, are inevitably contentious, because they are the products of representative institutions. Criticism of the code generally understates these points. What are presented as impartial legal arguments are often simply rival views of the public interest.

abstract: Knowledge advancement occurs when the creation of new and useful knowledge encompasses and supersedes earlier knowledge. A rapidly growing number of scholars with state-of-the-art research tools has led to the growth of knowledge exploration in almost every field. It, however, has been observed that the findings of new studies frequently differ from previously established evidence and even disagree with one another. Conflicting and contradictory results prevail in the literature. This phenomenon has puzzled many people with respect to which findings are reliable and which should be considered as valid. Inconclusive results in the literature inhibit, rather than facilitate, knowledge advancement in sciences. Meta-analysis, which is referred to as the analysis of analyses, designed to synthesize findings from a large collection of quantitative analyses that produce inconsistent results has become a major research method in the fields of medicine, education, and psychology; however, the method has been slow to penetrate research in nonprofit and public management (NPM). This study, therefore, discusses how meta-analysis contributes to knowledge advancement in the fields of nonprofit and public management by using nonprofit commercialization as an example to examine its impact on nonprofit capacity and donations, respectively. The attention of this discussion is directed toward how the use of meta-regression models is able to offer new and useful knowledge that encompasses and supersedes earlier knowledge in the literature with evidence-based results. Moreover, this study examines whether the use of SEM-based meta-analysis produces equivalent results when compared with results from traditional meta-regression models. The comparison results suggest that the use of SEM-based meta-analysis is able to produce equivalent results even when missing data are present. Overall, this study makes at least two contributions. First, it introduces a newly-developed method for conducting meta-analysis to the field of NPM. This method is especially useful when there are missing data in data sets. Second and most importantly, this study demonstrates how knowledge advancement in NPM can be achieved by conducting meta-analysis. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Community Resources and Development 2019

This thesis is about the impact of the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm on public sector reform in Thailand. The main objective of the thesis is to explore the question of whether Thai public sector reform belongs to the NPM paradigm, especially whether the intentions and contents of policy documents are actually realised in the implementation process. The study commences by reviewing the transformation of public administration to NPM and how this has affected developing countries. In theory, the traditional model of public administration, namely bureaucracy, has been considered as dysfunctional, no longer able to cope with changing circumstances and the new environment. NPM was introduced during the 1980s and 1990s in some rich countries in order to replace the traditional model of public administration. However, there are doubts about the appropriateness of NPM for the public sector in developing countries. The thesis is specifically concerned with Thailand and as a first step delineates the history of public administration and its reform in Thailand including current policies. This includes the introduction of NPM. The remainder of the thesis is comprised of a case study of one ministry in Thailand. Much of the data was collected from semi-structured interviews with officials in the ministry and government agencies responsible for reform. The case study focused on four dimensions of reform: organisational restructure and redesign of internal authority, public culture and values reform, workforce reduction, and internal NPM reform initiatives. The findings were mixed. Some NPM style initiatives such as restructuring of roles and functions were accomplished. However, some areas of NPM have either been partially implemented (downsizing) or not introduced at all (greater competition in public sector). It was also found that some reform initiatives, such as public culture and values reform, fell outside of the NPM paradigm. The research concluded that the NPM paradigm had made limited progress in the Thai public sector.

ABSTRACT This study is focused on the analysis to establish civicness-laden public management in association with non-profit organizations. Through the efforts to build the model structure, we can study the main dimension which is required to pay more attention in order to strengthen the process of civicness-laden public management, and investigate into the problem to improve the public administration capability of the government under cooperation between the public sectors (government) and the private sectors (non-profit organizations). Speaking in details, the targets of this study include: (1) To investigate the theoretic meaning of the establishment of civicness-laden public management from documentary references. (2) To study the problems in connection with the establishment of civicness-laden public management. (3) To state the parameters of cause and result under the role and function played by non-profit organizations in civicness-laden public management. (4) To establish a theoretic structure for the study of civicness-laden public management in association with non-profit organizations. (5) To describe in details the main dimension and guideline for each parameter and also to provide the methods and strategy for fulfillment. We expect that this study of public management will enable people to recognize, internalize and vitalize again the issues such as the quality of citizens and cooperation between the public sectors and private sectors, and will also open an new realm and area for public management. In this study, we also hope that the government can adjust the traditional role as a provider to a role to implement criteria or reinforcement gradually, especially to exert the function of ¡§good governance¡¨ so that the private sectors may have more opportunity to offer and participate in social services in a wider range. As to the non-profit organizations, they can make full play of their role function, for example, they will be more active and positive to play the role function of expansion and innovation, the role function of improvement and promotion, and the role function of extensive social participation. In the meantime, it is also required to promote character and re-socialized education for people as well as to maintain the ideas of democratic society and various positive value judgments through the cooperation and interaction between the government and non-profit organizations. In this way, both can supplement each other to build a cooperative network and create a value-added and everlasting administration model so that the government and private sectors may produce ¡§integrated advantages¡¨ to achieve the success of civicness-laden public management. Key words: civicness-laden public management, non-profit organizations.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Canberra, 2007. / Includes bibliography (p. 238 - 260) Also available online.