Reform Activism: New Public Management by the Book

Managerialism has been used and pursued as a source of legitimacy since the 1980s. Policymaking and public administration as a profession have undergone far-reaching transformations through the incorporation of managerial knowledge and know-how. Such principles have gained a great scientific reputation since they have been integrated into handbooks, turning them into a recognized academic discipline. This article reviews the ways and means of “scientificizing” new public management (NPM). The argument is based on the study of more than sixty English and French handbooks. These books contain assumptions attached to a specific social group that are formulated in such a way that the instructions appear merely objective. Nonetheless, NPM as a discipline is nothing new. The old wines of scientific management, public choice, and sociology of organizations are to be found in the new wineskin of “performance” and “accountability.” A typology of NPM entrepreneurs shows various profiles: consultants, scholars, and top civil servants coalesce to blur frontiers that used to separate civil service from the private sector. The topic goes beyond the specialists’ scope to address a whole rhetoric of performance, as well as a more general issue of the citizen consumer.