BOOK REVIEW ESSAY
What Is the New Public Management?
I am grateful to Sandford Borins and
Donald Savoie for helpful comments on
earlier versions of this essay.
J-PART 12(2002):!: 137-151
Andrew Stark
University of Toronto
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After more than a decade of spirited debate, neither its sup-
porters nor its critics can quite get a handle on what the new public
management is—and in particular on what is new about it—let
alone on whether, taken as a whole, it is a good thing.
True, there is a defined (if unwieldly) set of ideas that usually
gets conjured up whenever NPM is the topic of discussion: compe-
tition between public and private service providers; decentralization
and delayering of government bureaus; more choice for citizens;
benchmarking and output measurements; performance contracts and
other financial incentives for public servants; creation of inter-nal
markets; and assimilation; within the public sector, of private-sector
management techniques including better risk-management Yet
despite this emergent consensus on NPM's specific content, several
scholars have concluded that NPM embodies "radically different,
indeed conflicting goals" (Kettl 1995, 14) or that it dis-plays a
"disparate, and at times contradictory, set of traits.... Indeed,
sometimes the new public management seems like an empty canvas:
you can paint on it whatever you like. There is no clear or agreed
definition of what the new public management actually is . . . "
(Ferlie et al. 1996, 10). These statements imply that, notwithstand-
ing the agreed-upon specifics, NPM seems prey to a lack of clarity
at a more theoretical level.
Consider some examples: One theorist believes that with NPM
"public managers are given more discretion" (Kaboolian 1998),
while another identifies NPM with "an attempt to limit the discre-
tion of public servants" (Barberis 1988). Or, along similar lines,
NPM finds itself associated with both the idea of "letting managers
manage" and the notion of "making managers manage" (Kettl
1997). Some say that NPM brings with it an "increased focus on
results" (Lindquist and Paquet 2000, 84); others declare that NPM,
1311Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
Book Review Essay

in asking "employees to assume responsibility for change," neces-

sarily "accepts a degree ofrisk-takingand acknowledges intent as
well as results." One scholar, in the same breath, associates NPM
with both "managerialism" and "entrepreneurialism," even
though—at least in business-management circles—those two
concepts are considered far from compatible (Terry 1999). Or, again
in the same breath, another analyst links NPM with a stress on
"efficiency," but says that the "classic definitions of effective
government" which NPA challenges also "encourage . . . efficiency"
(Kamensky 1996). Scholars have connected NPM with a variety of
strange theoretical bedfellows, including (to name a few)

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managerialism, principal-agent theory, public-choice theory,
deconstructionism, postmodernism, total quality management,
reengineering, democratic theory, and cybertheory (Terry 1999;
Kamensky 1996, 249).

No wonder, then, that a leading critic of NPM, Henry Mintz-

berg, is able to declare that "business can learn from government no
less than government can learn from business," and that while
privatization is to some extent "probably useful," a "good deal of it
is also just plain silly" (Mintzburg 1996), while two of the principal
originators of NPM, David Osborne and Ted Gaebler (1992, 45),
can near-identically announce that

[pjrivatization is one arrow in the government's quiver. But just as obviously,

privatization is not the solution. Those who advocate it on ideological
grounds—because they believe business is always superior to government—
are selling the American people snake oil... . Business does some things better
than government, but government does some things better than business.

To Mintzberg, the glass is half empty. To Osborne and Gaebler, it is

half full.

As for the bottle, H. George Frederickson (1996) asks, "Is

reinventing government just old wine in new bottles? The answer is
mostly, Yes." Frederickson is joined in this claim by some fellow
NPM skeptics: "While claiming to be original," one argues, "many
of the organizational and managerial ideas of the NPM school can
be traced back to earlier debates in public administration" (Thomas
2000; see also Savoie 1995). Other critics see NPM very differently,
not as old news and hence unoriginal but as entirely unprece-dented
and therefore radical or dangerous. It is unlikely that the new public
management can "be accommodated within traditional public
service values and standards," write a pair of NPM opponents (Doig
and Wilson 1998), while another describes NPM as a "clear-cut
break with traditional public administration values" (Moe 1994).
But the critics aren't alone in harboring this dichotomy. Advocates,
too, are split into those who describe NPM in reassuring, calming

IWJ-PART, January 2002

Book Review Essay

terms as nothing but an improvement on tradi-tional values—"NPR

builds on some time-tested administrative reforms" (Kettl 1995)—
and others, who speak in exciting, intriguing terms of a "current
wave of innovation and ferment in the public service [that] is
different in both scope and significance from the reform efforts of
the past" (Borins 1995).

It would seem, then, that although a fertile debate continues

over whether NPM ought to be, it is time to regroup and consider
what it is, and in particular how new it is. We are helped in this task
by two books recently published by the Institute of Public Adminis-

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tration of Canada, which perhaps by virtue of their indirection—
neither is explicitly about NPM and both are set in a Canadian con-
text—provide a different angle and shed bright, if oblique, light on
the meaning and import of NPM. Evert Lindquist's edited volume,
Government Restructuring and Career Public Services, an impres-
sive collection of essays by scholars on public-service reforms and
restructuring in Canada, offers chapters not only on the federal
government but on each of the provincial and territorial govern-
ments as well. The scholarship is uniformly rich, and—taken simply
as a documentary on what went on in Canada's public serv-ices
over the past decade—it's an indispensable piece of work. But
beyond this, many of its chapters—from Lindquist and Gilles
Paquet's essay on the "new cosmology" represented by public-
service reform to individual chapters that look in detail at each
regime from Newfoundland to British Columbia—can be read as
examinations, rooted in the vocabulary and scholarship of main-
stream public administration studies, of the ways in which NPM fits
into (or jars with) Westminster systems.

The lion's share of Managing Publicly, by Henry Mintzberg

and Jacques Bourgault, consists of a patented Mintzberg-style study,
in which the scholar goes out into the field and observes what it is
that managers in three federal departments—Parks Canada, the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Department of Justice—
actually do with their time, recording and then analyzing what he
finds. There follows, in the latter portion of the book, commentaries
on Mintzberg's work by several scholars, as well as a roundtable
discussion by practitioners. Mintzberg's own analysis is as rooted in
the specifics of the bureaus he analyzes as the essays in Lindquist's
volume are in the provinces they examine. Parks Canada officials,
Mintzberg writes, exemplify "managing on the edges," through
having to handle an array of external interest groups; the Mounties
exhibit "managing normatively," through instilling and relying upon
a strong organizational culture; and the Justice Department portrays
"managing policy," through fusing policy/advisory with administra-
tion/implementation roles. But by virtue of its very specificity,

139/J-PART, January 2002

Book Review Essay

Managing Publicly, as does Government Restructuring, speaks in a

discursive way to the larger ques-tion of the nature and novelty of
NPM-style reforms. Yet unlike Lindquist's book—which uses the
vernacular of Westminster-style public administration—Mintzberg
instead prefers the more universal language of strategic manage-
ment: although his public managers happen to be Canadian, for the
purposes of his analysis and the lessons he draws, they could be
pretty much anywhere.

FOCUSING ON WESTMINSTER SYSTEMS

THROUGH THE LENSES OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

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So to what judgments do these books lead us on the question
of NPM's essence and newness? Begin with Lindquist's. In an
introductory essay, Lindquist, drawing from testimony given at a
1993 U.K. Treasury and Civil service committee, lists the pillars of
the Westminster-style public service as "integrity, political impar-
tiality, objectivity, selection and promotion on merit, and account-
ability through ministers"; this latter signifies Westminster's
insistence on the anonymity of public servants themselves, as well
as the notion of a "permanent civil service" (Lindquist 2000; see
also Kernaghan 1976). If we collapse objectivity into impartiality—
both essentially refer to the idea of public-service neutrality—and if
we set aside integrity, which is not a quality unique to Westminster-
style public service or indeed to the profession of public service
itself, then in an ideal-stylized Westminster system, the public
service is anonymous, neutral, merit-based, and permanent. So
how does NPM fit into this structure? How much does it alter the
Westminster dispensation and how much conform to it? And can
addressing these questions aid us in getting at its essence?

To answer, it helps to move beyond Lindquist's taxonomy to

identify the ways in which these four qualities—anonymity, merit,
permanence, and neutrality—are related, and to note their essential
symmetry. Anonymity is a "theory of personal identity in action"
(Sutherland 1991), according to which public servants remain face-
less to the public because their acts are attributed to the political
master. In a Westminster system, "everything should be treated as if
it were the action of the minister" (Barberis 1988). We might say,
then, that when it comes to the public servant, anonymity detaches
the person from his (official) acts.

Merit, for its part, means that political masters cannot hire or
promote bureaucrats—or set up systems to do the same—on any
principle other than their qualifications. More specifically, ministers
cannot engage in wholesale patronage; they cannot take into
account the political beliefs of individuals in deciding who to place

140/J-PART, January 2002

Book Review Essay

in what bureaucratic position. In other words, when it comes to the

public servant, we might say that merit detaches the personfromhis
(personal) beliefs.

Permanence means that public servants enjoy tenure, and

within broad bands cannot be fired or penalized—or for that matter,
rewarded—for their acts of office, certainly by comparison with
their private-sector counterparts. When it comes to the public ser-
vant, in other words, we might say that permanence detaches his
acts from their (personal) consequences, or at least the natural con-
sequences that would follow for him in most other lines of work.

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Neutrality, finally, means that, regardless of their own beliefs,
bureaucrats must carry out the will of their political masters. What-
ever their own policy views or opinions, which in any case they
impart to the minister only if they occupy an advisory role, they are
ultimately of no consequence. The only beliefs that have conse-
quences are those of the political master, and, on the stylized West-
minster politics/administration dichotomy, it is the public servant's
job to implement them. When it comes to the public servant, in
other words, neutrality detaches his beliefsfromany (official)
consequences.

The four pillars of the stylized or ideal-typical Westminster

system, then, deconstruct the public servant in the following ways:

• Anonymity detaches the person from his (official) acts.

• Merit detaches the person from his (personal) beliefs.
• Permanence detaches his acts from (personal) consequences.
• Neutrality detaches his beliefs from (official) consequences.

In the American system, of course, none of these four prin-

ciples apply to advise and consent or to other appointed bureau-
crats. Such officeholders routinely get personally identified with
their official acts (ask Elliott Abrams) and personal beliefs (ask Bill
Lann Lee); they are, in other words, neither anonymous nor ap-
pointed on merit principles, without heed to their politics. And their
acts have personal consequences (ask David Stockman) while their
beliefs have official consequences (ask Richard Perle); they are, in
other words, neither permanent nor neutral. Of course, even in real-
world Westminster regimes, the four principles never exist in pure,
undiluted form. In fact, without ever going so far as the American-
style abandonment of all four principles, many West-minster
pathologies—and innovations—represent a modification of a
particular pair out of the four concerns, although it is a different
pair in each case

141IJ-PART, January 2002

Book Review Essay

NPM represents one such departure from Westminster norms,

but to see this, to place NPM in proper context, first consider some
others. Certainly in Canadian provinces public servants at the
lowest echelons used to be—and in some cases still are—appointed
in ways that flout both the merit and the permanence principles.
Liberal postmasters or road crews would take over from Tory post-
masters or road crews as governments changed. But such patronage
proteges, precisely by virtue of their low levels, always honoured
the other two Westminster principles. They remained both anony-
mous and neutral implementers, not opinionated shapers, of policy.
Or, to take another example, mandarins or superbureaucrats in

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Westminster systems reverse this image. They shed their anonymity
(their acts are associated with their persons) and their neutrality
(they are powerful enough that their beliefs have consequences) but
they remain both permanent and merit based in their appointments
(Campbell and Szablowski 1979).

Both low-level proteges and high-flying mandarins might bend

a couple of Westminster principles, but neither breaks with all of
them. They thus represent variations on the Westminster theme as
opposed to departures from it, provoking concern in some quarters
without causing anyone to say that they spell the death of the
Westminster system. And they are joined by others. Whistle-
blowers, along with public servants who are called to testify in
parliamentary committees as in Canada's Al-Mashat affair, lose
their anonymity. Their acts become associated with them personally,
and, consequently, they seriously jeopardize their capacity to be
treated only on merit. Their beliefs become associated with them
personally. As Peter Aucoin (1995) puts it, "Going public not only
eliminates the traditional anonymity of public servants; it often
exposes their views on matters of public policy, however much they
attempt to restrict their commentaries to approved government
policy." Or, as S.L. Sutherland (1991) notes in her discussion of the
Al-Mashat affair, requiring public servants to testify at the political
level not only strips them of their anonymity, it also, in its own
fashion, eats away at the merit principle by "forcing the officials of
what is apparently intended to remain a professional bureaucracy
into partisan stances." But those stances or views need not have
issued forth in consequence of any policy sort. Whistleblowers (as
were the Al-Mashat officials) are generally implementers, not
devisers, of policy; they behave neutrally, in other words, within
their roles. Nor, given various types of whistleblower protection
statutes, need their acts have any consequences of a personal sort;
the whistleblower still remains part of the permanent public service,
as did the Al-Mashat officials.

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 Book Review Essay

Consultants, many of whom fill traditional public-service

roles, reverse this image. Many are not neutral; indeed, they are
retained specifically to render advice. "[T]he crucial advisory space
enveloping core executives," Herman Bakvis writes,"is increasingly
being populated [by] gurus from think tanks, polling firms and
management consulting organizations" (Bakvis 1997; see also
Peters 1996), and so their beliefs have official consequences. Nor
are such consultants permanent. They are retained temporarily and
can be let go depending on their quality of service; their acts have
personal consequences. Yet most such consultants remain anony-
mous; their (official) acts are not associated with them personally.

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Nor need their hiring violate merit principles. Their (personal)
beliefs need not be associated with them personally, need not be
taken into account in their retention—and usually aren't (Saint-
Marie 1998).1

Just as it has accommodated proteges and mandarins, the

Westminster system is able to encompass whistleblowers and con-
sultants. And likewise with the innovation whereby ministerial
aides—or other "politically sympathetic 'outsiders' or 'irregulars'"—
enter the permanent bureaucracy after a period of political service
through "positions once reserved for career civil servants" (Aber-
bach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981). Such aides flout the principle
of neutrality (as political advisors, their beliefs do have conse-
quences) and merit (as politicos, their beliefs are very much associ-
ated with them personally, and in fact are the reason they were
originally hired). Yet they remain anonymous: Their (official) acts
are associated not with them but with their ministers. Once they
have entered the public service, they are there permanently and
their acts need not, within a broad range, have any (personal)
consequences.

All of these innovations, whether they are thought to be for

good or for ill, bend the Westminster system—take it away from the
stylized ideal—without breaking it. We still recognize the systems

Exhibit 1
Variations on the Four Westminster Themes
Themes Preserved (P); Themes Threatened (T)
Anonymity Merit Permanence! Neutrality

Proteges P T T P
Mandarins T P P T
'As Denis Saint-Marie (1998) notes, the Whistleblowers T T P P
rise of policy consultants, in Canada at Consultants P P T T
least, began several years before the Aide-bureaucrats P T P T
emergence of NPM in the 1980s.

143/J-PART, January 2002

Book Review Essay

that harbor them as Westminster-style in practice. And, against this

backdrop, NPM can be seen as nothing but its own kind of two-part
variation on the four-part Westminster theme. Indeed, it's the only
remaining one. NPM attacks anonymity and permanence. It insists,
contra anonymity, that official acts be far more associated with the
persons who execute them than the traditional Westminster dispen-
sation requires. According to NPM, as Sandford Borins (1995 and
2001) puts it, one of the major "enemies of accountability [is]
anonymity." Or, as Lindquist and Paquet (2000) put it:

A key [Westminster] principle is that, even if a minister did not have a direct

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hand in a policy or administrative error, the minister is accountable for the
actions of public servants in the department or agency and of those individuals
and firms under contract The logic of [NPM-style] alternative delivery and
quality service is at variance with [these] principles.... Alternative-delivery
models—particularly partnerships and alliances—require that officials and
agents be accountable to the minister but also to the other partners, while the
precepts of the quality-service movement emphasizes accountability to clients
and citizens. This points to a 360-degree accountability process based on dia-
logue and balance among relevant stakeholders which stands in sharp opposi-
tion to the Westminster concept

Likewise, NPM insists that an official's acts be linked to personal

consequences far more than the traditional Westminster regime
allows—it forges a '"link between an individual's performance and
merit-based adjustments" (Sasketchewan Public Service Commis-
sion 1986)—and more generally insists that officials be directly
rewarded or penalized, even fired, depending on the nature of their
acts. NPM, in other words, shakes the permanence pillar of the
Westminster system. As Graham White (2000, 337) writes in his
chapter on Ontario in Government Restructuring, the "notion that a
career in the OPS [Ontario Public Service] is a job for life is one
obvious casualty" of the province's embrace of NPM. Donald
Savoie (2000, 278-79), in his discussion of New Brunswick, notes
premier Frank McKenna's lack of "patience with the concept of
'career for life' in the public service."

But while NPM departs from the Westminster principles of

anonymity and permanence, it need not be at variance with the
Westminster principles of merit and neutrality. There is nothing
about NPM that requires or even allows public servants, whether
permanent or temporary, to be hired on any principle other than
merit. Certainly NPM necessitates no weighing of the linkage
between the person and her beliefs. "The NPM revolution is a
continuation of past efforts," as even one critical observer
acknowledges, "to professionalize the public service by incor-
porating merit-based systems . .. into governance frameworks"
(Bardouille 2000). Nor is there anything about NPM that requires
new public managers to be anything other than neutral imple-

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Book Review Essay

menters. "NPM," as Christopher Hood noted some time ago, "pur-

port[s] to offer a neutral. . . instrument for realizing whatever goals
elected representatives might set" (1991; see also Cunningham
2000). Indeed, NPM seeks to "reinstitutfe]" (or at least come closer
to) the stylized, if rarely actualized, Westminster "policy-administra-
tion dichotomy" (Kamensky 1996; see also Frederickson 1996), by
"walling off [implementation] agencies behind more effective
barriers to political manipulation" (Osbome 2000). In sum, as
Gilles Paquet and Lise Pigeon (2000) acknowledge in their contri-
bution to Government Restructuring, when it comes to NPM,
"[fjew reforms really questioned neutrality or merit."

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An examination of the four pillars of the Westminster model
thus suggests that while NPM is indeed new—it represents a unique
variation on the Westminster theme, a muting of a particular two out
of the four Westminster principles—it is for that very reason no
more radical than any other muting, than the proteges, mandarins,
whistleblowers, consultants, or aide-bureaucrats who, over time,
have washed away at some but not all of Westminster's pillars
without eroding the structure. There is no reason a public service
that adopts NPM need do so either. Or, at least, why it should do so
to any greater extent than have those other innovations, which have
each been greeted by their own mixtures of encouragement, cau-
tion, and discomfiture. NPM can be understood as a typical, if
indeed genuine, Westminster-style innovation.

BRINGING IN THE AMERICAN SYSTEM

THROUGH THE SCOPE OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

There is another way to gain perspective on the new public

management, one that substitutes the Mintzbergian vocabulary of
strategic management for the language of public administration and
that in the process expands beyond the Westminster model to
encompass American government. Mintzberg (1996) understands
NPM as embodying three assumptions: that "particular [governmen-
tal] activities can be isolated, both from one another and from direct
authority"; that "performance can be fully and properly evaluated
by objective measures"; and that "[activities can be entrusted to
autonomous professional managers held responsible for their
performance." This is helpful as far as it goes, but Mintzberg's
taxonomy stops short of coherence, of finding in strategic-manage-
ment concepts a unifying thread or contextual frame for NPM.
Nevertheless, his approach is suggestive. What it would have us do
is set aside the concepts of anonymity, neutrality, merit, and perma-
nence that we associate with Westminster-style public administra-
tion and think instead in terms of the payers, providers, agents, and
principals we identify with strategic management (as well as with

145/J-PART, January 2002

Book Review Essay

economic doctrines such as public-choice or principal-agent

theory). If we do so, what can we glean about NPM's meaning and
novelty?

On a traditional model of functional democratic governance,

government comprises the agents and the providers, while the
public comprises the principal and the payers. That is, government
consists of both the civil service—the providers of government
services—and the politicians, the agents who—in overseeing the
providers—represent the interests of the principal. And that princi-
pal, of course, is the public, in its role as citizens, which is also, in

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its role as taxpayers, the payer.

There is also a traditional model of dysfunctional democratic

(and in particular American) governance, one in which a kind of
role exchange or inversion takes place. In this model, things get so
out of whack that government thinks of itself not only as the agent
but also as the payer—as when political masters come to believe (or
are thought to believe) that the public's money is in fact the govern-
ment's money, along the lines of George W. Bush's campaign
mantra that "Washington thinks it's their money, but it's yours."
And, in a complementary way, things also get so out of whack on
the dysfunctional model that providers begin to think of themselves
as principals—as the entities whose interests government is meant
to serve. Analysts of bureaucratic capture focus on instances where
providers within government act as if their interests are the ones the
agents, the politicians, should be furthering. Providers outside
government, too, can come to think of themselves as the principals
to whose interests government is "fiduciarily obligated" to promote
(Stark 1997)—as when the Department of Transportation treats
"highway builders" instead of "drivers," or HUD views "real-estate
developers" instead of "poor urban dwellers," as their true princi-
pals (Osborne and Gaebler 1992).

In a stylized way, central strands of American debate over the

well-ordered polity play between these different poles. The heirs to
the Finers and the Friedrichs, focusing on a traditional model of
government officials as both agents and providers, debate the
proper extent to which those two roles inevitably overlap or else
should be thought of as distinct. The Gingriches and the Reiches,
focusing on a traditional model of the public as both payer and
principal, debate the extent to which those two roles overlap (such
that it's the public in its taxpayer role whom politicians should take
to be their principal) or else should be thought of as distinct (such
that those who pay the most taxes are not necessarily those who
should benefit most, as principals, from the expenditures).
Reformers from Samuel Adams to Howard Jarvis—dismayed by the

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extent to which government at various periods seemed, dys-

functionally, to treat tax revenue as its own money—try to wrench
things back to the original model, where the public is understood as
the payer. Other reformers from Herbert Croly to Theodore Lowi,
dismayed by the extent to which the providers at times had come to
think of themselves, dysfunctionally, as principals—whether
through bureaucratic or business capture of the state—try to wrench
things back to the traditional model, where the providers are
watched over by agents representing the true principal, citizens,
rather than thought of as the principals themselves.

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Against the backdrop of all this, what it is that's new about the
new public management gets set out in stark relief. In a sense, the
new public management represents a move toward the final frontier,
the last possible combination of roles. Differing from the traditional
model, in which the agents and the providers reside in government
and the principals and the payers in the public, and differing as well
from the corruptive model, in which the agent thinks it's the payer
and the providers think they're the principals, the new public
management seeks, not absolutely but as much as possible, to make
the principal his own agent and to fuse the roles of provider and
payer.

To tilt the balance toward the point where the principal is his
own agent means nothing more than to accept that the citizen must,
more than before, represent himself in his dealings with public-
service providers. Indeed, this is what is really meant by NPM
references to the citizen as consumer. By becoming empowered to
make more of his own choices and look after his own interests—
whether through vouchers or citizen charters or one-stop-shopping
or "new intermediary [purchaser] proxies" such as health authori-
ties—the citizen-consumer, on the NPM dispensation, is thought to
possess (or else will be furnished with) "knowledge about a range
of products or services, a degree of market power, and the capacity
to make choices between providers" (Ferlie 1996). By thus "in-
creasing the role and voice of customers in the service delivery . . .
process" (Kamensky 1996), NPM in effect converts the principal—
the citizen—into his own agent. Donald Savoie (1994) reports that
in the view of some British officials, consumers of public services
now expect to determine "standards of service and quality" them-
selves; they are "no longer prepared to accept the standards laid
down by producers often with an eye more to their own conve-
nience than to that of their consumers."

To tilt the balance toward the point where providers assume

the role of payers, at least to some extent, means nothing other than
to make the provider pay for poor or costly service, to give him a

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financial stake in his own performance. This is what is entailed by

NPM's focus on "executive agencies" or "special operating agen-
cies" or various kinds of capitation-based payments, which offer
managers "substantial incentive rewards tied to performance,"
"substantial bonuses linked to performance" (Paquet and Pigeon
2000), or "performance targets and performance-based pay"
(Barberis 1988). Under New Zealand's NPM-style reforms, for
example, "managers are held personally responsible for their
organizations' performance.. . . [I]f they meet most or all of [the
benchmarks], they are eligible for bonuses of around 10 percent of
their salaries" (Osbome 2000). Or, as Osborne and Gaebler (1992,

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169) ask rhetorically, "[I]f schools lose money every time a student
departs—as in Minnesota—do teachers and administrators act
differently? Of course. If motor vehicle offices were paid only when
they processed drivers' licenses .. . would their employees act
differently? You bet." In other words, NPM wants some of the
provider's own money to be at stake, so that the provider pays if its
services prove substandard.

Understanding NPM as an attempt to bring, wherever possible,

the principal and the agent roles together, and the payer and the
provider roles together, also helps frame the basic stance taken by
NPM's critics. Their fear is that the principals cannot function as
their own agents, that parents—especially poor parents—do not
have the capacity to defend their interests in the education market-
place or that patients—especially poor patients—might not have the
ability to fend for themselves in the medical marketplace. Certainly,
they haven't the means to fight for themselves as well as better-off
parents or patients can (deLeon and Denhardt 2000). Alternatively,
NPM's critics question whether the interests the consumer-as-his-
own-agent represents—namely, his own individual interests in
accessing more business subsidies or welfare assistance—actually
cohere with the true interests of the principal properly understood—
namely, citizens in general—which might exclude certain kinds of
business grants or welfare benefits. Likewise, NPM's critics fear
that providers cannot function as payers without harboring perverse
incentives to cut services in the name of profit—to simply walk
away or declare bankruptcy if their share of the payment becomes
too onerous—or, alternatively, to accumulate obscene profits if
what they have to lay out proves too inconsequential

The question as to whether NPM's partisans or its critics get

the better of these debates in any particular case will, of course, be
answered in the details—details of the sort that are revealed in the
studies that the Lindquist and Mintzberg volumes, as well as recent
work by Borins (1998), represent. If, however, the question is what
is NPM, and is it really new—does it represent a radical break from

14S/J-PART, January 2002

Book Review Essay

traditional democratic governance in America and elsewhere?—

then the language of principal/agent/payer/provider does suggest an
answer, the same answer as is intimated by the frame of anonymity/
neutrality/merit/permanence in the Westminster model. Yes, NPM is
new, in that it represents a new combination—indeed, the final
frontier, the only remaining combination—of the four roles. Veer-
ing away both from the traditional government of agents/providers
facing a public of principals/payers and from the dysfunctional
government-as-agent-that-thinks-it's-the-payer facing providers-
who-think-they're-the-principals, NPM tries to enable empowered
principal/agents to face innovative provider/payers. NPM is not

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only new, it is new in a way that is about as fundamental as one
could imagine, while remaining within the agent/payer/provider/
principal framework.

But there is another side to the coin. Although it is new, NPM

is not radical. Indeed, it represents nothing more than a recombina-
tion of well-known roles, not a breaking out of them. It is more like
a squaring of the circle, the final frontier of possibilities our system
of democratic governance affords us. Yes, NPM's critics, such as
Mintzberg, have a point when they balk at the idea of transforming
the citizen too exclusively into a consumer. But they have no more a
point than have other critics, historical and contemporary, who have
rebelled against citizens who go too far in thinking of themselves in
their provider or their (tax)payer roles. And yes, NPM's critics have
a point when they worry about providers who are also payers, in the
sense that those providers will have a financial stake in the quality
of their service provision. But they have no more a point than have
other critics who have rebelled against providers who usurp the
agent role—the role of the politicians who should be supervising
them—or providers who (alternatively) upgrade them-selves to
principals, usurping the role of the citizen they should actually be
serving. It is of course these excesses that NPM is meant to tack
against, and if NPM can fall prey to its own excesses in turn, they
are excesses that resemble others we have seen. Just like debates
over those others, debates over NPM are best seen as part of a much
broader, ongoing, and familiar discourse over demo-cratic gover-
nance, one that is continually adjusting the balances and nuances of
the entire set of roles available to government and to the public.

NPM, then, can be defined in either the language of public

administration (as a compromise of Westminster-style public-
service anonymity and permanence, but not merit or neutrality) or
in the language of strategic management (as a movement toward
combining the provider role with the payer role and the principal
role with the agent role). Other innovations have departed from the
Westminster anonymity/merit/neutrality/permanence model or have

149/J-PART, January 2002

 Book Review Essay

recombined agent/principal/provider/payer roles in their own ways,

and with competing benefits and costs. In this way, NPM is not
new. But no other initiative has varied the Westminster theme of
anonymity/merit/permanence/neutrality in precisely the same
fashion as has NPM, or has combined agent/principal/payer/pro-
vider roles in precisely the configuration NPM has. In this way,
NPM is indeed new.

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