Public Sector Reforms: Changing Contours on an NPM Landscape

Previous studies suggest that 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. Focusing on accounting changes in the UK central government, this paper explores whether movements towards NPG ideas can be identified at the level of political debate. No evidence is found that NPM is a transitory state. Rather, the findings demonstrate that political debate continues to utilise predominantly NPM arguments, with the three systems viewed as containing complementary, rather than competing, schemes.

Criminal Justice Reforms in Northern Ireland: The Agents of Change

This chapter examines who and what brought about the transformation in the criminal justice system of Northern Ireland between 1998 and 2015, seeking to pinpoint the critical moments which stimulated the reforms, how they were delivered, and through what processes they are now being maintained. It seeks to identify the key agents of change and considers whether it is possible to generalise from Northern Ireland’s experience so that other conflicted societies might benefit from the lessons learned.

Studying administrative reforms through textual analysis: the case of Italian central government accounting

This paper contributes to the literature on public-sector reforms by proposing textual analysis as a useful research strategy to explore how reform archetypes and related ideas are deployed in the parliamentary debate and regulations advancing reforms. Public Administration (PA) (Wilson 1887; Weber 1922), New Public Management (NPM) (Hood 1991, 1995; Dunleavy and Hood 1994; Ferlie et al. 1996) and Public Governance (GOV) (Osborne 2010; Rhodes 1997) can be depicted as three different archetypes providing characteristic administrative ideas and concepts (i.e. interpretive schemes) and related tools and practices (i.e. structures and systems) which lead reforms. We use textual analysis to look into more than twenty years of Italian central government accounting reforms and investigate how the three administrative archetypes have evolved, intertwined and replaced each other. Textual analysis proves a useful tool to investigate reform processes and allows highlighting that in neo-Weberian countries, such as Italy, NPM and GOV, far from being revolutionary paradigms, may represent fashionable trends that did not leave significant traces in the practice and rhetoric of reforms. These results also suggest interesting implications for practitioners and policy makers.