Sammendrag:

This book examines the dynamics of comprehensive civil service reform in Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia. During the past 15 years, New Public Management has evolved into a new international administrative orthodoxy. This book challenges the globalisation thesis, which maintains that NPM is spreading fast around the world and generating convergence between civil service systems. We argue that administrative reforms are transformed by a complex mixture of environmental pressure, polity features and historical and institutional contexts and that this transformation implies substantial divergence and organisational variety and heterogeneity. There is therefore a need to look behind the new NPM orthodoxy and to develop a more differentiated view of the problems of governing the public sector. Three forms of transformation of NPM are studied in this book. First, the transformation of the reforms themselves, which is examined by focusing on NPM reform processes, ideas and content. Second, the transformation of administrative systems - i.e., the effects of NPM reforms on political-administrative control, organised interests, policy capacity and governmental culture. Third, the transformation of theory and the implications of NPM for reform theory and democratic ideas.