The strange resilience of new public management: the case of medical research in the UK’s national health service

Whether New Public Management (NPM) ideas and practices have remained resilient or are now in decline remains a topic of contention. We investigate the case of a national system, introduced in 2006, for performance managing medical research in the United Kingdom’s National Health System (NHS). We argue that the system conforms to traditional NPM, providing empirical evidence of its late adoption and resilience. We highlight potential conflicts in the adoption of NPM in this context and demonstrate for the first time the potential for this NPM-style system to produce unintended and unwanted consequences in the context of medical research.