A New Management in the Public Sector?

This paper examines the crisis of the bureaucratic mode of organisation within public and private sectors and the emergence of new forms of organisational control within which maximal operational decentralisation occurs alongside the further centralisation of strategic command. It is suggested that the new basic principle of post bureaucratic management corresponds to the idea of giving managers ‘freedoms within boundaries’ and leads to the development of much more horizontal contractual forms of control. ‘The New Public Management’ is considered within this framework and it is suggested that trends towards much more internally devolved forms of organisation are indeed noticeable within the civil service, local government, education and elsewhere in the UK. Finally it is suggested that the new organisational forms are compatible with the full range of political values and examples are given to show how one Labour and one Liberal London local authority have shaped these forms in differing fashions.