How New Public Management Reforms Challenge the Roles of Professionals

The article discusses the relationship between New Public Management reforms and professional roles in European countries. The author presents the traditional autonomous role of professionals and argues that this role is challenged in New Public Management reforms. Then the author looks more closely into the comparative European literature on New Public Management reforms to find general messages about the specific challenges for professionals. And the Danish way of implementing New Public Management reforms is introduced with a specific combination of decentralisation, managerialism and democratisation. Professionals are faced with all of these reform strategies and each of them raises important research questions in a study of reforms and roles. Finally the author presents the few European comparative studies on actual changes in professional role as a consequence of New Public Management reforms and the result is the upcoming of maybe a new interactive role and professional managers. The result calls for further studies into these new roles. ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to thank the European University Institute Library (Florence) under the auspices of EUSSIRF, part of The European Commission's large scale facilities Training and Mobility of Researchers programme (Fourth Framework), for the possibility to stay at the library in Florence and collect all the material for this article.