Post-New Public Management: reform ideas and their application in the field of social services

Public sector reforms used to be easier to understand in the past – or so it seems – especially during the heyday of New Public Management (NPM) from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Indeed, what Christopher Hood (1991) once called ‘New Public Management’ was a generalised reform programme that was implemented throughout the whole Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) world and beyond, at the supranational level as well as at the national and local levels. It was all about business-like changes in public sector organisations (e.g. corporatisation), including the replacement of hierarchical coordination by competition, the market mechanism as a possible modus operandi for improving the efficiency of public services, the introduction of a product culture intended to strengthen accountability and so on (Lindberg et al., 2015: 3).