The Middle Aging of New Public Management: Into the Age of Paradox?

As “New Public Management” enters middle age, scholarly attention has moved to some degree from descriptive mapping and a priori critiques to the analysis of surprises and paradoxes associated with recent and contemporary public service reforms. Some standard analytic lenses for examining such paradoxes, explored here, are the Mertonian tradition of analyzing unintended effects of social interventions, cultural theories of surprise, and the analysis of discontinuities and unexpected couplings in the operation of complex systems, though the New Public Management literature to date has employed the first lens more intensively than the other two. We conclude by exploring features of New Public Management reforms that may have contributed to paradoxical effects and argue that the analysis of such paradoxes can help advance administrative science and the understanding of public sector reform.