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Neoliberalism and the origins of public management

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 17:50 authored by Samuel KnafoSamuel Knafo
There is a rich literature on the emergence of new public management in the 1980s yet surprisingly little about the historical and social lineages of this movement. The scholarship on public management generally suggests that it was born out of the neoliberal critique of the state. The public sector would have thus borrowed corporate practices concerned with performance in order to instil market-like competition and make efficiency gains. This article challenges this reading by showing that concerns with performance management emerged instead from new planning technologies developed in the US military sector. I argue that these planning practices, initially developed at the RAND corporation, would radically transform governance by changing the way in which decision makers consider data about performance and use it to develop strategies or policies. I then explore the impact of this new approach on both corporate and public governance. I show how these ideas were translated for business studies and public administration in order to radically transform both fields and ‘make them more scientific’. As I show, this process contributed directly to the rise of what became called public management and provided new planning tools that radically transformed how we think about governance.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Review of International Political Economy

ISSN

0969-2290

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

4

Volume

27

Page range

780-801

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Centre for Global Political Economy Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2019-05-17

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2020-12-27

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2019-05-16

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