Abstract

In Christopher Hood’s now classic article ‘A Public Management for All Seasons’, privatization is considered to be one of the constitutive elements of New Public Management (NPM), perhaps the constitutive element of New Public Management (Hood 1991). Privatization is not only one of the four public sector ‘megatrends’ that Hood links to NPM. He also dubs privatization as one of the ‘doctrinal components’ of NPM because NPM is replicating or coloured by private sector thinking. Thus, ‘hands-on professional management’, ‘explicit standards and measures of performance’, ‘output control’, ‘disaggregation’, ‘competition’, ‘private sector styles of management’, ‘discipline and parsimony in resource use’ are all doctrines more or less taken over from the private sector.