Yesterday’s Tomorrows Revisited—the Route to Better and Cheaper Public Services
Yesterday’s Tomorrows Revisited—the Route to Better and Cheaper Public Services
This introductory chapter briefly reviews the recent history of government modernization efforts with emphasis on the New Public Management, a reform agenda with which the UK is particularly associated. Such reforms included drawing on ideas from business, bringing in new kinds of people as managers of government organizations, and structural makeovers of various kinds intended to cut running costs and make government more focused, responsive, or ‘joined-up’. New types of information technology were introduced with the aim of cost-cutting and introducing transformative change in the traditional workings of bureaucracy. And a stress on improved presentation and packaging of initiatives and ideas was aimed at making government more persuasive, effective and ‘user-friendly’. The chapter lays out nine possible outcomes of such reforms, in terms of what happened to costs of running government and of what happened to consistency and fairness in administration, to be explored in the subsequent chapters.
Keywords: modernization, cost-cutting, reform agenda, New Public Management, information technology, presentation
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