Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
1, 2009
ABACUS
1467-6281
0001-3072
Abacus
ABAC
ORIGINAL
XXX
NPM:
2009CRUELLEST
Accounting
ARTICLE
Foundation,
INVENTION
Unviersity
OF THE HUMAN
of SydneySPIRIT?
Blackwell
Melbourne,
Publishing
Australia
Asia
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6281.2009.00275.x
IRVINE LAPSLEY
The New Public Management (NPM) is an inuential set of management techniques drawing on private sector performance criteria and practices. It has been
widely deployed by governments seeking to modernize and transform their public
sectors, and has achieved global signicance. The ideas of NPM have proved to be
irresistible to governments in debates on current and future developments in the
public sector of advanced economies, and increasingly so in developing countries.
This article seeks to examine the impact of NPM and assess its effectiveness.
The study of NPM is complicated by its unstable nature, with changes in NPM
over time and in different settings (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000). Therefore, the
major focus of this article is restricted to the U.K. experience, with a particular
focus on the early twenty-rst century. The U.K. has been regarded as a pacesetter,
along with countries such as Australia and New Zealand, in the adoption of
NPM from the outset (Hood, 1991, 1995). This article advances the case that all
1
This article is based on a lecture in honour of Ray Chambers. Its title is inspired by that of
Chambers 1983 lecture at the University of Edinburgh, AccountingOne of the Finest Inventions of the Human Spirit.
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governments are under pressure to modernize their public sectors. The agenda
of modernization (Lapsley, 1999, 2001a, 2001b; Lapsley and Pong, 2000; English
and Skaerbek, 2007; Broadbent and Guthrie, 2008) is a shorthand for the NPM
doctrine which draws, inter alia, on private sector-derived accounting and management technologies in the pursuit of public sector efciency. This is a challenging
agenda. Given the pressures for change, it is suggested here that governments
intent on reform are tempted by the allure of the NPM solutions, as provided by
the NPM toolkit. However, in terms of outcomes, the failure, generally, of NPM
makes it a cruel disappointment for policymakers and users.
This cruelty is based on a comprehensive assessment of what NPM seemed to
be at the outset, what it purports to be and what it has become. In the 1990s the
initial focus of NPM was on management styles and structures, as discussed
below. This article examines the phenomenon of NPM in the early parts of the
twenty-rst century and depicts four key elements of NPM in action at this stage of
its trajectory: (a) the continued reliance on, and debatable impact of, management consultants in public sector transformation, (b) the digital revolution and
e-government as devices of modernization, (c) the entrenchment of the audit
society, in which compliance has primacy, and most recently, (d) the signicance
of risk management in the public sector, which mitigates against social entrepreneurship. Of these elements, the rst three are most embedded in NPM initiatives.
The nal elementrisk managementis an emergent factor in NPM implementation, as is also discussed below. It is suggested that the pressures for NPM will
not abate. Rather, the evolution of NPM will continue to be severely contested
(Lapsley, 2008).
ANTECEDENTS OF NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
The U.K. government adoption of NPM can be seen as an outcome of conviction
by politicians with strong beliefs in the merits of the private sector business model
of management for all organizations (Thatcher, 1993) and senior civil servants who
willingly engage with NPM policy options. Initially, this policy was demonstrated
by the appointment in 1980 of the leading U.S. industrialist, Sir Ian MacGregor,
to transform the U.K.s nationalized steel and coal industries. The impact of this
perspective on how to deal with the public sector can be seen from the referral of
the problem of NHS management to the then deputy chairman and managing
director of the Sainsbury grocery chain, Roy Grifths. Arguably, the Grifths
Report (1983) is the forerunner of NPM thinking in U.K. public services management. As was a contemporaneous report on the management of British universities
(Jarratt Report, 1985) of similar ilk (led by Alex Jarratt, who was at that time
chancellor of Birmingham University). Jarratt, however, also had had considerable
industrial experience in banking and publishing. These studies are indicative of
the inuence of big business mimicry on reforming the management of U.K. public
sector organizations in the years shortly before Hood coined the term NPM.
The inuence of the global economy on the actions of governments in the latter
part of the twentieth century and the early twenty-rst century has also led many
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to adopt NPM practices. The liberalization of the former Eastern Bloc, the emergence of China and India as major producers and markets, the global presences of
brands (e.g., Coca-Cola, MacDonalds) and the emergence of major corporations
(Ford, Toyota, Microsoft, IBM) with annual budgets dwarng GDPs of smaller
countries means that there has been an attenuation of the strong nation state of
the early twentieth century (Gamble and Lapsley, 2008). Instead, the emergence
of global patterns of consumerism fosters the concept of the world as a single
entity, which changes the role of the sovereign nation state (Waters, 2001). From a
national perspective, the management of economies is weakened by globalization.
For policy makers, the key levers to power are perceived to rest with making
the public sector more efcient, economical and effective (Lapsley, 2008). This
circumstance makes NPM ideas attractive to policymakers across the world.
NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
The belief that management can transform public sector organizations rather than
alternative policy options, such as more traditional forms of public administration
or merely increasing expenditure on public services, is encapsulated in the NPM
approach. NPM components, as articulated by Hood (1991, 1995) in two of the most
widely cited articles in the public sector literature, identify seven key elements:
1. Unbundling public sector into corporatized units organized by product.
2. More contract-based competitive provision, with internal markets and term
contracts.
3. Stress on private sector management styles.
4. More stress on discipline and frugality in resource use.
5. Visible hands-on top management.
6. Explicit formal measurable standards and measurement of performance and
success.
7. Greater emphasis on output controls.
The 1991 article by Hood was neither a normative model nor template for
change. Rather it can be seen as a reection on what had been happening in the
1980s in the U.K. It is not possible to say exactly when NPM began, it preceded
the authorship of Hoods 1991 article and can be seen as a product of the 1980s.
The 1995 article by Hood positions NPM in an international context. This article
identies the U.K. as a pacesetter in the adoption, implementation and promulgation
of NPM ideas.
There have been subsequent attempts to revise, to nesse or to build on the
basic elements of NPM outlined by Hood. Consider Osborne and Gaebler (1992),
where a rened role for government is advocated as a catalyst for enterprise
(expressed as revenue earning, not just spending) and as steering state services to
respond effectively to changes. More elaborate models include those by Peters
(1996) and by Ferlie et al. (1996). Peters (1996) identies four forms of government: market, participative, exible and deregulated. The Ferlie et al. contribution
devised four models of public service organizations undergoing change: the efciency
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The act of moving from the apparently straightforward elements of Hoods basic
NPM model is fraught with potential difculties of interpretation. The implementation of NPM ideas may encounter resistance within organizations, or even at a
societal level, with a kind of passive resistance. This resistance may take complex
forms rather than outright confrontation. As the following discussion demonstrates,
there are severe measurement problems which may render ideas of results-oriented
management cultures untenable. There are also difculties of unintended consequences where policies, practices and outcomes differ from those predicted or
expected by NPM.
EVIDENCE: NPM AS A CRUEL DISAPPOINTMENT
As noted above, the precursors of the expression NPM were taking place in the
U.K. in the early 1980s. After two decades of the NPM project, there is no sign of
the project abating. However, in the twenty-rst century, the NPM has evolved.
This evolution has continuities with earlier aspects of NPM, but it also reects
wider changes in society as it seeks to enact what may be regarded as an overt
managerialist agenda as the states central transformational mechanism, rather than
traditional, procedural, bureaucratic machines. In examining the implementation
of NPM in the U.K. in the twenty-rst century, this article focuses on the four
dimensions identied above as key elements of the governments transformation
agenda for public services: (a) the continuing reliance on, and the debatable impact
of, management consultants in public sector transformation; (b) technological
change and e-government as devices of modernization; (c) the entrenchment of
the audit society in which compliance has primacy; and (d) the increased emphasis
on risk management in public sector organizations. At this stage in the U.K.
trajectory of NPM these facets of government policy represent key cornerstones
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Table 1
EXPENDITURE ON MANAGEMENT CONSULTANCY BY U.K. CENTRAL
GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS, 19932006
Defence
Environment
Health
Home ofce
International developments
1993
m
2006
m
55.64
7.34
4.66
3.81
0.2
256.3
163.0
125.0
125.0
256.2
of its implementation, with risk management becoming the most recent strand of
NPM thinking.
Management Consultants
Management consultants have a longstanding and continuing role as tools of
governments seeking to modernize or transform the public sector. The presence
of management consulting activity predates the arrival of NPM, but it can be
argued that NPM has given a fresh impetus to management consulting activities.
An indication of the growing signicance of management consulting in U.K. central
government can be seen from Tables 1 and 2.
Table 1 shows a signicant and continuing increase in expenditure on management
consultants. This expenditure is for the U.K. central government departments
with the highest expenditure on management consultancy. These statistics are
drawn from different sources and must therefore be interpreted with a degree of
caution. However, the trend of signicantly increased expenditure on management consultants by central government departments is evident. While Table 1
reveals the Department of International Developments has the largest increased
spend on management consultants, there is also an average annual increase of
27.7 per cent on management consultancy in defence expenditure, with average
annual increases in expenditure on management consultancy per annum for
Environment, Health and Home Ofce, respectively, of 163 per cent, 198 per cent
and 245 per cent, over the period 19932006. However, Table 2 gives a different
angle on this expenditure. In particular, it shows a substantial expenditure on the
services of management consultants from companies which have expertise in IT
and high technology, an issue which we take up further in our discussion of egovernment initiatives, below.
These gures do not provide an indication of how the activities of management
consulting rms actually impact on the organizations which they advise, or the citizens
who use public services. There is an active debate on the contribution which
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275m
LogicaCMG
Accenture
PA Consulting
Capgemini
Matt MacDonald
PwC
Atos
KPMG
Deloitte
175
130
102
85
77
65
59
57
50
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See, for example, the Australian governments vision of an IT enhanced transformed public sector
(Australian Government, 2006).
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Governments with serious transformational intent see technology as a strategic asset and
not just a tactical tool. Technology alone does not transform government, but
government cannot transform to meet modern citizens expectations without it.
These visionary images have contributed to a debate about whether the use of egovernment is a threat to the continuation of new public management. Specically,
the use of e-government is seen as a mechanism for greater outreach to citizens,
with greater direct contact and less reliance on management. Those who subscribe
to this thesis see the world of e-government as instrumental in creating a post-NPM
world, which enhances citizens capacity for solving social problems (Dunleavy et
al., 2005). Strikingly, the reality of these claims is not substantiated by available
evidence, as discussed below.
The Reality of E-Government
Brown (2001) describes e-government in the U.K. as a process of permanent failure.
Brown justies this descriptor of permanent failure on three grounds: (a) software
development problems, (b) project management problems, and (c) procurement
problems.
The following projects have been identied as problematic (Committee of Public
Accounts, 2001) and all exhibit Browns three implementation problems:
The above cases represent classic failures. However, there are more recent
problematic cases. An illustration of this is U.K. Online for Business which was
launched in 2000 to make Britain the best place in the world for e-commerce.
By 2003, it was expected to result in one million business trades on the internet.
This target was never achieved and U.K. Online for Business was wound up in
April 2004, after 25 million was spent on it (Judge, 2004). Another example is
the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which was scrapped
within three years of its launch as costs estimated at 2.6 billion had failed to
yield an operational IT system to supervise the management of offenders from
conviction through prison sentence to supervision by the probation service on
their release (Ford, 2007). Within the NHS, a computerized manpower planning
system, the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS), was abandoned in
favour of conventional interviews for junior hospital doctors posts in the face
of the inability of MTAS to allocate junior hospital doctors to hospitals
(Hawkes, 2007).
The above examples are relatively inexpensive failures (with cost estimates
from 25 million to 2.6 billion), when compared to the most ambitious, albeit
awed IT project, Connecting for Health (CFH), which has a projected cost of
12.5 billion. CFH was expected to deliver
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However, Hawkes (2007a, 2007b, 2007c) reveals that there are numerous cases
of the CFH project failing to deliver. For example, the patient administration
system (PAS) at Milton Keynes was reported as not working. Elsewhere, twenty
years of accurate immunization records were lost because of faulty software
introduced in 2005 (Hawkes et al., 2007).
There are also issues around the expertise available. Connecting for Health had
four consulting rms: CSC (Computer Services Corporation), BT, Fujitsi and
Accenture. However, in September 2006, Accenture withdrew from the project
(Judge and Bolger, 2006). Furthermore, in February 2007 Fujitsis Head of
Healthcare Consultancy stated: What we are trying to do is run an enormous
programme with the techniques that we are absolutely familiar with for running
small projects, and it isnt working. And it isnt going to work (Rose, 2007).
The former chief executive of the CFH project was reported as being ashamed
of the quality of the IT systems being implemented in hospitals, which he had
described as appalling (Weekly Telegraph, 2007). Although all hospitals in England
and Wales were expected to have patient record systems installed by the end of
2006, only thirty-four out of 169 received these systems and, of these, twenty-one
received an older, outdated system (Dorward, 2008).
Why do these major IT projects repeatedly fail? The U.K.s National Audit
Ofce (2006b) identies twenty-four successful IT projects. However, these are all
smaller scale projects. The NAO report pinpointed project management skills as
key. Montanes (2007) also identies project implementation as a critical factor in
success/failure. In particular, a closer integration of IT and other reforms and a
strategic approach are necessary to achieve successful implementation. Here is
another example of cruel disappointment for NPM modernizers.
The Audit Society
Power (1994, 1997, 2003) has advanced the thesis that, in the U.K., we live in an
audit society. This has two major implications: (a) the universality of audit as a
technology, and (b) the resultant compliance (or tick box) society. One facet of
this is the existence of an audit explosion (Power, 1994, 1997). Power describes
the general situation of the spread of audit as an audit explosion:
Regulation of private company accounting by nancial audit . . . Environmental
audit . . . Value for money audit . . . Management audit . . . Forensic audit . . . Data audit . . .
Intellectual property audit . . . Medical audit . . . Teaching audit . . . Technology audit . . .
Further examples of this audit explosion have occurred since. These include the
advocacy of a gender audit by the Equalities Commission to address continuing
disparities in pay between female and male employees (Prosser, 2005); police
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ofcers in Scotland were part of a religious audit to determine their religions and
the possibility of religious discrimination (Howie, 2006); the Chief Inspector of
Schools in England and Wales called for spot checks of schools by school inspectors (Beattie, 2007); and the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in an interview
called for an audit of all criminal legislation to determine where the gaps are
(Charter, 2006). A specic case of this audit explosion can be found in the NHS.
The National Health Service has heavy inspection and audit with at least fty-six
bodies with a right to visit NHS hospitals and trusts. The sheer number of inspection
standards, and volume of information required to demonstrate compliance, make
it difcult to extract value from these processes and use them to improve patient
services, in the view of NHS managers. For example, the Health Commissions
Light Touch annual health check has an overwhelming impact. It requires 500
separate information topics to be addressed, so voluminous, managers doubted
they could complete them. There is also overlap with other audits and inspections
(NHS Confederation, 2007).
Within this audit explosion in the NHS, there is a preoccupation with target
setting. One example of the tick box approach to target setting is the case of
ambulance crews which have a specic target of eight minutes as the time by
which they must respond to emergency calls. The rigid interpretation of this rule
may mean a call made within eight minutes in which the patient dies of heart
failure is regarded as a success, but it is deemed to be a failure if the target of
eight minutes is exceeded, even if the ambulance crew save the life of the patient
who has had a heart attack (Moss, 2007). Another notable example of this is the
specic target that patients should be treated within four hours of admission to
the accident and emergency (A&E) unit of hospitals. This is alleged to have two
dysfunctional effects. The rst of these is the admission of patients into the hospital
who are in danger of waiting more than the target time of four hours in A&E,
just in case. Many of the just in case patients are discharged, even on the same
day, which suggests they were not needing to be admitted in the rst place, other
than to meet their A&E targets (Hawkes, 2007b). Another twist to this specic
target is the way hospitals are alleged to retain patients in ambulances in holding
patterns. This patient stacking may last for up to ve hours as it is alleged that
patients with broken limbs or breathing difculties are parked in ambulances
because hospitals are unwilling to admit patients if they cannot treat them within
four hours of admission (Campbell, 2008). Not surprisingly, the existence of this
practice is, however, contested by the Department of Health (Alberti, 2008).
If the second dimension of this audit society is considered, the police services
provide stark examples of the compliance mentality. A major review of policing
in England and Wales led by Sir Ronnie Flanagan (Flanagan Report, 2007, p. 8)
reported that there was unnecessary bureaucracy in these police forces. This
report observed that, while some of this unnecessary bureaucracy came from
burdens imposed on police ofcers, there was also a strong element of what the
Flanagan Report (p. 7) called self-created burdens as a perceived protection
against future scrutiny. This phenomenon of self-creation is a clear example of
legitimating behaviour as part of a compliance or tick box culture, as a consequence
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At this conference there were other examples cited which revealed a frustration
with the iron cage of the audit society. Two particular cases (Berry, 2007) were:
(a) A Cheshire man was cautioned by police for being found in possession of an egg with
intent to throw and
(b) A child in Kent who removed a slice of cucumber from a tuna mayonnaise sandwich
and threw it at another youngster was arrested because the other childs parents
claimed that it was an assault.
A twelve-year-old boy was charged with grievous bodily harm for icking an elastic band in class
(Hopkirk, 2007).
Picken (2008) reported that British Transport Police had specic targets to stop and search under
U.K. anti-terror laws and they faced dismissal if they did not make their targets.
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the detriment of strategic management.6 The impact of this tick box mentality
has resulted in a boycott by leading police forces (including Suffolk, Staffordshire,
Leicester and West Midlands) of performance targets which require police ofcers
to record minor childish behaviour as criminal offences, in a bid to move to what
they call commonsense policing (ONeill, 2008). Indeed, it is interesting to note
that the Flanagan Report (2007, p. 9) attributed the compliance phenomenon to
wider societal inuences rather than simply the working practices of the police
services.
Within local government in England and Wales, concerns have also been
expressed over the volume and scale of oversight bodies. Over 90 per cent of local
authorities in a survey considered that local government had too many inspections
and that inspections should focus more on strategic issues. In fact, in this survey,
nearly two-thirds of local authorities believed that the costs of inspection greatly
outweighed the benets (Local Government Association, 2004). In Scotland, the
Best Value Audit of local government has not had its intended impact. Arnaboldi
and Lapsley (2008) report on an investigation of the development of the Best
Value Audit regime. This particular manifestation of auditing was devised as a
method of transforming local government by placing auditors as enforcers of a
compliance regime which was intended to achieve a culture change in the management of local authority services. The culture change embraced the management
ideas of the NPM with great emphasis on management structures and styles and
with the citizen as consumer. Arnaboldi and Lapsley reported limited culture
change in their case study sites. However, they did present evidence of dysfunctional
outcomes, including the displacement of core activities by the need to comply
with the bureaucracy of the Best Value regime. These examples demonstrate the
disappointment of NPM systems of targeting and auditing which have perverse
outcomes.
Risk Management and Entrepreneurship
The inuence of big business ideas on how best to manage public sector organizations and their importance in the development of NPM have been noted
above in the discussion of the antecedents of NPM. There it was presumed that
the management practices of big business were superior to those of the public
sector. The most recent of these private sector management practices to be
adopted by, and recommended for, public sector organizations is risk management. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, but it is located within the NPM
(Power, 2007). However, the adoption of risk management practices in the public
sector can be seen as an outcome of some of the worst abuses of private sector
management in modern times. Hamilton and Micklethwait (2006) chart the
impact of the major corporate disasters of the early twenty-rst century: Barings,
WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, Marconi, Royal Ahold, Swissair. Consistent with other
Fahy (2007) reported the police performance regime made senior ofcers focus on performance
indicators at the expense of strategic development of leaders.
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similar works, like John Argenti (1976), they attribute these failures to a number
of factors, including dominant chief executive ofcers, weak auditors and weak
internal controls. However, as part of enhanced governance systems to prevent a
recurrence of this corporate mismanagement, Hamilton and Micklethwait endorse
the development and wider adoption of risk management tools. The specic
adoption of risk management as a technology can be seen as part of the raft of
reforms which led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S. and the combined audit
code of practice in the U.K. (Smith, 2003). Clarke and Dean (2007) are very critical
of the role of accountants and accounting practices in major corporate failures,
but they are also sceptical of the above governance procedures put in place as a
consequence of these failures, which they see as directed more at appearances
(i.e., legitimation) than at rectifying underlying problems.
Hamilton and Micklethwait (2006) observe that the above corporate disasters
have been attributed to overzealous entrepreneurial management which neglected
good practice in corporate governance. Within the NPM movement there have
been active proponents of entrepreneurship in public services (notably Osborne
and Gaebler, 1992). The rationale for this advocacy of social entrepreneurship is
that public managers should be innovative and released from the iron cage of
public sector bureaucracy. However, this advocacy of social entrepreneurship has
been criticized as encouraging risky behaviour, inconsistent with public administration (Bellone and Goerl, 1992). Indeed, it has been suggested (Courpasson and
Reed, 2004) that the infusion of the enterprise culture in government organizations has undermined traditional bureaucratic means and mechanisms and posed
challenges for public service managers capacity to adapt to this new regime. This
tension fosters an environment in which public sector organizations are receptive
to the introduction of risk management. This context may be seen as more receptive,
given the above evidence of IT failures and weak use of management consultants.
Risk management, in this context, may appear to offer a neutral, impartial
technology to public service managers who seek to balance the desire to be
entrepreneurial with obligations to avoid unnecessary risks. In terms of the cruel
disappointment focus of this article, Powers (2007) critique is pertinent. He
maintains that risk management is not an effective management tool, with serious
unintended consequences and with cruel disappointment for policy makers and,
indeed, managers. The phenomenon of risk management is examined here in two
stages: in practice, and impacts.
Risk Management in Practice
Contrasting with the conventional wisdom in the private sector, the risk of failure
has a disproportionate impact in public services. As Behn (1998) expressed it, it
does not matter if you get it right 99 per cent of the time, because all the attention
will be paid to the 1 per cent of the time things went wrong. In his view (p. 149),
the Ten Commandments of Government are: Thou shalt not make a mistake.
Thou shalt not make a mistake . . . Thou shalt not make a mistake. In this sense,
public services can be seen as a receptive context for the formality of risk management. Indeed, the potential for risky behaviour by public managers has been
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CONCLUSION
So is New Public Management the cruellest invention of the human spirit? It is
entirely understandable if governments turn to NPM technologies to transform
their public sector, given the constraints of operating within a global economy and
the burden of electoral hopes for governments to deploy effective economic policies.
It is argued in this article that the natural area for governments to choose to
demonstrate the virtues of their stewardship is that of public sector transformation.
The expectations of policy makers and managers are high as they seek to pursue
efcient systems of management. Given these imperatives, it is highly likely that
governments will turn to NPM as a perceived solution as they seek recipes for
public sector transformation.
However, the technologies available within the NPM toolkit may thwart, rather
than deliver, successful policy outcomes. It has been suggested here that the rst
point of reference for reforming governments may be management consultants.
But there are difculties in effectively harnessing management consultants expertise. These are manifested at numerous levels. There is evidence that, while public
sector organizations have a continuing dependence on management consulting
expertise to achieve transformation, there are doubts over the effectiveness of
management consultants. The U.K.s Committee of Public Accounts (CPA, 2007)
has estimated close to 18 per cent of all expenditure on management consultants
is wasted. Yet there is also some evidence of creative behaviour: the use of
management consultants for routine behaviour to circumvent core staff cutbacks.
While there is a need for further empirical evidence, there are suggestions of
management consultants reports being used for legitimation rather than instrumental purposes.
There is the closely related issue of IT and technology as mechanisms of public
sector transformation. In this eld there is an increasing reliance on management
consultants in IT to deliver on public sector projects. There is evidence of the
persistent failure of e-government. In part, this is a consequence of a lack of expertise,
often in project management, but it is a symptom of overly ambitious projects
which cannot deliver. These outcomes are indicative of a belief on the part of
government in the transformational properties of technologies, without an awareness
on their part of the limitations of those same technologies.
The increasing reliance on audit technologies has important implications for
policy makers, managers and citizens. Fundamentally, it is tempting for policy
makers to deploy audit as the technology to regulate and control, by substitution
of auditing expertise where the public sector environment does not create the
kinds of yardsticks of performance which markets provide. This is a distinct part
of the NPM armoury. It carries with it dangersthe unintended consequence of
creating Powers audit society. The outcome of giving primacy to audit in the process
of transforming public services may be the encouragement of a compliance culture,
which is demonstrated by a tick box mentality. For public service managers they
may nd that their workers become more preoccupied with procedures than with
delivering quality services to citizens. This phenomenon is very important but it also
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2009 The Author
Journal compilation 2009 Accounting Foundation, The University of Sydney
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Journal compilation 2009 Accounting Foundation, The University of Sydney