By Michael Barzelay, University of California Press, February 2001

How policymakers should guide, manage, and oversee public bureaucracies is a question that lies at the heart of contemporary debates about government and public administration. In their search for better systems of public management, reformers have looked in particular at the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. These countries are exemplars of the New Public Management, a term used to describe distinctive new themes, styles, and patterns of public service management.

Calling for public management to become a vibrant field of public policy, this valuable book consolidates recent work on the New Public Management and provides a basis for improving research and policy debate on managing public bureaucracies.

The New Public Management Official Website

From the Book Cover:

"Barzelay provides a convincing and coherent interdisciplinary framework for public sector management policy, which helps bridge the practitioner-academic divide. Public officials involved in reform policy will benefit from this book."-Alex Matheson, Public Management Service, OECD, Paris

"Much of what passes for analysis of New Public Management, both among advocates and detractors, is biased and superficial. Michael Barzelay has made a serious attempt to move the debate forward by identifying standards for reasoning about public managment, and this book deserves to be read carefully by students and teachers of the subject."-Christopher Hood, Gladstone Professor of Government, Oxford University

"This is a smart, challenging, and important book. It provides us with a framework for studying public management, demonstrating that it is indeed a field of policy analysis like environmental policy or foreign policy. . . . Barzelay outlines the rules that should govern serious multidisciplinary discourse in the field, thereby laying the foundation for a truly international research community."-Fred Thompson, Editor, International Public Management Journal

"Barzelay is a pioneer in the kind of administrative reform that empowers civil servants while making them more accountable to the societies they serve. His new book . . . is a much needed intellectual contribution to a field where interdisciplinary thinking is essential."-Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, Fundação Getúilio Vargas, São Paulo, and former Minister of Federal Administration and Reform, Brazil

About the Author:

Michael Barzelay is Lecturer in Management and Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Formerly an associate professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, he is author of Breaking Through Bureaucracy: A New Vision for Managing in Government (California, 1992) and The Politicized Market Economy: Alcohol in Brazil's Energy Strategy (California, 1986).

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