Resisting the “new public management”: Absorption and absorbing groups in schools and GP practices in the UK

Abstract

The “new public management” (NPM) “reforms” have been extensive in the public sector in the UK. The paper’s primary focus is on the managerial and organizational effects of these accounting and finance‐led changes in the specific context of schools and GP practices. Central to the paper’s analysis and conclusion is the way that, in both these areas, many of the changes are perceived as unhelpful, intrusive and potentially dangerous for the nature of the core activities and values which underlie these organizations. The organizational effect of this dominant attitude is to develop appropriate “absorbing” mechanisms to “manage” these changing “disturbances” so that core activities and values remain unaffected. The paper develops, in two ways, the published analyses of these absorption processes: first, by providing a comparison over time of these absorption processes in schools and GP practices using a wider data set and second, by extending the analysis to show how these processes change as the nature of the “disturbances” shift and develop over time. The paper ends with a call for a wide‐ranging evaluation of the merit and worth of these “reforms” both generally and in the specific context of schools and GP practices.