New Public Management and Max Weber

NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND MAX WEBER
INTRODUCTION
Weber presented the theory of Ideal Bureaucracy which according to him was governed by rules, was hierarchical and was the most efficient way of doing government business. Its opponents and proponents of NPM considered it to be inflexible, rule-bound and inefficient and therefore argued for reforms. Some among the reformists emphasized some of the components of Webers ideal bureaucracy and advocated for its existence in the Western democracies on the basis of legal-rational authority.
NPM AND THE MASTER TREND OF HISTORY

Weber meant by rationalization as: The process by which explicit, abstract, intellectually calculable rules and procedures are increasingly substituted for sentiment, tradition and rule of thumb in all spheres of activity. Rationalization leads to the displacement of religion by specialized science as the major source of intellectual authority; the substitution of the trained expert for the cultivated man of letters; the ousting of the skilled hard worker by machine technology; the replacement of traditional judicial wisdom by abstract, systematic statutory codes. Rationalization demystifies and instrumentalizes life.
SOME IMPORTANT CONCLUSIONS

Rationalization meant mastery over mystery which increasingly reduced the administration of humans to calculable, cold, hard, matter-offactness etc. Technocratic modes of governance after WW II represented quintessential rationalization but should only be taken as a predisposition of the officials rather than an organizational form.
There can be no such thing as purely technical, apolitical policy of state sector reform. NPM never meant to abolish bureaucratic form rather of refining it. NPM has a private sector outlook wherein values of efficiency and accountability are highlighted. Bureaucracy on the hand highlights issues surrounding the political and constitutional relations between the state and its citizens. Bureaucratization itself is a component of rationalization because dehumanized bureaucracy removes all personal biases whereas in NPM, public goods and services are provided as commodities in a marketplace.
It reduces human beings into commodities and implies an idea of instrumental rationality and technical certitude that implicitly belies the reality of political and social ambiguity, conflict, wrong-headedness and downright confusion in the administration of all human affairs. It has rejected the role of rhetoric and thereby politicians in tapping human sensibilities than can connect people to the impersonal systems and organizations that control their lives. NPMs focus is to roll back the state and then to try to depoliticize more and more areas of public policy making however the general trend is towards Webers rationalization.
BUREAUCRACY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

It is said that public sector reforms follow fashions and no self-respecting government can afford to ignore it. Therefore the idea of a Neo-Weberian state might not be taken very well. But there has been criticism of Weberian concept of organizational efficiency achieved through bureaucracy by many writers. However the issue is not yet resolved. Many writers feel that bureaucracy has become populated with professionals. This creates problems of political and managerial control and professional autonomy as well as increasing role of professionals in policy making.
By 1960s, economic rather than social interpretation of political and bureaucratic behaviour in the shape of public choice theory had gained momentum. Hence every thing was marketized. But again the sociological critiques were challenged on the grounds that Weber was probably misunderstood because he was far less interested in efficiency than legal-rational authority. The whole era of state-sector reform in Western democracies has been an effort to strike a balance between instrumental and substantive rationality.
THE NPM RESPONSE AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

It had rediscovered the earlier discarded concept of dichotomy between politics and administration. The mechanistic interpretation of political-bureaucratic interactions exacerbated problems of inter-agency collaboration in achieving policy purposes. But fixed term contractual appointment for higher officials brought in new service ethos whereby the idea of precisely measuring performance against specific targets was quite self-fulfilling.

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NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND MAX WEBER

NPM AND THE MASTER TREND OF HISTORY

SOME IMPORTANT CONCLUSIONS

BUREAUCRACY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

THE NPM RESPONSE AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

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