New Public Management and Public Sector Employment Relations: United Kingdom, the United States and Australia

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During the last two decades governments, particularly in the English speaking world, have restructured andreorganised public services and the administrative processes that have coordinated the delivery of those services. This process has been variously characterised as 'managerialism' (Gardner and Palmer, 1992; Pollitt, 1993), 'New Public Management' (Hood, 1990; Rhodes, 1991), 'entrepreneurial government' (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992), 'post bureaucratic government' (Laffin and Palmer, 1995) and 'corporate management' (Davis, Weller and Lewis, 1989). Despite this conceptual pluralism it can be said that the discourse of public administration has been largely supplanted by the discourse of public management. As such there has been a gradual, but not necessarily systematic, transformation from an administrative to a more explicitly market-oriented managerial model of the state.

The public sector has been a focus for restructuring in the context of the internationalisation of many economies. In New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom, where changes have been arguably most extensive, the rationale for the changes has been presented in terms of 'modernisation' of the state apparatus so as to facilitate the repositioning of those economies in accordance with the perceived logic of globalisation. This presentation of the state reflects a broader debate about the role of the state in the context of the internationalisation of economies. Claims about this process range from the apparent irrelevance of the state (Ohmae, 1990, 1995) to the continuing importance of the state as manager of national economies (Boyer and Drache, 1996; Hirst and Thompson, 1999). For proponents of globalisation the social relations of labour are no longer bound by or defined by the nation state. In particular, the employment arrangements within the state need to reflect the 'borderless' world of capital that is said to be emerging. Although this-particular line of argument has been questioned (Sklair 1995; Hirst and Thompson, 1999) there is now a vulnerability of employment relations in the state that both organised and unorganised labour has found difficult to resist (Elgar and Smith, 1994; Edwards and Elgar, 1999; Waddington, 1999).

The purpose …