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Abstract. NPM concepts and techniques have produced a mix of "results'. Undoubtedly there have been some measurable efficiency gains. There are also plenty of cases of genuine service quality improvement, and of cost-saving. Equally, however, there are well-documented concerns about organizational fragmentation and loss of the capacity to implement integrated policies, about inappropriate applications to complex human services, and the widespread gaming of performance measurement regimes and about probable damage to traditional public service values.
Elements of NPM have been absorbed as the normal way of thinking by a generation of public officials in the core states. Many NPM-ish organizational structures remain firmly standing. Management consultancies have secured their place as regular participants in governance at many levels of government - at least in the core NPM states (Saint-Martin, 2005). By the standards of previous administrative fashions - even by comparison with the spread of Weberian bureaucracy itself - NPM must be accounted a winning species in terms of its international propogation and spread.
Keywords: Translation, international, stages, adaptation
Introduction
You cannot see, touch, smell or hear the NPM. It is a rhetorical and conceptual construction and, like all such constructions, it is open to re-interpretation and shifting usages over time. It is also a rhetorical construction in English, and we can therefore expect that the concept will be particularly prone to shifts in meaning when it crosses language barriers into French, Chinese or Japanese (to mention just three language communities which have adopted the term). So comparison is not a straightforward matter.
Definitions
Even in its English mothertongue, there have been considerable definitional disputes and ambiguities. As Dunleavy et al put it recently: 'There is now a substantial branch industry in defining how NPM should be conceptualised and how NPM has changed' (Dunleavy et al, 2006, p. 96). A survey of all the different attempts at definition would make for a very long (and rather boring) article, so I will instead simply refer to one of the best recent discussions - that of Dunleavy et al (2006, pp. 96-105) and to my own earlier and simpler discussion (Pollitt, 2003a, chapter 2). Taking these together, I will here assume that the NPM is a two level phenomenon: at the higher level it is...