Managerialism

Context and Definition

In Western societies in the 1980s, a consensus emerged that governments were regulating, owning, and owing too much, and that the welfare state was not working as planned. People wanted to be taxed less and were expecting others to become more self-reliant. Privatization and deregulation became popular. At the beginning of the 21st century, when globalization is increasing at ever-greater pace, governments are immersed in neo-liberalist philosophy: privatization of programs, deregulation of corporate behaviors, reducing government debts, participating in free trade agreements, and providing fewer social services at a lesser quality.

At the same time that this shift in philosophy occurred, the public sector has been transformed by the emergence of the “New Public Management.” The trend, initiated in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, has appeared in the United States and Canada since about 1995. New Public Management is a paradigm that promotes a decentralized and performance-oriented culture in the public sector. More precisely, New Public Management can be identified through a number of features:

• Providing high-quality services that citizens value
• Demanding, measuring, and rewarding improved organizational and individual performance
• Advocating managerial autonomy, particularly by reducing central agency controls
• Recognizing the importance of providing the human and technological resources managers need to meet their performance targets, and
• Maintaining receptiveness to competition and open-mindedness about which public purposes should be performed by public servants as opposed to the private sector (Borins, 2002, p. 3).

Managerialism emerged from the New Public Management trend.

To understand managerialism, management has to be distinguished from administration. Administration, the traditional concept and set of practices, refers to the review and decision making within public services. In contrast, management means the search for the best use of resources in pursuit of stated objectives (Politt, 1993, p. 5). This whole enterprise revolves around the tasks of better planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, and budgeting. Of course, the pursuit of best management often involves transferring many of the values, principles, and practices of the private sector (performance indicators, audit, etc.) to the public sector.

As with many of these trends, managerialism hit the education system, health care, and social services first, and only slowly penetrated criminal justice. Because New Public Management and managerialism developed first in these parts of the world, it is not surprising to find that it has been documented in criminological research mainly in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Traces of it can nevertheless be found in the United States, Canada, and other Western criminal justice systems.

Managerialism in the Criminal Justice System