Local governance through NPM has been marked by a complex and often burdensome culture of regulation, audit and inspection that may stifle opportunity for local innovation in service delivery significantly. Thus Lapsley (2009), in a paper tellingly entitled NPM: The Cruellest Invention of The Human Spirit, catalogues how the excessive use of management consultants, significant failures in the development of e-government, the growth of an audit society and the increasing use of risk management have led to NPM failing to deliver on all of its promises. Lapsley cites the case of the NHS, which has a heavy inspection and audit culture with at least 56 oversight bodies, and the Health Commission’s ironically titled ’light touch’ annual ‘health check’ that requires 500 separate information topics to be reported on. Lapsley also argues that, in areas such as ambulance services and policing, target setting can distort the activity and work of these professionals and lead to gaming and manipulation to ensure that national targets rather than local needs are met.
Processes of contracting out, the reduction in powers of local authorities, and increasing regulation and inspection frameworks mean that notions of public services meeting and being accountable to local service users have largely remained unrealised. It may be that, because of the audit culture and inspection regime, more central control is exerted than under NPM’s bureaucratic precursors. Wright sums up the impact of NPM on democracy in public services, arguing that it ‘may be convenient for politicians to hide behind the smoke-screen of managerial decision and autonomy, but this hardly adds to the democratic quality of decision-making’ (1997:11).
Second, NPM practices have failed to engage with the historical and cultural specificity of the organisations and communities in which it operates; this is marked by a correlation between NPM and the demise of the professional as manager – part of an increasing general distrust and disenfranchising of professionals in all areas of contemporary society (Gombrich, 2000; Broadbent, Dietrich, and Roberts, 1997; Krause, 1995). In place of such professionals, there has been a proliferation of the practice of ‘general management’ throughout the public services, with management idealised as a set of neutral, context non-specific skills and technologies. Thus areas such as health, schools and universities have seen the role of the professional significantly diminished in respect to their involvement in governance, management and leadership of the services in which they work.
Recognising that such transformations might be problematic in terms of creating dynamic management appropriate to context, there has been a more recent emphasis on leadership rather than management. In what O’Reilly and Read (2010) call ‘leaderism’, the new ideology is one of leadership within the tight boundaries of market ideologies. Leaders are free to lead, unencumbered by clumsy management strategies, but they can only lead in tightly constrained directions. Wallis and Dollery (1997) argue that these leadership discourses remove the need to wrestle with the challenge of aligning principal and agent by making the issue the establishment of a common goal between leaders and led. O’Reilly and Read suggest that such a shift could re-empower the role of professionals
‘The emerging discourse of ‘leaderism’ provides a potential way of unravelling this new ‘power/knowledge knot’ by repositioning service managers and professionals as strategic leaders and operational practitioners whose job it is to generate the long-term visions and develop the practical implementation technologies through which the needs and choices of much more demanding and discerning service consumers can be met.’ (O’Reilly and Read, 2010: 972)