Obedient Servants?: Management Freedoms and Accountabilities in the New Zealand Public Sector

The experiences of a representative sample of public servants, members of Parliament, and informed observers of the control systems of New Zealand’s public management model adopted in the early 1990s are examined in this book. Revealed is a trend that is moving away from the tradition of delivering public services through a centralized bureaucracy. Richard Norman uses his experience critiquing public service bureaucracies as a journalist, working for a government-owned corporation that crashed after becoming too entrepreneurial, and delivering training in finance and management to public servants adjusting to the systems of the “New Public Management” model to examine the creation of a new model of control that achieves a balance between control and empowerment.