Christopher Hood Books
Christopher Hood is a British academic specializing in public administration and government reform. He has served as a professor at the University of Oxford and is known for his influential research on public management, regulation, and administrative theory.
Known for: The New Public Management
Books by Christopher Hood
The New Public Management
What happens when governments start borrowing the language, tools, and incentives of business? In The New Public Management, Christopher Hood examines one of the most important shifts in modern governance: the move away from traditional bureaucracy toward a style of administration built on performance metrics, managerial discretion, competition, and measurable results. Rather than treating this transformation as a simple modernization story, Hood asks harder questions. Where did these ideas come from? Why did they spread so quickly across countries? And what do societies gain—or lose—when public services are run more like firms than public institutions? This book matters because New Public Management, or NPM, did not merely change internal government procedures. It reshaped how states define efficiency, accountability, citizenship, and public value. Many of today’s debates about targets, outsourcing, audit culture, and customer service in government still carry its imprint. Hood is uniquely qualified to guide this discussion. As one of the leading scholars of public administration, he combines historical knowledge, conceptual clarity, and critical distance to explain both the promise and the pitfalls of NPM. The result is an essential framework for understanding how contemporary government works.
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From Bureaucracy to Management
Major reform movements often begin with frustration, and New Public Management emerged from deep dissatisfaction with the old bureaucratic state. For much of the twentieth century, public administration in many countries was organized around hierarchical rules, standardized procedures, career civil ...
From The New Public Management
The Intellectual DNA of NPM
Ideas rarely arrive alone, and New Public Management was built from a striking fusion of intellectual currents. Hood traces its foundations to two broad sources: managerialism and market-oriented economic thought. Managerialism promoted the belief that strong leadership, strategic planning, performa...
From The New Public Management
Core Doctrines of the Managerial Turn
A reform movement becomes powerful when it can be reduced to a recognizable set of doctrines, and Hood is famous for identifying exactly that in New Public Management. At its core, NPM advances a cluster of ideas: professional management, explicit standards and measures of performance, output contro...
From The New Public Management
Performance Measurement Changes Government Behavior
What gets measured does not simply get managed—it gets redefined. One of Hood’s most consequential insights is that performance measurement is not a neutral tool. In the NPM framework, metrics are supposed to create clarity, discipline, and comparability. Agencies are given targets, outputs are coun...
From The New Public Management
Efficiency and the New Public Ethos
When governments embrace efficiency, they do more than cut costs—they redefine what counts as good public service. New Public Management pushed a new public ethos in which thrift, responsiveness, and service quality became central virtues. Citizens were increasingly described as customers, agencies ...
From The New Public Management
Accountability in a Fragmented State
Reform often promises clearer accountability, but fragmentation can make responsibility harder to trace. One of the central paradoxes in Hood’s analysis is that NPM sought to improve accountability through targets, audits, contracts, and transparent reporting, yet its organizational changes sometime...
From The New Public Management
About Christopher Hood
Christopher Hood is a British academic specializing in public administration and government reform. He has served as a professor at the University of Oxford and is known for his influential research on public management, regulation, and administrative theory.
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Christopher Hood is a British academic specializing in public administration and government reform. He has served as a professor at the University of Oxford and is known for his influential research on public management, regulation, and administrative theory.
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