Statul actual: un hibrid post-managerialist sau neoweberian?; remarci liminare

Abstract

The article questions, in a sceptical and prospective way, the institutional outcomes of this major trans-national trend of administrative reformism known as "New Public Management". In our view, the main cross-border legacy of the process of acclimatizing NPM precepts and recipes to various national configurations consists essentially in institutional rearrangements and in a repertoire of managerial tools and recipes, embedded into different institutional orders and hybridized with many other key features of various administrative cultures. Backing up major administrative reforms started several decades ago, the NPM rhetoric claimed to furnish the universal cure for the "bureaucratic" disease which was supposedly affecting the developed states at the end of the 1970s. From then on and although it never acquired the inner coherence of a real doctrine, it spread all over the world at the point of becoming both a "policy paradigm" and a "praxeologic". However, once implemented and in order to endure, the NPM-inspired logics, instruments and methods have fatally begun to suffer a process of routinisation which transformed them significantly. Hence, far from achieving their initial goal of "de-bureaucratizing" the state, NPM reformism became part of the endless processes of bureaucratic reproduction inescapably affecting modern states and ensuring their resilience.