New public management and libraries: a success story or just an excuse for cost reduction

Abstract

From the 1980's-in some parts of Europe from the 1990's-onward the new public management (NPM) has been emerging in public organizations including libraries. Since then there has been a need to develop strategies, to plan budgets, and to implement cost and activity accounting as well as benchmarking to compare the library's processes, costs and activities with those of other libraries. One basic idea of the NPM was to make a transition from focusing on how institutions function to a product-orientation, to improve the quality of the library services, to develop outputorientation, and to act market and consumer-oriented. There also was a need to change from the bureaucratic and hierarchically acting organizations to a more modern flexible and lean form of management. The aim of this paper is in the first part to describe the basic ideas of NPM, their realization in libraries, and how libraries have to handle constantly reduced budgets and the risk of being closed down (especially in the "age of austerity"); the second part will show how the University of Eastern Finland Library has managed to improve its services with the new public management approach. Many libraries are faced with serious financial cutbacks on the one hand and with emergent needs to (re)invest in neglected public infrastructure on the other hand. At the same time, they have to develop modern digital library services. Thus there is a need for efficiency, which is put in action via major budget cutbacks. Also many libraries have been closed down since the implementation of NPM ideas.

Examining the "Culture of Assessment" in Public Libraries

“…Greene & McMenemy (2012) demonstrate via a mixed-methods discourse analysis that the introduction of neoliberal language reinforces "negative stereotypes of a service in distress", which can only be addressed via ensuring "value for money" (p. 34). Düren et al (2017), despite a positive concluding evaluation of NPM, were not able to demonstrate that the adoption of NPM ideologies (and corresponding assessment approaches) were successful in preventing the closure of libraries. While the number of these studies directly addressing the outcomes of the introduction of NPM into public library management are limited, they do indicate a need to explore the applicability of the underlying premise upon which NPM is based to the public library context.…”

“…Although many provide commentary, some studies (Düren et al, 2017, Greene & McMenemy, 2012 have engaged directly with the question "What is the impact of the neoliberal ideology on public libraries?" Greene & McMenemy (2012) demonstrate via a mixed-methods discourse analysis that the introduction of neoliberal language reinforces "negative stereotypes of a service in distress", which can only be addressed via ensuring "value for money" (p. 34).…”

The emerging roles of academic librarians in Kenya: apomediaries or infomediaries?

“…This also suggests the need for relevant on-going professional development of librarians for them to meet the needs of their users as they cannot fully understand the needs of the current users if they merely rely on their initial training. Librarians' training has to be in tandem with technological developments (Mandal and Dasgupta, 2019), failure to which they (and their institutions) will face difficulties in meeting the needs of their current clients (Düren et al , 2017; Martin-Yeboah and Atuase, 2019; Salman, 2017).…”

“…This threatens the existence of academic libraries (Martin-Yeboah and Atuase, 2019; Salman, 2017; Thomas et al , 2017). Academic libraries therefore have to reinvent themselves to remain relevant, for example, through re-aligning their vision to the changing technological world, and user expectations (Harland, 2017), failure to which they will be obsolete and out of business (Düren et al , 2017).…”

Conceptualising Benefits of User-Centred Design for Digital Library Services

“…The New Public Management ideology has adopted elements from the private sector that aim at improving the effectiveness of public service provision (Hyndman & Lapsley, 2016;Osborne, Radnor, & Nasi, 2012). Despite some criticism (e.g., Lilburn, 2017), management and measurement in the public sector is an area of continuing interest to both scholars and practitioners (Düren, Landøy, & Saarti, 2017;O'Flynn, 2007;Stenvall & Virtanen, 2017;Talbot, 2010).…”