Mobilizing critical feminist engagement with New Public Management

• Main Author: Weeden, Sara Ashleigh
• Other Authors: Howard, Cosmo
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: Gender; Post-structuralism; Critique; Institutional Level Analysis; Public Administration; Discursive Field; Foucault; Discourse Analysis; Public Management Theory; Public Management Practice; Public Managers; Subjectivities; UVic Subject Index::Humanities and Social Sciences::Political Science::Public administration
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/3152

This thesis mobilizes a feminist critique to examine the ways in which New Public Management (NPM) represents a gendered discourse. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, NPM is mapped as a discursive field in order to tease out its dominant and subordinate discourses. The tensions between the dominant discourses and between the dominant and subordinate discourses are examined. The discursive themes of NPM are then engaged using a feminist post-structuralist framework in order to develop a feminist critique. From this critique, it is argued that NPM discourses reinscribe dominant masculinity as well as challenge the Weberian model of bureaucracy by reconstructing a gendered division of labour that takes place entirely within the public sphere.