Government narratives of public management reform: The Case of English Health and Social Care.

This paper analyses public management narratives in three recent UK policy documents proposing reform in health and social care. The analysis identifies the persistence of New Public Management (NPM), Network Governance (NG) and Digital Era Governance (DEG) narratives, while finding narratives of reprofessionalisation to be weak and contradictory. The paper argues that strong master narratives associated with NPM, particularly emphasizing marketization and patient choice, and NG, focusing on collaboration and integration, are enabled and supported by substantial DEG and weak reprofessionalisation sub-narratives. Thus, the paper concludes that public management narratives coexist in a hybridized manner, while raising questions about potential tensions between these narratives, which are glossed over in policy documents. This finding therefore highlights the need for further research exploring the political and rhetorical use of different narratives in public management reform.