The Narratives of New Public Management in an International and Israeli Perspective and the Gendered Political Economy of Care Work

Abstract

This article sheds light on the gendered political economy of the New Public Management (NPM) in Israel; namely that justifications based on savings legitimize the extreme power gap between state administrators and workers (primarily women) in service and caring occupations. Analyses of NPM in other countries do not usually mention this gendered political economy even though accounts from Ireland (Hardiman/MacCarthhaigh 2011), Sweden (Premfors 1998) and developing countries (McCourt 2008) tend to agree: the promises of improved efficiency, savings and better returns for tax payers have been more instrumental in justifying privatization, marketization and decentralization than in generating actual financial benefits. Nevertheless, these promises were effective in convincing Israeli administrators to embrace the NPM’s demand to allow ‘managers to manage’.