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Public organizations have undergone major changes over the past few decades. The umbrella term used to characterize these changes in the style of public administration is ‘New Public Management’(NPM). NPM is a cluster of ideas borrowed from the conceptual framework of private-sector administrative practice––a multifarious concept, covering diverse ideas and theories about what the nature of public management and administration should be. Arguably, then, NPM is primarily not a practitioners’ product but, rather, a construct of the research community, which assembled the programmatic aspects of NPM. The impact of these programmatic aspects on public administrative routines, operations and everyday work is a matter of analysis at the technological level.

This thesis studies both the programmatic and the technological aspects of NPM. It focuses on how the programmatic aspects of NPM transform into technological aspects and how we can understand the outcome of these transformations, ie NPM’s impact on public administrative practice. The four discrete papers of the thesis cover three aspects (‘Icons’) of NPM–‘Competition’,‘Contracts’ and ‘Control’–in depth: