From the Bundesanstalt to the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - Political Systems - Germany, grade: 1,3, University of Bremen (Zentrum für Sozialpolitik), course: Public Administration and Social Management, language: English, abstract: Bureaucracy [...] is slow, inept, and wasteful. Striking the prescriptive literature is the degree that this stereotype is simply accepted without any empirical evi-dence [...] (Meier/Hill 2005: 52).

This citation represents - although heavily questioned in the Oxford Handbook of Pub-lic Management - a widespread opinion that the classical bureaucracy model is not able to meet modern administration challenges effectively. This is the reason, why the New Public Management (NPM) was welcomed as a new concept for modern administration.
But at the beginning, the New Public Management (NPM) approach was looked at very skeptically and critically in Germany. The introduction of management and business administration elements, developed in the Anglo-Saxon countries, as new concept to improve efficiency in the public administration was considered unnecessary at best due to the fact that the German public administration was certified to have a relatively high performance in comparison to other western countries. Maybe because of this the Ger-man interpretation of the NPM approach was introduced very late, later than in most other western European countries. The result of this German NPM version is the Neues Steuerungsmodell (NSM) (Jann 2005: 76).
The NSM is the German interpretation of the NPM approach with significant similarities but some differences. Whereas the NPM is often connected with liberalization tendencies in the Anglo-American region with the aim of smaller administrations (Mei-er/Hill 2005: 55), the NSM was introduced in communal, regional and federal administrations to improve effectiveness and efficiency but not necessarily with reducing the size of an administration department.
One perfect example for the implementation of the NSM in an authority is the reform of the Bundesanstalt für Arbeit (BA) as part of the Hartz legislation in the second Schröder election period from 2002 till 2005. The BA is as one of the biggest social policy institutions responsible for all employment market issues such as job service and placement, transfer payments and vocational training and its reforms were clearly related to the NSM approach as this paper will show.
Several strategies for modernization in the public sector are subsumed under the NSM concept without distinguishing between completely new strategies and approaches and old reform ideas that are just brought up again.