Management and New Public Management: the limits and paradoxes of imitating the private sector

The article uses quantitative data (the COI 2006 survey) to compare the French public and private sectors and assess the spread of New Public Management policies in French administrative bodies. Mechanisms such as annual assessment talks, individual targets and incentivizing bonuses are studied in both sectors in terms of frequencies and audiences. At a time when the state sector has come under fire for ostensibly being behind the curve, findings reveal a contradictory situation characterized by different managerial practices being broadly diffused across the public sector, albeit less than in the private sector. Above all, it showed a much lesser achievement of concrete outcomes. All in all, a relatively paradoxical vision of public workers is developed here. Essentially, it is symbolic in nature, despite being partially neutralized by resistance to the individualization that this situation enables.