New public management: A critical, feminist approach

In this thesis, the New Public Management approach is argued within the context of gender. This argument, which was conducted using a feminist critical and realist epistemology, is grounded on two essential concepts: Social reproduction and subsumption. Social reproduction has paved the way for the criticism of the dominant perspectives (of consist of exclusion and sexism) in public administration as in most social sciences. Moving forward, subsumption; a term that allows us to understand the age of "social factory", is included in the theoretical framework that discusses the placement of gender as an ontological entity in the constitution of current social formation. Subsumption is used as an analytical entity to distinguish new public management from its predecessor, the classical public administration paradigm. The first conclusion arrived in the thesis is, public administration, as a discipline concerning the social reproduction, has arisen as the new public management approach in the age of real subsumption. The indispensable connection with neoconservatism and the neoliberal perspective, which individualizes the cost of reproduction by externalization, changes the strategical selectivities and recalls the traditional, gendered division of labour. Therefore, the discriminatory perspective of classical public management towards women switched from exclusion by subsumption, which is a mandatory extension to the liberal equality discourse, to explicit exclusion. While this strategy, whose versions of which have been implemented in western capitalist countries in a rather concealed manner, in cases within authoritarian political settings, this strategy transpires in more explicit and intense ways. In this context, it is concluded that the new public management approach, which can articulate with political regimes as long as there is a shared neoliberal perspective towards capital accumulation, is not neutral to gender but an essentially sexist perspective which is loaded with elements that deepen the inequality in all the extensive dimensions of public administration; and especially within public employment which we focus on in this thesis. Keywords: New Public Management, Social Reproduction, Subsumption, Public Administration, Gender, Materialist Feminism