To understand how worldviews guide human behavior, social scientists have long sought to develop all encompassing models of human thought and action.
This article drawsfrom a long intellectual history that
beganwith culturaltheory in the 1970s. From cultural
theory, public management experts developed the
field of new public management (NPM), which has
been employed to varying degrees in governments
around the world for several decades now (Horton,
2006). NPM posits that there are specific models for
organizing an institution,the people within it, and its
interaction with other institutions and individuals.
While NPM has been applied primarily to government
entities, its theoretical bases and empirical findings
hold vital information for all institutions, especially
those concerned with managing risk. Additional findings from social and cultural psychology have recently been employed to refine cultural theory/NPM
further, resulting in what I call the ‘unified model
of morality’ (Bruce, 2013).