. the NPM is not one phenomenon or paradigm, but a cluster of several (Ferlie
et al. 1996);
. the NPM has a number of distinct personae, dependent upon the audience,
including ideological, managerial and research-oriented personae (Dawson and
Dargie 1999);
. the geographic extent of the NPM is limited to the Anglo-American,
Australasian and (some) Scandinavian arenas, while PA continues to remain
dominant elsewhere (Kickert 1997);
. the nature of the NPM is also geographically dependent with, for example, the
British and American variants actually being quite distinct from each other in
their focus and locus (Borins 2002);
. in reality, the NPM is simply a sub-school of PA that has been limited in its
impact by the lack of a real theoretical base and conceptual rigour (Frederickson
and Smith 2003);
. the benefits of the NPM are at best partial and contested (Pollitt and Bouckaert
2004); and
. the NPM is a failed paradigm (Farnham and Horton 1996).