Clearly, such an exercise is only useful for identifying outliers, and not for making any fine differentiations. The extremes were taken as cases whose overall scores (summed across all seven dimensions) were more than one standard deviation away from the mean. The high and low cases identified in this way fitted sufficiently well with other impressionistic views of variation in New Public Management over the 1980s to serve as a basis for a discussion as to what might be responsible for putting a country at one or other of the extremes.