Hard and soft NPM in city management

This chapter examines NPM in practice. It examines NPM as a colonising device which mobilises management practices as the dominant strain of thinking in public service organisations, in this case in the study setting of cities. The prevailing concept of NPM in the literature is conventionally depicted as a preoccupation with calculative practice and there are many city studies which take this perspective (for example, Lapsley, Miller, and Panozzo, 2010; Kornberger and Carter, 2010; and Ahrens and Ferry, 2015; McCrone, 2022). However, this study not only examines aspects of hard NPM (as expressed by specific calculative practices) but it also extends the discussion of NPM to examine soft NPM—the mimicry of private sector business practices but which goes beyond calculative practices to include softer forms of business techniques, such as branding from marketing (Bertilsson, Renstam, and Sullivan, 2022). Branding has been described as a business practice which is penetrating many aspects of everyday living (Kornberger, 2010). Also, much of the NPM literature emphasises the importance of accounting and calculative practice in everyday living, but this study reports on calculative practice as complex, with instrumental, ambivalent, and symbolic aspects.