‘Pushing the Boundaries’ versus Identifying the Boundaries: An Institutional Perspective on NPM Principles
This paper considers the boundaries of new public management (NPM) principles in the context of the mandate for a commercial approach within a New Zealand state-owned enterprise (SOE). Investigating a commercial approach to NPM through an institutional theory lens, the case study highlights complexities and potential conflict between structured NPM principles and the more complex reality. Analysis reveals blurred lines and boundaries have implications for public sector organisations such as SOEs, government and other stakeholders, where managers push the boundaries beyond the point where stakeholders are comfortable. Thus, a key challenge involves developing clearer institutional boundaries to balance freedoms with stakeholder acceptability.
To address the needs of the EU NoAW project, in this paper we solve the problem of efficiently generating the argumentation graphs from knowledge bases expressed using existential rules. For the knowledge bases without rules, we provide a methodology that allows to optimise the generation of argumentation graphs. For knowledge bases with rules, we show how to filter out a large number of arguments and reduce the number of attacks.