New public management denotes a renewed stress on the importance of management in public services that was observed in several OECD countries from the 1980s. The term is distinguished from the US ‘New Public Administration’ movement of the late 1960s, some of the different and conflicting elements it comprised are discussed, and some earlier ideas on the same lines are identified. Some of the different themes in New Public Management scholarship are discussed (advocacy and criticism, morphology and analysis, evaluation, and case history). It is suggested that the term has outlived its usefulness, since it is too crude to denote different varieties of contemporary public-service managerialism, but it continues to be heavily used.