First Sector: Management

During the decade of 1980, there was a move in OECD countries toward what was lately defined as “NPM—New Public Management” (Hood, 1995). The social background for this change process was “the pressure to become more efficient and effective, so as to reduce their demands on taxpayers, while maintaining the volume and quality of services supplied to the public” (Brignall & Modell, 2000). Obviously, these demands should be addressed by a shift in the management methods used in the public sector. As part of this challenge, the public sector should adjust itself to other worldwide economic changes, e.g., the emergence of information economy where “most of the economy, and the central nature of work, is involved in creating, processing, communicating, using, and evaluating information” (Rice, MacCreadie, & Chang, 2001). These two major challenges – NPM and the shift to information economy – are at the background of the case study presented in this chapter: the case of the establishment of a new authority for privacy and data protection in a local Ministry of Justice. We analyze the establishment process of this authority from the MERge perspective, showing how the model helps achieve NPM goals and meet challenges emerged by the information economy.