About my admittedly rough distinction between NPM and “neoliberalism,” I think the specificity of NPM is, first of all, that it refers specifically to a form of *public management* which I think can be defined along three axes of contrast:

1. NPM contrasts with various older forms of state policy-making (particularly in Europe), such as the older French social democratic model where centrally administered public services were provided directly by the state apparatus and governed by ministerial decrees. (That contrasts with the NPM model of denationalized agents who are governed by the state through a series of incentives and contracts.)

2. NPM strictly picks out public-sector governmental action. Thus, similar practices pursued by non-state actors don’t count as NPM, because they aren’t public management. In other words, if a university marketing office implements a new neoliberal branding project (as in Bonnie Urciuoli’s work on Hamilton), I might call that “neoliberal” — Bonnie certainly would — but I wouldn’t call it “public management” because the operative party isn’t the state.

3. NPM tends to designate a practice of government rather than an academic “doctrine.” In this sense, NPM is narrower than “neoliberalism,” which can designate a mode of governance but also readily comes to designate a more philosophical form of market ideology. Thus “neoliberalism” gets used to talk about the Milton Friedman type of free market ideologues (I can’t really comment on how accurate that is, since I don’t read much economic theory) — but one would not readily call Chicago School economics a form of NPM, again because it is a theory of economy and society, not itself a mode of governance. Of course, since ideology and practice always permeate each other, this last distinction is not very clear-cut. Still, I find it useful to observe that public policymakers can implement NPM without necessarily being committed to a strong theory of market efficiency or something. (Sometimes you find people implementing NPM because they have to, or because their peers are doing it, or because the status quo is broken and they want to try something else, etc — in all of those cases you can find NPM being implemented without having to buy into a strong ideological superstructure, if you know what I mean.)