The New Managerialism and Public Service Professions is a fresh and insightful analysis of the changes that have taken place in the UK public sector over the past twenty years. It charts how established professional institutions became the subject of a torrent of criticism and how this initiated a process of management reform that continues today. However unlike many other recent accounts it is not assumed that these policy goals were always implemented or that new approaches to the management of services are necessarily effective. Drawing on an extensive review of major published research it considers developments in three areas: the National Health Service, social services and housing. This analysis reveals marked differences in the way the professions responded to change and how, in some areas, older values and ways of working persist. The book also identifies certain costs and unintended outcomes of reform and raises questions about the future capacity of public services to deal with ongoing pressures to modernize.