The “Ordinary” Civil Servant: Soft Activist

Abstract

Rapid social change strains ideas no less than established social relationships. Whether reacting to or anticipating fundamental social changes, such as the shift from agricultural to industrial work, Swedish public servants have organized new programs and expanded public employment to a point at which more than 50 percent of gross national product is now consumed by the public sector. These changes, coming within a relatively brief historical period (i.e., roughly fifty years), have severely challenged prevailing ideas about the proper relationship of government to society as a whole and have undermined civil servant role orientations that had become as comfortable as they were widespread. According to this comfortable view, the appropriate function of government was to enforce rules of fairness and equity in social relationships. The most important requirement for a civil servant, therefore, was training in the law. Knowledge of administrative law together with personal qualities of objectivity and impartiality defined the “classic” Swedish view of administrators as judges, whose chief responsibility was to select and apply legal rules to problems presented to them.¹