Abstract
Towards the end of the 20th century, the notion of the distinctiveness of public sector as a ‘model employer’ began to fragment. Macro forces and the dissemination of reform ideas appear to have contributed to a rethinking of the notion of the uniqueness of the civil service and to the weakening of conditions of employment for civil servants in many countries. Nowadays, the notion that the public sector warrants a distinctive internal labour market system is no longer obvious. Not only have the domain and responsibilities of civil servants changed, as others in this volume describe, but also in many countries the status of civil servants was also dramatically altered. Civil servants have become de-privileged in terms of their conditions of employment, losing their special conditions of recruitment and advancement as the public sector turns to business and industry for inspiration and best practices (OECD, 2005a). The transfer of private sector management techniques into the public sector challenges the notions of a career service, lifelong employment and general employment conditions affecting the quality of working life. Decentralization of responsibility for hiring, firing and promotion and drift in prevailing norms about how these processes are determined contribute to making it increasingly difficult to describe the operating internal labour market (ILM) system within a given jurisdiction or organization; the notion of a single or even dual ILM in government has become obsolete.
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© 2007 Per Lœgreid and Lois Recascino Wise
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Lœgreid, P., Wise, L.R. (2007). Reforming Human Resource Management in Civil Service Systems: Recruitment, Mobility, and Representativeness. In: Raadschelders, J.C.N., Toonen, T.A.J., Van der Meer, F.M. (eds) The Civil Service in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593084_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593084_11
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