Governance and Civil Service Systems: From Easy Answers to Hard Questions

Abstract

Public administration research and teaching over the past couple of decades have become increasingly focused on theorizing and explaining institutional change in civil service systems. It could perhaps be argued that organizational change always has been an important feature of the discipline, with literatures such as organizational development focusing on endogenous sources of change in public organizations. The changes brought about by cutback policies, new public management (NPM) and the development towards governance, however, pose major new exogenous challenges to the Western civil service systems. This focus on change, both within the civil service and also in its relationship with actors in its environment, has entailed problems of different kinds. One type of problem stems from many public administration theories’ relative lack of interest in change. Much of the organizational theory on public organizations, for instance, was mainly concerned with organizational structure as such and had little reason to conceptualize major changes in public organizations. Similarly, early schools of human resource management departed to a large extent from the assumption that public and private careers tracks were not communicating vessels, hence there was little need to look at public employment strategies in a competitive perspective.