An Impact of Public Management Concepts on Civil Service Regimes?

Abstract

A confrontation with the blurred meaning of “public management” and “New Public Management” NPM is indispensable before trying whether there is an impact of such concepts on civil service regimes. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the division of public employees between “civil servants” and provider of public services is nothing recent. The opposition between public management and public administration has different roots in practice and in scholarship. The NPM label is applied indiscriminately to a range of reforms, many of which are simply the consequence of budgetary difficulties or pragmatic attempts to modernise the organisation of government, which do not necessarily translate into changes of the legal status of public employees, the career system, the possibilities of dismissal or recruitment systems, and pays and benefits. Analysing public employment regimes needs taking into account a series of sociological elements, starting with the specific strength of unions in the public sector.

Analysing public employment regimes and the changes they are undergoing needs an interdisciplinary approach. Legal scholarship cannot do without sociologists, historian and fiscal economy specialists who help understanding the ingredients of each country’s path dependency. A specific effort needs to be done in bringing together constitutional and administrative lawyers on one side and specialists of organisational theory and the practice in public organisations.

Keywords: Civil Service; Public employment; Public Management; New Public Management

JEL Classification: H10, H11, H50, H70, H83, K23, K4