Employment Flexibilities in the Public Services: Concepts, Contexts and Practices

Abstract

This special edition of Public Policy and Administration emanates from a joint PAC/CIPFA sponsored research workshop held in London in June 1997. The workshop examined the extent to which the major public services in the UK were adopting more flexible employment practices and moving away from centralized bureaucratic structures to more decentralized and devolved systems of management. Papers were presented on the civil service, local government and the National Health Service (NHS), with a comparative study of the German/British experience. The members of the workshop included academics from Belgium, Germany the Netherlands and the four countries of the UK, as well as practitioners from the Local Government Management Board, CIPFA and the civil service. This mixed group enjoyed a stimulating day of debate and discussion which contributed to the revised papers appearing in this journal. It became clear that many of the changes in personnel policies and practices across the civil service, local government and NHS are similar, although there are also some notable differences both amongst sectors and within sectors. Similarities and differences between the UK and other European countries supported the idea there was no single paradigm of new public management. Rather, as Hood (1995a) suggests, there are a number of cultural variants and no single inexorable shift from public bureaucracies to public businesses. This is well illustrated in the paper by LUffler. She highlights the fact that legal, constitutional and cultural constraints are preventing the adoption of personnel flexibilities, found in the UK, in the German civil service. But she points to other means of engendering changed behaviour and stimulating improved efficiency and increased productivity amongst German civil servants. The workshop agreed that the turbulent and unpredictable environments facing public sectors, combined with new political ideas about governance and approaches to public management, constitute the contexts within which