Merging to survive? Institutional legitimacy and material considerations in the light of the reorganization of corps within the French civil service

Abstract

The article sets out to examine the mergers of corps of top technical civil servants in France from two angles: their institutional and material dimensions. Its findings are based on archive material relating to the negotiations that marked the reform processes and on interviews with the protagonists of the reform within the ministries, cabinets, professional associations and trade unions of the corps in question. Rather than consider the top civil servants simply as the instruments of change, affected (or otherwise) by it, or even as obstacles to the reforms under examination, the article looks at their capacity to take action, to defend their interests and their privileges and to accompany the reform in order to ensure their long-term survival. One of the central questions raised by this study into the mergers is whether they make it possible to maintain and reproduce the models of domination of the great corps on the machinery of government. Continuity in and through change is at the heart of the debate. Points for practitioners The idea of merger was prompted by the decision to drastically reduce the number of corps in France. In the light of an in-depth empirical study and several first-hand accounts, this article looks at the issues raised by these kinds of mergers at two levels. On the one hand, from the point of view of the changes they can trigger in the relationship between a corps of the State and the Ministry to which it is answerable, and, on the other hand, from the point of view of the purely material dimension of the negotiations involved. It would therefore seem that the reforms that set out to make economies of scale first of all need to take a good look at the efforts agreed to by those very corps that they are supposed to target.