French Civil Service Research Articles

Tonkin’s giấy dó and its Chinese roots

There are various sources concerning the manufacture of Indochinese paper at the be­ginning of the 20th century: articles published in colonial magazines by engineers or by industrial managers working in Indochina, photographs and postcards taken by the colonial services; the work of Henri Oger, administrator of the French civil services stationed in Hanoi between 1912 and 1919; and during a later period and Dard Hunter’s book published in 1947, following a trip he made to Indochina. These sources provide a fairly precise idea of paper production and its social organisation in the region. This article presents the production of paper in the northern part of present-day Vietnam. It attempts to show the links between the Chinese and Tonkinese paper making.

Gender quotas in the French bureaucratic elite: the soft power of restricted coercion

Drawing on a collective study of gender and executive careers in the French Civil Service, this article provides an account of the genesis and implementation of the gender quota introduced by the 2012 “Sauvadet law” in senior executive positions of the State bureaucracy. First, it shows the crucial, yet unobtrusive, role played by feminist actors in the process, in spite of the absence of any strong open politicization of the issue, from agenda setting to implementation. Second, the article points to the dual character of the reform. On the one hand, the gradual character and limited perimeter of the quota (to senior executive “initial appointments”) restricted its immediate quantitative impact. On the other hand, the constraining, technical dimension of the tool endowed it with a potential to foster incremental social change.

Gender, Class and Bureaucratic Power: The Production of Inequalities in the French Civil Service

Este artículo examina las lógicas detrás de la tenaz persistencia de las desigualdades de género en las carreras del servicio público en Francia, basado en 95 entrevistas biográficas realizadas con funcionarios en puestos de alta dirección y ejecutivos entre 2011 y 2013. El estudio combina la atención a las consecuencias del contexto organizacional con análisis de la interacción entre género y clase, centrándose especialmente en la forma en que los gerentes y los ejecutivos se apropian de las políticas de igualdad. Si bien los antecedentes familiares tienen impactos diferenciales en las trayectorias y orientaciones educativas de mujeres y hombres, encontramos que las burocracias administrativas gubernamentales también contribuyen fuertemente a la producción de tales diferencias a través de las reglas y normas que las políticas de igualdad luchan por cambiar, especialmente en tiempos de austeridad e intensificación de las reformas de la “nueva gestión pública”. Si bien la mayoría de los gerentes y ejecutivos de ambos sexos tienden a negar las causas organizativas y sociales de la desigualdad, la difusión de normas igualitarias fomenta la expresión de la conciencia de género por una minoría de mujeres y reestructura las masculinidades y eminidades gerenciales.

Overcoming the tensions between values: a challenge for French public service managers and their training schools

While there is universal recognition of their important role in the functioning of administrations and for the motivation of public officials, the values that serve as a reference for the public service are witnessing a change in the way they are understood and implemented in practice, particularly with regard to the new requirements of public management. The analysis developed in this article centres on the interplay between various dimensions relating to the perception and use of the key values of the French civil service and highlights the tensions that prevail despite the apparent preservation of the axiological reference universe of those concerned. It raises the question of the role of schools in the training of values management. It draws on the results of a survey conducted in France by the network of civil service schools (Réseau des écoles de service public; RESP) among managers undergoing training and their teachers and supervisory staff. Points for practitioners The study shows that organizations that are responsible for the initial or continuing training of civil servants offer a breeding ground for the (re)production of public service values. However, for civil service managers to be able to deal with the potential tensions between values (no clear hierarchy, apparent contradictions) it is necessary to develop their capacities for reflective analysis and practical application that will allow a critical distance and promote a contextualized ethical approach.

Acceptability of driving an equipped vehicle with drive recorder: the impact of the context

The objective of this study conducted in the S_VRAI project [saving lives by road incident analysis feedback] is to present results about the acceptability of equipping a vehicle with an event data recorder (EDR) without feedback. Five focus groups were conducted in two different French Civil Service departments. Lack of privacy, volunteering, anonymity and the data access are main elements of the acceptability of the EDR. The results show also the importance of the societal and professional context when studying the acceptability of an EDR. However, all these elements need to be moderated by the corporate culture.

Appraisal in the Public Service, Instrument of Human Resource Management

The purpose of this article was to put forward staff appraisal process in the Public Service of advanced countries. Even if British and French Civil Services have different characteristics coming from their specific cultures, even if staff appraisal development has followed different rhythms, they meet together to consider that appraisal is a key instrument to improve public performance and Human Resource Management.Pay related to performance (PRP) triggers international debates because some consider it as ineffective and a source of discord inside a working team. But the two countries have to address the problem to find how to motivate their staff. The British civil servants seem less reluctant to PRP than their French homologues who feel more comfortable with a collective approach of appraisal, even if this system is criticized because some poor contributors may hide themselves behind good performers. The solution that could be prescribed would consist in using a collective approach of appraisal in combination of a system rewarding individual performers, in order to motivate staff individually and collectively as well.

Back to the nineteenth century: the managerial reform of the French civil service

The French civil service managerial reform initiated in 2007 was supposed to establish a brand new professional world where civil servants would be called to use new public management (NPM) methodology and tools in order to be more efficient and accountable. The final goal was to ‘privatize’ civil servants at least partially. Beyond the economic argument in a time of deep fiscal crisis, the rationale of the reform was political and philosophical, to eliminate the specificity of the civil service. The implementation of the reform and a massive reduction in force have produced systematic conflicts with unions, and most managers have rejected measures that had been designed to foster their individual motivation. A central argument of this article is to show that the values of this NPM reform run counter to those of a majority of civil servants and that public management is not politically neutral. Another argument, based on empirical surveys, is to demonstrate that this reform is of a conservative nature, designed to reinforce traditional hierarchies within the State bureaucracy. Finally, the so-called modernity of public management has produced an involution regression toward the social and professional structures of the nineteenth century.

Performance-related Pay-Hype versus Reality

Performance-related pay has been regarded as the sole crusader for obtaining effective performance by several academicians and professionals. However, contrary to this popular belief, research shows that performance-related pay is not effective in all institutional settings. This article discusses that reward bargains need to be customized according to the institutional structure, thus discarding the notion that only performance-related pay can improve performance. Characteristics of the public sector (organizational structure, personnel management systems, nature of resources and incentives, multiple principals, measurement problems and intrinsic motivation) which are not in sync with performance-related pay are also discussed in order to exemplify that performance-related pay instead of improving performance creates barriers. Pitfalls of performance-related pay (intrinsic motivation, decreased cooperation, decreased equity and higher control) are discussed in order to suggest that these pitfalls should be considered before performance-related pay systems are adopted by the organization. Examples from British and French civil services are used throughout the article in order to further clarify the issues.

Interprétation économique des évolutions en cours de la gestion publique des ressources humaines : vers une logique de marché ?

In the light of the contractual economic paradigm, this papers aims at examining how the recent evolution of public human resource management modify the relation that exist between the public bureaucracies and the market. We show how the human resource management practices that have been developed in the French civil service for some years contribute to simulate the market in allocative and incentive terms. We finally question the economic efficiency of such practices in the civil service.

Constructing merit in the civil service: The French Ministry of Culture (1880–1980)

Merit-based procedures for evaluation and grading in the French Civil Service have often been studied with the idea that concepts and practices circulate between public and private sectors, domestic and foreign organizations. Less attention has been afforded the in-house origins of procedures for assessing the work of civil servants. This article focuses on the procedures gradually built up to evaluate government employees in the French Ministry of Culture. Light is shed on the difficulties of making good the Republic's promise to base merit on differences in talent alone. How is a civil servant's work to be measured? Are qualifications evaluated while seeing to it that as many employees as possible can be promoted? Focusing on procedures – imagined or actually implemented – for grading, evaluating and promoting museum personnel shows that the process follows a timing and modality that vary depending on one's position in the hierarchy. The evaluation process nevertheless creates ties between socio-occupational groups that all else separates. Ways to measure civil servants’ activity existed before the neomanagerial objection to bureaucratic rules and regulations of the 1960s; the French system for evaluating merit is, thus, not simply an importation of anglo-saxon managerial methods.

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

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.

Sortir du chômage en Île-de-France

Résumé L’objet de cette recherche est d’expliquer les disparités intercommunales de retour à l’emploi dans la région Île-de-France. Partant du fichier historique statistique de l’ anpe , on estime des modèles de durée du chômage qui permettent d’évaluer les chances de sortir du chômage dans chaque commune de la région. On constate globalement que les disparités locales sont fortes d’une commune à l’autre, quel que soit l’indicateur que l’on retient pour estimer ces disparités. Les écarts d’une localité à l’autre restent élevés lorsqu’on neutralise les différences de structure par âge, sexe et qualification, ce qui confirme l’existence d’un effet spécifique du territoire. La région affiche une géographie particulière : au centre et dans la grande périphérie, les sorties du chômage sont plus rares que dans une zone intermédiaire de moyenne périphérie à l’échelle régionale. Les localités les plus éloignées du centre se caractérisent généralement par des durées du chômage élevées. Pour tenter d’interpréter cette logique concentrique, nous nous intéressons à l’impact de la structure urbaine sur le retour à l’emploi. Alors que certaines localités semblent souffrir d’une mauvaise connexion physique aux opportunités d’emplois, on peut évoquer pour d’autres des effets de ségrégation résidentielle.

La mise en œuvre du statut des Juifs du 3 octobre 1940

Upon the promulgation of the status of the Jews of October 3rd 1940, Jews are excluded from civil service, among other exclusions. However, in order to manage things efficiently, civil services must obtain an answer to a question which had never been asked up to them : who is a Jew among the civil servants ? And, first of all, they must identify who, among them, belongs to this group. Nevertheless, even if this assignment is quite unusual, the services carry this identification through in a lapse of a few weeks only. The instructions given by the central office were accompanied with rather inefficient methods, so numerous processes were initiated in order to get a better implementation of the status. First, there were some “technical” tentative steps, but as early as the end of 1940, the French civil services were able to “identify” the “Jews” and to purge their ranks.

Performance-related pay and work motivation: theoretical and empirical perspectives for the French civil service

At a time when the civil services of most OECD countries have embarked on a process of modernization of their practices, we are questioning the relevance of introducing performance-related pay systems, particularly in view of the, more often than not, negative effects on the work motivation of civil servants. The French civil service has recently decided to pay a part of its public officials on the basis of their performance, and we show how these individualized remuneration practices can, in the long term, undermine the public service motivations that drive some civil servants. Our reasoning is supported by the empirical results of studies conducted in the United States, in England and also in France, as well as on the developments of intrinsic motivation theories, combined with the developments of the public service motivation theory. Points for the practitioners Whereas the implementation of performance-related pay as an instrument of motivation has become widespread within the civil service, this article focuses on the difficulties inherent to these compensation practices. We underline in particular the negative effects of performance-related pay on the public service motivations of civil servants. As these specific motivations can be pushed aside, human resource management tools should be adopted that encourage the development of intrinsic motivation, such as task enlargement or enrichment or the implementation of participative management methods.

Modernisation of French Civil Services

Modernisation of French Civil Services

The Hidden Politics of Administrative Reform: Cutting French Civil Service Wages with a Low‐Profile Instrument

The article addresses internal and hidden politics of changes in bureaucracies by focusing on the introduction and use of policy instruments as institutional change without radical or explicit shifts in administrative systems. Beneath public administrative reforms, it examines the use of “low‐profile instruments” characterized by their technical and goal‐oriented dimension but also by their low visibility to external actors due to the high complexity of their commensurating purpose and the automaticity of their use. The core case study of the paper offers a historical sociology of a technique for calculating the growth of the French civil service wage bill from the mid‐1960s to the 2000s. The origins, uses, and institutionalisation of this method in the French context are explored to emphasize the important way of governing the bureaucracy at times of crisis through automatic, unobtrusive, incremental, and low‐profile mechanisms. While insisting on the salience of techniques for calculating, measuring, classifying, and indexing in the contemporary art of government, it also suggests the need for observing and explaining “everyday forms of retrenchment” in bureaucracies.

The Effects of Psychological Contract Fulfilment and Public Service Motivation on Organizational Commitment in the French Civil Service

In a context where French public organizations are confronted with a rise in the demand for high-quality services, with limited financial resources and with a new form of management based upon a ‘results culture’, understanding work commitment in the civil service seems to be more crucial than ever Committing servants to their public organization is necessary to improve public services quality. According to Perry and Wise (1990), public service motivation seems to be important in explaining organizational commitment in public organizations. Further, psychological contract and organizational commitment appear to be significantly associated in public organizations (Coyle-Shapiro and Kessler, 2003). This study investigates psychological contract and public service motivation as antecedents of organizational commitment using survey responses from 754 civil servants, including police officers, teachers and servants working in Civil Engineering Administration. According to the results, psychological contract and public service motivation could both explain organizational commitment in French public administration. However, depending on the form of commitment, public service motivation and psychological contract vary in their predictive power.

De la gestion prévisionnelle des effectifs, des emplois et des compétences (GPEEC) aux cadres statutaires : la progressive émergence de la notion de « métier » dans la fonction publique d'Etat en France

<titre>From the Planned Management of Staff, Jobs and Competencies towards a New Statutory Framework&#160;: The Gradual Emergence of a job approch (m&#233;tier) in the French civil service </titre> The term m&#233;tier sums up a project of gradual reform in French civil service staffing policy. The term was introduced along with methods aiming to plan ahead for changes in staff and professional know-how through the use of &#8220;referentials&#8221; listing the totality of &#8220;job types&#8221; necessary to fulfil all administrative needs and the competencies associated with them. An analysis of the actual uses of these methods shows the failure of a plan to develop a tool that could serve as a basis for all human resource management functions. However, the procedure turned out to be operational so far as meeting the more precise and strategic needs of various ministries was concerned&#160;: aid in the requalification of civil servants whose posts might become unnecessary due to new technologies or institutional change, aid in the career management or in favouring the mobility of civil servants with support functions for several ministries&#160;; in addition, it served as a basis for discussion between those receiving allocations and those responsible for a particular unit, with a view to management control. On the whole, the main point is the recognition of the importance of skills and professionalism over and above membership in a corps, or the &#8220;profession&#8221;. The same idea can be found in a recent report of the Conseil d&#8217;&#201;tat, suggesting that those in charge of a particular unit be given the means to choose staff according to individuals&#8217;professional background and acquired competencies rather than according to the status of their original corps. Thus the idea of m&#233;tier is used to create a link between two moving entities&#160;: on one hand the changing missions of public organizations, on the other the changing missions of individuals in the course of a career. Reference to m&#233;tier thus consists more in renewing the model of a civil service career than in questioning its relevance.

Le droit à la carrière des officiers de la marine

The &#8220;right to a career&#8221; &#8212; in other words, a guarantee of job stability and advancement &#8212; is presented here as one of the advantages of belonging to the French civil service. It is situated in the wider framework of a system of employer-employee relations and commitments of a diverse nature that the author suggests calling &#8220;job exchanges&#8221;. In that particular sense, the marine officer&#8217;s career constitutes an archetype&#160;: above and beyond a contract, the relationship is one of a commitment measured in time and remunerated economically and symbolically. It reconciles two notions in an exemplary manner&#160;: the first is statutory, in the sense that it is attached to the rank of officer and implies having successfully passed through the preceding ranks, independently of the posts or jobs occupied; the second is linked to the possibility given to marine officers of pursuing a career by means of job progression, thanks to a recognition of competencies acquired in various posts or during special training, to a greater or lesser degree following set itineraries.

The “service project” experience in the French civil service

Reform of the French civil service, embarked on in 1989, was designed to involve state employees and officials in the process by appealing to their sense of duty and commitment, rather than adopting a top‐down approach and imposing control over them. “Service projects” provided for active participation of state officials in the definition of aims and objectives and organisation of their services. Several thousand individual services were involved. The evidence suggests that, in practice, participation concerned mainly the conditions of work organisation and often failed to involve all levels of the hierarchy. The reforms did not involve the trade unions, although they were consulted. As in the case of quality circles, which the reforms resembled, participation by all agents was not maintained after the first project. The use of “strategic projects” are still under way but the dimension of staff participation has progressively disappeared. The conclusion is that “service projects” are a failed experiment in staff participation and involvement.