Higher Civil Service Research Articles

Public Bureaucracy and Regionalism in South Korea

This study explores ways for the central Korean government to reinforce its legitimacy through answering the demands by provinces for more equitable representation in the public bureaucracy. Based on the widespread belief of the existence of regionalism or regional bias, the Korean civil service is scrutinized in terms of civil servants' regional background The South Korean public bureaucracy as a whole seems to be representative of the people, but evidence over time shows that the higher civil service and the leadership of the central bureaus are under representative of natives of the southwestern region (Cholla).

Who Serves the People? Educational Backgrounds of South Korean and Japanese Bureaucrats

Numerous studies reveal that the higher civil service in many countries has been occupied by well-educated males, but the educational backgrounds of each nation's civil servants are different and vary with regard to the cultural and social norms of each country. Education is a major determinant for employment and promotion. The definition of well-educated is determined by each nation's political, social, and economic environment. This study investigates the educational backgrounds of government employees in South Korea and compares them to those of government employees in Japan. Primary attention is given to changes in public employment practices based on variables of educational back-ground (i.e., education level, institutional path, and field of study). Findings indicate that there are many similarities between the South Korean and Japanese government work forces, and the "best product" policy in public employment practices is common in both countries. In this setting, the public bureaucracy is a major instrument for policy making and implementation.

Inside perceptions of public policy making in france: preliminary analysis

The study, based on interviews in Paris with government officials from the Office of the Pres-identify, Prime Minister's Cabinet, cabinets of five important ministries including that of the Economy, grands corps members, and Leaders of the trade unions, seeks to determine the reality of the process of goverrimentai policy making in the Fifth Republic and, most importantly, the influence of the major participants in policy formulation. Cumulatively, the responses point out that the president and prime minister are viewed as the top arbiters of public policy, in the general and social and economic areas. They are followed, in decreasing order , by the Minister of the Economy, the ministers of important ministries, National Assembly, higher civil servants (especially members of the grands corps), Senate, and trade unions. Characteristically, all groups of participants interviewed have tended to rate their own part in the policy process more highly than the other groups had rated it. In general, the prelimina...

Historical Legacy and Recent Developments in the German Higher Civil Service

Historical Legacy and Recent Developments in the German Higher Civil Service

The Higher Civil Service in Greece

The Higher Civil Service in Greece

Business and the Conservatives

In her efforts to revivify the British economy. Prime minister Margaret Tatcher has been attempting to promote societal values that will support the creation of an "enterprise culture." To do so, she has been doing battle with the consensual economic planning undertaken by business, unions and civil servants known as tripartism and the gentlemanly ethos underpinning such arrangements. Her broadsides against such members of the British gentlemanly culture as the Tory grandees in her own party and members of the higher civil service have been aimed at replacing the British gentleman with a new ideal type more suited to lead her "capitalist revolution."

Book Review: The Higher Civil Service in Belgium and in Industrialised Countries: Recruitment, Career and Training

Book Review: The Higher Civil Service in Belgium and in Industrialised Countries: Recruitment, Career and Training

The British Higher Civil Service: Recruitment and Training

The British Higher Civil Service: Recruitment and Training

Histoires de vie, espaces de vie

Life stories, life spaces. — As sex and age, spaces in daily life indicate social position : one is not the same high civil servant whether male or female, young or old, or whether one lives in the Vllth district of Paris or in Nanterre. Urban space is a powerful factor of socialization, a mediator of social reproduction as the example of working-class families show in old industrial region. It is also both a way to express a social position and a constitutive factor of representations of a social world. To take into account spaces where these representations enter is a must when investigating these life stories.

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:MAX FRENKEL, Federal Theory, Canberra, Centre for Research on Federal Financial RelationsKENNETH WILTSHIRE, Planning and Federalism: Australian and Canadian Experience, St. LuciaCHRISTOPHER D. GILBERT, Australian and Canadian Federalism 1967–1984: A Study of Judicial TechniquesMARK BIRRELL (ed.), The Australian States: Towards a RenaissanceIVAN BERINGER, GEORGE CHOMIAK, HAMISH RUSSEL, Corporate Management: The Australian Public Sector, SydneyS.R. MAHESHWARI, The Higher Civil Service in Japan, New Delhi,O.P. DWIVEDI AND NELSON E. PAULIAS (eds), Ethics in Government

Steering the Ship of State: One Tiller but Two Pairs of Hands

Policy-making reflects the combined activity of both politicians and higher civil servants; both have their hands on the tiller of the ship of state. But they approach problems of governing from different perspectives – partisan or bureaucratic – and each has a different contribution to make. This article considers six models of the relationship, varying according to inputs of political will and the probability of programmes achieving success. They are: willpower dominates; perfectly informed trade-offs; everything is uncertain; everything is predetermined; capture by civil servants; and policies dominate. The analysis emphasizes that there is a greater need for changes in the knowledge and behaviour of politicians in office than for further reform of the civil service.

Sir Horace Wilson, 1900–1935: the Making of a Mandarin

In 1975, Max Beloff wrote an article entitled ‘The Whitehall factor: the role of the higher civil service, 1919–39’, which historians have been singularly slow to exploit. Influenced, no doubt, by the publication in the same year of the Crossman Diaries, Beloff argued that no modern political history could be complete which ignores the influence of the civil service on policy-making. ‘The anonymity of the civil service’, he argued, ‘may or may not be a valuable convention of the constitution: it is one which the historian of modern Britain accepts at his peril.’ The peril was greatest, he suggested, for the inter-war period because it was then that higher civil servants in Britain ‘probably reached the height of [their] corporate influence’. In contrast to their predecessors, they controlled a far more centralized machine whose influence had been greatly extended by increasingly interventionist policies. In contrast to their successors, they were a highly compact group – being a mere 500 in number.

Pointers for a Discussion on the Relations between Politicians and Higher Civil Servants

Pointers for a Discussion on the Relations between Politicians and Higher Civil Servants

The British Career Civil Service under Challenge

For the first time in the modern history of British government it is a matter of serious public debate whether or not there should continue to be a career civil service, more particularly a career higher civil service. Important though the advent of the Conservative Government first elected in 1979 has been in bringing the matter of the career civil service to a head, discontent with the kind of service which Sir Charles Trevelyan advocated in the 1850s, and Sir Warren Fisher actually fashioned in the 1920s, for Sir Edward Bridges to celebrate later, has been rife for many years, and this discontent has been present in politicians on all sides. Fabian reformism, though, has given way to more combative attitudes generated by the revived economic liberalism which is present in the Thatcher Government, which creed threatens the bureaucratic self-interest of the career civil service, and which has helped to make that service's relationship with that Government a conflictual one. Foreign arrangements are cited in the discussion which follows about the future of the career civil service, in which it is argued that the Thatcher Government implicitly subscribes to a form of ‘capture theory’ about the role which the career civil service has come to play, with regard to which the Government's attitudes are essentially conservative.

Academics in Japan's Advisory Council System

Against the background of increasingly knowledge-intensive policymaking in post-industrial society, this study attempts to explain both the purpose of the extensive participation of academics in Japanese government policymaking and the uncertain significance of the practice. The ambiguity and danger surrounding this uncertainty are the function of a number of critical cultural and institutional factors that persist in the higher civil service and academe.

Politicising the Higher Civil Service

Politicising the Higher Civil Service

The Higher Civil Service in Europe and Canada: Lessons for the United States, by Bruce L. R. Smith, ed.

The Higher Civil Service in Europe and Canada: Lessons for the United States, <i>by Bruce L. R. Smith, ed.</i>

Social Democracy and Bureaucracy

The Labour Party in Great Britain has been committed to the principle of equality and has addressed itself both in rhetoric and in practice to furthering the equalitarian ideal in power and authority relationships in English society, viz., in Parliament and industrial organizations. However, though the Party has relied heavily on the bureaucracy for effecting social democracy, the Party has had little interest in equalitarian access to the Higher Civil Service, which has traditionally recruited predominantly middle-class Oxbridge graduates. The explanation lies in the joint membership of Labour Party intellectuals and civil servants in what Edward Shils, has called the "aristo-gentry" culture.

The Higher Civil Service in Europe and Canada

The Higher Civil Service in Europe and Canada

Recruitment, Training and Promotion of Higher Civil Servants in Pakistan (1947-71)

Recruitment, Training and Promotion of Higher Civil Servants in Pakistan (1947-71)