Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

154 Public Management and Administration
in the battle to contain costs, governments will look at any alternative. Staff are
now increasingly recruited at all levels. Base grade appointment is becoming
quite rare in some places and it is more common to recruit graduates or even
department heads directly from outside.
Public sector employment has generally declined. Among the advanced
countries there is a general decline in numbers employed by government as
a percentage of the workforce (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000). In the United
Kingdom, for example, between 1979 and 1999 public sector employment in
the UK fell from 6.5 million to 4 million, although definitional changes make
a strict comparison difficult to make (Greenwood, Pyper and Wilson, 2002,
p. 17). The National Health Service is no longer part of the public service, but
is publicly funded and with close to a million employees those numbers should
really be added to the 4 million cited above. In general, however, a number of
countries have reduced the number of public employees.
These changes have been controversial and were resisted by employees and
unions. But at a time when flexibility, a mobile workforce and management by
results are common in the private sector, it makes no sense for the public services
to insist on the personnel practices of a past age. Caiden (1982, p. 183)
refers to ‘the bulk of public employment where conditions are similar to those
obtaining in the private sector’ and this is, in fact, the case. Except, arguably, at
the highest levels, most public servants carry out similar duties to those in business.
Personnel practices peculiar to the public sector were introduced because
government work was considered to be quite different, but increase in size and
function has meant that most public servants are engaged in service delivery, not
policy advice, and the case for different standards of employment is less tenable.
It follows that personnel arrangements more like those in the private sector
will become commonplace. According to Osborne and Gaebler, public sector
experiments have shown the success of ‘broad classifications and pay bands;
market salaries; performance-based pay; and promotion and lay-offs by performance
rather than seniority’, and that other important elements of a personnel
system could include: ‘hiring systems that allow managers to hire the most
qualified people … aggressive recruitment of the best people; and streamlining
of the appeals process for employees who are fired’ (1992, p. 129).
The public service is now more competent than it was. Better methods
of management and analysis as well as recruitment and promotion procedures
are likely to make public sector managers smarter, especially when
combined with better utilization of new technology. The human resources
available now are certainly better than they were, when it was assumed that
public administration required no special competence. Greater flexibility in
promotion and improved performance measurement should allow the competent
to rise faster. With the demise of the career service model, staff are less
likely to spend their entire careers in one agency, or even in public service, but
to interchange between public and private sectors. In addition, while there
are criticisms of having economists or management specialists in charge of