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Reform without doctrine: public management in France

Luc Rouban
CEVIPOF, Paris, France
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to give an overview of the public management process in France and tries to explain why it is specic as compared to other countries. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based upon a sociological and comparative methodology. It reports the empirical ndings of a European survey. Findings Management reforms in France are fragmented and do not t in a general doctrine or a new philosophy of the state. The French managerial reform style is due to the domestication of management tools by Napoleonic structures. Nevertheless, management innovations are used in order to draw new frontiers within public administration between what is the centre and what is the periphery. Research limitations/implications The methodology as well as the ndings of the paper could be used for a more systematic comparative work in order to understand why and how public management tools t in national political as well as professional traditions. There is scope for connecting public management research with broader historical and sociological studies of public administration. Originality/value The paper shows that both political values and work practices have to be taken into account in order to understand why public sector management reforms are easier in some countries even within the Napoleonic tradition. Keywords Organizational culture, Political sociology, Public administration, Public sector reform, France Paper type Research paper

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Over the last 15 years, a lot has been said about public administration reform. A huge literature has been devoted to the various implementation paths and rhythms of the new public management doctrine and systematic comparative works (Bouckaert and Pollitt, 2004) have shown that national specicities are still quite alive even if meso-level reform models can be sketched. It is relatively easy to demonstrate that all European public administrations have been transformed with a common focus point: budget savings, whatever their rationale, national or EU based. Beyond this convergence point, reform paths as well as their impact on the administrative cultures and structures cannot be assessed globally (Kickert, 1997). The point here is to know what are the basic features of a specic national administrative apparatus and to what extent they are changed by (and involved in) the public management reform process since the early 1990s. This point raises two questions about what is an administrative tradition and what is a change. An administrative tradition is the result of a complex mixture between an historical and social legacy, legal structures, professional values and, nally, compromises between various political priorities (Peters, 2008). Thus, it cannot be reduced to a set of legal or management tools. In many cases, a new tool may be easily absorbed by any administrative system with sufcient social and professional resources for defending

International Journal of Public Sector Management Vol. 21 No. 2, 2008 pp. 133-149 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0951-3558 DOI 10.1108/09513550810855636

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its identity and internal regulations. Similarly, a change may be interpreted both as an evolution, or even as an apparent evolution, of this tradition or as a signicative departure from it especially when a new doctrine about the goals and raison detre of the state and public administration are dened, as it is the case with the new public management (NPM) doctrine. In order to understand to what extent there is a Napoleonic model in France and to what extent it has been changed over the last 20 years we would like rst to highlight the basic features of the administrative tradition in France, from a sociological point of view and not only from a descriptive public management perspective. Then, we shall address three points concerning the extent to which this Napoleonic model has been changed. The rst one is to assess the contextual changes that have occurred since the 1980s and their consequences on the administrative model; the second one is related to the corporatist nature of the management reform process; nally, we would like to underline that there is a gap in France between management tools and the political culture of civil servants which gives way to a specic reform style. 1. French administrative traditions and the meaning of change The French administrative system concentrates apparently the Napoleonic model basic features as they have been exported and adapted within various countries especially on the southern border of Europe: a state-centric conception of governance; a specic administrative law system for regulating the policy process; a clear separation between public and private sector careers; senior bureaucrats working as policy advisers more than managers (Ongaro, 2008). There will be much to say about the proportion of Napoleonic historical legacy in the way the actual French administrative model has been conceived and run since 1945. As a matter of fact, other competing powerful factors have had a tremendous effect on the physiognomy as well as the metabolism of the French traditional system as it can be described today, including the inuence in the second world war aftermath of the left political parties and especially the Communist party over the quantitative growth of the public sector as well as the development of social advantages for the civil servants, the successful technocratic projects of the higher civil service in the 1950s or the need to reassert the power of the executive after the decolonisation crisis of the 1960s. Whatever the true Napoleonic aspect of the French public administration, which could deserve a real historical debate, some characteristics seem to distinguish the French system among other Mediterranean countries. The rst point is the political and symbolic weight of the public service notion (in the French meaning of service public and not in the English one) which calls for a systematic intervention of public authorities, whether national or local, in order to preserve the welfare state and to foster solidarity among citizens (through various means including, for instance, a large national education ministry). A second relevant point is corporatism. The whole state civil service is organised along the lines of corps, each of them offering specic career paths within ministries as well as criteria of professional excellence. Corporatism refers in the French case to the internal competition of corps within the civil service in order to protect and defend their professional area and to maintain the social hierarchy among the various corps as it is produced and reproduced by the competitive exams and grandes ecoles system. The last point is related to the fact that the French civil service policy is based upon a mixture of elitism (a majority of higher civil servants come from

the upper classes, that is not the case for instance in Italy) and socialism as the civil service is supposed to offer an upward social mobility to every willing citizen whatever his or her social background. From this perspective, any kind of real change, i.e. any structural change, should modify at least one of these three characteristics. Other aspects, such as the politics-administrative relationship or the interchange between the public and private sectors are very important, of course, but may vary from one period to the next (Dreyfus, 2000) and sometimes from one ministerial sector to the next and cannot be regarded as structural factors. We shall argue here that public management reforms in France are only instrumental. They cannot change themselves the basic characteristics of the administrative system because they are disconnected from a global set of market-oriented values and because they do not t within any kind of clear doctrine or new state philosophy. Another point to be raised is to know whether the state is still central as social actors and local authorities have gained a new autonomy. From this perspective, public management reforms would be only the result of a new governance giving more weight to the European Union, pressure groups or local governments and requiring ipso facto that the state would be treated as a partner and not any more as the only source of legitimacy. Such considerations call for political science responses. Global debates about the strength or the weakness of the state may give a wrong indication about what is really important. For instance, there is no doubt that the decentralisation process has given French local authorities more decision-making power on welfare policies. But this does not mean that the central state is weak, because one may consider that, if the management of welfare programs is politically risky, internal security issues are politically more important in order to win the next elections and/or to legitimise the government action. Strength and weakness are common words used to appreciate the state situation but it would be a bit presumptuous to think that government circles and administrative elites are so unconscious that they give their power without any compensation. Of course, it is always possible that they have been forced to, but this situation is quite unusual and suppose that there would be a radical conict within the state, for instance between the executive and Parliament members, that is very unlikely in the French case under the Fifth Republic umbrella. As a whole, political structures have remained fairly unchanged. First, it is crystal clear that the state in France is still the centre of political life. Electoral participation in national elections is always greater than in local elections. Major new public policies (environment protection, health care, even employment as illustrated by the CPE case ` in 2006 the contrat premiere embauche, a new system of short-time contracts for youngsters) are elaborated within government circles, with just a lip service given to the labour unions role. Important social questions such as the immigrants integration or positive action within private rms as well as public administrations are debated at the national level with a systematic involvement of the executive and the Prime minister, on the basis of reports written by senior civil servants. When urban riots spread over the suburbs at the end of 2005, policemen, prefects and national politicians were at the centre of the media coverage, not the local leaders. The 2007 presidential campaign clearly shows that the demand for a state intervention in most policy areas is still very high as compared to other countries, especially those, as Italy or Spain, where

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local governments have a real political weight. Thus, it is important to distinguish the decision-making process from the implementation process that is largely delegated, decentralised and negotiated. Another factor is that the quality and efciency of major public services are not disputed. Since 20 years ago, opinion polls show on a regular basis that satisfaction levels are high among users, up to 80 per cent for public hospitals, the re service, the police or municipalities services. There is no gap between the citizens and the civil servants, who are regarded as honest and efcient even if a bit slow and bureaucratic (Rouban, 1999), and this is a major point of difference with the Greek situation (see Spanou, 2008). Relationships with users have been put at the centre of recent government initiatives in order to develop e-administration procedures (Torres et al., 2006) or to improve services for disabled or immigrant population (Warin, 1997). Similarly, civil service careers are still very attractive as demonstrated by the pick in the number of candidates to the ENA competitive exam in the 2000s or the candidate/position ratio which is still of 6 to 1 for the senior ranks and 26 to 1 for clerical positions (Direction generale de la fonction publique, 2006). These factors of stability may explain why the management reform process seems so slow in France. Nevertheless, changes have occurred and it would be misleading to conclude that France is unreformable, a consideration developed at length by intellectuals and newspaper essays (Fauroux and Spitz, 2001). Common theoretical explanations of administrative inertia or change in France highlight the bureaucratisation of politics due to the high rate of former senior bureaucrats within the political elite and contend that only a strong political commitment may alter this structure (Suleiman, 2003) or, alternatively, consider that the state has been progressively constrained to adopt market tools in order to cope with the economic globalisation process. From the latter perspective, the French political system would be entirely dominated by economic pressure and market globalisation (Culpepper et al., 2006) and a NPM-avoured reform would be only a side-effect of a broader change. In both cases, administrative change is regarded as an automatic mechanism following either a political change or an economic transformation. Little attention is devoted to the internal competition between corps and their ability to domesticate management reforms or to the civil servants values and professional practices. We would like here to provide another analysis, focusing on the professional and internal dimensions of management reforms, showing that their global impact is highly dependent from the resources and constraints civil servants are facing. From this perspective, administrative change is not any more automatic but the result of local, cumulative and intentional arrangements. Most comparative works about the development of NPM reforms are based upon macro-level analysis but they cannot identify why some countries within the same administrative regime offer so many differences in the advancement and/or interpretations of reforms. On the other hand, micro-level analysis focusing on individual organisations (Rainey, 1998; and discussion on this point by Ongaro and Valotti, 2008) cannot explain how the administrative DNA has been transformed or not. We would like to introduce here a sociological dimension which could explain the fact that administrative reforms are entirely, partially or absolutely not adopted within the working environment of civil servants who are the major actors of reforms as long as one considers real outcomes and not only political fashionable speeches.

2. Contextual changes The main characteristic of the administrative reform in France is that it proceeds though incremental changes and not through major legislation changing overnight the statute of the civil service or the relations between the state and the local governments. Things have been progressive over the last two decades (see Table I), but, as a whole, the picture that can be drawn today is quite different from the one we were used to in the 1980s. While the various governments, Left or Right, were still sharing an interventionist behaviour and defending an organic conception of the state (see Peters, 2008), things were changing for most civil servants. A major change is related to the retrenchment of the public sphere with the privatisation of former public sector rms, in the bank and insurance sector in the early 1990s and then in the public utilities sector whose most famous champions such as Electricite de France (EDF) have been partially and progressively open to market competition after many negotiations with the EU. A lot have been said on this point (Schmidt, 1996) but this change has had two main consequences. The rst one is that former public enterprises rapidly show that they were quite able to adopt private business management tools and compete foreign challengers in a very short time. This is clearly the case for Air France or France Telecom. The public sector myth, as an institutionalisation of the collectivist views shared after 1945, and on the basis of which labour unions have been always eager to protest and strike, revealed rapidly to be weak while the service public myth was still alive and well and systematically opposed to further EU deregulations. Another consequence for higher civil servants has been that second careers within business rms proved rapidly to be both more difcult, since they required more professional knowledge in management than network resources, and more attractive, since they offered best salaries and working conditions for relatively young civil servants who were looking for entrepreneurship whether public or private. From a sociological point of view, this is the rst time since the post-second world war years that the elite system is facing a split over, the private business competing with the state in order to attract the best and the brightest coming form the grandes ecoles. These centres of excellence started to launch new business administration programs and up to 20 per cent of the ENA students have now a MBA or a business school degree as opposed to 3 per cent in the 1970s. On the other hand, these changes mean that the state service is now a professional choice for the social elite members more than just a family
Date Policy goals 1982 Decentralisation rst wave 1986 Total quality management. Public enterprises privatisation rst wave 1989 Public service renewal calling for civil servants participation in ad hoc and local management improvements 1993 First wave of measures improving service delivery 1995 Reform of the state aiming at distinguishing regulatory functions from operational tasks. First systematic managerial reform attempt 1997 Public enterprises privatisation second wave 2003 Decentralisation second wave. Reform of the civil service retirement plan. New program budgeting system to be implemented in 2006 Government Socialist Conservative Socialist centre Conservative Conservative Socialist Conservative

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Table I. Major historical steps of administrative reform in France since 1981

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duty as it was the case a few years ago and that organisations have to ght in order to retain their best managers. A survey of recent trends in pantouage, i.e. the departure of civil servants to the business sector, shows clearly that members of the Inspectorate of Finance, for instance, quit the public service younger and younger and that most of these departures are denitive, involving a dismissal. In the 1990s, 50 per cent of the inspector under 36 years old had decided to quit for the private sector while they were only 14 per cent before 1970 (Rouban, 2002). A second change is due to the decentralisation process that was attained through a series of laws since 1982 that gave the local governments more powers in domestic elds (Steven, 1996). The main impact of decentralisation was the renewal of public management through local experiments. Regional metropolitan centres and big cities used extensively the resources given by the decentralisation laws in order to initiate new management procedures. Contracting out and public-private partnerships became common tools for local governments while a new attention was devoted to professional training. The statute of the local civil service, which is much more exible than the state civil service statute, gave the opportunity to foster performance management and to organise new professional proles (project managers, human resources managers) along the lines of the local executives needs. All these ad hoc management experiments did not give way to a specic doctrine but they demonstrated that public management was easier to implement at the periphery rather than within the ministries central services or even within their eld ofces. Paradoxically, the decentralisation process has proved to have more effects upon public management than upon the political equilibrium between the state and the local governments. A real devolution process, as it has been observed in Italy or in Spain, is very unlikely for the time being. The intricacy of the national and local political classes (up to 98 per cent of the parliaments members are themselves local politicians; local elected positions are the starting point of a majority of national political careers) is a major factor of stability. France is still a unitary state. Any step toward more decentralisation is always highly disputed between the local politicians and the government. For instance, the decentralisation Step II launched in 2003 by the Raffarin government involved important policy transfer to local governments and up to 130,000 state civil servants (most of them were clerical staff working for the Education ministry) had to be moved to the local civil service but while keeping all their previous working conditions, including bonuses. Thus, local politicians asked the state more nancial grants in order to cope with this new scal burden and claimed that they were not ready for that because the regional services had not sufcient management staffs. All in all, negotiations lasted two years after the enactment of the law in 2004. A third major change occurred in 2005-2006 with the budget process reform. The loi organique sur les lois de nances (LOLF) has been voted in 2003 both by the right and the left parties in order to renew the whole budget structure along the lines of a program budget including performance indicators and giving more exibility to managers who can make savings on personnel costs in order to have more budget for running costs. The entire national budget is divided into 34 major missions divided themselves at a more detailed level into 168 programs, some of them being managed by several ministries. This reform is regarded as a consensual and implicit small coup dEtat as Alain Lambert, a right senator and one of the LOLF fathers, recently said (Lambert, 2006). As a matter of fact, the LOLF is potentially a major factor of change

for public management in France not only because it creates a legal basis for the notion of public performance but also because public management is supposed to be now a by-product generated by the new scal constraints. For instance, new general secretaries have been instituted within ministries in order to steer the budget process and check whether the performance indicators are coherent, usable and useful. This is not to say that the LOLF in particular and public management in general are changing the whole administrative architecture. One of the most striking features of the silent managerial revolution in France is precisely the fact that main structures have not been upset. For instance, prefects in regions and departments are still major actors and the channels though which the budget information is coming up from the eld ofces to the ministerial central ofces. Paradoxically, the prefects authority has been reinforced with the LOLF. Similarly, power structures have not been radically changed. Ministerial cabinets are still very powerful and have not given up their central role in policy-making even if they have to cope with more demands coming from political circles as well as from pressure groups. One of the main questions for the future will be the nature of the relationship between them and the newly appointed general secretaries who are themselves appointed on the basis of professional as well as political considerations and have nothing to do with the British permanent secretary formula. A rst examination we have made of the LOLF implementation has shown that the cabinets directors are still in command while general secretaries have much more a technical duty. However, management tools and practices are now needed even in classical line administrations if only for the sake of a careful budgeting process, on the basis of quality or performance indicators. This is the true effect of the LOLF: public management is a consequence of the budget structure change and not the result of a doctrinal construction elaborated by the administrative elites. Curiously enough, public management is not commonly taught in French universities as it is often the case elsewhere in Europe (Kickert, 2005) and is usually developed as a professional knowledge in administrative application schools, such as the Public Health National School, or in technical grandes ecoles such as the Ecole des Ponts-et-Chaussees or the Ecole des Mines in order to prepare engineers to their future leadership in public as well as in private organisations. Most French managers have been trained under the umbrella of the administrative law tradition and they do not share a strong public management culture. They are still legal-oriented: public purposes are supposed to be achieved with the appropriate application of the law, with a special attention given to the equal treatment of users, a major value within the French administrative world. But the debate between administrative law and public management is not so simple. Recent trends in public intervention call for the development of a soft law especially in technical sectors where regulatory agencies or multilateral arrangements have replaced line administrations and the usual hierarchical decision-making process (Auby, 2003). Managers are now confronted with a legal uncertainty that requires careful evaluations and a good knowledge of legal bargaining. They have also to cope with a growing number of complex laws and regulations and cannot give up this legal dimension of their work in order to focus on performance questions. As a consequence, they have to rely more upon corporatist networks as well as upon a political support in order to avoid professional mistakes. This particular situation explains why important questions about the real rule of the administrative game have not still been answered.

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3. Public management and the civil service sociology Confronted with professional knowledge acquired in administrative schools and deeply anchored in the corps system, public management, as a general set of tools and practices, has had, for the time being, a few elds of application. Public management efforts have confronted with the corporatist structure of the French civil service. A major issue is the connection between budget savings and human resources management. Since 2003, interest has grown for performance bonuses and merit pay in order to foster productivity and, for the government, to demonstrate that it was highly preoccupied with public management questions at a time of high public decit. Systematically used for ministerial division heads, these bonuses have been experimented many times with various successes for line managers and even for clerical staff at the interior ministry. To say the truth, these performance bonuses operate a real discrimination only for senior civil servants since their total bonus amount may vary up to 100 per cent. Since bonuses may represent in this category between 30 to 50 per cent of the total annual income, performance-based management is taken seriously at this level even if evaluation criteria are often blurred by political considerations. However, for the great majority of civil servants, performance bonuses only account for a small percentage of their total income and cannot change their working conditions. These new bonuses have been extensively used in order to simplify a highly complex system of bonuses and additional rewards, automatically given according to the corps and the rank, as a means to compensate poor career proles and to ease negotiations with the unions since no global salarial agreement has been reached since 1998. For two or three decades, the old bonus system has been criticised by ofcial reports as too expensive, unclear and unfair (Comite denquete sur t le cou et le rendement des services publics, 2004). Nevertheless, as a whole, civil ` servants are rather reluctant vis-a-vis performance bonuses which can feed conicts between agents or weaken the corps ethos (esprit de corps) which is crucial in the French public administration because it implies and calls for group solidarity and collective action more than individual performance. This point raises a more general issue that is the relationship between management tools and social and political values that will be evoked below. Other public management issues include the denition of professional proles in order to ease mobility from one ministry to another one, the development of functional positions within ministries, such as those of project managers, an internal devolution process giving more autonomy to elds ofces through contractual arrangements (Cole and Jones, 2005), and, more recently, changes within the competitive exam system, especially the disappearance of any age requirement for most positions or the acknowledgement of professional experience under the EU pressure, in order to hire people from the private sector or from other European member states. Actually, these last innovations are due to the demographic pressure since, on average, 50 per cent of the whole civil service is likely to retire between 2006 and 2012. Departures for retirement will be much more important in some sectors. For instance, 65 per cent of the local government managers and 70 per cent of the public hospital managers will retire within this period. One main consequence of this huge generational change is that it is necessary now to offer good professional perspectives to candidates who share a high level of professional expectations. This historical change is also a sociological change since the

proportion of over-qualied candidates is more and more important. For instance, in 2004, up to 30 per cent of category B civil servants (intermediate level) had at least a four-years university degree while the B category is ofcially open to those having only a baccalaureat (high school degree) (INSEE, 2004). The human resources management policy is not and cannot be a top-down policy for the simple reason that demands coming from candidates as well as from young civil servants have changed. Professional upward mobility and interesting tasks implying more autonomy are now regarded as natural. The anti-bureaucratic movement comes principally from within the ranks of the civil service and not from an external pressure. A principal characteristic of the French situation is that successful management reforms have been handled by the corps themselves eager to channel the professional changes. This has been obviously the case of the infrastructure ministry since the early 1990s, because it was confronted by the decentralisation process which provoked a radical transformation of its role evolving from a direct intervention at the local level to a new role of expertise, consulting and business-like service provision. From another perspective, the whole process of professionalisation of the Army has been entirely driven and steered in the 2000s by the military itself. Human resources management has been largely developed in the defence sector since professionalisation calls for more technicians with better careers. This change called for a legislative transformation of the military statute enacted in 2005 giving new professional rights to the military civil service (training, careers prospects, social rights) whose legal regulations are now closer to their civilian counterparts. Thus, the LOLF implementation has initiated a debate about the utility of corps. On the one hand, it seems necessary to dismantle them in order to run budget programs efciently and to reallocate the agents according to performance criteria and/or budget appropriations along the lines of a job system. On the other hand, it is clear that the best results in the implementation of public management reforms have been attained when the corps themselves had been involved in the reforms. This observation is true only when several alternative conditions are met: a small corps, sharing a vision of its own professional future and social role (this is the case of the ingenieurs de lEquipement within the infrastructure ministry) or a strong hierarchical corps whose elites are legitimised and recognised because excellence criteria are not disputed (this is the case of the Army). These characteristics are generally those of the grands corps that have been able to modify their professional rationale in order to cope with the changes that the LOLF was bringing. The Court of Accounts, for instance, has reinforced its watchdog role, focusing now much more on policy evaluation, and has developed a new communication policy with the media. The Inspectorate of Finances, while in deep crisis in the 1990s, is now participating as an expert-resources centre to the new rounds of ministerial audits initiated in 2004 in order to set up the LOLF principles within the various ministries. Counter-examples can also be given. Public management is very hard to implement in ministries such as the education ministry that is managing about 1,000,000 teachers all over the country even if some devolution efforts have been recently made in order to simplify this huge mechanism. But teachers belong to various corps, do not share the same vision of their profession, are highly politicised and disdain generally the administrative hierarchy that manages them. Thus, the corporatist structure seems to be very useful when there are real corps which develop a self-consciousness of their role and duties and not only a group of civil servants with a

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few careers rules. For the time being, the various governments have decided to compromise and prefer to merge the corps for more efciency, when their tasks are similar. The goal is to reduce the number of corps of approximately 1,200 to 200. But it is necessary to point out that about half of the whole civil service is working within only 37 corps. Thus this reform aims at merging only very small corps. This is the real French paradox. Corporatist structures are both impediments and internal levers for managerial reforms. There is a clear contradiction between the LOLF requirements and the social structures. The solution of the problem will be certainly very simple: only strong corps will survive the LOLF implementation. In other words, the new program budgeting system will call for internal struggles in order to delineate operational tasks from steering positions in each ministry. Some management tasks, such as those of general secretary, will be regarded as only functional and let to managers with a high turn over rate while major programs staffs will be occupied by senior civil servants coming from traditional corps. As Guy Peters suggests (Peters, 2008), NPM can reinforce the Napoleonic tradition. This is obviously the case in France where public management rules feed a new differentiation within the ranks of the civil service between the new elite and the new management circles (Rouban, 2007). Last but not least, public management reforms have been promoted in a global political environment where reductions in force seem impossible. As a matter of fact, there are still in the middle of the 2000s about 2.5 millions state civil servants. In addition, there are also 1.8 million local civil servants and 0.8 million public health civil servants. As a whole, there are about ve million civil servants, i.e. 22 per cent of the total national working force, what is one of the highest European ratio and about 40 per cent of the national budget are devoted to the civil service (pay and pensions). Much could be said about this situation that is particularly puzzling from a comparative perspective (Derlien and Peters, n.d.). Paradoxically, the decentralisation process has fed a huge growth of the local civil service while the state civil service has been stabilised since the mid-1990s. Since 2003, budget savings have lead to a decrease of jobs within the state civil service but they account for the time being to a small percentage of the total (in 2007, 15,000 positions will be suppressed, i.e. 0.7 per cent of the total). But data do not tell the whole story. One of the major issues in French politics is that the civil service policy is still a social policy. Namely, the civil service policy is regarded by the various governments, from the left as well as from the right, as a multi-functional tool dedicated to the upward social mobility and preservation of the middle-classes (this explains the central role of the education system), to integrate young people coming from the immigrate population, to promote minorities or women rights and, nally and above all, to ght unemployment. The philosophy of the civil service policy is exactly at the opposite of the new public management concept, at least from a global point-of-view and, of course, with exceptions. From this perspective, the state is still a major actor of social change. Most reforms aiming at promoting, for instance, women or young unemployed people have been initiated within the civil service. Many new recruitment ways have been created since ten years, such as the jobs for the young (emplois-jeunes) which mixed contractual recruitment and professional training within public organisations in order to integrate later within the civil service young people who had failed to get degrees at school. In 2005, a same kind

of mechanism has been created aiming this time both young and senior people over 50 unable to nd a job. At the local governments level, it is clear that the recruitment policy obeys new management requirements but is still related to the local rate of unemployment. Local ofcials have a large autonomy in hiring civil servants for the C category (clerks) and the 2006 reform of the local civil service authorises small cities to hire freely managers upon functional positions without competitive exam. Local politicians have always asked for more freedom and have used often-autonomous local agencies to offer jobs to the local population, especially when the candidates were on the right political side. There is still in France a avour of the Italian lottizazione system. The French allergy to NPM may be explained by this combination of factors. This is not to say that the system is not exible as administrative law rules and court decisions allow for many arrangements. For instance, the rule of disconnection between the rank and the job offers the opportunity to allocate agents, if they want to, from one organisation to another, public or private, without difculty. The real point about the French public administration is that it is less Napoleonic, i.e. hierarchical, than corporatist (Rouban, 1998). Namely, public agents are relatively free to build their professional path as long as they follow the explicit and implicit rules of their corps or professional universe. This explains why human resources management is so hard to implement without conicts: while line managers call for it, as a means to protect their autonomy, a majority of agents regard it as a threat for their own autonomy at work or as a device for reinforcing the hierarchy. The high rate of social conicts within the French public sector may be interpreted as a consequence of this permanent struggle around a defensive vision of work relationships. Most public demonstrations are not based upon salary demands but upon the defence of a professional sector and its social utility. Labour unions are used to generalise and politicise these sectoral demands while the rate of unionised civil servants is very low in France: 15 per cent on average for the whole public sector as compared to 28 per cent in Italy, 27 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Portugal and 20 per cent in Spain (International Labor Organization, 2005). 4. Public management, values and work conditions One crucial aspect of public management reforms is their social and political background. We contend that social and political values are key questions which may explain the success or the failure of reform because management tools become real tools and not gadgets only if they t in a professional or a larger social culture which give them their legitimacy. In other words, values and practices they are related to, constitute the readme.txt of new managerial devices. If much attention has been devoted to the connection of organisational values and management reform (Wallace et al., 1999), the political dimension has not been sufciently explored in discussing public management questions with some recent exceptions (Van de Walle, 2006). Moreover, values may explain why some managerial changes such as the privatisation of the civil service are possible in some countries when they are only marginal in the case in France, whatever their institutional design. Even if NPM features may t in various administrative values (Hood, 1991), we shall contend here that NPM is not politically neutral as the ideas of competition, performance, privatisation or reduction-in-force which are at the heart of this doctrine refer to

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market-oriented values and characterise political right values, a point that has been demonstrated in many electoral studies, especially in the French case (Brechon et al., 2000). Management tools are not neutral as far as they require a new philosophy of the state, which is clearly the case with NPM. It is also very important to take into account work practices since they organise the prospects and expectations of civil servants, thus the degree of involvement in the reform process. A poor organisational climate, a lack of collective and professional identity will lead to individualistic calculus and exit behaviour. In many cases, civil servants will just say: lets be careful, the system will be the winner. We shall contend here that two dimensions are important: the rst one is the level of market-values within the ranks of the civil service; the second one is the image of work and social relations. If public agents do not share market-values, it is highly probable that a privatisation of the civil service will be hard to engage or to continue. If the image of work is negative, due to a low level of autonomy or a poor trust in the hierarchy, there is not room for reforms that will be immediately interpreted as a threat or as an additional burden. This variable may explain why a majority of public agents may be suspicious when large reform programs are proclaimed by the governments as it was the case in France in 1995 with the Juppe government or in 2003 with the Raffarin government. In order to test these hypotheses, we shall use here the European Social Survey (European Social Survey, 2003) which offers comparative data on political belief and work relationships. We distinguish here private wage-earners (without the independent professions) from civil servants (without the public utilities workers) and we compare the Mediterranean or southern countries to a couple of northern countries fairly involved in NPM Denmark and the UK. A market-value indicator has been built on the basis of two variables. The indicator is made of the addition of answers given to two questions: (1) The less the government intervenes in the economy, the better it is for the country. (2) The government should take measures to reduce differences in income level. As shown on Table II, there is a clear-cut difference between the level of market-values in Denmark and the UK on the one hand and Mediterranean countries on the other, within both the private sector and the civil service. This could give evidence that managerial reforms are far from being consensual and have been largely imposed on civil servants in most Mediterranean countries. Another striking feature is that the private sector elites (dened as a subgroup made of those with the higher degrees and the higher annual net income) are much more
Denmark Private sector (wage-earners only) Civil service 58 49 UK 42 42 Spain 30 28 France 35 30 Italy 33 29 Greece 32 32 Portugal 23 26

Table II. Proportion of market-values oriented civil servants (%)

Note: The sub-samples of civil servants are relatively small (between 130 and 300) for each country but there is no statistical error due to the age, gender or occupation distribution Source: ESS (2003)

market-values oriented than their counterparts in the civil service: 38 per cent against 29 per cent in France but 55 per cent against 24 per cent in Italy or 55 per cent against 39 per cent in the UK. These data may indicate that managerial reforms may not depend only upon the average level of market-values within the civil service but also upon the nature of the elite networks the government relies on. Where business circles are more inuent, or at least more inuent than the higher civil service, managerial reforms are not more consensual but more frequent. Another point to be raised is the political stance of civil servants themselves, as it can be studied through the self-position on a left-right scale. Political traditions are different from one European country to the next but left traditions are established in Mediterranean countries on similar basis, whether socialist or communist. Historically, ` this tradition is at least reluctant vis-a-vis market values. On Table III, we have only indicated the level of left positions. As the scale includes ten degrees (0 means the left and 10 means the right), we have considered as left-oriented those who position themselves from the degree 0 to the degree 4. Thus, Table III indicates the rate of civil servants really on the left side. A cross-analysis shows clearly that civil servants on the left side of politics do not share market-oriented values: about 30 per cent only, whatever the country. On the other hand, there are huge variations within the right-oriented civil servants population in the proportion of those who share market-values: 17 per cent in Portugal, 27 per cent in Italy and Spain, 38 per cent in France, 42 per cent in Greece but 54 per cent in the UK, and 69 per cent in Denmark. Obviously, even right-oriented civil servants in Mediterranean countries do not share enthusiastically market values. The highest level of left self-position as well as the largest difference between the private sector and the civil service may be found in France while the level of left self-position is the same in the two sectors in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Of course, there is not a direct link between the political self-perception and the support for managerial reforms. Nevertheless, political history and traditions have a real weight in France when debating the nature of the reform. For instance, the public service tradition implies a real political philosophy based upon ideas such as cite solidarity and secularism (la which forbids any religious involvement or demonstration in the public service) which are deeply rooted in the Republican and left tradition (Chevallier, 2003). Poor work conditions may also feed political criticism and opposition to managerial reforms. When we take a look at the degree of work autonomy, as measured by a combined indicator (Table IV), we can see that the level of professional autonomy is the lower in France, Greece and Portugal, three countries which have not developed systematic managerial reforms while levels are higher in Italy and Spain, where devolution or privatisation solutions have been systematically explored. One may underline the fact that this level is low in the UK as compared to Denmark. This
Denmark Private sector (wage-earners only) Civil service Source: European Social Survey (2003) 20 30 UK 21 30 Spain 42 42 France 37 49 Italy 37 37 Greece 21 17 Portugal 32 33

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Table III. Proportion of left-oriented civil servants (%)

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Private sector (wage-earners only) Civil service

Denmark 37 48

UK 23 24

Spain 11 19

France 17 14

Italy 20 30

Greece 9 18

Portugal 16 15

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Table IV. High level of professional autonomy (%)

Notes: This indicator is based upon ten degrees scales measuring in each case the control wage-earners have over their working hours, the organisation of their daily work, their working environment, the decisions about the general direction of their work, the change of the work tasks. A position between the seventh and the tenth degree is regarded as a high level of autonomy for each variable. A high level of professional autonomy is attained when respondents have a high degree of professional autonomy on four or ve variables Source: European Social Survey (2003)

observation is conrmed in the ESS 2004 second wave. When asked, 13 per cent of Danish civil servants against 38 per cent of British civil servants think that their work is closely supervised. This suggests that national contexts play a role not only in the probability of managerial reforms but also in their results and the way they are received and domesticated by the civil servants. Neither NPM countries nor Napoleonic countries constitute a homogeneous group. Public management may increase or decrease the margin of work autonomy since its real effects depend heavily from national traditions and social structures. The central question, then, is to know to what extent civil servants trust their hierarchy. A striking feature in the French situation is that most civil servants distrust their hierarchy. This is due to several reasons: upper positions have been more and more politicised over 20 years, as it is the case in Italy (see Ongaro and Valotti, 2008), career prospects are relatively poor for those who have failed to enter an administrative grande ecole even if they have high level degrees. A 2006 survey focusing on the state reform advancement shows that 94 per cent of the civil servants claim for sanctions when their superiors prove to be bad professionals (TNS-SOFRES, 2006). This distrust prevents civil servants from proposing improvements in their daily work. A test may be found within the ESS survey. Interviewed persons have been asked: regardless of the outcome, how fairly or unfairly were you treated in your attempt to improve things at work? This question is decisive in order to know to what extent civil servants are likely to play the reform game. As shown on Table V, answers are quite negative in France. These results conrm our hypothesis: the hierarchy does not taste individual initiatives. Reform is still a risk for civil servants as long as it is not handled by a powerful corps or collectively controlled. A top-down reform process coming from the higher levels has a very short lifetime, as demonstrated in 1995 when the Juppe government tried to enforce a global managerial reform.
Denmark Table V. Fairly treated after an attempt to improve things at work (%) Private sector (wage-earners only) Civil service Source: European Social Survey (2003) 77 76 UK 67 71 Spain 69 70 France 31 31 Italy 58 61 Greece 49 65 Portugal 59 71

Conclusion French public administration is not any more a pure Napoleonic example but it is certainly one of the more Napoleonic of the various Mediterranean countries we have evoked here. State civil service policy is still a major tool for achieving social goals, grands corps and prefects have been able to cope with or to adopt managerial changes, the corporatist structures and cultures, i.e. the organic conception of the state, are at the heart of the reform process and administrative law, whatever its qualitative change, is still a major normative framework. The administrative courts system and the state Council have been even reinforced with the EU integration process that calls for more regulations and more legal expertise. Public sector careers still attract the social elites even if they are now likely to quit rapidly for the business sector. A majority of civil servants are still left voters and reject a global managerial reform for professional as well ideological reasons. Nevertheless, things are not any more what they used to be in the 1970s or in the 1980s. More attention has been devoted to human resources management and training, the decentralisation process has pushed forward many local management initiatives and the LOLF is progressively changing budget and nancial practices. The combination of the LOLF reform and the generational renewal will certainly produce a new administrative culture more receptive to individual efforts and less to corporatist rules. These changes are already observable since the high rate of young over-qualied agents coming from the middle-classes put the traditional hierarchies under pressure. The reform process in France has two main characteristics. First, there is no global doctrine that could upset the traditional features of the French model but an accumulation of little changes that, nally, draws a new picture of the administrative system. This is much more an internal process than an external change enforced by the government or public opinion. Second, since a long time, management reforms have been more developed at the periphery of the administrative system, in local government as well as in autonomous agencies, than in central ministries. Nevertheless, the LOLF revolution is generalising the managerial culture if only for utilitarian reasons and is empowering considerably the Finance ministry which is now the driving force of the reform. What is a stake is to know who will be the winner in the new management professional game. The implementation of managerial reforms rises a crucial point about the new frontiers between what is the centre and what is the periphery. In ministries, line managers are confronted to a highly politicised hierarchy that encompasses not only the cabinets and the special advisors and their networks but also some of their former colleagues who have decided to be involved in the political sphere. A new frontier is drawn between the politicised circles who decide and the management ranks enjoying more autonomy while having to full more precise tasks. In other words, the aim of NPM to separate steering and evaluation from implementation is partially attained in France through politicisation.
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Schmidt, V. (1996), From State to Market? The Transformation of French Business and Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Spanou, C. (2008), State reform in Greece responding to old and new challenges, The International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 150-73. Steven, A. (1996), The Government and Politics of France, 2nd ed., McMillan, Basingstoke. Suleiman, E. (2003), Dismantling the Democratic State, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. ` TNS-SOFRES (2006), Barometre du changement dans le secteur public, TNS-SOFRES, Paris. Torres, L., Pina, V. and Acerete, B. (2006), E-governance developments in European union cities: reshaping governmentss relationship with citizens, Governance, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 277-302. Van de Walle, St. (2006), The impact of public service values on services of general interest reform debates, Public Management Review, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 183-206. Wallace, J., Hunt, J. and Richards, Ch. (1999), The relationship between organisational culture, organisational climate and managerial values, The International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 12 No. 7, pp. 548-64. Warin, Ph. (Ed.) (1997), Quelle modernisation des services publics?, La Decouverte, Paris. About the author Luc Rouban gained a Doctorate in Public Law from the University of Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne and Master of Political Science from Sciences Po, Paris, 1983. He is currently CNRS Research Director at the CEVIPOF, Centre de Recherches Politiques de Sciences Po, Paris. He also serves as professor in various public administration schools including the Ecole Nationale dAdministration, Paris. He has also served previously as a consultant for ministries and research agencies such as the Civil Service Ministry and the Commissariat General du Plan. He is member of the editorial boards of Governance, Public Administration, Public Management Review, Revue Francaise dAdministration Publique, and Telescope (ENAP Quebec). At the CEVIPOF, Luc Rouban deals with public administration, civil service, public management, political as well as business elites issues. Luc Rouban can be contacted at: luc.rouban@ sciences-po.fr

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