Search Results

This chapter analyses the case of pay for performance in the British Civil Service since the 1980s, which progressively moved from a 19th-century classified pay system (in which pay rises came either from promotion to a higher grade or from incremental progression on a given grade) to one in which a fifth or more of pay was obtained by discretionary bonuses. It is argued that the intended consequence or perhaps more correctly, anticipated consequence of performance-related pay — to improve the motivation of public servants — has proved elusive. When a policy is the result of decisions by many actors, it is not clear whose intentions were paramount. In contrast, the unintended or unanticipated consequence was that, although performance appears to have improved in several cases, it did so by other means than motivation. Notably, it came about because of the emergence of processes facilitating convergence between goal setting at the individual and organizational levels. These have supported a renegotiation of performance standards and priorities at the individual level.

This chapter examines how BBC radio and its practices created possibilities for the recognition of African-Caribbean voices, as they discussed life in England years before the arrival of Windrush, and just before television re-emerged as a cultural force. It also examines how programmes created for West Indian audiences changed foci, and began to offer varied, personal perspectives on life for African-Caribbean immigrants. It outlines the influence of radio upon the BBC Television Service, management directives and pre-war programming. Beginning in 1939, the programme Calling the West Indies featured West Indians troops on active service reading letters on air to their families back home in the Islands. The programme later became Caribbean Voices (1943–58) and highlighted West Indian writers who read and discussed literary works on the World Service. These programmes offered rare opportunities for West Indians to discuss their perspectives on life among white Britons and subsequent social issues.

This chapter analyzes the BAOR's own attempts to adapt to the changing nature of Anglo-German relations between 1948 and 1957. This involves constraints caused by the organizational structure of the British armed services in Germany, the impact of service accommodation on levels of contacts, official attempts by military units to improve relations in local towns, and the experiences of individual officers and ranks. Secondary source material on the official relationship between the British army and the Germans is limited and so far covers only the period immediately following the German surrender in May 1945. Nonetheless, most of the recollections of servicemen in Germany during the 1940s and 1950s tend to focus on army life rather than on the contacts made with the local German population.

The very absence of large-scale mutinies in the Indian armed forces between 1939 and 1945 indicates that Indian soldiery was quite content with British military service. Moreover, there were no overt hostile communal feelings among different religious communities within the Indian Army despite the rise of Hindu–Muslim animosity in the ‘greater’ society. How, in the absence of a nationalist ideology, the Indian soldiers were motivated to fight and die in the age of total war is a puzzle which this chapter attempts to resolve. The British could separate the soldiery from the host society by providing tangible and non-tangible incentives to the jawans. Military discipline further converted the agricultural labourers in the ranks into automatons of sorts, while racial/ethnic pride partly enabled the Indian soldiery to encounter the brutal ‘face of battle’.

Marriage is a tool of career development in the modern British diplomatic service. It indicates emotional maturity on the part of the diplomat, and denotes his/her readiness for positions of higher responsibility. Eighteenth-century diplomacy was very much a career for single men. The diplomatic profession was badly paid, as a result of which diplomats were unattractive propositions on the London market. Besides, few women wished to be parted from family and friends to live in social and linguistic isolation abroad. Many diplomats took mistresses wherever they could be found. One advantage of living abroad was the licence it gave to men and women to pursue irregular unions comparatively free from prying eyes. The question what women thought they were getting into when they chose to marry a diplomat, and why, marks the closing decades of the eighteenth century, a once unattractive choice of spouse had become more acceptable.

This chapter examines the aftermath of the expansion of the imperial honours system through the experiences of those social groups who had been newly included in the system: especially the broad, insecure middle classes. Groups who continued to be marginalized by the system, such as professional women, clamored for increased recognition or argued that the system was rotten to the core and needed to be removed. In the empire critiques of honours crystallized around nationalist causes, while elites who were willing to exchange loyalty for status enjoyed the greater variety of honours available to them, doubling down on their commitment to the empire-wide system of hierarchy and distinction that defined them against nationalists. Official honours policy and the behavior of those who had been included in the “democratization” of 1917–1921 sought to defend a status quo rather than continue the inclusion of the years at the end of the war. The Treasury retrenched, reducing the number of honours distributed throughout the empire, and narrowed the range of people who could receive them, focusing on honouring state servants rather than the wider public in Britain. At the same time, recipients of the Order also sought to defend its honour against people in lower ranks of society by policing in minute detail the use of the privileges of holding honours. The honours system thus defined a form of proximity to social and political elites within and outside Britain. This definition prioritized state service, thus creating a connection between hierarchy and state expansion that would continue through the century.

The introduction discusses existing literature on honours systems around the world and, in particular, in Britain. It draws attention to some of the ways in which people have obscured or downplayed the centrality of honours to important social and political processes in Britain and the British Empire. It also briefly compares the British system to other international honours systems and how scholars have analyzed them. It discusses in some detail the relationship between party politics, the civil service, colonial governments, the monarchy, and civil society institutions in nominating people for honours.

This chapter discusses US physician Don Berwick's speech during the eightieth anniversary of the British National Health Service. He said that there comes a time “for stability, on the basis of which, paradoxically, productive change becomes easier and faster, as the good, smart, committed people of the National Health Service (NHS)—the one million wonderful people who can carry you into the future—find the confidence to try improvements without fearing the next earthquake.” He also lamented the “duplicative, supply-driven, fragmented” US health care system. The tension between productive improvements and unproductive “earthquakes” in both the United States and the United Kingdom is the core problem in improving health care quality elsewhere.

This chapter considers the threats faced by public service broadcasting (PSB). These threats come externally from market forces, from commercial adversaries chipping away to advance their own agendas, and from the political class with their concerns about bias. The BBC also faces the challenges common to all mature organisations: that of calcification and inertia consequent upon size and success. These attacks have not only had a real effect at the BBC but also on the wider industry with UK PSB content spend reduced by almost £1 billion in the space of a decade. Both management and government need to recognise that content must be re-prioritised. If this cannot be done, the industry must act to found a new organisation whose sole priority is the support of content.

Denmark, Germany, and Britain have marketized their employment services in different ways. This chapter introduces the tasks involved in moving jobless people into, or closer to, paid work (assessment, advice, training, job placement, and the organization of make-work schemes). In Denmark New Public Management and municipalization trends have combined to produce dramatic fluctuations in the volume of work and the rules of the market; marketization has proceeded in three waves since 2005. In Germany, there are diverse market segments reflecting the persistence of three different transaction modes in the wake of the Hartz reforms; marketization was implemented in 2002–5. In Britain, a series of privatization experiments led to the creation of a highly concentrated, centralized, and uncompetitive market, with several multinational firms managing the bulk of the market as Work Programme prime contractors; this market structure was created in 2008–11.

This chapter presents the author's personal interpretation of public service broadcasting (PSB), dissects the relationship between advertising and public service broadcasters, and uses some of Thinkbox's qualitative insight to imagine the future of advertising within PSB. Thinkbox specializes in presenting hard and impartial facts amidst a decade of ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative’ facts about what is happening to TV. It is argued PSB can be paid for in only one of three ways: a universal licence fee, direct treasury funding, or advertising. Were the BBC to stop receiving a license fee and look towards advertising income instead, overall TV ad revenues would be unlikely to increase sufficiently to replace it and all other broadcasters would suffer, not to mention many other media.

This chapter examines the enlistment of southern Irish loyalists into the British Colonial Service during the Irish Revolution and its aftermath. First, it assesses the revolution’s impact on their decisions to enlist, focussing on the way in which colonial service provided a convenient route out of Ireland for loyalists (Protestant and Catholic) unable or unwilling to remake their lives under the new dispensation. Secondly, it interrogates their loyalist credentials, arguing that while most were loyalist by birth or conviction, a significant minority had loyalty thrust upon them by circumstance. Predominately Catholics born outside the Irish Unionist tradition, they were unwillingly or unwittingly draped in the loyalist mantle despite their indifference or opposition to the loyalist cause. Finally, the chapter examines enlistment in the 1930/40s, when disproportionate Irish Protestant enlistment derived from a sociocultural communal identity steeped in imperial affinities, and a Colonial Service recruitment policy favouring Ireland’s former loyalist class.

This chapter first considers the odd relationship between the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), during the waning days of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. In addition to surveying a number of pertinent memoirs and biographies, it examines fictional accounts of espionage, focusing on John le Carré's classic espionage novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). The chapter then looks at the Cold War cooperation between the US and UK intelligence services, as the CIA took the lead in combating Soviet subversion and espionage in Europe and around the world. Finally, it introduces the two most damaging American spies of the Cold War era, Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hanssen of the FBI.

The British Secret Intelligence Service identified the RSFSR People’s Commissariat of Health (RSFSR Narkomzdrav) as being the main agency within which ostensibly civil facilities engaged in offensive biological warfare work were concealed. Significant funds for BW research were channeled from RSFSR Narkomzdrav to the Plague Fort at Kronstadt and to other laboratories in Leningrad. Semen Ivanovich Zlatogorov, who had participated in Russian efforts to combat the October 1910 to February 1911 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria, and had subsequently emerged as one of the world’s leading authorities on pneumonic plague, was the lead scientist heading up BW research in Leningrad. The key institution operating closely alongside the Narkomzdrav facilities appears to have been the Red Army’s Military-Medical Academy.