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This chapter introduces the notion of Public Service Bargain (PSB) and points to variations in its three dimensions: reward, competency, and loyalty and responsibility. Based on these variations, it discusses the centrality of PSBs for politics and points to the intellectual origins of the idea. The distinction between trustee- and agency-bargains is introduced.

The liberalization and/or privatization of formerly highly protected, monopolistic, public utilities, and infrastructural services has added to the challenges of welfare‐state adjustment. The move to market competition is affecting these industries’ historical role not only as providers of public service goods but also as important national employers. The chapter provides an initial account of the consequences of liberalization and privatization for the quality, cost, and availability of utilities and infrastructural services and for employment. A comparison of the telecommunications and railways reforms of France, Germany, and Britain identifies different mechanisms to ensure that public service goals continued to be met and assesses the performance of the different regimes. In addition, the chapter compares the employment effects of liberalization in the telecommunications, posts, railways, and energy sectors of a wider range of countries.

This chapter analyses issues about values related to the governance and management of universities as public service institutions. It examines a further dimension of the culture of publicly funded universities, and places the debate about the management of academic knowledge work in a wider, European perspective. Some of the issues raised can be applied to other higher education systems outside Europe, providing that due attention is also paid to the local context of such systems.

This chapter has five purposes. First, to provide a general theoretical orientation and framework to analyse changes in UK higher education at the institutional, organizational, and individual academic and manager-academic levels. Second, to provide an analytical narrative about the emergence and subsequent development of ‘New Managerialism’ (NM). Third, to review the discursive strategies and control technologies embodied in different formulations of NM and New Public Management (NPM). Fourth, to identify and assess the endemic contradictions, tensions, and conflicts within and between these discursive strategies and control technologies, as well as their broader implications for longer-term institutional change and organizational innovation. Fifth, to provide an initial interpretation of the process of ‘hybridization’ in public services domains and organizationals, and its wider significance for the development of universities as ‘knowledge-intensive organizations’.

The very generous, service‐oriented ‘social–democratic’ welfare states in Sweden and Denmark did consistently achieve higher levels of overall employment, extremely high levels of public services, greater equality in wages, and higher rates of female employment than either the ‘liberal’ or the ‘Bismarckian’ welfare states covered in this study. Following the liberalization of capital markets and errors of fiscal and monetary policy at the end of the 1980s, however, the Swedish economy went from an overheated boom into a deep recession, which then required significant cutbacks of social spending and public‐sector employment in the 1990s. By contrast, Denmark combined growth‐oriented macroeconomic policies with more flexible labour‐market regulations that allowed it to maintain the high level of public services while also increasing employment in private services. With the rapid recovery of the Swedish economy at the end of the 1990s, both countries are again successful in combining high competitiveness in the international economy with very high levels of social protection.

One of the central themes of this chapter is the neo‐liberal critique of the ‘public service ethic’ which it has been thought by Social Democratic thinkers as the main way in which the self‐interested behaviour of welfare bureaucracies can be constrained. The chapter looks at the close links between the neo‐liberal approach to this and the Public Choice School of public policy analysts who argue that the role and expansion of welfare bureaucracy is best explained by the utility maximizing behaviour at work in such bureaucracies when they are exempt from market disciplines and the possibility of bankruptcy. The role of interest groups in a welfare state is taken up again with reference to the work of Macur Olson in terms of his account of the rigidities caused to the economy by long lasting interest groups. The neo‐liberal approach to trades unions is also considered in this chapter.

Chapter 8 looks at the way senior public servants coped with managerial rationalities; the continuous reform of the public service. The rise of the new public management in the 1980s led to recurring challenges to the administrative traditions of the public service in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The chapter analyses how the heads of the public service articulate the traditions of ‘constitutional bureaucracy’ found in Westminster systems of parliamentary government and selectively draw on past understandings to understand present-day changes. It describes living traditions under challenge that reshape reforms as reforms reshape them. It concludes that the heads of the public services have found ‘space’ or ‘voice’ to identify innovative ways of combining past traditions with new organizing principles of governance. In each case, it is not a question of ‘in with the new, out with the old’, but of ‘in with the new alongside key parts of the old’. The myths and legends of yore remain germane to the modern public service.

Discusses three conventional assumptions that are made about public management: that it is in the throes of a millennial transformation to a new style; that today's ‘new’ public management ideas differ sharply from those of earlier eras; and that the favoured doctrines of contemporary public management tend to be dubbed as economic rationalism. Goes on to point out that the book looks at public management from a different perspective, and reduces its arguments to seven related propositions, discussed in the remainder of the chapter that: grid/cultural theory captures most of the variety in both current and historical debates about how to organize public services; application of a cultural‐theory framework can illuminate many of the central analytic questions of public management; if we look across time and space, we can identify ideas about how to organize government and public services that correspond to each of the four polar categories contained in cultural theory; no one of those recipes for good organization has a clear claim to be considered more modern than any of the others and each has in‐built weaknesses; variation in ideas about how to organize in government is not likely to disappear; the dimensions identified by cultural theory enable analysis of organizational variety to be pursued at a range of levels; and the understanding of cultural and organizational variety, within a historical perspective, merits a central place in the study of public management. These seven propositions overlap, and some of them are given more space than others in the book; this chapter concentrates mainly on the first proposition, and aims to introduce grid/group cultural theory in the context of public management, but the other six propositions are also discussed more briefly, as a way of setting the scene for the remainder of the book.

This chapter looks at an increasingly important part of EU trade policy — trade in services. It discusses the notion of ‘public services’ at a more general level, and then discusses the treatment of public services in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and in bilateral trade agreements in detail. Among the conclusions is that the concept of trade in services according to the GATS and according to certain bilateral trade agreements of the EC is considerably broad, because it does not define the term services and because it encompasses four modes of supply, which include investments and temporary migration to provide services. Public services, understood in a broad sense as services supplied in the general interest, are at the heart of many debates about trade in services. Most of these services are covered by the GATS and the bilateral trade agreements.

The authors focus on the principal aspects of the Thatcherite economic reform programme and assess to what extent they were accepted by the British electorate. The analysis shows that the electorate accepted the Conservative reforms on privatization and trade union legislation and that, during her time in office, Margaret Thatcher won public backing for the changes. But in two other respects, Margaret Thatcher failed to carry the country with her; once the problem of inflation was solved at the beginning of the 1980s, the electorate wanted the government to pay more attention to the high level of unemployment and did not appear to accept Thatcherite policies in this area. The electorate showed no enthusiasm for the Thatcherite philosophy of reduced government spending on public services. The analysis of the Thatcherite economic reform programme gives support to the thesis that a political party does not need to be closely in tune with the electorate's policy preferences in order to win an election.

This chapter examines the strategies that have been developed to manage the dilemma between maintaining services and constraint. These include shifting responsibility in various areas towards the market and the individual or voluntary sector, target-setting, manifold attempts to manage and restrain public provision, and attempts to change people's behaviour to cut demand. It argues that none of these approaches is entirely acceptable to public opinion and none has been markedly successful in solving the problem. This suggests that the dilemma of spending versus cutting will continue to underlie policy-making, that future policies must combine a range of approaches, and that greater attention to fostering a more informed and genuinely democratic debate is necessary so that new policy directions will be able to gain public support.