Critical Book Review
| Author | Pierre P. Tremblay |
| Published date | 01 March 2002 |
| Date | 01 March 2002 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020852302681012 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Critical book review
Pierre P. Tremblay
The New Public Service, Paul Charles Light, Washington, Brookings Institute,
1999, 184 pp.
The New Public Organization, Kenneth Kernaghan, Brian Marson and Sandford
Borins, Toronto, Institute of Public Administration of Canada, 2000, 370 pp.
Public service has well and truly changed since the time when Georges
Moineaux, under the pseudonym of Georges Courteline, referred to those who
worked in it as ‘Messieurs les ronds-de-cuir’. Today, civil servants have little in
common with their predecessors and no longer conform to a single model. The
factors that transformed the organization of the public sector and its human
resources are already well known. The changing role of the state, which, accord-
ing to the title of a book by Luc Weber, is a major economic player, is sufficient
in itself to illustrate the gap between the old and new worlds of the public service.
One might add that since the public sector had always been representative of the
ambient social culture, it was inevitable that the origins of civil servants would
become much more diverse. This type of change nevertheless remains cosmetic
in nature. It does not reveal, in the reviewer’s opinion, the full depth of the
transformation in the sector. Recent books by Paul C. Light and by Kenneth
Kernaghan, Brian Marson and Sandford Borins shine a revealing spotlight on the
subject.
Paul Light delivers a detailed analytical report on a survey carried out amongst
masters graduates of the public administration and public policy programmes
of major American universities. These establishments include Harvard, the
University of Indiana, the University of Minnesota and the University of Kansas.
The part of the book devoted to the methodology employed for the survey pro-
vides a full list of the establishments from which the samples come. The choice
seems to me to be quite judicious given that the leaders are more often than not
major teaching institutions. To obtain a historic overview of changes to the public
service, Light divides his respondents into five cohorts of graduates. This enables
him to obtain an observation period of twenty years, from 1973 to 1993.
The data from the survey and the analysis made by the author tend to confirm
certain ideas that we may entertain concerning the current public administration.
International Review of Administrative Sciences [0020–8523(200203)68:1]
Copyright © 2002 IIAS. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New
Delhi), Vol.68 (2002), 145–147; 024941
02_IRAS68/1 articles 8/3/02 10:52 am Page 145
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