Selection and the Social Background of the Administrative Class: A Rejoinder
| Author | R. K. KELSALL |
| Date | 01 June 1956 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1956.tb01485.x |
| Published date | 01 June 1956 |
Selection and
the
Social Background
of
the
Adin
inistrative
Class
:
A
Rejoinder
By
R.
K.
KELSALL
R.
ROBINSON’S
review-article in the Winter, 1955, number of
Public
M
Administration
raises several important issues on which
I
should like
to comment.
The qualities which are required in the bureaucrat are both intellectual
and moral. They are determined by the nature of the work to be done and
by the setting within which it has to be done.
It
is more important that
members of the Administrative Class should possess these qualities than that
they should have a particular kind of social background. With this part of
Mr. Robinson’s argument
I
am in full agreement. He apparently thinks, how-
ever, that
I
want to do two things. First, he supposes that, in quoting Laski
on the paralysing effect of House of Commons criticism,
I
am anxious to alter
the setting within which the bureaucrat has to work, and to protect him from
such criticism. My purpose was, however, a much more limited one.
It
was
merely
to
show that some part of the caution and hesitancy of higher civil
servants could be attributed to
this
factor. Secondly, Mr. Robinson implies
that
I
would willingly sacrifice the efficiency of the Service in order to secure
a more equal representation of the various social strata. Here, too, he is quite
mistaken. My contention is that the efficiency of the Service would probably
be increased if those sources of talent hitherto under-represented were more
fully utilised. My reasons for
this
belief may be briefly set out as follows.
(1) In the pre-war open competition, the interview had the result of
altering the order-of-merit arising from the written part of the examination.
As
a result of a detailed examination of the cases of
all
open competition
entrants between 1925 and 1939, however,
I
was able to show that marks in
the written part of the examination were more reliable as an index of sub-
sequent career success than marks for the
viva voce.
A
close study of these
cases also showed that, once having joined the Service, there was no associa-
tion between having been at a particular type of school and the degree
of
career success achieved. We would therefore be justified in expecting those
who only failed to be offered a post because their interview marks were not
quite high enough, to have made more successful civil servants than their
rivals who would not have been chosen at all except for their
viva voce
marks.
In giving too much weight to the interview, therefore, the Service probably
suffered an important loss of efficiency. Even if the two groups had been
drawn to an equal extent from the same social strata, the argument would still
hold good. In fact, my evidence suggests that the first group was significantly
lower in social origin than the second one. My criticism of pre-war open
competition policy is that the interests
of
the Service were to some extent
sacrificed incidental to giving effective (but unacknowledged) preference to
those with a certain type of social background and educational history. Quite
apart from the
direct
effects of using the
viva voce
to substitute one group of
successful candidates for another, the field of candidates available must have
169
To continue reading
Request your trial