HRM in the public sector: An introduction [PART 1]

• Lets start by defining what the ‘public sector’ is, and what it might be composed of.

Broadly speaking, the public sector refers to those organisations whose ‘owner’ is the state, including the organisation of the state itself. It is thus different from the private sector, whether for- or not-for-profit.

The definition becomes clearer when we look at the different parts of the public sector.

1.organisations that carry out government administration, whether central, regional, local or supranational. This is what is usually referred to as the civil service


2.Armed forces and the police. This is a special group in that they are subject to a special kind of discipline due to their role.


3.public employees who provide services to citizens, such as education and health. e.g. doctors, nurses, teachers, etc. In some countries, however, part or all of these services are purchased by the state from the private sector, and this is the reason for much of the variance in the size of the public sector across countries.

4.Semi-independent agencies and non-departmental public bodies, also called ‘quangos’. In the UK their number is contested and placed at between 700 and 1500 by different sources. These bodies typically perform regulatory and advisory roles which are deemed to be performed best independently from government.e.g. Ofcom, the Civil Aviation Authority.

5.Finally, there are trading companies which are owned by the state. In the UK these include the BBC, Royal Mail and London Underground.

• Bear in mind that in the UK, the public sector accounts for approx 20 percent of the workforce( a total of almost 6 million workers). The two largest groups are employed in education(1.6 m) and the NHS(1.56 m), who together account for more than half of all public sector employees.
  

• So, what is the history behind these numbers?

-The British civil service was created through a series of acts of parliament in the middle of the 19th century, which curbed the previous system of patronage by which public offices were granted to political allies and personal connections. By 1870 most of the regulations of an independent, merit-based civil service were in place.

-After WWII, the creation of the ‘welfare state’ saw a huge increase in the number of public employees through the expansion of public services, the creation of numerous benefit programmes (which needed to be administered) and the nationalisation of many industries which had previously been part of the private sector, e.g. British Coal (1946), British Rail (1948), British Gas (1948-1972), British Steel (1967).

-Starting in the 1980s, under the Thatcher and later governments, there was widespread reform of the way the public sector was managed, targeted at an active management of the performance of public services, and a retrenchment of the ‘trading’ public sector through numerous privatisation programmes. These reforms have come to be known as the New Public Management (NPM), a label that is still applied today to refer to ongoing reforms in the public sector.

-Finally, we have witnessed in the past few years huge challenges to the public sector in what has been labelled as an ‘age of austerity’. The exact consequences for the running of the public sector remain to be seen, but are likely to be profound.

• What is all this information in relation to HRM in the public sector?

See PART 2  for a detailed analysis of the three models of HRM in the public sector:

1. Traditional public sector HRM as practiced in most Western countries between WWII and the 1980s, and is still prevalent in many countries.

2. Reformed HRM as adopted after the 1980s in New Public Management countries

3. Current trends in public sector HRM as a consequence of the current economic crisis.("the age of austerity").

Image sourced from : danhawes.blogspot.com