This revised and expanded edition of a benchmark collection compares how civil services around the world have adapted to cope with managing public services in the 21st century. The volume provides insights into multi-level governance, juridification and issues of efficiency and responsiveness as well as exploring the impact of fiscal austerity.

The role and position of the civil service as core actors in the public sector has been seriously questioned in recent years. This volume provides a comparative study of civil service systems in Asia, Western Europe and Africa. The cast of international contributors provide new insights.

This book combines academic wisdom and practitioners’ insights to critically examine the challenges faced by civil service systems in the 21st Century. Moreover, the book evaluates what types of civil servants are needed to tackle critical issues such as rapidly ageing populations, increased urbanisation, environmental degradation, swift technological advancement, and globalisation of the market place in the social and economic realm of the 21st Century. Its topics range from civil service development in post-Soviet countries indicating that peer-to-peer learning is the way forward, to civil service reforms in China, Japan, and Korea in their quest to satisfy their citizens demands and expectations in the 21st Century. Other topics span across regional analyses by focusing on current dominant trends and challenges confronting administrative and civil service systems, vis-à-vis technology, innovation and “big data”, and their disruptive effects on society and government. This book will be of interest to both academics and practitioners, and would-be builders of the 21st Century world.

This thoroughly revised and updated second edition of Civil Service Systems in Western Europe presents a comprehensive overview of the important issues in modern bureaucracies and provides a comparative analysis of the civil service systems of various Western European nations.

This book compares contemporary civil service systems across East and Southeast Asia, a dynamic region of greater diversity in local administrative tradition, imported models of modern administration, and the character of prevailing political institutions. Featuring chapters on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, this book provides a detailed analysis of key aspects of the civil service system, including centralization, recruitment, classification, openness of positions, performance assessment, promotion, training, and senior civil service. It distinguishes four modes of public employment, namely, bureaucratization, professionalization, politicization, and marketization, to develop a conceptual framework for comparing the civil service system at the operational level. The region’s contemporary civil service systems appear to be hybrid systems that combine, at varying degree, these modes of public employment, responding to administrative reform pressures. The patterns of public employment across East and Southeast Asia reflect local administrative traditions, imported Western models of administration, and the relative timing of democratization and bureaucratization. With contributions from leading local experts across the region, this book will be invaluable to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in Asian public administration, especially civil service systems.

This book addresses salient current issues in public administration research. It seeks to suggest where future research may or indeed ought to be focussed. To advocate the future routes for the development of research, this book is divided into themes, with a clear overlap between different approaches. The book has contributions that will assist students of public administration/public sector management and public policy, especially new PhD students, but will also be a useful resource for more established researchers to understand the major emerging issues within the field.