that their political objectives are met, lending managerial decision within public
services an intrinsically political dimension. The eVect of the electoral cycle is often
prominent with politicians seeking to make their mark pressurizing managers to
focus on the achievement of short-term targets. A high-proWle example of the
consequences of political intervention in public service employment concerns the
establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the USA, in
the wake of 11 September 2001. President Bush was determined that employees of
the proposed DHS should not have the right to join unions or bargain collectively
(Masters and Albright 2003 ).
These contextual features aVect the character of the public service workforce. First,
public services are highly labour intensive and a substantial proportion of public
expenditure comprises labour costs. It is a proportion which hovers between 50 and
70 percent in developed countries (Ingraham et al. 2000 : 406 ). Second, the proportion
of women in the workforce has been increasing. Since 1995 , across OECD countries,
women have made up more than half the public sector workforce and there has also
been a substantial growth in the proportion of women with ‘high-level responsibil-
ities,’ which increased from 14 to 24 percent between 1990 and 2000 / 1 (OECD 2002 :
5 – 6 ). In some services, particularly education, the predominance of women is
particularly marked. In Italy, for instance, 75 percent of the education workforce
is made up of women (Bach et al. 1999 ).
Third, alongside and related to the gendered nature of the workforce, there is
a relatively high proportion of part-time workers. In Denmark, there are more
part-time than full-time women workers in the public sector (Bach et al. 1999 ); in
the UK, a third of women in the public services are part-time (Audit Commission
2002 ), compared to under a quarter in the private sector; this is a pattern repeated
in France.
A fourth distinguishing feature relates to occupational composition and the
general level of educational attainment. Public servants are relatively well qualiWed.
In the UK, 44 percent have a degree or a high-level vocational qualiWcation; this
compares to barely a quarter in the private sector (Audit Commission 2002 ). An
equally striking picture emerges in Spain, where in the public sector 56 percent of
employees have a technical, professional, or university qualiWcation, as opposed to
26 percent in the private sector (Bach et al. 1999 ). The level of qualiWcations is
associated with the presence of many professions in the public sector workforce
which include doctors, nurses, social workers, and teachers.
TheWnal distinctive characteristic is associated with the values of public servants
with diVering views on what motivates them. It is a diVerence that Le Grand ( 2003 )
highlights in categorizing public servants as ‘knaves’ or ‘knights.’ Public choice
theorists suggest that public servants engage in bureaucracy-maximizing ‘knavish’
behavior to increase their status and remuneration; a situation facilitated by the
absence of competitive pressures or systems of performance management and the
availability of a steady stream of public funding (Niskanen 1971 ). Others view
472 stephen bach and ian kessler