Public Service at the roots

How is public service represented in the communities?

What are the traditional and also the unconventional ways in which public service manifests itself in the neighborhoods?

When did public service became forever changed and what changed it?

Who made public service an area of politics?

Its important to differentiate public service from civil service.

Civil service is the professional branch of government, from local to regional up to state in public administration.

This includes QUANGOS (in the UK and Ireland), or Quasi-autonomous (or not) non-governmental orgs. AkA NDPB (non departmental public bodies). In short, public funded orgs incorporated in the private sector.

The first two immediate distinctions between civil and public service are that one is inherently a bureaucracy and a professional governing elite.

The civil service bureaucracies dig deeper between the general interest and the interest of the elite in power through different systems of meritocracy across time:

1- historical institutionalism

2- self involvement

3- corrupting the natural state of men

4- appropriating resources

5- inefficency adressing individual needs

6- disfunctionality (undermining its own goal of self perpetuation)

7- creates deeper economic and social disparities (struggle of classes)

Traditionally, Bureaucracies do not create policy but instead they exist to enact it. But in practice bureaucracies interpretation and execution of policy may lead to “informal influence” over the Leadership. Leadership that created the regulation and purpose for that bureaucracy and to whom the bureaucracy is directly responsible. Conversely the Leadership (Board, government or executive) answers towards the electorate or membership that the bureaucracy intends to benefit. In practice the bureaucracy is created to allow for the individual to interface with an organization, such as a government, without interfering directly with the Leadership. So, normaly larger organization or bureaucracies result in greater distancing the individual (voter, citizen, defendant) from the  Leadership, which might be intentional.

The Baron Von Grim in Germany wrote in 1790: ” bureaucracy is not appointed to benefit the public interest, indeed the public interest appears to have been established so that offices might exist”. Or in other words, substitution of sectional interests for the general interest. The suggestion here is that, left uncontrolled, the bureaucracy will become increasingly self-serving and corrupt, rather than serving society. (In Wikipedia). Or in other words, The means justify the ends. Marx also talks about the transition from primitive egalitarian societies to a state of centralized authority by the State ”  in civil society, forcing other people to do things becomes increasingly the legal right of the state authorities only”. The issue being the  bureaucracy as a social stratum deriving its income from the appropriation of part of the social surplus product of human labor. Wealth is appropriated by the bureaucracy by law through fees, taxes, levies, tributes, licensing etc. (in Wikipedia).

Marx of course questions the very essence for a need of a bureacracy in case where the surplus allocated to the machine would go instead to internalizing the morality and self discilpine, so that people would make bureaucratic supervision in mediating conflicts of interests redundant since resources would be directly distributed among the labor force. Max Weber, less radical on questioning the purpose for the rule of law,a supporter of bureaucracy under the principle of rational organization, admits that bureaucracy is the aparatus for legal domination and that Bureaucracy is in fact inneficient when dealing with an individual interest as opposed to the general interest. Also to Weber the focus is on the authoritarian nature of bureaucracy but this time the author recognizes a leveling effect on social and economical differences by this unchallengeable system of authority. Weber recognizes two principal problems in bureaucracy:

– group thinking undermines critical thinking

-“Catch -22″ (Heller)- the more complex are the bureaucracies the less coordination there is, facilitating contraditction and recursive measures ” the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy”.

Michel Corzier who wrote the “Bureaucratic Phenomenon” in 1964, launches the Theory of Disfunctional Bureaucracy. He says the bureaucratic system of organization is like a cycle and that the only way in which people are able to gain some control over their lives is to exploit ‘zones of uncertainty’ where the outcomes are not already known.

This raises the two central issues on the difference between civil and public service:

– Is there a need for both to co exist in a symbiotic manner

– whether the only possible approach between both is one of permanent conflict.

The conflict between civil and public service may actually stem from the inside of breaucracies.

Fiction author Jerry Purnell”

“…in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.”

In bureaucracies the organic structure aims for institutional perpetuation, meaning that its survival is its primary reason.

“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.” (Jerry Purnell)

Proof of that is that civil service actually pre dates greek citizen democracy, or any political state system. The first historical reference are the Sumerian Scribes, who had a tremendous power in manipulating the flows of information by having th monopoly of writing inscriptions and keeping the records. The Persian Empire was divided in provinces under the rule of “satraps” with a royal secretary to supervise troop recruitment and overseeing local conditions. The Chinese bureaucracy was oriented towards a “meritocracy” system of examinations to allow for poorer individuals to dispute places with established noblesse. From the Qin Dinasty 221–207 BC). During the Han Dynasty(202 BC–220 AD) the xiaolian system of recommendation by superiors for appointments to office was established. In the areas of administration, especially the military, appointments were based solely on merit. The following Tang Dynasty (618–907) adopted the same measures for drafting officials, and decreasingly relied on aristocratic recommendations and more and more on promotion based on the results of written examinations. the Song Dynastyy (960–1279)  were eager to implement a system where civil officials would owe their social prestige to the central court and gain their salaries strictly from the central government. This ideal was not fully achieved since many scholar officials were affluent landowners and were engaged in many anonymous business affairs in an age of economic revolution in China. Nonetheless, gaining a degree through three levels of examination — prefectural exams, provincial exams, and the prestigious palace exams — was a far more desirable goal in society than becoming a merchant. This included the employment of a bureau of copyists who would rewrite all of the candidates’ exams in order to mask their handwriting and thus prevent favoritism. Ancient China efforts towards transparency in recruiting civil servants raises the modern issue of equal opportunity (institutions vs civil servants) and the issue of corruption and abuse of power.

Again, in the UK some non governmental institutes incorporated in the private sector also are covered by the statute of civil service. In India there is a national Union Public Service Commisssion that conducts civil service examination with alledged functional independence from the State, while in Brazil the University of Brasilia and the Instituto do Barao do Rio Branco do the same for the foreign service.

In the US until 1909 the civil servants jobs were used to support the political parties. The US includes the Competitive Service and the Excepted Service, the majority of civil servants being appointed under the first one, while the former being reserved to special categories, like security and diplomatic agents.

Are bureaucracies acting for the elected officials or even imposing on them? There is no record about civil service succeeding in public service.

If we wish to believe that we live in a democracy, then it must be true that appointed bureaucrats cannot act contrary to elected officials’ interests. (This claim is itself debatable; if we fully trusted elected officials, we would not spend so much time implementing constitutional checks and balances) (In Wikipedia).

Fear of bureaucracies: public spending cutbacks, privatizations.

The new currents of opinion about the effects of bureaucracy:

-The Congressional Abdication Theory (Theodore Lowi 1979) claims that implementation of policies in the public interest is not under elected public officials control in as much as it is by the appointed bureaucrats. The idea of iron triangles (iron hexagons and hollow spheres)  taking over Congressional money allocations.  Interest groups that would have more extreme views than Congress. Another author, Niskanen, who worked under the Reagan Administration actually promoted cutbacks of public spending and the introduction of privatization in the 1980s and ’90s through those same ideas, implementing oversight mechanisms of “police control” and “early warning systems”

Historical co-existence of civil service and political order or law

in the study of political science. One might say that political science is the study of the many forms of civil service and its institutional progressive, conservative or supra individual, “public choice” or “memetic”/ Darwinian (Mikael Sandberg)construction. Meaning that a political system (Aristotele cycle of sophiocracy to Tyrany) would be the result of how civil service regenerates or crumbles on a certain period over time. The status quo or political stability would be better established by securing or institutionalizing the civil service at whatever cost: State, Military and Middle Class (also the corporativism three bastians of social order, with the Vaticans “Rerum Novarum” and “Quadragesimo Anno” in the turn of the XIX Century to the 1940’s).

One might argue that both public service and civil service go hand in hand and that one could not live without the other, but that one is best represented when separate from the other.

Machiavelli already in the Renaissance said in his work that the Prince’s ultimate concern should be the common interest of his subjects, therefore the end justifies the means, or in other words it would be the enlighted ruler’s main concern to be objective and realistic in his political analysis over any situation and decide having in mind his perpetuation in power at whatever the cost might be. The hegelian paradox in this doctrine kind of neutralizes itself because if the Prince is a wealthy, powerfull leader by right of birth or military achievement, he could never really feel and understand the needs and demands of the populace beneath him and therefore he could never aim at anything else other than his self preservation which, as a consequence of the Prince’s isolated existence, could never last. The question would be whether the Prince would be replaced in power or thrown off by his people. Machiavelli focus more on the elite, considering the historical context, with the metaphor about the Borgias, for instances.

In the XVII century, Thomas Hobbes, anthropological pessimist, philosopher partisan to the Contractualist (Social Contract), proponent to the natural evil of man in his “state of nature”, it would be up to a strong state (Leviatan) to secure men natural egotistical and self destructive instincts, allowing for the preservation of private property through justice and a heavy government authority. Only through repressive behavior could men enjoy individual freedom. Which brings up an interesting point about the conflicting nature of public service (for example would the civil rights movement in the US had taken place in the Northern States had the Southern states aligned perfectly with the anti-segregationist policy proposed by Lincoln or even later by Roosevelt and Johnson?)

How civil service and public service work better together in opposite sides but under the same political and judicial freedom

Public Service is a reactive movement against the failures of civil service. Martin Luther King defended the “sitting in” protests by cafeterias or other segregated places and said that its the protester duty to respect the law by challenging it in an orderly fashion, and be willing to take the punishment (being arrested) and that no other way is a higher demonstration of respect for the Law. The Law, not in the sense of civil service and status quo, elite power, like in the thoughts of Hobbes and Machiavelli, but a Law for public service: one Law that manipulates but can also be manipulated.

So, public service regenerates or reinvigorates civil service, but it dependes on civil service to succeed. Public Service would not be usefull in societies where, people living deprived of dignity and liberty, the power could be reasonably picked up to the streets and used to destroy the government, like St Thomas of Aquinus defended, but instead public service is on a perpetual Marxian relation of production with civil service. This civil and public service relationship is not based on property (like Marx), but the theory does apply in terms of State brokered relations between both (intercepting with the theory of communicative action of Habermas, intercepting Karl Poppers intersubjectivity and Marx’s materialism). Unlike Proudhon’s “The Philosophy of Povery”, heavily criticised at the time by Marx and Engels, the general interest in public service cannot be attainable by rising above the rulling class (either through meritocracy or communitarism). Nor should public interest be achieved by reaching a perfectly egalitarian societycreating the means to end conflict, like scientific socialists Engels and Marx propose in the “Communiste Manifesto”.

Like a capitalist exclusive relationship to the capital and a wage worker consequent relation to the  capitalist. Like a feudal land owner relates to a peasant and slavemaster relates to a slave. Like Marx said about relations of production – “The specific kind of participation in production determines  the specific forms of distribution”. Public service is a Utopia.

The closest philosophical basis for public service is utopian socialism. Like most utopian socialists and anarchists, public service in the communities, neighborhoods, proposes a more rational society and economical system. Neither one feels the need for a political revolution or class struggle, such as the already mentioned Acquinus “regicide”. But public service does not undermine the system.

Robert Owen, a welsh businessman, attempted (in the spirit of Karl Popper experimentation scientific method), to introduce shorter working hours, daycare for children and renovated housing in the XVIII century. Hi view was that human social behavior was not fixed or absolute and that human beings are free to organize. Charles Fourier with his theory of turning work into play (inspired Marx theory of alienation and feminism through female liberation). Both Owen, Fourier and Etienne Cabet founded “intentional communities” (religeous socialism) in the US. The purpose of these were to share resources (team work/fellowship), create family oriented neighborhoods and crate ecological sustainable lifestyles. Communal focus on voluntary simplicity, provide services to disadvantaged and disabled populations (like war refugees and homeless). The best successful examples of such public service enterprises were ones championed by anarchists, such as Tolstoi and Kropotkin, right in the eye of winter during disturbing post revolutionary times of the Bolchevism in the former USSR. Or other in northern Spain pre counter-revolution civil war led by Franco in the 1930’s.

The Historical tries of Public Administration to lead public service in the US

Woodrow Wilson is considered to be the father of public service in the US.

He reformed public administration in the US  in an 1887 article called ” The Study of Administration”. He was concerned with the separation of politics and public administration. Wilson was dedicated to the training of civil servants on merit based assessments and using models of private sector to externalize business-like practices.

Luther Gulick followed in the 1940’s with a new generation of organizational theories, inspired by the studies of Max Webber and Von Stein. Emphasized the scientific method, efficiency, professionalism, structural reform and executive control. One of the academics Henri Fayol drew upon private management tactics for administrative sciences. Politics-administration dichotomy remained in the center of the administrative theory vs governmental organizations.

In the 70s, the Vietnam war and Watergate self destructive government alienated citizens and public service. There was a general feeling that the wasteful public administration needed to be separate from government. So, the Hoover Commission chaired by the University of Chicago was charged with reorganizing government which spawned the Prof. Brownlow to found the Public Administration Service for consulting with the government.

In the 80s was born the “New Public Management” Theory (“Reinventing Government” by Osborne and Gaebler). The new model advocated the use of private sector-style models, organizational ideas and values to improve the efficiency and service-orientation of the public sector.

Al Gore, under the Clinton Administration used this model to reform Federal Agencies and it became the prevalent model throughout Canada and the UK.

NPM: Splitting large bureaucracies into smaller, more fragmented agencies, encouraging competition between different public agencies, and encouraging competition between public agencies and private firms and using economic incentives lines (e.g., performance pay for senior executives or user-pay models). NPM treats individuals as “customers” or “clients” (in the private sector sense), rather than as citizens. (In Wikipedia).

Criticism of the NPM includes treating citizens like “customers” or “economic units” instead of democratic participants. Notwithstanding, the NPM is widely accepted throughout most OECD countries nowadays.

In the 90s the successor to NPM was “The Digital Era Governance”: reintegrating governments responsibilities (e.g. not-for-profit eDemocracy project which invites politicians, senior public servants, academics, business people and other key stakeholders to engage in high-level policy debate).

Another current of thought in the 90s was “New Public Governance” empowering government to take on public service, by assigning political staff to civil service senior positions.

Decision Making Process in Public Administration

Niskanen model: “budget maximizing model” (already discussed previously) where he criticizes bureaucrats who will seek to increase budget expenditure for enhancing their own redundancy. This led to mass privatizations during the Reagan Administration to fight that tendency.

The goals of the field of public administration are related to the democratic values of improving equality, justice, security, efficiency, effectiveness of public services usually in a non-profit, non-taxable venue; business administration, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with taxable profit. For a field built on concepts (accountability, governance, decentralization, clientelle), these concepts are often ill-defined and typologies often ignore certain aspects of these concepts (Dubois & Fattore 2009).

The dichotomy of profit versus non profitable is center stage.

Summary: The formula for the evolution of public service in the political arena.

Bureaucracies influence political leadership (Elites).

Bureaucracies impose on political leadership and on their individual beneficiaries (“customers”) indifferently. The proof of that lies in History: meritocracy and civil service existed before the state system (citizenship). If bureaucracies (public administration) are not actual predators, why would we waste resources on oversigh mechanisms, like early warning systems, checks and balances, press and regulatory agencies, or simply privatize and cut public spending? Why would the government implement the New Public Management doctrine otherwise? 

Public administration traditional and generally accepted “meritocracy” recruiting method. Why?

-fight against corruption? Or instead a way to convert the bureaucrats (“nature state”) to switch loyalties (rural, class, community) and change those for the unconditional cause of the civil service/public administration? 

The civil service M.O in the political scene:

1- corporatisms and totalitarisms

2- pluralism

In corporatism/totalitarisms STATE and SOCIETY are mixed in. There is only one voice to protect and defend the status quo (regime). The only interest is to keep power, otherwise the whole system crumbles (Machiavelli’s Prince). OR SOCIETY is subdued by STATE (Thomas Hobbes). The only chance for public service rests on a post-revolution field of opportunities (“The End of History” -Marx)

In Pluralism, SOCIETY and STATE are two different realities. Public service works best when civil service is worst. Egalitarian societies or the public service actually rising over the political leadership (elite), Whether it be by “communitarism” (utopia and anarchism) or meritocracy (double-hatting or loyalty switch), neither one works well for public service. Egalitarian societies lack the tension of “relations of production” (Marx).

Also, any attempt to make civil service (public administration) more dependable to the political power and vice versa will only contribute to subdue SOCIETY to STATE and turn any pluralism closer into a Hobbesian Levitan. For instances “New Public Management” turns citizens into customers, alienating democratic participation of citizens from the public service process. The “Digital Era Governance” (reintegrating governments responsibilities through somewhat promiscuous mutual interference over internal affairs, between political leadership and civil service)..Both tend to step over the role of public service to try instead a sort of mutual code of good conduct and administrative practice.

So What is community organizing and how does it work in the communities? (to be continued…)