Living in the Past? Change and Continuity in the Norwegian Central Civil Service

• Date: 01 September 2009
• Published date: 01 September 2009
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2009.02044.x
• Author: Tom Christensen,Per Lægreid

Change and Continuity in the Norwegian Central Civil Service 951

Tom Christensen

University of Oslo

Per Lægreid

University of Bergen

Living in the Past? Change and Continuity in the Norwegian

Central Civil Service

Looking at

Administrative

Innovation and

Change Abroad

Tom Christensen is a professor in the

Department of Political Science, Univer-

sity of Oslo, Norway. He has published

extensively on public sector reform and

institutional change from a comparative

perspective. He has published articles in

Governance, Public Administration, Public

Administration Review, Public Performance

and Management Review, Interna-

tional Review of Administrative Sciences,

International Public Management Journal,

Public Management Review, and Western

European Politics.

His recent books include

Transcending New Public Management:

The Transformation of Public Sector

Reforms

(Ashgate, 2007)

and

Autonomy

and Regulation: Coping with Agencies in

the Modern State

(Edward Elgar, 2006),

both edited with Per Lægreid.

E-mail: tom.christensen@stv.uio.no

Per Lægreid is a professor in the

Department of Administration and

Organization Theory, University of Bergen,

Norway. He has published extensively

on public sector reform and institutional

change from a comparative perspective.

His latest publications include articles

in

Governance, Public Administration,

Public Administration Review, Public

Performance and Management Review,

Financial Accountability and Management,

International Review of Administrative

Sciences, International Public Management

Journal, Public Management Review,

and

Journal of Management Studies.

His recent

books include

Organization Theory and

the Public Sector: Instrument, Culture and

Myth

(Routledge, 2007), coauthored with

Tom Christensen, Paul G. Roness, and Kjell

Arne Røvik.

E-mail: per.lagreid@stv.uio.no

[W]hen studying the history

of the civil service, it seems

appropriate to take an

“archaeological” approach.

In this article, the authors describe the changes that

have taken place in the Norwegian civil service over

the past 30 years, focusing on demographic changes in

education and gender and on changes in civil servants’

tasks, attitudes, and contact patterns.  e changes are

analyzed using tenure, structural, and demographic

perspectives.  e unique empirical database is provided

by surveys conducted every 10 years of civil servants in

the ministries since 1976.  e main empirical f‌i ndings

are that there has been a combination of robustness

and change.  e f‌i ndings show little support for the

generational version of a tenure perspective, meaning

that civil servants are not living in the past.  e

structural perspective, illustrated by the importance of

formal position, best explains the variations in civil

servants’ contact patterns and attitudes, followed by the

career version of a tenure perspective. Demography, as

represented by dif‌f erent educational backgrounds and

gender, also has an ef‌f ect.

Over the past two or three decades, the central

civil service in many countries has experi-

enced much change and turbulence.  ree

dif‌f erent phases of development are discernible: the

“old Weberian public administration,” the New Public

Management (NPM) era, and, more recently, what

has come to be labeled the post-NPM phase (Chris-

tensen, Lie, and Lægreid 2007). Some see these as

phases of dominance, whereby each new reform wave

pushes aside the main features of the former genera-

tion and installs its own admin-

istrative principles. Another

view, and the one we address

here, is that each phase involves

a rebalancing of existing and new

features, so that previous features

continue to exist, but sometimes

in new forms (Light 1998; Pier-

son 2004; Streeck and  elen 2005).  e result is an

increase in the complexity of administrative structures

and culture.  erefore, when studying the history of

the civil service, it seems appropriate to take an “ar-

chaeological” approach (Lægreid et al. 2003).

 e tenure of civil servants seems to be a potentially

important variable to focus on when analyzing the

changes in the Norwegian central civil service over

the past 30 years, spanning the three development

phases mentioned. People who have spent many years

in the civil service are the carriers of the history of

civil service institutions—functioning as their living

memory—and hence will pass on the history and

cultural norms and values of the institution to coming

generations (March and Olsen 1989; Selznick 1957).

 ey are important for the “regeneration” aspect and

for the ideal that turnover will be gradual enough to

allow older civil servants to socialize and train younger

ones (Pfef‌f er 1983). But civil servants with long ten-

ures are important for other reasons, too, because they

are naturally overrepresented among administrative

leaders.  ey bring to leadership positions experience

and attitudes formed over a long period of time and

informed by a mixture of tradition and change.

A crucial question that is addressed in this article

is whether civil servants with long tenure in central

public administration are living in the past, meaning

that their role enactment is more inf‌l uenced by the

historical path and the phase in which they entered

the civil service than by what they have acquired from

experience during their careers. Are their tasks more

related to the “old public administration”—in other

words, tasks related to laws, rules, single cases, and

so on—than those of civil servants with a shorter

tenures, whose tasks are more

“modern” and NPM-oriented

and include things such as

planning and policy develop-

ment, organizational develop-

ment, regulation, performance

measurement, or else more

coordinative tasks associated

with the post-NPM phase. Are their attitudes to their

roles or role enactment more old-fashioned?1 And

do they have a broader and dif‌f erent contact pat-

tern than civil servants with shorter tenure? Is the

signif‌i cance of tenure stronger in these respects than