Wir suchen noch dringend ein(e) Teilnehmer(in) ueber die deutsche Verwaltung
fuer die nachfolgend genannte Tagung!
Please contact :
Jean-Michel Eymeri:
j-m.eymeri@eipa-nl.com
Or Tangui Coulouarn:
tangui@hotmail.com
PROGRAMME OF THE FRENCH CNRS (NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH)
"QUESTIONING EUROPEAN IDENTITY"
---------
Projet de recherche
" BRINGING THE TOP CIVIL SERVANTS BACK IN "
Quelle place pour les hauts fonctionnaires dans les proces de gouvernement
des societes europeennes ?
co-ordinated by Pascale LABORIER and Jean-Michel EYMERI
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First international conference :
" STATUS AND ROLE OF TOP CIVIL SERVANT IN EUROPE TODAY"
organised by Myriam BACHIR, Tangui COULOUARN, Jean-Michel EYMERI in AMIENS
(France), Friday 15th June 2001.
This conference is the first of five in a research programme focusing on
comparative public administration in Europe. This project aims at bringing
together junior and renown scholars who specialise in the study of public
institutions, public officials and public policies in order to address an
issue which is simple, important but rather neglected today: the place of
senior civil servants within the governing processes of our societies. Old
debates about "technocracy" (be it a reality or a myth) are not to be renewed,
but it can be said that political scientists tend to agree on the fact that
top civil servants are "principal players" who take part in the governing
interactions in which daily public policy is made, along with other important
partners (ministers and elected politicians; heads of agencies and other
public entities; representatives of trade unions, major economic actors,
professional organisations, or various interest groups, etc.).
Before approaching more directly the influence or power of top civil servants
in the following conferences, this first conference will concentrate on a
comparative analysis of education, training, recruitment and career perspectives
of top civil servants in different European countries. Our general approach
is as follows: what is the influence of the means of education/selection
as well as the career prospects and rules of those top officials on the way
they fulfil their professional role? In other words, what those top civil
servants are both in terms of status and socialisation and
what they can become as a result of institutional rules, individual
opportunities or collective strategies can be analysed both as their
strengths and their constraints in their everyday activities. Thus, the aim
of this conference is not to give purely descriptive accounts of the different
social and educational background of top civil servants, and of the institutional
or sociological rules that apply to their careers, but to try and see how
the study of such aspects can contribute to a better understanding of the
attitudes and behaviours of top civil servants at work. To illustrate this
analytical strategy with examples, the very selective nature of the French
grandes ecoles and concours or the elitist education of future British senior
civil servants through Oxbridge provide French and British top officials
with a set of resources and constraints (a self-image, a Weltanschauung,
but also social networks, etc.) that are probably very different from the
situation of their colleagues in the Netherlands or Ireland, where top civil
servants are university graduates among others and
become white-collars without a special prestige compared to the rest of the
upper-middle class. Moreover, the ways top civil servants fulfil their role
probably depend on the fact that they are traditionally jurists in Germany,
social or political science graduates in Sweden, or very often generalist
graduates in Britain or France. Furthermore, the rhythm of administrative
careers, quite fast and with a good inter-departmental mobility (France,
Sweden) or slower and more "linear" within a single ministry (Germany, Greece,
etc.) might have consequences on the different forms of administrative work
in these countries, all the more so if the contrast between administrative
systems where promotions are (or used to be) self-regulated within the civil
service by peers or superiors (Italy, the Netherlands, United Kingdom) or
are more dependant on political influences of various intensity (Belgium,
Greece, Spain, France, Germany, S). The "open" or
"closed" nature of top civil servants¹ careers must also be taken into
account. In most countries, the professional horizon of top officials is
to work within ministries until retirement (Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy,
Austria, Portugal, etc.) whereas in some countries, it is possible to rotate
between ministries, agencies and different public bodies (France, Sweden,
UK) or even between the public and the private sector (profit or non-profit
oriented) in the frame of a position system like in the Netherlands, not
to mention the French pantouflage, i.e. having a "second career" in a public
or a private firm after leaving the civil service (a system that also exists
to a smaller extent in Spain). What are the effects of such different national
situations on the professional behaviours of top civil servants?
These are the kind of questions that the contributors to this first conference
are asked to answer. It is clear that beyond this or through
addressing these issues, participants will deal with methodological questions
about the ways and means, the difficulties and contributions of a concrete
comparative approach, that avoids both purely descriptive empiricism and
theoretical games with formal and abstract models, trying to work more in
a "middle-range" perspective.
The two working languages of the Project are English and French: papers can
be written and will be delivered orally either in one or the other language.
In order to avoid the risk of a "symposium-effect", i.e. a juxtaposition
of monologues a risk that is even greater when speakers come from
different countries and give accounts of different national situations
and in order to allow exchange and real debates, the deadline for sending
the papers to the organisers will be Friday 25 May 2001, at the latest. The
papers should exclusively be sent electronically so that they can be forwarded
immediately by e-mail to all participants, giving them three weeks before
the conference
to read the papers.
The group organising these five conferences will choose the best contributions
and publish them as a collective and bilingual book, edited by the Presses
Universitaires de France (PUF) (in the CURAPP series).
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