ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the characteristics, context and culture of the French civil service. It debates recent reforms of the French state by contrasting two interpretative frames labelled as public service and state productivity. The chapter describes that reforms introduced since the late 1980s have produced a great deal of organisational innovation that belief representations of the French state as immobile. The reform of the state has been a preoccupation of all recent governments. No fewer than seven different reform programmes have been implemented since 1981, with varying degrees of success, the most influential being that of Socialist premier Rocard in 1988-9. The modernisation of the civil service has been a preoccupation of all recent governments, reforms ranging from 'soft' measures to improve user friendliness to much harder attempts to introduce audit or to change terms and working conditions of government workers. Reform programmes have usually included reference to 'modernity markers' such as evaluation, personnel management, contractualisation and benchmarking.
