ABSTRACT
H. E. Dale, The Higher Civil Service, 1938. The administrative class has often appeared as the tip of the iceberg of the British Civil Service, and it has attracted a great deal of scrutiny and comment. For a number of reasons the class constitutes a 'concentrated' occupation. First, the practice of the occupation is confined to one organizational setting-national government, and predominantly to one place-London. Second, its numbers are small, hence the contacts of an administrator with his fellows are likely to embrace a much higher proportion of practitioners than is likely in many other occupations. Third, the majority of its practitioners (61 per cent) have experienced no other occupational world apart from that of the Civil Service:t according to the Survey of the Civil Service 'the administrative class has a smaller proportion of staff who have worked for other organizations than the average firm's staff of managers or board of directors'. 2 And finally the majority of administrators have passed through a limited number of educational institutions, for instance 56 per cent of the class were educated in the private sector (i.e. direct grant, public and other fee paying schools)3 and just under half of the class have degrees from Oxford and Cambridge.
