ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the public service, that is to say public officials, the way they work and the way they see themselves – values, attitudes and behaviour: culture in short. It considers the distinctive features of British administration and administrative culture in relation to the ‘reinvention of government’, the model of public administration developed by the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, not reversed by Labour’s victory. Leaving aside some good studies of the old Administrative Class, that was the case as regards ordinary officials in the post-1945 decades. The Oxbridge-educated Administrative Class might well have answered that they saw it as a form of public service, meaning a worthy job, serving their country in some way, with status and pay of course. The young people who enter the public service are very different from earlier generations. The word customer is common usage in publications, e.g. leaflets for the public.
