ABSTRACT
A confrontation with the blurred meanings of “public management” and “New Public Management” (NPM) is indispensable before trying to establish whether these concepts have had any impact on civil service regimes. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the division of public employees between “civil servants” and providers of public services is nothing new. The opposition between public management and public administration has different roots in practice and scholarship. The NPM label is applied indiscriminately to a range of reforms, many of which are simply the consequence of budgetary difficulties or pragmatic attempts to modernise the organisation of government, which do not necessarily translate into changes of the legal status of public employees, changes to the career system, in the possibilities of dismissal or recruitment systems, or to pay and benefits. Analysing public employment regimes requires taking into account a series of sociological elements, starting with the specific strength of unions in the public sector.
