Is the Higher Public Service a Profession

RESEARCH & EVALUATION

Is the Higher Public Service a Profession?

Craig Matheson Charles Stud University

Professionalisation in the public services is regarded as essential but the concept is ambiguous and organisationally weak. Moreover; if not jeopardised by managerialism, public service professionalisation today faces some major barriers or limitations. Nonetheless, the public service may be able to maintain greater professional status with increased emphasis on job security, occupational closure and horizontal organisation. The prospects for such conditions may now seem remote, but with this criteria in mind Australia will neglect the professionalism of its public service very much to its cost.

In this article, I wish to explore the question of whether the senior levels of the Australian public service (APS) constitute a profession. Although this question has been previously addressed by many writers including Crisp (1969), Spann (1979:339), Curnow (1989), Bailey ( 1989), Fisher (1 990) and Hyslop (1 99 1) there are three reasons why it warrants a re- examination. The first is that there is no consensus on this issue. The position taken by Crisp, Spann, Curnow and Fisher is either that the public service is not a full profession or that it is one in only a limited sense. While these writers concede that the public service possesses professional standards of conduct and professional expertise, they also note that the public service lacks most of the traditional attributes of a profession. These include an independent qualifying association which regulates entry, regulation by means of peer review, professional autonomy and standard requirements of prior education and training which confer peculiar and indispensable qualifications. Crisp (1 969:4) concludes that:‘higher public administration is currently, and doubtless must at best to some extent remain, a peculiar, even irregular “profession”’. Auslrelian Journal dPuWk Administrafiw 57(3): 15-27, September 1998

Other writers take a different position on this issue. For example, Bailey (1989:223) believes that ‘the public service now contains within itself a group which could and should be identified as a profession’. He maintains that this is the case because senior public servants possess specialised knowledge, professional ethics and a sense of public service. Hyslop (1991) also believes that the higher public service constitutes a profession by virtue of its possession of a code of ethics and expert knowledge. Uhr (1988:lll) likewise sees the career civil service as a ‘profession i n government’ which he contrasts with ‘the inflated pretence of many of the newer professionalisms, such as the real estate or automotive sales professions’.

The second reason why this issue warrants a re-examination lies in the fact that previous examinations of this topic have drawn to only a limited degree upon the sociological study of professions. This is an unfortunate oversight, for the study of the professions lies squarely within the domain of sociology rather than political science. Although Crisp drew on the classic study of the professions by Carr- Saunders published in 1933, there has been a

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great deal of work on the professions conducted since that time. Furthermore, the answer to this question that writers provide depends largely upon how they define a profession. Those who believe that a profession must possess its own independent qualifying association, peer review and formal training tend to answer in the negative whereas those who believe that the essence of professionalism lies in adherence to standards of professional conduct and the pursuit of ideals of public service tend to answer in the affirmative. If we are to arrive at a definitive answer to this question, we need to have soundly based general criteria by means of which we can distinguish a profession from other occupations.

A third reason for re-examining this question lies in the fact that many of those who believe that the higher public service constitutes a profession have seen in the loss of security of tenure for departmental secretaries and the abolition of the Public Service Board the demise of public service professionalism. Uhr (1990:27 l ) , for example, maintains that managerialism ‘produces a demand for a new model public servant more closely attuned to the narrower wishes of the government of the day than to the broader requirements of those phantom consciences associated with good governance, social justice or the public interest’. Nethercote (1993:21) has lamented the passing of the ‘mighty barons of the past’ and claims that security of tenure among departmental secretaries was the foundation of public administration professionalism. Wettenhall (cited in Ayres 1996:4) similarly believes that senior public servants of the postwar years ‘were not of the current frame of mind, where they thought they were simply implementing notions that were handed down’. For managerialists such as Keating (cited in Ayres 1996:6), by contrast, such changes do not constitute an erosion of professionalism, since senior bureaucrats do not serve a public interest that is separate from that which is defined by the government of the day.

To understand why the higher public service has been widely considered to be a profession, we need to examine the historical origins of the APS. This is because the APS was modelled on the British civil service, the elite of which was expressly intended to embody professional attributes. In the words of the Northcote-

Trevelyan report, the civil service elite would consist of ‘an efficient body of officers, occupying a position duly subordinate to that of ministers ... yet possessing sufficient independence, character, ability, and experience to be able to advise, assist, and to some extent, influence, those who are from time to time set over them’ (cited in Nethercote 1993:24). In this conception, the higher public service constitutes an autonomous force in government which acts as a guardian of constitutional proprieties or of the public interest rather than simply as the instrument of the government of the day (see Uhr 199 1). Senior public servants in this model act to uphold constitutional conventions and are politically neutral rather than the creatures of a political party. For this reason, they have enjoyed security of tenure (see Jackson 1988:241). In this respect, they resemble other professionals in being self- regulating and autonomous. The independence of the public service is also secured by independent non-political control of recruitment and the conditions of employment. These features are traditionally associated with the idea of a merit or career civil service (see Parker 1989b). Public service professionalism then is seen to reside primarily in the political neutrality of the public service. As Uhr (1988: 1 11) notes, when we use the term ‘politicisation’ we are referring to a loss of professionalism.

For many writers then, the higher public service constitutes a profession because i t possesses a degree of autonomy, expert knowledge, ideals of public service and a code of professional ethics. In all of these respects the higher public service resembles the ‘learned professions’ such as law and medicine. By contrast, other writers see the public service as being a profession in at best a limited sense, since i t lacks such key attributes as an independent qualifying association, formal training and accreditation and regulation by means of peer review. Opinion is also divided on the question of whether public service professionalism has been jeopardised by the managerialist reforms undertaken since the mid- 1980s. In this article my primary intention is to determine if the higher public service constitutes a profession. Once this question has been answered, it will be possible to provide an answer to the secondary question of whether the professional status of the public service has been

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Is the Higher Public Service a Profession? 17

jeopardised by the managerialist reforms. There are three broad approaches to defining

a profession within sociology (Lansbury 19783). The first is the ‘trait’approach in which a profession is defined in terms of its possession of a set of characteristics or traits such as intellectual training, specialised knowledge, self-organisation and a code of ethics. The second approach is the institutional one. Here a profession is defined in terms of a process of institutional or associational development in the course of which the profession emerges. This process involves such stages as the creation of a professional association, the establishment of formal training, political agitation towards the protection of the association by law and the adoption of a formal code of ethics. The third approach is the legalistic one. Here, a profession is defined in terms of its recognition of its status by t h e state. This involves registration, certification and licensing which permits the professional association to exercise monopoly control over entry and practice.

In this article I will rely upon the definition of a profession provided by the sociologist Randall Collins (1988:483). His definition synthesises the three aforementioned approaches and incorporates those elements which sociologists generally identify as being the key attributes of a profession. These include formal training, accreditation, occupational closure, ethics and horizontal structure. Collins maintains that a profession is an occupational group that has succeeded in acquiring an organisational structure of its own, independently of whatever other organisations its members happen to work in. Here, hiring and career progression depend on peer group approval rather than on the approval of hierarchical superiors. The most strongly organised professions are those in which the peer group not only staffs its own training institutes but has acquired the power as gatekeeper for entry into monopolistic licensing, enforced by the state, for the exercise of that occupation. Collins maintains that the occupations which are most successful i n attaining this horizontal professional structure are those whose activities involve the highest degree of uncertainty, such as areas of creativity (scientific research), anxiety -c harged bodily ail men ts (medicine) or complex conflicts and negotiations (law). Hierarchic controls are difficult to use in these

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circumstances and employers need to give considerable autonomy to practitioners. The high degree of power exercised by practitioners creates the potential for distrust among clients and employers, since they cannot evaluate whether the services they are receiving are as good as expected. The practitioners put up a united front i n t he face of this distrust, undertaking collectively to guarantee the validity of each individual practitioner by means of peer review.

If we view professions in this way, we can synthesise the trait, institutional and legalistic approaches. A profession typically possesses certain traits because of the nature of its tasks, the horizontal organisational structure which it assumes and the measures which it takes to win the trust of clients. For example, professional work typically requires practitioners to possess expert knowledge which has been acquired by means of formal training. Their expertise is certified by a professional association which often enjoys the power of monopolistic licensing guaranteed by the state. Codes of ethics stress altruistic ideals of public service because of the potential for distrust by users of services. Systems of sanctions are also needed to discipline errant practitioners. Since the profession has its own organisational structure, it tends to form an occupational community with its own professional culture or ethos. Professionals enjoy a high level of autonomy and freedom from hierarchical control since the imposition of such controls would limit their initiative and creativity. It is assumed that the quality of their work can only be judged by fellow professionals. A profession has usually emerged through a process in which it gains control over entry and licensing of practitioners. In Weberian terms, this constitutes a type of social or occupational closure in which the occupation strengthens its market position by excluding non-members from practice. In order to determine if an occupation constitutes a profession, we therefore need to examine the kind of tasks which its members perform, the type of training which they have undergone and the qualifications which they possess, the degree of autonomy which they enjoy, the degree of horizontal structure which the occupation possesses, the extent of monopoly control over entry and practice which it exercises and its professional ethos and ethics.

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Work Tasks and Qualifications A profession is typically characterised by the performance of complex tasks which involve situations of uncertainty and anxiety. These tasks require the exercise of expert judgment which is based on specialised knowledge acquired by means of formal training. Senior administrators resemble professionals inasmuch as they perform relatively complex tasks that require specialist expertise. Pusey ( 199 1 :7 1) found, for example, that the SES wanted to stress the ‘intellectual’ character of their work. This is reflected in the much higher rating that a sample of SES officers gave to ‘conceptual and analytical skills’ as requirements of their work when compared to a sample of private sector chief executive officers (Jans and Frazer-Jans 1991:342). Studies of the higher civil service in various countries have shown that while its work does not require detailed knowledge of a particular scientific discipline, its members are nonetheless usually experts in a particular subject area inasmuch as they ‘know the “territory”, the laws, the interested power centres and what has worked or failed and why’ (Rosen, cited in Page 1985:25,29). While their work is intellectually complex, it does not necessitate formal training in a body of theoretical knowledge. The only administrators who require such training are those employed in professional classifications and highly qualified specialists such as research economists or information technology officers. The difference between the skill requirements of such specialist work and those of mainstream administrative work has been acknowledged with the creation of a separate specialist category within the SES (Ives 1991 :483). The knowledge possessed by generalist administrators is pragmatic rather than theoretical and is acquired on-the-job rather than through formal training (see Crisp 1969:7). For example, the MABMIAC (1 992:40) found that on-the-job training was regarded as effective by 76 percent of staff.

What administrators require is not theoretical knowledge but ‘judgment’ or the capacity to make correct decisions. For example, Treasury officers argue that the work requires, ‘judgment or feel, rather than academic qualifications’ (Weller and Cutt 1976:36-7). One study has likewise reported that:‘Most experienced SES officers would agree that

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effective judgment is the linchpin of a successful SES career’ (Ives 1991:481). ‘Judgment’ is defined by Argyle (197256) as ‘the capacity to make realistic assessments of practical situations, and produce workable solutions to particular problems where it is more a matter of weighing different factors and guessing probabilities than of applying logical principles’. As many have noted, the criteria for judging the ‘rightness’ of decisions made at the senior levels of government are ambiguous and not reducible to logical formulae. Gellner (1988:210) maintains that it is difficult to assess big decisions at the top of organisations since issues are complex and incommensurable. Assessments of success must therefore remain essentially intuitive rather than rational. Consequently, administration is more like a craft which is mastered through practice rather than an exact science. For example, ’judgment’ is something which is learnt on-the-job through actually making decisions or observing those who make them rather than through academic study (Davies 1980:82; Sisson 1959:35-7; Hyslop 1993: 134; Crisp 1969: 1 3). Walter (1986:158) likewise suggests that efficacy in senior APS administrative roles depends less on prior knowledge and skills than on institutional acculturation. In addition to judgment, SES officers require corporate management skills, representation and interpersonal skills, leadership skills and conceptual and analytical skills (Ives 199 1 :480). These skills are all ‘cross- contextual’ inasmuch as they do not presuppose knowledge of any particular discipline.

In this respect, senior public servants differ from professionals such as medical and legal practitioners whose work requires mastery of a body of theoretical knowledge. As Collins (1975:342) notes, it is the presence of arelatively definite and teachable skill that permits professions to control training and entry to the profession. Notwithstanding this fact, it is possible for civil services to insist that entrants possess specific formal qualifications, as in many continental European countries. Although the British higher civil service does not stipulate a particular qualification as an entry requirement, in practice it has traditionally recruited Oxbridge-educated generalists. Within Australia, neither the continental nor the British model has been followed. The APS from its inception has sought to maximise access to

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entry positions by not imposing credential requirements upon recruits. As a result, its senior ranks were often filled by the non-tertiary educated. In practice, tertiary qualifications are now necessary to obtain promotion to the SES, but there are no prescribed qualifications which all public servants must acquire as a precondition of entry or advancement. Consequently, the APS lacks one of the key attributes of a profession, namely, the exercise of control over entry by means of the training and certification of recruits. As Curnow (1989:28) has observed, in the case of the higher public service there is no independent qualifying association which regulates entry into the profession and disciplines its members. Nonetheless, an analogue to professional closure can be found in the preference which has been accorded to economists in recruitment and promotion within the APS since the Second World War.

As Pusey ( 1 991 : 154) has noted, central agency economists use the promotion system to promote more of their own kind. The same process occurs in line departments. Campbell and Halligan (1992:183-4) report that policy specialists in SES positions in line departments have been displaced by central agency economists. This is reflected in the fact that 25 percent of the graduates employed in the APS have majored in economics and that 38 percent of SES officers possess economics degrees (Pusey 1991:278; Gregory 1997:90). Possession of an economics degree has formed the basis for a process of occupational closure analogous to that exercised by professions. For example, of the 250 policy advising staff in the Treasury, 95 percent have a degree in economics while the remainder have degrees in disciplines related to economics (Submission No. 95 to JCPA 1993: 1). Although economics qualifications may be stipulated as selection criteria, they are not of much relevance to policy and administrative work. Petridis ( I 98 1 :249, 259) reports senior officers as observing that an economics degree was not of much use in administrative work or in preparing policy submissions, but valuable in research work and the analysis of problems. Even senior officers with economics qualifications admit though that what makes an economics degree valuable is less the specific knowledge acquired during university training than the analytical skills which such training bestows. This illustrates

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the fact that the skills needed in administrative work are primarily acquired on-the-job rather than by means of formal training.

Horizontal Organisation

In addition to requiring the exercise of expert judgment, a profession will usually possess a form of horizontal organisation involving control by means of peer review. Collins (1988:483) maintains that a profession is essentially an occupational group that has acquired an organisational structure of its own which exists independently of whatever other organisations its members happen to be working in. Accordingly, careers in a profession depend on a reputation acquired in specialised groups and on the recommendations of peers rather than on the judgment of hierarchical superiors. In this respect the higher public service does not resemble a profession, since promotion depends upon judgments made by superiors rather than on the recommendation of peers. The fact that the APS is a ‘unified service’ possessing a single internal labour market provides it with a degree of horizontal organisation. Furthermore, the fact that access to jobs located above the entry position has traditionally been restricted to ‘insiders’ has represented a form of social closure analogous to that exercised by professional associations. In practice, however, a unified service has existed only in theory, since internal labour markets centred on individual departments or agencies have emerged. For example, over three-quarters of third-division officers appointed between I962 and 1974 were in the latter year still in the department that they had first joined (Spann 1979:329). Again, half of a sample of SES officers surveyed in 1989 had experience in only one department (SSCFPA 1990:33). As Goodsell (1990:347) notes, Australian public servants see themselves as working for the government or for a particular department or jurisdiction, not as members of an ‘Australian public service’ per se.

A profession is usually organised in the form of a professional association which licenses, certifies and regulates practitioners. An analogue to this existed within the APS until 1987 in the form of the Public Service Board, since this was an autonomous statutory body which controlled e n t r y to the APS and administered norms of official conduct. As the

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guardian of public service political neutrality and the custodian of the principles of the ‘career service’, the board provided a degree of protection against hierarchical control by politicians. The statutory independence which it enjoyed was designed to enable it to safeguard the expertise of career public servants and their ‘professional’ capacity to serve different governments with equal loyalty. The board was not a true professional association however, since it was a regulatory authority rather than a collegial body. By contrast, the Institute of Public Administration Australia has formed a genuine professional association for public servants, since i t is a purely collegial body. It has not possessed the powers of training, accreditation, licensing and regulation which a professional association would normally enjoy though. Rather, it has primarily functioned as a learned society, a forum for public debate on administrative issues and a vehicle for the articulation of the professional ethos.

Closely allied to the feature of self- government is the fact that professionals tend to enjoy autonomy at work, so that when exercising professional judgment they are not subject to hierarchical direction. Professions possess collegial rather than authoritarian organisation, since control is exercised by means of peer review rather than by means of the exercise of authority. It is true that senior and even middle-ranking public servants perform complex work which makes the imposition of rigid authoritarian controls counterproductive. Accordingly, an element of collegiality is present at the senior levels of departments. At the highest levels of organisations, members are controlled less by means of rules and direct instructions and more by their socialisation into value systems that lead them to identify with the organisation and its goals. The overt exercise of authority is inimical to the development of such identification (Dunsire 1978: 140-1). Consequently, senior managers will generally take care not to ride roughshod over their subordinates. As Wheeler ( 1980: 166) noted, the secretary needs to adopt a collegial or ‘team leader’ rather than an autocratic style if she or he is to preserve the independence of mind of her or his subordinates and to attract and retain their commitment. Senior bureaucrats are experts in their policy fields and their power resides in their expertise as well as in their office.

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Pusey’s ( I991 : 128) research, for example, shows that SES officers comply with superiors not only because the latter possess the authority to issue directives, but also because superiors offer persuasive arguments and are seen to be experts themselves. In this sense, the senior levels of the public service resemble a profession in which authority rests on professional expertise rather than on hierarchical seniority.

The SES also possesses a degree of horizontal structure, since when introduced in the mid- 1980s it was intended to be a service- wide administrative cadre. However, as Goodsell (1990:347) has noted, when situated on the continuum between an ‘integrated’ civil service of the European type and an ‘employed’ civil service of the American type in which employment conditions resemble those found in the private sector, the changes have not sufficed to move the SES more than a short distance towards the integrated type. Collins similarly notes that there is a continuum of occupations with greater or lesser characteristics of being a profession. In the APS, this continuum runs in parallel to the hierarchy, so that it is the SES who most resembles a profession and the lower ranks the least. For example, over half of Australian Taxation Office (ATO) staff see authority in their organisation as being based more on formal authority than on expertise in the task at hand. SES officers in the ATO, by contrast, are more than twice as likely to see the organisational culture in ‘organic’ (ie collegial) as opposed to ‘mechanistic’ (ie bureaucratic) terms as officers at AS0 4 to 6 level (Jans et al. 1989:65). Survey data also show that SES officers enjoy better social relations with their superiors than do the lower ranks and that their superiors are more consultative when making decisions (see DITAC 1992: I 1 ; Department of Finance 1990:40-I; TFMI, 1992:455).

Security of tenure conferred upon departmental secretaries a significant degree of autonomy vis-a-vis ministers (though not in respect of central agency controls). This autonomy was legitimated by a professional ideology which contended that senior public servants possessed expert knowledge which ministers were by convention obliged to consult (Lucy 1985:274). While an element of collegiality is present at the topmost levels of departments, this is qualified by the fact that government departments are bureaucracies in


which members are legally subordinate to hierarchical superiors. As Crisp ( 1969:4) notes, public servants, unlike lawyers or doctors, are not autonomous since the locus of their accountability is hierarchical superiors rather than peers. This is confirmed by Campbell and Halligan’s (1992:2 12) research, which shows that senior public servants overwhelmingly see themselves as being accountable to their hierarchical superiors (especially the minister) rather than to a professional ethic.

Economists employed within the APS possess a degree of horizontal professional organisation. For example, many maintain links with the wider economics profession through reading journals, attending academic conferences and frequent contact with academic and private sector economists. Pusey ( 199 1 : 133) reports that economists see themselves as being ’cosmopolitan intellectuals’ in contrast to ‘locals’ with social science degrees in program departments. This is especially true of economists working i n research agencies, since they regard themselves as professionals whose peers lie outside the public service in academia. Warhurst ( I 982:94) reports that those Tariff Board officers who were engaged in research saw themselves as being ‘professionals’ and that they regarded those who were engaged in project or inquiry work as being mere ‘technicians’. A form of ‘horizontal’ professional association for public service economists exists in the form of the Canberra Economics Society, a group to which, Pusey reports, virtually all top SES economists belong. Similar horizontal affiliations exist among professionals who are employed within the APS, such as accountants and lawyers (see Jans and McMahon 1988:62).

Diplomats have also traditionally maintained that they are members of a profession, but one lying within the public service rather than extending beyond i t . Accordingly, they have occasionally demanded that the diplomatic service be provided wi th an independent statutory basis. Diplomats have traditionally been recruited separately into their own career stream and have undergone more formalised training. Traditionally, diplomats resembled professionals such as lawyers since they dealt with complex conflicts and negotiations. Before the development of modern transport and communications they also enjoyed a high

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degree of freedom from hierarchical control. The potential for distrust by superiors was assuaged by means of adherence to professional standards of conduct. It can be concluded that while the SES possesses an element of horizontal organisation, i t more closely resembles an ‘employed’ civil service in which employment conditions approximate those found in the private sector rather than the European model of an integrated civil service corps (see Goodsell 1990349). The downgrading of central agency personnel management has further weakened the institutional basis for such a service-wide administrative cadre. The replacement of centralised control w i t h agency-based management envisaged in the Reith Discussion Paper would limit the prospects for an integrated SES even further (see Uhr 1997: 135).

Professional Ethics and Ethos

One of the key attributes of a profession is the possession of a code of ethics which regulates the conduct of practitioners. Professions also have a professional ethos which emphasises the distinctiveness and importance of their work and which embraces altruistic ideals of public service. By these means, professions legitimate their autonomy and secure the trust of clients. They are also able to regulate the conduct of practitioners in the absence of hierarchic controls by getting them to internalise professional standards of conduct. Many writers maintain that the higher public service constitutes a profession, since i t possesses professional codes of conduct and altruistic motives of public service. The work of higher public servants is accordingly a ‘vocation’ rather than a job (see Bailey 1989; Parker 1989b). Such a professional ethos is especially strong among central agency staff. For example, Campbell and Halligan ( 1992:2 1 1, 2 17) found that a striking difference existed between SES officers in line departments and those i n the central agencies, particularly Treasury and Finance, in respect of their perceived primary accountability. Whereas 3 1 percent of those in central agencies saw their primary accountability as being towards ‘professional standards’, this was true of only 4 percent of those i n the line departments. Senior public servants in both central agencies and line departments take pride i n their technical

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expertise and believe that they serve the public interest. Economists also possess a professional ethos based on their expertise and they tend to see themselves as enlightened champions of the ‘public interest’. In addition to ideals of public service, the professional ethos of senior public servants has also upheld professional standards of conduct, professional expertise and non- partisan loyalty to the government (see Hyslop 199 I ; Wheeler 1980).

Notwithstanding their adherence to a professional ethos, senior bureaucrats perceive their primary accountability as lying with hierarchical superiors rather than with professional standards. This is not surprising, since senior administrators are subject to hierarchical control rather than to control by peers. The reason why professions stress accountability to professional standards is because practitioners are not subject to hierarchical control and must therefore exercise a considerable degree of autonomy. In such instances, strong internalised normative controls are needed to assuage the fears of clients and employers. By contrast, senior administrators are subject to hierarchical control and their primary duty is accordingly to obey superiors rather than to observe a code of professional conduct. For example, although there is a professional code of conduct in the form of the Guidelines on OfSicial Conduct, these do not sanction professional independence exercised in the name of the public interest but obedience to superiors (see Jackson I988:244). Central agencies such as Treasury and Finance discharge ongoing functions independently of the government of the day and this provides them wi th a certain degree of autonomy. As ‘departments of principle’ they most closely approximate the Northcote-Trevelyan ideal of autonomous professionals pursuing the public interest. This would explain why so many more of their senior officers perceive their primary accountability as being towards professional standards.

Security of tenure for department heads and non-political control over appointment and promotion did provide senior administrators with a degree of autonomy and their abolition appears to have made senior public servants less responsive to professional standards and more responsive to their superiors. For example, Campbell and Halligan (1992:207) report that


SES officers are much more responsive to their superiors’ demands than they were before the changes to tenure. The extent of autonomy enjoyed by senior public servants even before the changes though should not be exaggerated. As Jackson (1988:243) notes:‘there is no example of an Australian public servant who contradicted the government of the day in the name of the public interest being rewarded’. One departmental secretary similarly observes that: ‘in the day to day activities of government, most of the medals for frank and fearless advice have been awarded posthumously’ (Ayres 1996:3). It may be concluded that although the higher public service possesses professional standards of conduct, the primary object of accountability is hierarchical superiors rather than peers. Where public servants enjoy greater autonomy, however, they are more likely to perceive themselves as being primarily accountable to professional standards rather than to superiors.

Conclusion

The answer to the question of whether the higher public service constitutes a profession cannot be a simple yes or no. All that we can say is that when located on the continuum between a full profession and a non-profession, it falls roughly mid-way. The higher public service resembles a profession inasmuch as its members possess specialist expertise, professional ethics, ideals of public service, a degree of collegiality and some autonomy. It differs from a full profession though inasmuch as there is no relatively definite and teachable skill, no prescribed course of training for entrants, no standard and indispensable qualifications for admission and minimal control exercised by means of peer review and recommendation. In sociological terms, the higher public service can be described as a ‘semi-profession’ since it has some of the attributes of a full profession but not others. Within the APS we can identify certain groups which possess a stronger degree of horizontal organisation and occupational closure than does the SES as a whole and which therefore more closely resemble a profession. These include economists, central agency officers and diplomats. The higher degree of professionalisation which has been attained in these instances can be attributed to the presence


of a greater degree of autonomy (as we find in the cases of diplomats and central agency officers) or to the practice of occupational closure. The latter can be based on credentials (as in the case of economists) or on selective recruitment and promotion (as in the case of diplomats).

What these examples show is that the SES could acquire a more professional cast if it possessed a greater degree of autonomy, a more horizontal structure and formal training and accreditation of members. As Goodsell (1990:351) has noted, the SES could be transformed into a fully fledged civil service corps by creating an administrative staff college at which entrants would undertake postgraduate study in public management, administration, economics, law and political science. Corporate feeling and values of service could be engendered by a program of staff mobility and the use of acts of public recognition instead of incentive systems based on self-gain. These measures would provide the SES with a greater degree of occupational closure and a stronger degree of horizontal integration. Even if these measures were adopted, however, there would remain three major limitations to the extent of professionalisation which the SES can undergo.

The first of these lies in the fact that higher administrative work does not primarily involve the use of skills or theoretical knowledge acquired by means of formal training but the exercise ofjudgment based on experience. This renders formal training otiose and makes it difficult for administrators to monopolise the provision of advice. For example, ministerial advisers have to a large extent displaced senior bureaucrats as sources of policy advice (Campbell and Halligan 1992:204). At the most senior levels of government, it is political rather than technical or economic considerations that tend to govern decision-making (Matheson I997:20). Furthermore, criteria of technical rationality vary considerably. As the existence of different departmental lines attests, there is no ultimate criterion of technical rationality over which administrators can claim exclusive possession. Senior public servants are therefore unable to claim that their advice is authoritative i n the same way that legal and medical practitioners can when advising clients and patients. Furthermore, if ministers remain in office for long enough they can acquire a


considerable degree of technical expertise themselves (see the SES officers quoted in Campbell and Halligan 1992:25, 134). Unlike medical or legal practitioners, generalist administrators do not need to spend many years studying a body of esoteric knowledge in order to practice their craft. Outsiders who gain sufficient experience of administrative work may acquire a level of expertise equal to that of career public servants. For example, when senior staff have been laterally recruited they have been successfully trained on-the-job. This occurred during the Second World War and also in the 1970s. when the Department of Urban and Regional Development recruited from universities, state and local government and the private sector. In this instance, it was found that with the exception of staff working in a research area, senior staff could be trained on-the-job (Lloyd and Troy 1981 :266, 193).

The second barrier lies in the fact that the public service must be hierarchically organised so as to permit the coordination and control of work. Collins (1988:484) maintains that it is the fact that their tasks do not intrinsically involve the coordination and control of others that pushes professions towards a horizontal form of organisation. Since higher administrative work inherently involves the exercise of line authority, it cannot possess a purely collegial form of organisation. The fact that bureaucrats are legally subordinate to ministers means that any attempt to exercise professional autonomy can be construed as insubordination. As Parker (1989b3387) notes, there is no objective way of drawing the line between the legitimate exercise of official independence and an unacceptable frustration of a government’s purposes. Given that ministers enjoy formal authority over bureaucrats and the legitimacy of democratic election, it would be a courageous bureaucrat indeed who would directly challenge ministerial authority. Cole (1980:170-1) noted that no officer relishes the prospect of a clash with the minister and this observation is even more true today than it was then, since departmental heads now enjoy their incumbency only at the behest of the minister. For example, SES officers report that the removal of tenure has made the SES much more attentive and responsive to their political superiors. One maintains that many officials now temper their advice to accord with

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what the minister wants to hear rather than speak their minds (Campbell and Halligan 1992:207- 8).

The third barrier to professionalisation lies in the fact that higher administrative work is not sufficiently complex to prevent the effective use of hierarchic controls. Under these conditions, whatever autonomy public servants possess is enjoyed only at the behest of politicians. If politicians decide that an independent, non- partisan public service is no longer needed, then the institutional safeguards of autonomy (such as security of tenure and independent non- political control over recruitment and promotion) can be abrogated by executive fiat. Whereas laypersons are unable to judge the quality of medical or legal advice, ministers can assess the quality of higher administrative work in terms of its political palatability or in terms of the degree of ‘responsiveness’ which bureaucrats exhibit. Although these are not the only criteria by which higher administrative work can be judged, the fact that policy advice can be assessed according to multiple and divergent criteria means that it is difficult for ministers to know if they are being correctly advised. In such instances, they tend to use political responsiveness or a single overriding technical or ideological criterion in order to assess the soundness of advice. This preference for univocal and politically responsive advice is reinforced by the phenomenon of ‘bounded rationality’ noted by Simon (1957), in which decision-makers seek to simplify problem solving by relying upon simplified models of a situation rather than by exploring all possible alternatives. These simplified models usually assume the form of a ‘departmental line’ or the ‘conventional wisdom’ on policy issues. As one former minister has noted, our system of government ‘has seemed occasionally to be capable of dealing only with one paradigm at a time’ (Jones 1992: 1 1). He notes that Keynesian demand management was the unchallenged orthodoxy until the mid- 1970s, that industry protection enjoyed bipartisan support for decades and that from the 1980s, the neo- classical paradigm has enjoyed almost unchallenged dominance. Where one paradigm reigns supreme, it is possible to use hierarchic controls to enforce it, since judging the rightness of policy advice becomes simply a matter of ascertaining its degree of congruence with the


official or ministerial line. As Campbell and Halligan (1992: 193) note, officials in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia have frequently expressed their relationships with civil service superiors and/or their political masters as being one of ‘trying to divine their minds’.

This kind of behaviour is at odds with that envisaged within the Northcote-Trevelyan model of an autonomous professional public service. This model assumed that public servants would provide ‘frank and fearless advice’ to ministers that was based upon lifelong experience. Furthermore, since their career prospects did not depend on the patronage or favour of ministers, they would be capable of providing loyal and impartial service to any elected government. While this model confers a degree of autonomy on bureaucrats vis-a-vis ministers, it fails to confer such autonomy on bureaucrats vis-a-vis their bureaucratic superiors. Given that bureaucrats’ career prospects depend upon judgments made by their superiors, there is little incentive for them to provide frank and fearless advice. Page (198544) notes that the importance of hierarchy in organisations does not lie in the ability to trace decisions to the top, but in the capacity of superiors to review the work of subordinates and the consequent attempt on the part of subordinates to anticipate the reactions of their superiors. Subordinates will not waste time making proposals that will be flatly rejected. Instead, they will provide advice that they think will be accepted. This has been observed in many studies.

The chief shortcoming of the Northcote- Trevelyan model, however, is not that it confers too little autonomy on bureaucrats but that it can never wholly assuage the doubts held by ministers about the loyalty of their bureaucratic advisers. This is for the reason noted by Weber, namely, that government bureaucracies tend to form aseparate group within the state with their own special interests, values and power base (Beetham 1985:72). The special interests of bureaucracy lie in the maintenance and extension of administrative positions and power. Warhurst (1982: 138-9) calls this the ‘imperial interest’ of departments. According to Weber, the distinctive outlook of bureaucracy lies in the belief that it has a superior objectivity in interpreting the national interest free from party bias. The RCAGA (1976: 1 8-1 9) observed that many senior public servants in the 1970s had


come to believe that they were the ‘guardians of the public interest’. One senior official (Harris I989:49) has observed, for example, that public servants can experience a tension between acting in accordance with what they perceive to be the minister’s views on the one hand and with what they perceive to be in the nation’s good on the other. As Uhr (1987:22) has noted, while the WestminsterNhitehall model of a professional career civil service guarantees that the bureaucracy is non-partisan, i t does not ensure that the bureaucracy is politically neutered, since public servants develop their own political preferences. The power of bureaucracy according to Weber lies in its knowledge and experience and the cloak of secrecy with which it conceals its operations. The penchant of bureaucrats within Britain and Australia for secrecy has often been noted. Weber (cited in Beetham 198558-9) concluded that government bureaucracies, by virtue of their expertise, practice of secrecy and confidence in their own superior competence and impartiality, have both the means and impetus to usurp political power. This creates a potential for distrust on the part of politicians which has been assuaged in two different ways, both of which undermine the professional autonomy of public servants.

The first is by increasing ministerial control over the appointment and promotion of senior bureaucrats. Contract employment and the abolition of central staffing agencies are the two chief means of achieving this. The second involves selecting senior bureaucrats or advisers on the basis of their political values and personal loyalties rather than purely on merit. As one SES officer has noted:‘a minister wants someone he can work with ... someone he knows to be sympathetic to his particular policy objectives’ (quoted in Campbell and Halligan 1992:208). Walter (1986: 154) likewise maintains that what ministers require of their advisers is not simply technical expertise but expertise combined with commitment to the minister’s values and personal loyalty. This factor underlies the creation of ministerial advisory staffs. Ministers now also play a greater role in the selection of SES officers. Halligan and Power (1992:84) report that the issue of personal compatibility with the minister, traditionally raised only in connection with the appointment of departmental secretaries, now extends down to

8 National Council of the Institute of Public Administratian, Australia 1998

branch head level. The greater degree of control that politicians now exercise over appointment and promotion and their resort to political partisans and personal loyalists as sources of policy advice have reduced the autonomy of senior public servants and undermined their professional status (see Campbell and Halligan 1992:207-8; Barnett 199 1). As many observers have noted, security of tenure and independent non-political control over recruitment and promotion were the principal foundations of public service professionalism.

It may be concluded that while the higher public service can never attain as strong a form of professional organisation as occupations such as law and medicine, i t could nonetheless acquire a more professional cast if it possessed a greater degree of job security, occupational closure and horizontal organisation. The prospects for this are not promising. If the recommendations contained in the Howard government discussion paper Towards a Best Practice Australian Public Service (1 996) are adopted, the higher public service is less likely to resemble a profession than it does currently, since it envisages the extension of contract employment to SES officers. This would undermine the remaining institutional basis for such professional attributes as expert non- partisan advice and professional ethics, since these presuppose a degree of independence from political control. What has happened i n Australia is that politicians have decided that it is more important to have a politically responsive public service than it is to have one that is independent and non-partisan. Yet as many students of public administration have noted, an independent non-partisan public service provides certain benefits. As Parker (1 989b:387) observes, an independent public service provides knowledge based upon a lifetime career, independent judgment and equitable treatment of citizens without fear or favour. The danger that arises when politicians exercise complete control over the public service is that bureaucrats will tell politicians only what they want to hear and that they will cease to pay any attention to the broader public interest (see Parker 1989a:345; Jackson 1988). Certain values that are important to liberal democratic government are jeopardised when the public service becomes simply the tool of the government of the day. What is required of the

26 Matheson

higher public service is an institutional form that will strike a balance between the legitimate demands of ministers for political control on the one hand and the need to protect the broader public interest on the other. Such an institutional form is likely to require the higher public service to at least retain, if not to have strengthened, those professional attributes which it currently possesses.

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