Civil servant identity at the crossroads: new challenges for public administrations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose To compare and contrast the changes introduced in Canada and Switzerland as a result of public management reforms and explore the ethical challenges they entail. Design/methodology/approach This is a case study of two countries based in part on secondary sources but also on observations made by the authors. Findings The strategies used in each country are different reflecting their distinct political institutions. But there is a commonality, namely the emergence of new ethical problems related to the changes under way. Each country has tackled these new ethical challenges in similar ways. Individual and group behaviour of both Canadian and Swiss civil servants is regulated through “external controls” (codes of ethics, rules of conduct), but also by means of the socialization of new professional values (quality of customer service, flexibility, innovation, creativity, efficiency and effectiveness). These external controls and new values are insufficient, however, to allow civil servants to develop their own capacity for ethical deliberation, an essential condition for enhancing ethical behaviour in modern public administrations. Research limitations/implications The findings are not based on a systematic comparative study and can only therefore be interpreted as indicative. Originality/value The writers offer an interesting model relating to methods of behaviour regulation in an ethical public service and the need to ensure that the public good and the public interest remain at the core of public servants identity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".