The constitutional position of the British Civil Service : an assessment of the impact of managerialism on the notion of 'the servant of the Crown' via a case study of HM Prison Service
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The institution of the civil service is of much contemporary interest here in Britain and elsewhere. The phenomenon of civil service reform forms a significant part of the wider movement to remould public services or in the now legendary phrase, to ‘reinvent government’ on what could be perceived as a global scale, ranging from the more sophisticated democracies such as in the USA, Britain, Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, to the newly emerging ones such as Eastern Europe and South Africa. The apparent trend of globalisation is arguably not only confined to the field of public service reform; it can also be seen in other contexts such as the growth of the intergovernmental cooperations within Europe and the Far-East, as well as the proliferation of the Information Superhighway which facilitates an electronic exchange of ideas across geographical frontiers. The reasons for this apparent global convergence fall outside the immediate province of this chapter. This thesis questions one of the enigmas of the modern British constitution, which is that the civil service does not have a statutory footing. So, it is the Executive rather than Parliament which has the prerogative power of regulating the civil service. The enigma is encapsulated in the position where the Executive regulates the civil service, which in turn serves the Executive qua their historical status as 'servants of the Crown'. The thesis is concerned with the cumulative impact of managerial reforms within the British civil service during the Conservative administration from 1979 - 1997 on the idea of civil servants as 'servants of the Crown'. It argues that the key managerial initiatives introduced into the civil service by the Conservative government during this period, illustrate the dangers of the notion of 'servant of the Crown' being captured by the Executive for their short-term political ends. The thesis shows that the managerial transformation collides not only with established constitutional doctrines relating to the civil service but also with the broader norm or theory of constitutionalism embedded in British constitutional history.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".