The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (41 page)

 
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Term generally referring to administrators paid for implementing the policies of national governments. The term derives from British civilian (as opposed to military) officials working in India in the nineteenth century. The UK civil service is the body of officials, paid for out of the public purse, who work in the departments of state and those associated bodies and agencies which are headed by a secretary of state in the cabinet. It developed out of the
ad hoc
system of service to the pre-nineteenth century executive and a number of historic departments, notably the Treasury, the Home and Foreign Offices, and the Board of Trade. The growth of governmental responsibilities from the late nineteenth century involved the creation of more departments: the majority, such as Education, Employment, and Environment, functionally defined; but some territorially defined, these being the Scottish, Northern Ireland, and Welsh Offices. Defined on this central department basis the civil service may be distinguished from those who do not work directly for a department of state, such as employees of
quangos
. In the early 1990s the exact number of UK civil servants is open to dispute, although conventionally it is put at somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000.
The origins of the civil service as a modern bureaucracy lie in the implementation of the Northcote— Trevelyan reforms in the second half of the nineteenth century. These ensured, first, that entrance to the civil service was by competitive examination, both for the administrative (highest) and executive (intermediate) classes. Promotion was also on merit. Secondly, the civil service became a life career and hence a profession for the educated to enter into. Thirdly, the tasks of civil servants were divided into the intellectual and routine. This meant that departments developed as hierarchic: those drawn from the administrative class filled senior policy advice positions; those from the executive class filled positions defined by their superiors; and those on clerical grades—the least intellectual—carried out routine work. Fourthly, the civil service as a permanent institution of government developed an ethos of political neutrality, willing and able to advise and serve an elected government of any party programme. This clearly closely mirrors
Weber's
ideal type of bureaucracy.
Unification of the civil service, with centralized schemes of recruitment, standardized terms of pay and conditions, scope for mobility and promotion between departments, and a corporate ethos, was achieved between 1919 and 1939. Responsibility lay chiefly with Sir Warren Fisher, who was both permanent secretary to the Treasury and head of the civil service, and established unity through the exertion of Treasury control. Apart from some modernization during the Second World War, the British civil service remained largely intact up until the 1970s.
Under the Conservatives since 1979, the British civil service has changed markedly. Governmental growth has been checked, and the privatization or marketization of some responsibilities has led to contraction in some areas of government. Such quantitative change has been matched by qualitative change. First, entrance to the civil service has been widened to take in the employment of those who have been successful in the private sector. Secondly, this move to diversify recruitment has weakened the idea of the civil service as a life career. It has become more acceptable to move freely between work in the civil service and the private sector, and to enter the civil service at a later stage after attaining some ‘life experience’. Thirdly, civil servants are evaluated less by their pure intellectual power and more by their perceived management skills. At the same time, the departmental basis of the civil service has been partly broken up. Departments of state have been retained as core policy advice bodies, but those departmental functions which have been considered to involve the mere implementation of ministerial policy have been hived off into agencies, associated with their former department, but now with their own budget, mission statement, and cost centre manager. Fourthly, the political neutrality of the civil service has been increasingly under attack. The Thatcher governments were accused of promoting civil servants on the basis of ‘Is he one of us?’ Controversies over the rights and duties of civil servants who disagreed with their minister or who thought the minister might be misleading Parliament led to the issue of new guidelines on the duties and responsibilities of civil servants in relation to ministers in 1985. These changes taken together have weakened the unity of the civil service—a fact which pleases some and horrifies others. The introduction of citizens' charters heralds a further development towards output-oriented management in which fragmentation is accompanied by a move to limit bureaucratic autonomy through customer performance review.
The changes wrought on the ‘classic’ British civil service appear to have their origins in a number of factors. First, key changes are consistent with recommendations for greater efficiency and effectiveness in the Fulton Report (1968), which responded to demands for the modernization of government to arrest British relative decline by copying successful practice from other countries. The civil service college at Sunningdale was its only lasting immediate result. Secondly, the changes are consistent with a more contemporary ideological preference for market or quasi-market forms of supply associated with the new right. Thirdly, the move from hierarchic departments to functionally segregated agencies appears to give a public sector mirror to the move from ‘
fordist'
mass production methods to post-fordist ‘small is beautiful’ flexible production units in the private sector. Finally, fragmentation and politicization are entirely consistent with the result of an elected government believing that the civil service has a political agenda of its own which has undermined previous elected governments and must not be allowed its head again.
Australia, Canada, and France are examples of other countries with a more or less unified and hierarchical civil service. The United States displays a distinctly different pattern, because each incoming administration normally replaces the existing heads of each department and agency with its own nominees ( see
spoils system
). The Weberian model therefore applies to lower-level civil servants but not to upper-level ones.
JBr 

 
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Defined as the set of intermediate associations which are neither the state nor the (extended) family; civil society therefore includes voluntary associations and firms and other corporate bodies. The term has been used with different meanings by various writers since the eighteenth century, but this main current usage is derived from
Hegel
.
The need to (re)build civil society after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe has been a common theme of reformers and commentators there since 1991. The communist regime had disapproved of the institutions of civil society. Therefore, apart from hardy examples such as the Catholic Church in Poland, there was not a lot of it about.

 
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The
Oxford English Dictionary
definition is ‘a division or order of society according to status; a rank or grade of society’. But this confuses as much as it clarifies. It is not what
Marx
or
Weber
mean by class; and Weber specifically distinguishes class from status. As, however, the
OED
meaning is the everyday one, there is great confusion as writers about class slither around between one (implied) definition and another.
For Marx, class is defined by one's relationship to the means of production. One either controls a factor of production or one does not. In the first case, one belongs to the landlord or capitalist class. In the second, when one has nothing to offer but one's labour power, one belongs to the
proletariat
. Marx and Engels believed that ‘Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great…classes directly facing each other:
Bourgeoisie
and Proletariat’ and that ‘the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie’ (
Communist Manifesto
, 1848). The bourgeoisie and the proletariat have starkly contradictory class interests. Politics and economics are a
zero-sum game
.
However, Marx refined and (some would say) muddied his two-class model. First, he stressed that a ‘class in itself’ is not necessarily a ‘class for itself’. Only when the proletariat became conscious of its common interest and common opposition to the bourgeoisie could it expect to become a revolutionary class. People may suffer from
false consciousness
and fail to realize where their true class interests lie. But Marx by no means always sticks with the schematic two-class model. In the
Communist Manifesto
itself, for instance, he and Engels note how the working class may ‘compel … legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions of the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hour bill in England was carried.’ (The Ten Hours Act 1847, restricting maximum working hours, was a cross-bench measure, carried with predominantly Tory support against most of the Whigs.) In his journalism and political commentary, Marx recognized complex ebbs and flows of class alignment, as when he claimed that ‘the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpenproletariat…, the intellectual lights, the clergy and the rural population’ united against an urban proletarian revolt in Paris in 1848, or that ‘[Louis]
Bonaparte
represents a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasants’ (
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
, 1852).
It fell to
Weber
to make explicit the distinction between a class and a status-group. As he put it: ‘status position … is not determined by class position alone: possession of money or the position of entrepreneur are not in themselves status qualifications, although they can become such; propertylessness is not in itself status disqualification, although it can become such.’ There, then, is the plot summary of every Victorian melodrama and modern sitcom. The Duke of Omnium and his self-employed window-cleaner are in the same class (owners of a factor of production) but not in the same status-group. The Duke's window-cleaner and his daughter who cleans the windows in the factory where the works are in the same status-group but different classes.
Unfortunately, English uses ‘class’ to cover both concepts, whereas Marx's and Weber's native German distinguishes them. Usually, discussions about class and politics are really discussions of status-group and politics. For instance, studies of class and vote in the UK have traditionally divided the electorate by the classification scheme used by the Market Research Society. For many years, this has run along the following lines:

A Higher managerial, administrative or professional
B Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1 Supervisory, clerical; junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2 Skilled manual worker
D Semi-skilled and unskilled manual worker
E State pensioner, casual worker

Such a scale is perfectly appropriate for market research but not for politics. Advertisers need to know which medium is read by ABs and which by DEs because they need to know the consumption patterns of the audience reached by the medium. It is pointless to advertise AB goods in a DE medium, and
vice versa
. But this has nothing much to do with class. The consumption habits of self-employed window-cleaners and of employed window-cleaners are very similar; their voting behaviour is not. Likewise for salaried managers and capitalist business owners. A better class scheme for voting studies is the one now used in successive volumes arising out of the British Election Study. This separates owners from managers, and
petite-bourgeois
(small proprietors) from the rest of the ‘working class’. Modern Marxists debate extensively whether such people as managers (who control people and capital although they do not own them) and small tradespeople (who own capital but too little of it to have much control over their own environment, let alone other people's) should be described as occupying ‘contradictory class locations’ ( see e.g.
Poulantzas
). Arguably, though, it does not matter into which box people are put so long as their class characteristics are understood. See also
middle class
;
working class
;
class consciousness
.