No abstract

This article reports the results of a major survey that was distributed to the members of the International Personnel Management Association and the Section on Personnel and Labor Relations of the American Society for Public Administration. The intent of the survey was twofold: to gauge the respondents' perspectives on the relative importance of various personnel techniques, activities, and values, and to assess their projections concerning the changes that will occur during the next decade. In addition to providing an interesting snapshot of the perceived state of modernization within public‐sector human resource management, the results reflect a considerable degree of agreement concerning the expected direction of further changes. Themes arising from the reinvention movement, as well as the technological revolution, dominate the response patterns. The implications of these perceived alterations in the field of human resource management are discussed, and potential problem areas are identified.

Governments around the globe are facing unprecedented staffing challenges. At the time when governments need to be most adept at luring talent to public service, their ability to do so has rarely been so constrained and complicated by economic, social and organizational pressures. This article provides an overview of the types of recruitment and selection initiatives already in place in many nations that can help the world's governments attract and retain talent. Relying heavily upon examples from the United States and Western Europe, but also integrating experiences from a variety of both developed and less developed countries (LDCs), we describe a series of recruitment and selection “best practices.”

Reinventing government is a cross-national movement that has important, and potentially negative, implications for the career civil service. This article examines the global development of the reinventing government movement, arguing that it represents at least in part an attack on bureaucratic power and the career public service Each of its principal themes—including debureaucratization, decentralization, privatization, and managerialism —poses challenges to important public service values We argue that reinventing government, contrary to its most ardent proponents' rhetoric, threatens to undermine the important role played by public servants in modern democratic governments The broad implications of this argument are explored.

No abstract

Based on a 50-state survey, this article provides an analysis of the impacts of civil service reform on human resource management (HRM) systems. The most fundamental conclusion is that public employees in a majority of states are being directly affected by human resources reforms. In particular, the civil service's traditional job protections are eroding because of decentralization of HRM authority, the active declassification of workers, restrictions on due process rights, and the efforts of activist governors. The implications of these phenomena on the professional civil service-and the notion of a public management career-are examined.

No abstract

This article summarizes a few of themost interesting findings of a comprehensive survey of human resource management best practices in state and local government. The 4-year project has examined the most enlightened human resource management initiatives extant in government agencies and provides a number of appealing reform examples that might be transportable to other governmental settings, including federal agencies. Many of the findings challenge accepted notions about the intractable nature of public personnel systems and provide potential models that can be emulated in public agencies at every level of government.