In recent years, many developed countries undertook the task of reforming their civil service systems.1 These reforms are set against the changes in the government in these countries. New values that were short-term outcomes and a culture of performance and customer-oriented service came to be demanded of the public sector. The governments attempted to reform the system of appointing personnel to the civil service to cope with these changes. According to past studies, the civil service system is divided into two: career-based and position-based systems (Auer et al., 1996).2 The OECD, in its analysis of the civil service systems of member countries, noted that over the past several decades, the systems tend to shift from a career-based system to a position-based one (OECD, 2004). Some academic scholars noted that there is a common tendency to move away from the traditional Weberian bureaucracy (Demmke, 2010; Lægreid and Lois Recascino Wise, 2007). It is generally thought that the position-based system, where civil service staff are appointed through open competition from internal and external candidates, is superior to the closed career-based system.
The purpose of this paper is to prove that the shift to a position-based system is not effective in all countries. This paper focuses on the "mobility" of the external labor market around the government. The position-based system needs high labor mobility3 to appoint staff through open competition, which calls for internal civil service applicants and external applicants from the private sector to compete for positions in the civil service. However, the competition will not occur under conditions of low labor mobility. This paper takes up two cases, Britain and Korea, to examine the hypothesis. Britain is a case of high labor mobility, while Korea is a case of low labor mobility.
In Chapter 1, I study the models of the civil service system in the public administration systems of the past. In Chapter 2, I examine the preceding studies on the recent trends in civil service reform and demonstrate the hypothesis of this paper from the viewpoint of external labor market mobility. Chapter 3 focuses on the research methodology of this hypothesis. Chapter 4 is an analysis of the case studies Britain and Korea. Chapter 5 provides concluding thoughts of the issues examined in this paper.
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