Edited by David Farnham, Annie Hondeghem and Sylvia Horton

PART I: INTRODUCTION - The contexts of staff participation and public management reform - Trajectories, institutions and stakeholders in public management reform - Staff participation in the public services - PART II: COUNTRY STUDIES - Austria: the dynamics of public management reform and staff participation - Belgium: staff participation in the Copernic reform - Britain: staff participation and modernisation under 'New' Labour - The Czech Republic: staff participation and modernisation of central state administration - Finland: catchall systems, developing practices - France: from direct to indirect participation to where? - Germany: limited reforms and restricted participation - Italy: the case of the Revenue Agency - The Netherlands: modernisation, participation and strategic choice - New Zealand: public management reform and the Partnership for Quality Agreement - Switzerland: staff participation in government agencies undergoing change - The United States: staff participation in administrative reform 1993-2004 - PART III: CONCLUSION - Making sense of staff participation within public management reform - Appendix A: Questionnaire for the Leuven project - Appendix B: An analysis of the range of direct participation methods used within 12 civil services

This book is about the role of civil servants and their trade unions in the public management reform process. It starts by putting public management reform in its economic, social, cultural and legal contexts. Then, building on neo-institutional and stakeholder theories, the book explores how staff and their representative organisations have influenced the formulation and implementation of public management reforms in 12 OECD countries. This study challenges top-down elite theories that have dominated the existing literature and explains how staff participation practices, both direct and indirect, have impacted on the implementation of reforms in different ways in different countries. The book concludes that variations in staff participation in the reform process depend upon institutional and political factors and the distribution of power in the employment relationship.