“It is exceedingly difficult for front-line workers and their managers to have a sense of responsibility in their place of work. It is true that their work was once guided by fairly rigid administrative rules, but it is also true that a number of these administrative rules have been done away with. In their stead, the work of front-line managers and workers is subject to many voices, many hands, and many oversight bodies.”

The public service is a classic whipping boy in the press and in the living rooms of the people. It is, the story goes, bloated, corrupt, inept, overstaffed, overpaid, underworked, and takes too many holidays. Statistics seem to support this impression to some extent: between 1995 and 2006, the Canadian public service ended up with 51% more executives, 46% more financial managers, 98% economists, and 40% fewer general service staff, including music teachers. While the private sector was in crisis between 2007 and 2010, the number of public servants paid over $100,000 a year doubled.

Savoie, a respected academic with a long history of work with the public service, proposes an explanation for why. The past few decades have seen, with the best of intentions, a push to use lessons from the private sector in the public service: extensive performance audits, centralizing final authority, making sure that things are cost effective.

These are doomed to failure, says Savoie. Cost-benefit analysis requires a bottom line, and that’s something the public sector, by definition, does not have. These attempts to create a private sector culture have sacrificed public service ideals like frugality and service without gaining commensurate benefits. The result has been steadily decreasing emphasis on front line workers like music teachers, and steadily increasing centralized control powers that have little to contribute to the overall public service mandate, leading to a reputation for bloat, overpay and underwork.

The book can sometimes be a bit heavy into political theory, but the bottom line message is interesting. Savoie is also sometimes a bit overeager to interpret things in a way that supports his theory, when it could as easily go the other way. Still, it takes on an interesting question, and if you flip through the political theory bits, it does so in an interesting way. If this is something you’re interested in, I suspect it’s one of the best books in the field. Well worth the read.