The 21st-century public servantNeedham, Catherine ; Mangan, Catherine

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The 21st-century public servant: working at threeboundaries of public and private

Catherine Needham & Catherine Mangan

To cite this article: Catherine Needham & Catherine Mangan (2016) The 21st-century publicservant: working at three boundaries of public and private, Public Money & Management, 36:4,265-272, DOI: 10.1080/09540962.2016.1162592

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People delivering public services in the public,private and third sectors face similar challengesas they manage shrinking budgets, increasedcitizen demands and technological advanceswhich undermine the viability of traditionalmodes of service delivery. This paper reportsfindings from a project on the 21st-century publicservant, funded by a knowledge exchange grantfrom the Economic and Social Research Council.The project built on the University ofBirmingham Policy Commission (2011) into the‘Future of Local Public Services’, which identifiedthe need to pay attention to the changing rolesundertaken by public servants and the associatedsupport and development needs. Public servantsare here defined broadly, to incorporate peopledelivering public services across different sectors,reflecting the mixed market of providers ofpublic services.

Through interviews with people involved insupporting and delivering public services inEngland, and a survey of new graduates in localgovernment, the research considered how thepublic service workforce is changing, and whatfurther changes are anticipated. During theresearch, we encountered three framings ofpublic and private, which we discuss in thispaper. Exploring public service work throughcounterposing the public and private is of coursenot a new approach, but here we consider threeframings of the public and private which areparticularly resonant for people working in thecurrent context of public services, adjusting tolong-term austerity and technological change.The three framings of public and private areethics, careers and identity.

To write about public services through themetaphor of the public–private boundary is to

tread very familiar ground, and we approachthis border with some trepidation. As Williamsand Powell (2015, p. 1) put it in relation topublicness:

Attempts to understand the changing nature of ‘thepublic’ in developed nations are hamstrung by themultiple uses and applications of the termitself…Whilst some of these concepts may be mutuallycompatible others clearly derive from distinctdisciplinary traditions and the tendency of thesetraditions to ‘talk past’ one another means that it isoften not clear whether these multiple ‘publics’ arefundamentally different or have simply beendeveloped independently of one another.

Other authors have written of the differentframings of the private, and the different ways inwhich public and private intersect (Benn andGaus, 1983; Okin, 1991).

However, perhaps because interviewees werevery familiar with the framing, public and privatewas a binary which kept reoccurring in theinterviews. For interviewees and surveyrespondents, it was a common way to talk abouttheir working practices, their career paths andcommunication techniques. This could relate tostructural reform (greater privatization ofpreviously public services), for example, orchanging career paths (greater fluidity betweenpublic and private sectors). Some of ourinterviewees were located in the third (non-profit) sector, and this gets in the way of asimplistic public/private binary by sector.However, the third sector interviewees also talkedabout their roles in ways which were expressiveof pro-public or pro-commercial values andidentities.

Catherine Needhamis a reader in PublicPolicy and PublicManagement at theHealth ServicesManagement Centre,University ofBirmingham, UK.

Catherine Manganis a senior fellow atthe Institute forLocal GovernmentStudies, Universityof Birmingham, UK.

The 21st-century public servant:working at three boundaries ofpublic and privateCatherine Needham and Catherine Mangan

In a project on the roles and skills of the 21st-century public servant, interviews withpublic service workers highlighted three boundaries of public and private: relating toethics, careers and identities. Two contingent factors shape the capacity of staff to beable to reconcile the public and private aspects of their work: the degree of fiscalausterity and the scope for reflective practice. Strategic workforce planning needs tosupport staff to manage the different versions of public and private.Keywords: Austerity; careers; ethics; identity; workforce change.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540962.2016.1162592

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License(http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproductionin any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

. Published by Taylor & Francis

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Research designThe research presented here is located within abroader project which aimed to capture thedifferent roles, competencies and skills of the21st-century public servant, the support andtraining requirements of these roles, and theways in which central and local government canbetter support and promote public servicecareers. A range of practitioner-focused resourceshave been produced by the project (Needhamand Mangan, 2014; Needham et al., 2014). Inthis paper we focus on emergent findings relatingto the framings of public and private, which weredeveloped inductively from the interview andsurvey data.

Forty interviews were conducted with a rangeof people working in the public sector (forexample in local authorities, the National HealthService, the fire and rescue service, the policeservice), the private sector (service providers,commissioning support functions) and the thirdsector (service providers, service user and careradvocacy bodies). We also conducted a focusgroup of officers and members in one localauthority, and undertook a survey with recentgraduate entrants into local government.

The interviews and focus group drew on apurposive sample of people working in publicservices in the West Midlands region (includingfrontline workers, managers and leaders) and innational stakeholder organizations. We usedsemi-structured interviews, based on astandardized topic guide, with questions derivedfrom themes drawn from a literature review(Needham et al., 2014). Interviews were audiorecorded. The survey was undertaken online,with a link sent to 100 recent recruits to theNational Graduate Development Programmefor local government. Fifty-four peopleresponded, a response rate of over half, which isgenerally considered as acceptable for onlinesurveys (Rubin and Babbie, 2010, p. 117). Ethicalapproval for the project was granted by theUniversity of Birmingham.

Interview and focus group transcripts wereanalysed thematically according to the themesdeveloped in the literature review (Miles andHuberman, 1994). Coded sections were sharedbetween the two researchers to enhanceconsistency in the analysis. Coding was done byhand, working off hard copies. The quotationsused in this paper were selected for inclusion onthe grounds that they were illustrative of thepatterns found in stage 1 or stage 2 of theanalysis. Descriptive statistics were producedfrom the quantitative survey data using tablesgenerated by Survey Monkey. Survey verbatimswere analysed through the same two-stage

process as the interview data.The three framings of public and private

that emerged from this analysis process relate toethics, careers and identities. After setting theseout, we then explore the key contingent factorsthat interviewees identified as shaping theircapacity to respond to the challenges. The first isthe degree of austerity they were facing; thesecond is the extent to which they were able toengage in reflective practice.

EthicsIn the interviews, focus group and survey weasked people about whether the term ‘publicservice ethos’ had any resonance to them. Thepublic service ethos has been a common referencepoint in discussions about public service reformfor many years. Ethos captures the sense of anintrinsic motivation to serve the public, distinctfrom extrinsic motivations such as materialreward or fear of sanctions (Le Grand, 2003).Intrinsic motivations are particularly importantin public services since users often cannot imposeextrinsic sanctions like exit on poor qualityproviders (Chapman, 1993; Le Grand, 2003).

The survey of graduate entrants into localgovernment showed that ‘wanting to serve thepublic’ was the most powerful motivator of choiceof career. Two-thirds of National GraduateDevelopment Programme respondents believethat there is a distinctive set of public servicevalues, and interviewees similarly spoke aboutwanting to serve the public. However, bothsurvey respondents and interviewees highlightedthe ethos as something which was in flux, ratherthan stable. Of the 33 survey respondents whobelieved in a public service ethos, around three-quarters felt that these values are changing aspublic services adapt to reduced public spending.Comments included:

As finances are tightening and we are looking tomake money out of council services, I believe thewhole ethos of the public sector will have to changeand public sector workers’ mindsets may need toevolve if this is to be a success. There is also nolonger a ‘job for life’ so I think people in the sectorfeel less secure in their jobs which may well have aneffect on their morale/performance/values at work.

Values are being shared and amalgamated acrossthe two sectors.

[Local government is] becoming less responsive topublic opinion as cuts are becoming more necessary.Public services being run more like private services.As councils look for a way to save money there ismore of a drive for self-funding services or social

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enterprise spin-offs. The impact of this is thatservices become more profit driven and focused ondelivery of outcome rather than theprocess…Treating everyone fairly can be missed asthose most vulnerable are the most difficult andcostly to support and may be neglected compared tothe easiest as is the same in the private sector.

In response to this new financial context,interviewees talked of the need to acquire morecommercial skills:

We need commercial acumen. That’s not beenfavoured…in the past. But it’s not about profit, itis about what things costs, are we making the bestuse of public money? And can the third sector orprivate sector sometimes do things better, bettervalue for money?

Local government will need more private sectorskills, more crossover of skills and people. If staff inlocal government don’t have the commercial skills,they won’t be employable. We have to help them getthem.

Chief officers will probably need a whole new set ofskills. How do you do business relationships—howdo you take elected members with you?

What it meant to be more ‘commercial’ wasinterpreted in a range of different ways. Forsome, it was about more efficient monitoring ofcontracts with the private sector, whereas forothers it was about securing better value formoney from in-house services. One intervieweeexpressed this ambiguity surrounding the term:

Commercial skills— we know what we mean but ifI said to you what would a commercial socialworker do, does it mean I can make money for thecouncil or I can make relationships with commercialpartners, does it mean I can sell things? A piece ofwork needs to be done that fleshes those out.

Some interviewees did not see a tension betweena commitment to publicness and a stronger set ofcommercial skills within the public sector. Bettervalue for money and more effective contractmanagement were both felt to be strongly in thepublic interest. Others felt that the two wereoperating in tension, which was reflected in thelanguage they used to describe the environmentin which they were working. As one intervieweesaid: ‘I think there will be a fight betweenaltruism and commercialism. We needmanagers who still care’. A new graduateresponding to the survey reported a similarsense of tension:

There is a conflict with the dogma that councilsmust ‘think like a business’ and the idea that thecouncil should continue to provide services for freeand look favourably on the vulnerable.

These findings are consistent with theliterature on public service ethos, which hasargued that from the new public management(NPM) era onwards, there has been a shift awayfrom talking about a public sector ethos towardsa public service ethos. This new ethos was seen asthe basis for a ‘synthesis’ between the traditionalethos and private sector models of customerservice (Brereton and Temple, 1999; Needham,2006). In the customer orientation the ethicalconsiderations of public service are transferredfrom process to end product (Brereton andTemple, 1999, p. 471). ‘[E]thical considerationsare now couched in terms of optimum outcomefor customers rather than the motives of theactors engaged in service provision’ (Hebson etal., 2003, p. 485). This responsiveness tocustomers suggests an agnosticism about whetherservices are located within the public or privatesector.

NPM-type approaches have beensuperseded by other frameworks, such as newpublic governance which claim more conceptualinsight and normative appeal (for exampleOsborne, 2010). However, what emergesfrom our research is that the NPM drive forcommerciality is only now being felt stronglyby those working in frontline public services,because of the tightening grip of austerity.In the interviews and survey, peopleexplained that they were now being askedmuch more explicitly by council leaders andmanagers to take a commercial approach inways that they had not in the past. Yet thiscommercial approach has not so far beenwell defined within their organizations,leading to the tensions described above aspublic servants try to reconcile theirunderstanding and affiliation with theconcept of public service with a call to bemore commercial.

CareersMany interviewees felt that a new kind of careerpath is emerging, far removed from thetraditional ‘job for life’ that was seen tocharacterize some parts of the public sector inthe past. As one interviewee put it:

People will have portfolio careers, working indifferent sectors, working for different people at thesame time, not just sequentially. It’s not a job forlife, or even for five years.

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One interviewee described it as a ‘zigzag’ careerpath, rather than the traditional linear one wherepeople moved up the hierarchy within a singleorganization.

Interviewees from the public sector talkedabout the dilemmas they faced in decidingwhether to stay within their organization or tomove into public service delivery bodies in theprivate or third sectors. Some were fearful fortheir jobs in shrinking public sector organizations,feeling that they may be forced out of publicsector work rather than being able to make achoice. For some of the interviewees, the notionof a ‘portfolio career’ was felt to be a euphemismfor race-to-the-bottom employment practices inpublic service organizations that were rapidlyshrinking in response to austerity (‘the weeklysound of hand-clapping for another leavingdo’).

However, for others, there was a positiveaspect to having a career which took in a numberof different organizations and sectors. There wasa recognition that in a complex delivery contextpublic servants need to have a betterunderstanding of the cultures and motivationsof other agencies who have roles in achievingoutcomes for citizens:

If you’ve had couple of roles in commissioning, youneed to experience life on the provider side, supportservice or central service—get different perspectiveand get broader experience.

People in the third sector spoke of the valueof encouraging more local authority workers toexperience other sectors, and vice versa:

The local authority has a particular problem in thatbecause they are historically and culturallyestablished institutions they get a lot of people whoare used to one culture…There is less of that in thethird sector, funding comes and goes and peopleare more mobile. It is useful for the third sector toget into the local authority and see the whites of theireyes.

An interviewee from the private sector alsospoke about the benefits of working acrossboundaries, and how people could be bettersupported to do this:

I’ve learned a huge amount by having crossed overinto the private sector from local government. Iwould do my old job in a much different way withthe skills and experience I’ve learned. I don’t seeenough of the skills I’ve acquired in my current rolebeing applied in the public sector. The privatesector can learn from the public sector as well as

vice versa. I brought some skills to my current rolethat many of my peers who have never worked in thepublic sector haven’t got, and in particular aroundworking in a political environment.

Creating a shared understanding of othersectors and organizations would create ‘moreunderstanding and more mutual respect’, as oneinterviewee put it.

A willingness to look across boundaries toother parts of public services was also evidentwithin the survey of recent graduate entrants tolocal government. Although a third sawthemselves as likely to be working solely withinlocal government in five years’ time, a quartersaw themselves working in the wider publicsector, and 10% saw themselves as likely to beworking in different delivery vehicles, such associal enterprises. The remaining 30% did notexpect to be working in public service delivery atall.

Sabbaticals and secondments were seen asuseful tools for sharing learning and gainingexposure to other organizational cultures:

Where I have gained most has been being locatedin those organizations. There needs to be structuredplacement opportunities of some significant lengthwith requirement to be reflective, and some tasks aspart of that. Experiential stuff is the best.

Interviewees also referred to coaching,mentoring, shadowing and action learning aseffective ways of developing new skills, as well asnetworks and relationships across theorganization and more widely:

We train people into their role too much. We don’tdo any real training and development. We needmore work shadowing, but with a structure. Itdoesn’t need to cost a lot. We need to get peopleworking across the council with partners, not justwithin directorates and services. Managers need todo a lot more developing as part of the [personaldevelopment review] process.

People’s willingness to consider working indifferent sectors, or experience of having doneso already, links to Lewis’ (2008) empirical workwith third sector leaders. In interviews she foundthat many of them lacked ‘an explicitly “sectored”perspective on their careers’. However, ourinterviewees suggested that the mechanisms tosupport a career path that moves between sectorsare not yet in place. Those individuals who hadexperienced working in different sectors clearlystated the benefits but did not feel that theorganizations they worked in recognized the

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need for or the value of the knowledge theybrought with them. Although we might concludefrom the interviewees that, for the broader publicservice workforce, the notion of a career being‘sectored’ is out of date, this may not yet beapparent in the way in which organizationsdevelop their workforce.

IdentityA third framing of public and private thatemerged from the data was around identity andthe boundaries of the public and private self.This is a different kind of public/private boundaryfrom the previous two (Benn and Gaus, 1983).As Okin (1991, p. 68) points out: “‘Public/private”is used to refer both to the distinction betweenstate and society (as in public and privateownership), and to the distinction betweendomestic and non-domestic life’. Here it is thelatter sense which interviewees were deploying.

This was manifest in a number of ways. Thefirst was in relation to the individual values thatpeople hold and are expected to model at work.The importance of individual staff behaving ‘asa human’ was a recurrent theme of the interviews,indicating that good service meant sharingsomething of oneself rather than hiding behinda professional role or job title: ‘People need to beable to relate humanly to each other in the waythey deliver services’, as one interviewee for thatproject put it. According to others: ‘It’s aboutbeing human, that’s what we need to do’ and ‘It’s[not] about the kind of job you do but the kind ofperson you are’.

The importance of relational approacheshas been emphasised in a range of recentreports on public service change, highlightingthe importance of caring and supportiverelationships between citizens and staff (Cottam,2013; Muir and Parker, 2014; Needham andMangan, 2014). A lack of compassion amongnursing staff at Mid-Staffordshire FoundationTrust was felt to be part of the explanation forthe preventable deaths that occurred at thehospital (Department of Health, 2013). One ofthe recommendations of the Francis Reportinto those events was a drive to identifyindividuals with the ‘right’ values for nursing(Department of Health, 2013).

A number of interviewees spoke about theneed to think differently about recruitmentpractices in order to allow a focus on applicants’values, broadening the pool of potentialapplicants as well as reviewing them according todifferent criteria. However, interviewees alsorecognized that recruiting for subjective qualitiessuch as personal values may run counter toemployment and equalities legislation. One

interviewee, running a third sector organization,said:

Some of the equalities thinking has made it harderto recruit for aptitude and personality. Those arereally important for a relational model, but they aremore subjective. [At this organization] we putpersonal qualities and aptitudes and ask fordemonstrations of how they were used in a currentjob. We are looking for a kind of person. In mostof government they put out an advert, rather thanheadhunting, because they feel it’s fair, but I’m notsure it’s a very good way of getting the right person.We don’t do it, we advertise and we use ournetworks to get people to apply.

A second issue in relation to public andprivate identities was evident in relation to thecommunication practices of individual publicservants and the need to utilize social media inways that reconcile the public and private self.The people we interviewed discussed thedifficulties they faced in trying to use socialmedia in a way that felt ‘authentic’, but wasn’t toopersonal and didn’t get them into trouble withtheir organization:

You have to be careful with Twitter. It’s difficult todraw the line between personal and professionallife. I tend to re-tweet things but without a valuestatement attached. We are in politically restrictedposts so we have to be careful.

Twitter and Facebook are about publishing whatyou do in your life. But huge parts of my life are inthe public arena and I want to keep part of itprivate.

Another expressed the tension betweenauthenticity and organizational reputation:

A lot of public sector organizations fall into the trapof putting out this bland stuff…We’re talkingabout personality now. Comms are saying you needto be blogging as yourself. But when I do get thetime, fitting it into the day job, what guarantees doI have that no one is going to say you’ve oversteppedthe mark here?

Some of the people interviewed were ‘earlyadopters’ who had built up a Twitter presencebefore their organizations had developed a socialmedia strategy. Others were keen to get startedon social media, but were struggling to do so inthe context of organizational guidelines aboutcorrect usage. A third group was being told touse social media to communicate with the public,but were anxious and uncertain about how to get

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started. Some of the barriers to using socialmedia were technical (for example not havingaccess to the relevant websites due toorganizational firewalls); others were aboutoverload and time management, with staffstruggling to understand how to fit it into theiralready pressurized schedule.

From our interviewees we gathered a sensethat as public services change the ways inwhich they interact with local residents, theyare being expected to be more visible, availableand prepared to interact in a genuine andperhaps more informal way with residentsthan they have done in the past. Thisexpectation is a cause of anxiety as publicservants struggle to find time for this newdemand and to find an appropriate blend ofthe public and the personal in how they presentthemselves through social media.

These three framings of public andprivate—as ethics, careers and identities—expose dilemmas and pose challenges forpeople working to deliver public services. Inresponding to these issues, people talkedabout the contingent factors which werehelping and hindering their ability to copewith these boundary issues. The first relatesto the degree of fiscal austerity they werefacing within their organizations. The secondrelates to the extent to which they were ableto deploy reflective approaches whichallowed them to develop coping strategies incontexts of ambiguity.

Austerity: ‘It’s not salami-slicing becauseyou wouldn’t have salami that big’The context of long-term public serviceausterity as the key background condition andthreat facing public servants was evident in allthe research that we did. In the current fiscalclimate, public service organizations in the UKare struggling to balance the imperatives ofshort-term cost-cutting and redundancies witha strategic vision for change. Many intervieweesgave a sense of moving into a second phase ofausterity:

There may have been a narrative about the cutsbeing a burning platform for stuff that should havebeen done years ago, but it doesn’t feel like thatanymore, the easy stuff has all been done.

It’s not about doing more with less now, it’s aboutsaying what we can’t do, being very clear to thepublic about the limitations of that and say well yeswe can do this but only to that standard, or we can’tdo it, or accepting that someone else might be betterable to do it.

For some interviewees the current‘narrative of doom’ was inhibiting their abilityto cope with change. Some talked about a senseof loss and grief for the past, with organizationsparalysed by the impact of the cuts, and unableto provide a new vision to work towards. As oneput it: ‘No message of hope—leadership isputting council into survival mode by thelanguage they’re using. Nobody is planningfor post-austerity’. One interviewee spoke aboutthe effect of losing large numbers of staff: ‘Youhear the language of loss everywhere. I getaffected by it’. These sentiments resonate withfindings from research into local governmentresponses to austerity, by Lowndes andMcCaughie (2013) which concluded that‘ideational continuity seems to dominate withinlocal government…witness in salami-slicingtactics (less of the same) rather than bold newvisions’. One of the interviews gave a slightlydifferent take on the salami metaphor:

It’s not salami-slicing because you wouldn’t havesalami that big, it’s hacking things off. It’s aboutrethinking the role of the state in light of thechanging economy, technology, the changing waysthat people live their lives. The cuts are so big thatwe have to confront the questions we have beenputting off: what is a library service, what is aleisure service?

The biggest shift being driven by austerity wasdeveloping a different relationship with citizens,based on more coproductive ways of working(Needham, 2008):

We won’t have the money so we will have to focuson the enabling and facilitating, enabling the restof the community to do it.

As another interviewee put it:

You can only get so far by being a supply-sidemechanic, cutting and slicing. You need a bettersense of what your people are like, who they are,what their networks are, how they can do more notfor themselves but how they can be more a part ofthe value that you create about what you do as acouncil.

This perspective is supported by research whichconcludes that the role of institutional ‘bricoleurs’will become more important: individuals whobring together or recombine resources indistinctive ways to bring about opportunities(Lowndes and McCaughie, 2013).

However, another interviewee described thedifficulties she encountered in reconciling the

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efficiency/austerity agenda with more relationalways of working:

There is a complicated tension between the desire onthe one hand for efficiency and rational processesversus the expectations and needs of customerswhich is more relational and focused on the personaland local. Public service workers have to find theirway through that knot. We are expected to do both,to move to the more relational in the government’scommitment to localization and neighbourhoods.But elsewhere we are moving to customerrelationship management and call centres. Youphone or visit a call centre, pick up a ticket, it’s nota holistic relationship with the person on the otherend of the phone.

Reflective practice: ‘You need spaces whereyou take yourself apart’Many interviewees felt that more value isplaced on activity, rather than reflection,and this leads to risk aversion and lack ofinnovation in response to the issues set outabove. The financial challenges are drivinghigh levels of activity as councils work to findways to cut budgets and deliver servicesdifferently, reducing their workforce andleading to staff taking on increasing levels ofwork. But as one interviewee put it:

We put huge amount of store in activity and needto get better at valuing reflection, anticipating.The risk is if we focus on here-and-now we may notbe able to transform and innovate. How do youslow it all down?’

Another said:

You need spaces where you take yourself apart andsort it out [but] the organization is expecting you toglide along like a swan looking serenely happy withno mistakes whatsoever. Self-assurance can be areason for making an appointment but then thatperson can be very short-fused. How can yourecruit for self-criticism?

This reflective practice can help people tocope with the emotional aspects of theirwork, highlighted above. It can also be a wayto manage the anxiety that people are dealingwith because of cuts. Managers in theinterviews suggested that they don’t haveresources to do the job and something willgo wrong and no one is listening to them:‘Directors of adult care are taking decisionsabout where best to create the harm’, as oneput it. The end result is a ‘fake resilience’which is unsustainable.

The reflective practice that could help staffto cope with these multiple challenges was seenas best supported through experience, coachingand mentoring than traditional training courses.One interviewee said:

There is a real need to work on people’s ability tolearn, not just sitting in a classroom, go out, thinkfor yourself, what it is that we don’t know. We needmanagers who are able to do that and do that withtheir staff and think about how do we help peoplelearn.

Several participants suggested that peopleshould view their relationships at work withcolleagues and line manager as the bestsource of education and skills: ‘It’s less abouttraining, more about experience’.

Interviewees also felt that organizationsneed to be receptive to the learning thatcomes from exposure to other ways ofpracticing. One interviewee expressed herfrustration: ‘People have been out andbrought ideas back, but it’s like throwingseeds onto stony ground’.

Formal personal development reviewswere felt to be too process oriented, withlittle emphasis on personal development andno sanction for managers who didn’t take itseriously:

There is limited effective challenge for managerswho don’t develop their staff, no one notices,whereas if people didn’t manage their budgeteffectively we’d be down on them straight away.

Staff were seen to need more help to carveout time for reflection and training:

We don’t create the right environment for internalmanagers to develop the skills and knowledge thatthey now need. The biggest barrier to that is people’stime. There is a lot of organizational support,please feel free to take this course, but translatingthat aspiration into staff doing the training takesa different lever. You have to make the space for itto happen, you have to make them learn, otherwisethey won’t find the time because there is neverenough time to do everything already.

The clear sense that we got from theinterviewees was of a workforce that was stretchedand anxious, where reflective and learningpractice was not valued as highly as more tangibleforms of activity. Many recognized the importanceof reflection and peer support, but few felt thatthere were opportunities for this in their dailywork.

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ConclusionThe paper has presented three framings ofpublic and private which emerged from theresearch undertaken as part of the 21st-CenturyPublic Servant project. People’s uncertaintiesabout the boundaries of public and private relatedto ethics, careers and identities. Notions of thepublic service ethos were felt by some to be underthreat as they responded to pressures withintheir organizations to be more commercial.Career patterns were felt to be changing, withmore expectation that people will work outsidethe public sector for a time, and this again bringsboth challenges and opportunities for theworkforce. In relation to identities and the senseof self, there are dilemmas relating to privacy,authenticity and self-care which emerge in acontext in which people are being expected tobring more of themselves to work. These issuesare being intensified by the context of austerity,which seems to be exposing people moreprofoundly to public management trends whichhave been observed by academics for more thana decade. Reflective practice was seen as a way inwhich people could help prepare and protectthemselves from some of these trends, althoughorganizations were not yet felt to be doing enoughto support this.

There is a danger, of course, that too muchof this falls on the heroic individual practitioner:the fleet-of-foot worker, who manages a portfoliocareer and sustains an emotionally richengagement with citizens at the same time asexercising personal development and self-care.We found little in our research to suggest thatpublic service organizations are acting to sustainand prepare workers for the public service labourof the 21st century. Senior leaders and humanresources practitioners need to recognize theseissues, and how they are likely to impact on theirworkforce, in order to develop organizationaland collaborative strategies to support the publicservants of the future.

AcknowledgementsThis research discussed here was funded by theEconomic and Social Research Council as aKnowledge Exchange Opportunity grant: The21st-Century Public Servant (ES/K007572/1),2013–2014.

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