This paper analyze the present characteristics of the administrative elite in Danish local government, how their background and career trajectories have evolved in recent decades and how a major municipal reform in 2007 may have influenced recent trends in the civil service system.
The analysis lead to a characteristic of how the municipal career system has evolved during the four decades when New Public Management was placed on the agenda and local government became the primary provider of welfare services in the Nordic welfare states.
Though the ambition is primarily descriptive, new institutional theory and its emphasis on path dependencies and patterns of diffusion is used as a framework for understanding and comprehending observed patterns (Mahoney and Thelen 2010, Meyer et al. 1997). Thus the profiles of the top civil servants are seen as indicators of the municipal career system's sorting and promotion rules and how these have evolved over time.
The analysis is based on survey data from 1980, 1992, 2006, 2008 and 2016 supplemented with secondary data and a review of the literature on the subject (Ejersbo, Hansen and Mouritzen 1998, Hansen, Opstrup and Villadsen 2013, Mouritzen and Svara 2002). The primary focus is on the position as city manager – the highest ranking not elected civil servant in Danish local government – but the evolution in their position is contrasted and compared to other municipal top civil servants.
We find four primary career paths to the top of the municipal career system, where the academic gradually became the dominant. There has been a development away from occupational management in the direction of the development of a real management profession. Different explanations of the development are discussed as well as more recent emerging trajectories of change.
References
Ejersbo, N., M. B. Hansen and Poul Erik Mouritzen. 1998. "The Danish Local Government Ceo: From Town Clerk to City Manager." Pp. 97-112 in The Anonymous Leader. Appointed Ceos in Western Local Governments, edited by K. K. Klausen and A. Magnier. Odense: Odense University Press.
Hansen, M. B., N. Opstrup and A. R. Villadsen. 2013. "En Administrativ Elite under Forandring. Udviklingen I Danske Kommunale Topchefers Kollektive Profil Fra 1970 Til 2008." Politica 45(2):178-94.
Mahoney, James and Kathleen Thelen. 2010. "A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change." Pp. 1-37 in Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, edited by J. Mahoney and K. Thelen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meyer, J. W., J. Boli, G. M. Thomas and F. O. Ramirez. 1997. "World Society and the Nation-State." American Journal of Sociology 103(1):144-81. Mouritzen, Poul Erik and James H. Svara. 2002. Leadership at the Apex. Politicians and Administrators in Western Local Governments. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press.
