Comparing Public Bureaucracies: Problems of Theory and Method

3. Organizations as the Building Blocks of Government

Public Employment and Public Service Industries Defense employment is much more of a direct government employment "industry" in Canada than in the United States. The same may well be true of most other nations that tend to purchase a large proportion of their military hardware from the United States or from other arms-exporting countries. Therefore , if we consider that additional purchases made by allied countries from American arms suppliers contribute to the overall defense of the United States, then the actual indirect employment generated by defense in the United States, as reported in table 6, would be greater. Any attempt to determine just how much greater, however, would resemble an exercise in metaphysics. The second source of data for Canada was the Census of Occupations , which gave figures for people employed in complementary services such as private education and private policing. Especially in social welfare services, a service which has come to be regarded as increasingly public in Canada still has a significant private component. Also, there is a significant private policing function although one that is apparently not as significant as in the United States. In short the private sector has significant involvement in providing goods and services in Canada, although not as great as in the United States; this is true despite some feelings that the public sector is increasingly dominant. Unfortunately, we lack longitudinal data to determine whether the same movements that we have found for the United States are valid in Canada, but impressionistic evidence would seem to justify the assumption that they apply in areas such as policing and education. We have even fewer data for Sweden, although those that we do have show some similar patterns as those found in the United States and Canada. We do not have any reliable information on the employment generated by government purchases of goods and services, although in an economy in which approximately two-thirds of gross national product passes through the public sector, the figure is likely to be sizable. Even with a government so large, and with well over one-third of the labor force employed in the public sector (Peters, 1985c), there is still substantial private sector employment. Some of this 54 Public Employment and Public Service Industries Table 9. Public and Private Employment in Sweden, 1980 (percent) Education Health Social Sciences Police Public 96 94 93 82 Private 4 6 7 18 Sources: Peters (1985cli Statistiska Centralbyran (annual, 1980). employment is in industries generally considered to be public in Sweden. Table 9 provides for Sweden some of the same information that was presented for Canada and the United States but only in the areas of health, education, welfare, and police. Interestingly , the highest private involvement in any of these areas was in policing. Apparently even in a country with a (relatively ) low crime rate and a relatively large and centralized police force, there is still a demand for private services to supplement available public protection services. Perhaps, given the especially extensive development of the welfare state in Sweden, there was relatively little private employment in health, education, or welfare. Although the available information is not sufficiently detailed for presentation in tabular form, private provision of social services seems to have been declining over the past several decades. Conclusion The data we have presented, while limited in their scope and requiring more interpretation and analysis, do have some important implications for the nature of government in the last decades of the twentieth century. Most obviously, the declining separation between the public and the private sectors will affect the accountability and control of government. This is a classic question in the study of public administration but still 55 Public Employment and Public Service Industries one of great importance. In the United States the scandals of Watergate, Brilab, and Abscam elevated questions of the control of government and public officials to the front pages. Few countries have escaped similar scandals involving public officials . A more subtle and perhaps more important struggle, however , is under way out of the headlines. Because of the existence and expansion of the "contract state" and the development of privately marketed services to complement publicly provided services, it is increasingly difficult to determine who is ultimately responsible for the provision of a service and who is merely acting in the name of government. This ambiguity presents problems for both the public official and the citizen. In the case of...