IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/117861.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Climbing the velvet drainpipe: class background and career progression within the UK Civil Service

Author

Listed:
  • Friedman, Sam

Abstract

Although the theory of representative bureaucracy originates from concerns about the class composition of the public sector workforce, questions of class background have been notably absent in subsequent scholarship. In this article, I take advantage of new data on the class backgrounds of UK civil servants (N = 308, 566) to, first, explore descriptively how class shapes the composition of the civil service, both vertically in terms of occupational grade and horizontally in terms of department, location, and profession. I show that those from working-class backgrounds are not only under-represented in the Civil Service as a whole but also this skew is particularly acute in propulsive departments like the Treasury, locations like London and in the Senior Civil Service. This initial descriptive analysis then acts as the staging point for the central qualitative component of my analysis, drawing on 104 in-depth interviews across 4 case-study departments. Here, I identify three unwritten rules of career progression that tend to act as barriers for those from working-class backgrounds; access to accelerator jobs; organizational ambiguity in promotion processes; and sorting into operational (versus policy) tracks that have progression bottlenecks. This analysis highlights the need for more work on class representation, as well as underlining how representative bureaucracy may be impeded by patterns of horizontal as well as vertical segregation, particularly in work areas that have an outsized influence on policy design.

Suggested Citation

  • Friedman, Sam, 2022. "Climbing the velvet drainpipe: class background and career progression within the UK Civil Service," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 117861, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
  • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:117861
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/117861/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Friedman, Sam, 2022. "(Not) bringing your whole self to work: the gendered experience of upward mobility in the UK Civil Service," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 113417, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Law, Kuok Kei, 2014. "The problem with knowledge ambiguity," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 444-450.
    3. Subramaniam, V., 1967. "Representative Bureaucracy: A Reassessment," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 61(4), pages 1010-1019, December.
    4. Meier, Kenneth John, 1975. "Representative Bureaucracy: An Empirical Analysis," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 69(2), pages 526-542, June.
    5. Keiser, Lael R. & Wilkins, Vicky M. & Meier, Kenneth J. & Holland, Catherine A., 2002. "Lipstick and Logarithms: Gender, Institutional Context, and Representative Bureaucracy," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 96(3), pages 553-564, September.
    6. Sam Friedman, 2022. "(Not) bringing your whole self to work: The gendered experience of upward mobility in the UK Civil Service," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(2), pages 502-519, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ashley, Louise & Boussebaa, Mehdi & Friedman, Sam & Harrington, Brooke & Heusinkveld, Stefan & Gustafsson, Stefanie & Muzio, Daniel, 2023. "Professions and inequality: challenges, controversies, and opportunities," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 119522, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Zuzana Murdoch & Jarle Trondal & Benny Geys, 2016. "Representative bureaucracy and seconded national government officials in the European Commission," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 10(4), pages 335-349, December.
    3. Jussila Hammes, Johanna, 2013. "Civil servants’ education and the representativeness of the bureaucracy in environmental policy-making," Working papers in Transport Economics 2013:30, CTS - Centre for Transport Studies Stockholm (KTH and VTI).
    4. Lilith A. Whiley & Ashley Wright & Sarah E. Stutterheim & Gina Grandy, 2023. "“A part of being a woman, really”: Menopause at work as “dirty” femininity," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(3), pages 897-916, May.
    5. repec:bla:jcmkts:v:46:y:2008:i::p:1025-1047 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Diana Moreira & Santiago Pérez, 2022. "Who Benefits from Meritocracy?," NBER Working Papers 30113, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Bruno Frey & Werner Pommerehne, 1982. "How powerful are public bureaucrats as voters?," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 38(3), pages 253-262, January.
    8. Matthew J. Nanes, 2020. "Policing in divided societies: Officer inclusion, citizen cooperation, and crime prevention," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 37(5), pages 580-604, September.
    9. Michal Parízek, 2017. "Control, soft information, and the politics of international organizations staffing," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 12(4), pages 559-583, December.
    10. Assadi, Anahita & Lundin, Martin, 2015. "Tenure and street-level bureaucrats: how assessment tools are used at the frontline of the public sector," Working Paper Series 2015:19, IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.
    11. Mia Hsiao-Wen Ho & Pervez N. Ghauri & Mario Kafouros, 2019. "Knowledge Acquisition in International Strategic Alliances: The Role of Knowledge Ambiguity," Management International Review, Springer, vol. 59(3), pages 439-463, June.
    12. Hani Nouman & Nissim Cohen, 2023. "When active representation is not enough: ethnic minority street-level workers in a divided society and policy entrepreneurship," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 56(4), pages 777-795, December.
    13. ChienHsing Wu, 2016. "The Role of Individual Cognition, Immersion, and Knowledge Essence in Individual Knowledge Development," Journal of Information & Knowledge Management (JIKM), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 15(03), pages 1-22, September.
    14. Mansbridge, Jane, 2017. "Recursive Representation in the Representative System," Working Paper Series rwp17-045, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    15. Valerie Stead & Sharon Mavin & Carole Elliott, 2024. "Angela Rayner (Member of Parliament) and the “Basic Instinct Ploy”: Intersectional misrecognition of women leaders' legitimacy, productive resistance and flexing (patriarchal) discourse," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(1), pages 152-170, January.
    16. Jaclyn Piatak & Zachary Mohr, 2019. "More gender bias in academia? Examining the influence of gender and formalization on student worker rule following," Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration, vol. 2(2).
    17. Kendall Funk, 2019. "If the shoe fits: Gender role congruity and evaluations of public managers," Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration, vol. 2(1).
    18. Peter Neuhäusler & Torben Schubert & Rainer Frietsch & Knut Blind, 2016. "Managing portfolio risk in strategic technology management: evidence from a panel data-set of the world's largest R&D performers," Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(7), pages 651-667, October.
    19. Parizek, Michal & Stephen, Matthew D., 2021. "The Increasing Representativeness of International Organizations’ Secretariats: Evidence from the United Nations System, 1997–2015," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 65(1), pages 197-209.
    20. Xuhong Su & Barry Bozeman, 2016. "Family Friendly Policies in STEM Departments: Awareness and Determinants," Research in Higher Education, Springer;Association for Institutional Research, vol. 57(8), pages 990-1009, December.
    21. García-Sánchez, Isabel-María & Suárez-Fernández, Oscar & Martínez-Ferrero, Jennifer, 2019. "Female directors and impression management in sustainability reporting," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 28(2), pages 359-374.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • R14 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Land Use Patterns
    • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:117861. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.