Crises and waves – changes in the system of public employment in Europe

The recent decades of public employment have passed in a continuous wave between the maintenance of the Weberian “bureaucratic ideal” (Weber, 1978, pp. 220–221) and the new trend of the seventies, the 3Es (economy, effectiveness, efficiency) The essence of the “fight” can be summarised in the way how, and by how much, individual countries deviate from the ideal of the public servant independent of the daily fluctuations of politics towards the direction of a public employment that operates cheaply, effectively and efficiently (OECD, 1999, pp. 8–14). Different countries have built up distinct public employment systems depending on their actual economic situation, social conditions and traditions and, even today, they also react differently to the challenges. As far as the systems of public employment are concerned literature applies numerous types or categories (Linder, 2010, Gajduschek, 2005), but the substance of them is the same in an employment aspect, where the individual public employment systems are situated at some point on an imaginary Weberian – open employment scale.