Introduction: Challenges and Rationale

The 21^st century is the age of globalization, a process through which worldwide integration and transcendence takes place, with far-reaching consequences for governance, public administration, cultures, and economies. It is also an age of rapid change, with hyper-uncertainty, complexity, and an increasingly unknown future. To meet the challenges of this age of the knowledge-based world, governments must be prepared to build and upgrade their capacity to govern and manage through ‘strategic personnel and human capital development.’ This is now a prescription for survival, no longer a luxury.

These challenges are local, national, regional, and global and they occur casually and unexpectedly, producing surprises, potential chaos and breakdowns with transformation. Although some breakdowns transformation may be desirable for organizational or system renewal in an age of hyper-complexity and uncertainty, most have extremely harsh consequences for those effected. In governance and public administration, large-scale transformations have already taken place since the 1980s through massive downsizing, sweeping privatization, and application of the new market-based public management ideology.

The concepts of new governance and new public management have already brought on line an expanded corporate business sector and a shrunken government, in the name of small government for democracy. They have also aligned the entire role of governments around the world towards achieving the goals of corporate “globalization,” a process that tends to enclose global capitalism through corporate organization of the market system. This represents a multitude of challenges posed to governance and public administration. These range from accountability and ethical problems to a loss of institutional memory and much-needed talents, in a public personnel administration meant for building strategic human capital that can manage such challenges and cope with the ensuing crises. Today’s managerial skills are no longer good for tomorrow’s complex world, especially in the face of unexpected crises, emergencies, knowledge-based complexities, amongst other factors.  

Strategic Public Personnel Administration: History, Concepts, and Perspectives.

Public personnel administration is a historical component of public administration. As such, it is also as old as human civilization, dating back several millennia, when mass-scale public administration projects were first carried out. The advent of agriculture and rise of slavery required, and facilitated, the practice of personnel management on different scales. Construction of large-scale public works projects in ancient times required slaves, semi-slaves, mercenaries, volunteers, forced laborers, and paid workers, all of whom had to be organized, coordinated, and managed. Selection of different workers, both skilled and unskilled, and professional artisans such as carpenters, blacksmiths, accountants, record keepers, inspectors, planners, stone cutters, artists, and the like was not an arbitrary function; it was mostly calculated with instrumental rationality as well as political loyalty.

The construction of the Pyramids in Egypt, of the Suez Canal in Egypt under Persian rule circa 500 BC, of the gigantic Persepolis ceremonial capital-city structure in 5^th century B.C. Persia, the great Wall of China about the same time, as well as many other huge public projects in Rome, Persia, and elsewhere indicates how human labor and skills have been organized, selected, retained, coordinated, and managed to achieve planned and unplanned goals throughout the history of human civilizations. Similarly, the early Sumerians’ elaborate city planning, the early Iranian Elamite Empire’s strategic planning and construction of underground canal systems, the Persian bureaucracy and administrative system, and the Roman army regimentation, demonstrate how human activities were elaborately selected, developed, mastered, and managed with efficiency and effectiveness at a large scale from early on.

Recent discoveries show evidence of “women supervisors” serving as managers of the compensation system during the more than 80-year construction process of the Persepolis mega-structure as the ceremonial capital of the first World-State Achaemenid Persian Empire in the 5^th century B.C. Thousands of skilled workers, professionals, and functionaries were selected from all around the vast empire to perform the project; their compensation system was a challenging task. Many of the women bureaucrats who performed an efficient job of personnel management must have served in strategic positions of the government and public administration.

Thus, the history of public personnel administration goes back as far as early human civilizations. Continuity in civil and military public personnel administration is also manifest in the landmark public projects – roads, highways, buildings, bridges, fortifications, palaces, castles, and others – built around the world during the last two millennia.

What is most significant about the history of public personnel is the “strategic” feature of this undeclared and understudied profession within public administration throughout its long history. While supervisory personnel management is very common throughout history, strategic personnel management has played a key function in recruitment, selection, development, and retention of strategic personnel for key positions or tasks. Thus the role of strategic personnel management appears in the history of public administration. But what does this concept “strategic” mean?

Concepts and Perspectives

By “strategic,” I mean at least two or three principal perspectives: One is the long-term human capital building and development perspective that guides today’s and tomorrow’s preparation, through education and training in human resources management for long-term and results-oriented future performance and organizational behavior. This perspective must be congruent with overall strategic vision, mission, and plans for building and managing human capital to meet the challenges of the 21^st century. It requires broad-based, holistic thinking, with visions that consider all sorts of challenges as well as opportunities in an age of accelerated globalization of capital, labor, management, and virtual organizations worldwide.

The second perspective refers to the instrumentally key positions as well as functions and tasks that link the nerve systems of government organizations. All positions and functions or tasks are important to organizations. However, high-performing organizational managers and leaders know – and should know –that certain positions and functions or tasks are instrumental to linking strategic performance points of an organization. This is where preparation for human capital building and management is absolutely essential, to manage highly demanding organizations with increasingly complex and challenging 21^st century environments in an age of rapid globalization.

In this new, volatile environment, every manager and administrator must learn how to ride the high waves of change, develop and pursue vision, manage his/her employees and co-workers, and coordinate human performance activities with skilled leadership, motivation, and equitable compensation. Building and developing such a human capital or asset also requires capacity building in retention and promotion, without which organizational waste and productivity loss are almost guaranteed. The key to understanding and implementation of these strategic perspectives in building and managing human capital is innovation: in flexible structuration concerning organizational authority and decision-making systems, communication networks, coordination, job and position classifications, virtual as well as space-based workplaces, planning and recruitment, and promotion, compensation, and motivation systems. The age of using structural rigidity to maintain stability is over, and the new age of the 21^st century requires massive “flexibilization.” However, like everything else, flexibilization offers its own negative as well as positive effects to public personnel administration systems; it offers opportunities to both management and labor, but it also carries drawbacks and problems for employees and workers.

Dimensions and Issues in Strategic Public Personnel Administration

There are several dimensions to strategic public personnel administration in modern organizations in the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. While these dimensions are fairly universal across sectors and organizations, there are some key features unique to public organizations. These include strategic planning, structural (vertical and horizontal, rules, etc), process, and value or cultural dimensions; environmental, organizational, political, socioeconomic, managerial and leadership, labor, globalization, and technological dimensions; partisan politics and patronage systems, parliamentary versus presidential systems, or a combination of the two that define the environmental parameters of personnel systems in governments; legislative and other legal or constitutional requirements or constraints that public personnel managers are conditioned by; and functional performance dimensions. Strategic public personnel administration also deals with a number of critical issues that include gender, race and color, democratic representative bureaucracy and civil service systems, pay for performance, equity and efficiency, constitutional rights and responsibilities of public employees, flexibilization and job mobility, diversity, innovation and total quality management, merit and professionalism, ethics and accountability, labor, knowledge management, and political economy of civil service reforms and personnel systems.