Individualized Contracts For Top Public Servants: Copying Business, Path‐Dependent Political Re‐Engineering—or Trobriand Cricket?

This article compares the “contractualization” of senior civil‐service employment in New Zealand and the UK over the past decade. It argues the conventional interpretation of the introduction of individual contracts for senior civil servants—as part of a worldwide process of modernizing the public sector by mimicking private‐sector practice—neither explains major differences between the two cases nor the many ways in which private business practice was in fact not followed in either case. “Political re‐engineering” seems to have been a more important impetus in a form that was highly path‐dependent and did not produce convergent outcomes. But even so, it does not follow that the outcome of the new contract regimes adopted for top civil servants necessarily follows the intentions of the architects of reform, as is shown by discussing two prominent cases in which the new contractualized accountability arrangements were tested and an element of “Trobriand cricket” (that is, a game played differently from the intentions of those who introduced it) entered into the contractualization of senior civil‐service terms.