Civil Service

The organization and personnel of the executive branch of contemporary government. Every contemporary state, democratic or not, has some kind of civil service, however small or large, occupied with the execution of public policies and the implementation of laws/ Civil service originates in the European tradition of public or administration. It is not the same as public service or bureaucracy.

Public service is a broad concept that comes out of the tradition of French administrative law. It is a wider notion than civil service in the sense that it refers to various kinds of service offered by the state to its citizens through a multitude of agencies and organizations of the wider public sector. In more philosophical language, public service is also associated with public interest as a creation of the actions of state authorities.

Bureaucracy, on the other hand, is a system of hierarchically related positions. These offices are occupied by trained, full-time employees who have jurisdiction over an officially delimited area and process written documents. They are supervised by superiors who must comply with technical rules sanctioned by law. This classic conception of bureaucracy draws on the thought of the German sociologist and historian Max Weber (1864-1920). Although Weber's idea of bureaucracy stemmed from the Persian state (the predecessor of modern Germany), it has also been used for the study of large private and nonprofit organizations.