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This introduction seeks to locate the origins of the competency management in American and British management concerns with declining international competitiveness and the need for more efficient and effective managers. It examines the distinctive American and British approaches and identifies and defines the ideas, concepts and techniques associated with competency in each country. The transfer of these ideas and practices into the public sector accompanied the spread of new public management, which has increased throughout the 1990s. The movement is now an international one prompted by both the OECD and the management consultancy industry. The process of adoption and implementation has tended to be pragmatic and ad hoc but evidence suggests it is now becoming an important vehicle for organisational cultural change. This introduction provides the backdrop for the remaining five articles in this special issue of the journal, which illustrate both developments in theory and practice of competency‐based management within public services.

Purpose -This paper introduces the symposium on public management reform and its impact on public servant's identity. It provides both a descriptive and theoretical context within which the other contributions to the symposium can be located. Design/methodology/approach -It is based on a literature review and a summary of the articles in the symposium Findings -The paper describes the changes associated with new public management (NPM) and its variants and their impact on systems of public administration and public officials. It also highlights the contribution that cultural and social theories, drawn from anthropology and organisational psychology, make to an understanding of the processes by which public servants' identity are formed and changed. It complements this with an examination of different models of bureaucracy, which reflect the transition from classical public administration to NPM. These concepts and ideas are developed further in other articles in the journal. Originality/value -It provides an introduction for readers unfamiliar with the core concepts and ideas associated with individual, group and organisational identity and highlights for readers what is central to the research papers in the symposium.

This articler traces the origins, development and decline of the public service ethos in the British civil service and the extent to which it has been supplanted by a new set of values, beliefs and institutional relationships since the 1980s. The modem civil service dates from the mid-nineteenth century and has evolved to meet the changing needs ofthe state as it has movedfrom a regulatory to a social service to a welfare state and now to an enabling state over the last 150 years. Some periods were significant for step changes in the structure and role of the service but these have been interspersed with longer periods of incremental change. By the 1920s the service was underpinned with an ethicalframework or public service ethos, which both attracted and guided civil servants and shaped the public's expectations of their behaviour It also contributed to its high international standing and the respect ofgovernments ofall political parties and the public. During the 1960s, however, criticisms of the service increased and by the 1980s the public service ethos had become an issue as a series of events called into question the impartiality and integrity of senior civil servants. This article explores the origins and content of the ethos and the extent to which it has been replaced by a new set of values consistent with the new role of the state associated with public management reforms and governance.