‘We lost a type of job for a type of person in this country’: changing expectations of working in the UK scientific civil service

Abstract

Organisational change in UK government research establishments (GREs) during the late twentieth century profoundly affected the scientific civil servants who worked in them.[1] Civil service reforms in the 1980s and 1990s led to the reconfiguration of career management frameworks, alterations to physical working environments, the introduction of new management practices and an increasingly commercial outlook in GREs, yet we know very little about the how these changes were experienced by the scientists themselves. A new series of oral history interviews with former scientific civil servants offers the personal perspective of everyday working life in a GRE. Through extensive use of interviewees’ own words this article reveals the norms and values associated with working in the scientific civil service and articulates the processes of organisational change that led to a fundamental shift in how government scientists felt about their work. In so doing it offers a record of a type of scientific working life in the UK that has largely disappeared as a consequence of bureaucratic reform and commercialisation.

Keywords

• building research establishment
• defence evaluation and research agency
• defence research agency
• government research establishment
• government science
• life story
• oral history
• organisational change
• privatisation
• qinetiq
• royal aircraft establishment