PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION

In 1960 a newcomer to public personnel administration in Australia would have been presented with two treatises and told that these were the alpha and omega of the subject. The first edition of R. N. Spann's Public Administration in Australia appeared in 1959, while the Boyer Report, the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Public Service Recruitment , of which R. S. Parker was co-author, was also published in that year. The newcomer would have found in these works not only an introduction to the then generally accepted ideas about personnel management in Australian public services, but also a critical assessment of those prevailing ideas, a critique which reveals the authors' beliefs and which influenced the succeeding generation of practitioners.