This book addresses the key debates about public services reform in the last decade. The focus is on providing a detailed and critical analysis of both the restructuring of the public services, the emergence of a more managerially-organised public service and trade union responses to those developments. The main aims fo the book are to open up the debates about the restructuring of the central administrative structures in two liberal democratic states, to provide a rigorous empirical basis to studies about public service reform and to lay the foundation for addressing arguments about the relationship between restructuring of modern states and trade union responses to these processes.