France and Great Britain are usually said to display very different patterns of evolution as regards public administration and neo-managerial reforms. Indeed, whereas Britain is often depicted as a pioneer, especially regarding the important movement of agencification launched in the late 1980’s, France is generally described as a resisting case. This paper questions this commonly shared view by considering an insufficiently explored aspect of neomanagerial reforms: their centralizing dimension. Building on numerous semi-directive interviews conducted in both countries and on a detailed analysis of archives and public documentation, the paper compares the emergence and implementation of a centralized human resource management policy in the higher civil service in France and the UK since the mid-1990’s. It shows a progressive consolidation of organizations at the core of British and French administrative systems, promoting centralized government of top civil servants. In both countries, these organizations - namely the Cabinet Office in the British case and the Direction générale de l’administration et de la fonction publique (DGAFP) in France - convert to neomanagerial techniques of recruitment, training, assessment, pay and career management in order to impose themselves as transversal regulator of the administrative labor market. Doing so, these historically week organizations challenge the traditional roles of other actors, such as ministries of finance, professional associations, or departmental ministries. In this context, the ability of central organizations to govern from the centre seems to be highly dependent of Prime ministerial support for the construction of a centralized administrative labor market at the top.
