P18 Cultivating the Mandarins of Tomorrow: Public Sector Human Capital Issues in the Asia Pacific Region

Panel Members & Contact Details

Chung-An Chen, Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Email: cchongan@ntu.edu.sg

Chih-Wei Hsieh, Associate Professor, Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Email: cwhsieh@cityu.edu.hk

Soojin Kim, Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Email: sjkim@ntu.edu.sg

Liang Ma, Professor, School of Government, Peking University, P.R. China.  Email: liangma@pku.edu.cn

Assel Mussagulova, Lecturer, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney, Australia Email: assel.mussagulova@sydney.edu.au

Sangyub Ryu, Associate Professor, Department of Public Administration, Yonsei University, South Korea. Email: sangyub@yonsei.ac.kr

Summary

This panel explores the evolving concept of public sector human capital in the Asia-Pacific, emphasizing how cultural, institutional, and historical contexts shape recruitment, values, training, and performance. It highlights the limitations of Western-centric models and calls for regionally grounded, comparative research to better understand how public service careers are constructed and sustained in diverse Asian settings. The panel invites studies on topics such as public service education, competitive exams, Confucian ethics, and culturally embedded HR practices to foster more context-sensitive public management insights.

Decsription

In the last few decades, we have created unprecedented prosperity in our human society by using, or overexploiting, various natural resources. However, shrinking natural resources have caused tensions and conflicts across political boundaries. In the 21st century, we should seriously consider other alternatives such as human capital, a specific genre of resource that will never be depleted. The research on public sector human capital is multi-faceted, including public affairs education, the attraction and recruitment of public servants, values and ethics of public servants, interpersonal relationships, work attitudes, and performance.

Although public sector human capital research is traditionally Western-centric, many recent studies indicate that Western experiences may not be perfectly replicated in Asia. For example, attracting capable candidates is a core issue in the West, but is never a concern in Asia. Public service exams are extremely competitive in Asia (Lee, Chung, & Rhee, 2024), which results in parents’ high expectation on children in taking public service exams (Chen, Chen, & Xu, 2023). The cult of public service positions is a pervasive social phenomenon deeply rooted in Confucianism, a culture in which public officials enjoy high prestige in a society.

The public service exam is merely one of the many examples. Hofstede (2007) highlights that Asia’s distinct context necessitates more regionally focused, cross-cultural, and comparative research in public management. The region represents a convergence of deep-rooted civilizational legacies and rapid modernization. In East Asia, Confucian values—hierarchical harmony, respect for authority, collective duty—still shape bureaucratic norms (Hwang et al., 2009). South and Southeast Asia retain British‐influenced meritocratic exams and a clear politics–administration divide (Farazmand, 2023), while parts of the Islamic world interweave public service with religious and community ethics (ElKaleh & Samier, 2013). Superimposed on these legacies are postwar “economic miracles” that fostered state‐led, performance‐driven economies (Campos & Root, 1996). Concurrently, digitalization, widening inequality, and higher citizen expectations are challenging administrations, requiring Western models—public service motivation, collaborative policymaking, data‐driven management—to be adapted to Asian institutional and cultural contexts.

Given the background, we welcome studies of public sector human capital in the Asia Pacific region. They include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Public administration education: How does public administration education look like at universities? Does it foster, or compromise, students’ passion for public service jobs (Huang, 2022)? Do Asian students and Western students have different understanding of “good public servants” or “good government” due to cultural differences?
• Selection and recruitment of public servants: Is attracting capable candidates for public service a concern in your hometown? Or alternatively, most people want a public service career, so that public service exams are competitive? If so, does the current exam system attract competent, idealistic, and passionate candidates (Chen et al., 2025)? 
• Values and ethics: Do Confucian notions of face and harmony, British impartiality codes, or Pancasila’s communal ethos affect Asian public servants? If so, are they reflected in their public values system and public ethics? For example, under the influence of harmony in Confucianism, are East Asians more tolerant to corruption? 
• Public service training and socialization: Are unique cultures, values, and ethics considered in public service training or on-the-job mentorship? For example, South Korea blends formal leadership modules with guanxi-based mentoring (O’Neil et al., 2024; Kim, 2020). How does this affect public employees’ work morale? 
• Employee performance: Do values, ethics, and attitudes embedded in Asian cultures affect promotion, accountability, collaboration, and service quality (Ma et al., 2015)?

In sum, this panel aims to foster context-sensitive insights into how public servants are selected, socialized, and supported. Perhaps comparative quantitative or mixed-methods studies—within Asia or against non-Asian cases—can help with the answers. 

Relevance

“Beyond boundaries” is what we intend to pursue in this Asia-focused panel, and this goal is perfectly in line with the conference theme.

Over the past four years as co-chairs, we have successfully organized the Asia-focused panel in the IRSPM conferences, and the outcomes have surpassed our expectations. In our inaugural 23rd IRSPM in Wellington, New Zealand, we received roughly 40 submissions—primarily from East and Southeast Asia—and selected 20 high-quality papers for presentation across five sessions. From 2021 through 2024, our panels continued to feature three sessions annually, with an average of four to five papers per session. Notably, interest from Western scholars grew each year, resulting in an increased number of cross-national comparative proposals.

These outcomes have reinforced our confidence that an Asia-themed panel is a valuable and distinctive contribution to a predominantly European public administration and management conference. We anticipate that the 2026 IRSPM panel will again attract scholars and practitioners from Asia and beyond, fostering rich exchanges—particularly between Asian case studies and those from the Western societies.