Administrative service as civic practice: Pancasila-based public service ethics and the performance of educational support staff in a higher education faculty

Abstract

Administrative and educational support staff (tenaga kependidikan) occupy a largely under-theorised position in the citizenship literature, even though they mediate the everyday relationship between higher education institutions and the students and citizens they serve. Drawing on the sociology of bureaucratic encounter and on Pancasila-based public service ethics, this study examines how the performance of faculty-level support staff at a public university in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, enacts – or fails to enact – civic values of hospitality, responsiveness and accountability in the delivery of everyday administrative services. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, the study analysed indicators of staff performance (work quality, task accuracy, initiative, and competence) alongside organisational, individual, and cultural factors that shape service delivery. The findings show that staff performance sustains a broadly courteous and orderly service culture, but is constrained by weak task awareness, uneven competence, inadequate systems and facilities, hierarchical bureaucratic culture, and insufficient reward and evaluation mechanisms. These constraints are read here not merely as management failures but as breakdowns in the civic contract between the institution and its academic citizens. The article situates these findings within recent Scopus- and Web of Science-indexed scholarship on administrative service quality, street-level bureaucracy and public service ethics, and argues for reconceptualising administrative reform in universities as a form of institutional citizenship education. The article discusses implications for competency-based evaluation, digital service reform, and staff training.