Between life and death: organizational change in central state bureaucracies in cross-national comparison
| Author | Brendan J. Carroll,Jana Bertels,Caterina Froio,Sanneke Kuipers,Lena Schulze-Gabrechten,Scott Viallet-Thévenin |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020852320964558 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Between life and death:
organizational change
in central state
bureaucracies in
cross-national
comparison
Brendan J. Carroll
Leiden University, The Netherlands
Jana Bertels
University of Potsdam, Germany
Caterina Froio
Sciences Po, France
Sanneke Kuipers
Leiden University, The Netherlands
Lena Schulze-Gabrechten
University of Potsdam, Germany
Scott Viallet-Th
evenin
Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Morocco
Abstract
Identifying and explaining change in the structure of central state bureaucracies and the
determinants of survival of individual public organizations are two closely related areas
of research in public administration. We aim to bridge the gap between these two main
Corresponding author:
Brendan J. Carroll, Leiden University, Institute of Public Administration, Faculty of Governance and Global
Affairs, Turfmarkt 99, 2511 DP Den Haag, The Netherlands.
Email: b.j.carroll@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852320964558
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
2022, Vol. 88(4) 943–959
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
strands of studies of organizational change by presenting a novel approach to collecting
event history data for public organizations. We have developed this framework as part
of the Structure and Organisation of Governments Project, which aims to map entire
central state bureaucracies in three Western European countries. Our approach is
flexible enough to describe macro-trends in public sector organization populations
and to explain these trends by analysing the event histories of the organizations they
comprise. In addition to presenting our framework and how we applied it to create this
data set, we also present some initial cross-national comparisons of the distribution
of the event types recorded, highlighting initial findings and promising avenues for fur-
ther research.
Points for practitioners
We present here a novel approach for representing the structural changes that organ-
izations and sub-departments experience over time that can apply to any hierarchical
organization (public or private). Applying the approach illuminates the historical devel-
opment of organizations and their parts, and allows cross-national comparisons of
events and trends across organizations. Our comparison of ministerial organizations
in France, Germany and the Netherlands from 1980 to 2013 shows that trends in the
size of bureaucracies mask considerable structural changes within.
Keywords
administration in transition, administrative organization and structures, central admin-
istration, civil service, public administration
Introduction
The structure of government both reflects government priorities and shapes exec-
utive decision-making, so understanding how governmental structures change illu-
minates core concerns of public administration (Hammond, 1986; Mortensen and
Green-Pedersen, 2015; Tosun, 2018). In developed countries and beyond, trends in
public management and changes to political–administrative relations, executive
leadership and policy priorities have given rise to adapting bureaucratic structures.
Aggregate patterns of structural changes necessarily involve the creation, modifi-
cation and termination of individual public organizations and their subunits, with
serious implications for the tasks carried out by changed administrative entities.
Few scholars include both the macro- and micro-levels when examining public
sector organizational change, a combination that reveals both gradual change
processes and major government reforms (Adam et al., 2007). Fewer engage in
cross-national comparisons over a relatively long period of time (Lim, forthcom-
ing). Instead, two disparate strands dominate the literature on the structural
change of the state (Kuipers et al., 2018).
944 International Review of Administrative Sciences 88(4)
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