Learning from the Commission case: The comparative study of management change in international public administrations
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12546 |
SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
Learning from the Commission case:
The comparative study of management
change in international public administrations
Jörn Ege
German University of Administrative Sciences
Speyer, Speyer, Germany
Correspondence
Jörn Ege, German University of Administrative
Sciences Speyer, Freiherr-vom-Stein-Str.
2, 67346 Speyer, Germany.
Email: ege@uni-speyer.de
Funding information
German Research Foundation, Grant/Award
Number: FOR # 1745 TP 02 EG 395/1-2
Despite the growing importance attributed to organizational per-
formance in global governance, management change in interna-
tional public administrations (IPAs) is still poorly understood. In
particular, the lack of comparative analyses that cover a broader
range of management areas limits our descriptive knowledge about
the direction and intensity of management change in IPAs. Without
such knowledge, however, refining existing theories about the
causes and consequences of change is difficult. Based on the
reforms of the European Commission, the article reviews available
studies about managerial change in IPAs to identify pertinent
topics, available knowledge and gaps in the literature. Aiming to
narrow these gaps, empirical data on three IPAs are presented to
show in which areas and to what degree the management changed
over time in these cases and to illustrate how multi-dimensional
managerial change can be studied comparatively in future research
more generally.
1|INTRODUCTION
Effectively tackling transnational problems requires increasing coordination between jurisdictions, which often
involves International Governmental Organizations (IGOs). With an increasing delegation of tasks, a growing mem-
bership base and more functional differentiation of their bureaucratic arms (Lenz et al. 2015, p. 147), the problem-
solving capacity of IGO secretariats, henceforth referred to as International Public Administrations (IPAs), has come
under increasing pressure (see also Tosun et al. 2019). Despite being related to more traditional concepts of perfor-
mance, administrative problem-solving goes beyond effectiveness and efficiency (Trein et al. 2019). It has a distinct
focus on policy outputs and refers to an IPA’s capacity to engage in cooperative efforts with policy-makers to gener-
ate solutions that are expected to be collectively beneficial in making a contribution to solve the policy problem at
hand (see also Heidbreder et al. 2019; Maggetti and Trein 2019; Thomann et al. 2019). This capacity has long been
found to be key to the work of the ‘international civil service’(Biermann and Siebenhüner 2013; Langrod 1963) and
makes questions of management change particularly relevant for the study of IPAs.
Received: 30 January 2018 Revised: 20 July 2018 Accepted: 7 August 2018
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12546
384 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm Public Administration. 2019;97:384–398.
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