The interaction of administrative tradition and organisational characteristics: the case of agency personnel management autonomy
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852319889674 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The interaction of
administrative tradition
and organisational
characteristics: the case
of agency personnel
management autonomy
Tobias Bach
University of Oslo, Norway
Koen Verhoest
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Jan Wynen
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Abstract
Comparative scholars emphasise that public administration should be understood in
terms of context-bound patterns of organising and decision-making. Agencies in the
same context will display more commonalities than those in another. At the same time,
there is good empirical evidence for organisational-level variation in decision-making.
For instance, not all agencies in one country are delegated similar levels of personnel
management autonomy. This article develops a theoretical argument about how
administrative tradition moderates the effect of organisational drivers of personnel
management autonomy. We identify the degree of uniformity embedded in administra-
tive tradition as a key explanatory factor for this relationship. In empirical terms,
the article compares the perceived personnel management autonomy of agencies in
10 European countries nested in three country clusters (Scandinavian, Latin-
Napoleonic and Continental). The analysis confirms theoretical expectations about
Authors are listed in alphabetical order and contributed equally to this article.
Corresponding author:
Tobias Bach, University of Oslo, PO Box 1097, Blindern, Oslo 0317, Norway.
Email: tobias.bach@stv.uio.no
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852319889674
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2022, Vol. 88(1) 95–113
the context-specific effects of organisational characteristics on personnel management
autonomy in agencies.
Points for practitioners
This article explains why agency managers’ perceived degree of personnel management
autonomy varies between different administrative traditions. It shows that some
contexts display a greater heterogeneity of delegating personnel management autonomy
to agency managers, whereas other contexts are characterised by homogeneous practi-
ces of delegation to agencies of the same legal type. This finding suggests that changes in
agencies’ legal type are important instruments of effective reform in high-uniformity
contexts, whereas they will have only a limited effect in low-uniformity contexts.
Keywords
administrative tradition, autonomy and control, comparative public administration, gov-
ernment agencies
Introduction
[T]here is not, and cannot be, one best theory for explaining agency behaviour, any-
where, any time.
1
This article contributes to the debate about the relevance of macro- versus
meso-level explanations for the comparative study of bureaucracy (Aberbach
and Rockman, 1987; Levi-Faur, 2004). This debate revolves around the challenge
of cross-country comparison under conditions of within-country variation: ‘The
central problem of cross-systems comparison is how to distinguish the conditions
under which there is greater variation across than within systems’ (Aberbach and
Rockman, 1987: 477). Macro-level explanations are situated at the level of groups
of countries or individual countries representing distinct administrative traditions
(Kuhlmann and Wollmann, 2014; Painter and Peters, 2010; Peters, 2008;
Yesilkagit, 2010). In comparative research on public sector reforms, such contex-
tual factors are understood as ‘implementation habitats’ that filter which kinds of
reform are appropriate (Bezes and Parrado, 2013; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). In
the literature on the governing of agencies, macro-level explanations suggest that
agencies in the same context will display more commonalities than those in dis-
similar contexts (Pollitt et al., 2004).
Another strand of literature emphasises substantial variation in the governing
of agencies within similar contexts. These studies show how agencies differ regard-
ing formal and actual autonomy (Bach, 2014; Painter and Yee, 2011; Verhoest
et al., 2004; Yesilkagit and Van Thiel, 2008), the use of management instruments
96 International Review of Administrative Sciences 88(1)
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