The interaction of multiple drivers of intra-organizational change in ministerial administrations: A study of three decades of structural reforms in the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0952076720904439 |
| Author | Christina Lichtmannegger,Bach Tobias |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
Article
The interaction of
multiple drivers of
intra-organizational
change in ministerial
administrations: A study
of three decades of
structural reforms in
the Austrian Ministry
of Agriculture
Christina Lichtmannegger
Leibniz University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany
Tobias Bach
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Abstract
Administrative reform policies cutting across several sectors are commonplace in the
public sector. However, reform policies do not necessarily result in organizational
change. This article examines intra-organizational change within the Austrian Ministr y
of Agriculture in a longitudinal case study covering a period of three decades, which
allows us to study short-term and long term-effects of administrative reforms.
Whereas existing research mainly uses single-factor explanations for inter- and
intra-organizational change, this article emphasizes the interplay of various drivers of
organizational change within government organizations. In analytical terms, we draw on
the multiple streams framework to study intra-organizational decision-making which is
embedded in government-wide administrative reform policies. We find that reform
leads to intra-organizational change when a political entrepreneur is able to couple
Corresponding author:
Christina Lichtmannegger, Leibniz University of Hannover, Schneiderberg 50, 30167 Hannover, Germany.
Email: c.lichtmannegger@ipw.uni-hannover.de
Public Policy and Administration
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0952076720904439
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2023, Vol. 38(3) 287–308
288 Public Policy and Administration 38(3)
solutions and problems in a decision window, which may happen decades after the
initial reform attempts, underscoring that short-term reform failure may turn into
success in a long-term perspective.
Keywords
Europeanization, ministerial administration, multiple streams approach, reform imple-
mentation, organizational change
Introduction
The last decades have witnessed changing reform doctrines in the public sector and
different waves of structural changes. Administrative reforms have become an
everyday activity in the public sector. There is an increasing body of knowledge
about structural changes in ministerial departments (Davis et al., 1999; Derlien,
1996; Mortensen and Green-Pedersen, 2015; Pollitt, 1984). In contrast, few schol-
ars have paid attention to the dynamics of intra-organizational changes in minis-
terial departments (Christensen 1997; Hustedt, 2013). Moreover, most authors
focus on single-factor explanations of structural change, such as administrative
reforms (Rolland and Roness, 2012), Europeanization (Dimitrova and Toshkov,
2007; Zubek and Staro
nova
´, 2012), or political explanations such as political
turnover (Holmgren, 2018; James et al., 2016) and changes in political attention
(Mortensen and Green-Pedersen, 2015). These studies are important, yet
they potentially disregard the interplay of various drivers of structural change in
government organizations.
Much of the literature takes a macro perspective on the entire population of a
specific type of organization such as ministerial departments (Davis et al., 1999;
Mortensen and Green-Pedersen, 2015; Pollitt, 1984), while case studies of long-
term dynamics of structural changes unfolding within the same organization
are largely missing (but see Corbett and Howard, 2017). Despite governments’
ubiquitous reform efforts, we know little about the short- and long-term effects
of structural reform policies (but see Christensen, 1997; March and Olsen, 1983).
As we argue in more detail below, a longitudinal case study design is suitable to
address those challenges, namely to investigate several explanatory factors
for structural change within a single organization. This allows us to assess their
interactions and the conditions under which different explanations provide most
analytical leverage (MacCarthaigh et al., 2012).
Another challenge for analyzing the determinants of structural change is the gap
between the time horizon of theoretical explanations and the dynamics of struc-
tural change. Although organizational studies show that change is a long-term
process (Donaldson, 1996), it is striking that structural changes in public
organizations are primarily studied as short-term processes (Dimitrova and
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