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 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 further research. Points for practitioners We present here a novel approach for representing the structural changes that organizations and sub-departments experience over time that can apply to any hierarchical organization (public or private). Applying the approach illuminates the historical development 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.
This article explores the structural diversity of intraministerial organization over time. Based on organization theory, it proposes a generic typology for intraministerial units applicable to any hierarchically structured government organization. We empirically investigate the critical case of the German federal bureaucracy. By classifying its subunits, we analyze the longitudinal development of structural differentiation and its correspondence to denominational variety. The data stem from a novel international dataset, covering all ministries between 1980 and 2015. We find that intraministerial structure differentiates over time, across and within ministries. A stable core of traditional Weberian structure is complemented by structurally innovative intraministerial units. We conclude that the German federal bureaucracy is more diverse than suggested in previous literature. Our findings indicate that less Weberian bureaucracies are at least as structurally diverse and that more reform‐driven bureaucracies will have experienced at least as many changes in structural diversity.
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