Tolerant, If Personal Goals Remain Unharmed: Explaining Supranational Bureaucrats' Attitudes to Organizational Change

Abstract

Growth in membership and intensifying responsibilities require much greater adaptability in organizational structures and administrative arrangements at international than at national levels. The ongoing transformation toward multilevel governance seems to empower international organizations and thus shines a new spotlight on international civil servants. We know little, however, about what motivates this growing class of bureaucratic elite. Against this background, this article explores the question as to how officials of the European Commission relate to the recent management modernization within their institution (Kinnock reform). Competing explanatory approaches (opportunity, socialization, and governance views) are used to develop hypotheses about the relationship between Commission officials and their acceptance of or opposition to administrative reform. The main finding is that the individual attitudes of Commission officials toward administrative change can best be explained by the opportunity model, which emphasizes the rational calculation of individual costs and benefits.

Representative bureaucracy and seconded national government officials in the European Commission

“…To the best of our knowledge, no such comparative studies exist in the representative bureaucracy literature to date. 13 1 Choosing the Commission as empirical laboratory offers an opportunity to embed our analysis within an existing body of knowledge on Commission bureaucrats (Hooghe 2005(Hooghe , 2012Gravier 2008Gravier , 2013Stevens 2009;Bauer 2012;Murdoch & Geys 2012;Egeberg 2012a;Ban 2013;Kassim et al 2013). Moreover, and more practically, Commission staff data are more easily publicly accessible than those of other international organizations.…”

“…Choosing the Commission as empirical laboratory offers an opportunity to embed our analysis within an existing body of knowledge on Commission bureaucrats (Hooghe , ; Gravier , ; Stevens ; Bauer ; Murdoch & Geys ; Egeberg ; Ban ; Kassim et al . ).…”

'Supranationalism' in Question: Beliefs, Values, and the Socializing Power of the European Commission Revisited

“…She finds evidence for the first three in her 2002 book, but not her 2005 article. Bauer () and Kassim et al (, ch. 8), meanwhile, also find evidence that utility maximization, understood in terms of career prospects and departmental interests, is an important explanatory variable, but their findings are linked explicitly to attitudes to reform and they do not suggest that utility maximization applies more generally.…”

“…A second perspective contests the first and argues, on the contrary, that post‐recruitment experience – specifically, the working environment in the Commission – does have an impact on the loyalties of staff (Trondal , ). For the third, inspired by public choice accounts, employee preferences are shaped by self‐interest (Bauer ; Kassim et al , ch. 4).…”

EU politicization and policy initiatives of the European Commission: the case of consumer policy

“…Given varying attitudes in the Commission (Kassim et al 2013), this is a simplifying assumption. However, Commission officials tend to assess their organizational environment along rational calculations (Bauer 2012) and realize that the politicization of European integration challenges supranational competences (Bes 2017). The model developed here also works with the more constrained assumption that Commission officials on average hold a preference to at least retain the regulatory powers of the Commission.…”