Agencification and Location. Does Agency Site Matter?

In this paper, based on a large-N elite survey among Norwegian agency officials, the authors show that agency autonomy, agency influence and inter-institutional coordination seem to be relatively unaffected by agency site.

ARENA Working Paper 03/2010 (pdf)

Morten Egeberg and Jarle Trondal

Two decades of New Public Management have placed agencifiction high on the agenda of administrative policy-makers. However, agencification (and de-agencification) has been one of the enduring themes of public administration. Agencies organized at arm’s length from ministerial departments have fairly often been located outside of the capital or political centre. Although practitioners tend to assign some weight to central versus peripheral location as regards political-administrative behavior, this relationship has been almost totally ignored by scholars in the field. In this paper, based on a large-N elite survey, we show that agency autonomy, agency influence and inter-institutional coordination seem to be relatively unaffected by agency site. This study also specifies some conditions under which this finding is valid.

Tags: public administration, organisation theory, Norway
Published Nov. 9, 2010 10:52 AM