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An Organization Approach to Public Administration

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The Palgrave Handbook of Public Administration and Management in Europe

Abstract

This chapter addresses the need to combine organization theory with public administration research based in political science, starting from the concept of bounded rationality. This implies a theoretically informed approach to empirical studies of democratic governance and decision-making in formal public administration organizations. A transformative approach is applied combining environmental factors, cultural-institutional features and structural-instrumental factors. We argue that the Scandinavian take on the study of public administration as a mixture of political science and organization theory with a substantial empirical orientation is a fruitful one. To understand how composite and hybrid organizations based on mixed political orders and partly competing organizational principles, we have to apply middle-range organizational and institutional theories that take account of context and historical-cultural constraints of public administration.

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Correspondence to Tom Christensen .

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Christensen, T., Lægreid, P. (2018). An Organization Approach to Public Administration. In: Ongaro, E., Van Thiel, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Public Administration and Management in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55269-3_55

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