在生与死之间:中央国家机构组织变革的国际比较

Between life and death:organizational change in central state bureaucracies in cross-national comparison

识别并解释中央国家官僚组织结构的变化和个体公共组织生存的决定性因素是公共行政研究中两个密切相关的领域。我们旨在通过提出一种收集公共组织历史事件数据的新方法,来填补组织变革研究中这两个方向的空白。本研究确定的研究框架,是政府结构和组织项目的一部分,该项目旨在了解三个西欧国家的中央国家机构的全貌。我们的方法足够灵活,可以描述公共部门组织人员的宏观趋势,并通过分析其组织的历史事件来解释这些趋势。除了介绍研究框架以及我们如何应用它来创建这个数据库外,本文还对记录的事件类型分布作了一些初步的跨国比较,阐明了初步的研究发现和对未来的研究展望。

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.