The intensity of organizational transitions in government: comparing patterns in developed and developing countries

ABSTRACT

Organisational transitions in governments have long been discussed in the literature. While, more recently, organisational life cycle changes between birth and death have been the focus of research, a systematic comparison of organisational transitions across countries has barely been initiated. We aim to bridge this gap in the literature by providing comparative metrics for organisational transitions, which could be later enriched with structural data from researchers working in this domain. Termination literature mainly hails from the West, wherein this article brings in Pakistan’s developing context – long considered a terra incognita in comparative research – and breaks new analytical ground by comparing the intensity of organisational transitions in Pakistan with those of developed countries. The lack of vivid variance in the intensity of transitions among developing and developed countries, raises interesting questions as to the relationship between the intensity of structural reform and administrative performance. The article thereby seeks to encourage future comparative research.

KEYWORDS:

• Termination
• organisational change
• comparative research
• developing world
• government organisations
• Pakistan

Disclosure statement

We would like to acknowledge the support and guidance of Professor Geert Bouckaert KU Leuven in the development of the database for this article. The comments of the reviewers have been valuable for the article and we would like to thank them as well for their contribution. .

Notes

1. The Norwegian State Administration Database (NSAD) provides a detailed overview of the Norwegian state administration with information about state administration and data on civil service employees (https://www.nsd.no/polsys/en/civilservice/).

2. The Irish State Administration Database is very similar to NSAD with some variations in the event categories and includes data from 1922 to present; other details could be seen at http://www.isad.ie/.

3. The total population includes all individual organisations that could be identified in the documents serving as information source for the PSAD. The PSAD only includes organisation for which a minimum amount of information on structural change, legal foundation etc. was available.

4. See the table in the appendix for the number of change events each year.

5. We did not include Kaufman’s (1976) study since it has been critized for using a snapshot of two years and does not account for “births” and “deaths” in those years.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abiha Zahra

Abiha Zahra is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Administration in the Department of Governance and Global Studies, Information Technology University, Lahore, Pakistan and a Research Fellow at the Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research interests lie at the intersection of public sector reforms, policy, governance, and management with a focus on public sector organizations.

Tobias Bach

Tobias Bach is a Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Researcher at the ARENA Centre for European Studies, both at the University of Oslo, Norway, and a Fellow at the Hertie School, Berlin, Germany. He is a political scientist specialized in Public Policy and Administration. His main research interests include the structure and organisation of government and executive politics in an internationally comparative perspective.