Studying Dynamics of Government Agencies: Conceptual and Methodological Results of a Hungarian Organizational Mapping Exercise

Abstract

This article examines the structural changes experienced by Hungarian central government agencies in the period 2002–2009. The analysis has two ambitions: Firstly, to contribute to a certain reconceptualization of organizational change and organizational termination and, secondly, to examine the effect of agencies' structural design features on agency stability and survival. According to the findings, agencies' structural insulation from politics is associated with the hazard of agency terminations in a way markedly different from the one hypothesized, and found, in earlier studies. Stronger formal-institutional insulation and autonomy is associated not with a smaller but with a markedly larger hazard of agency termination.

Keywords:

• event history analysis
• structural dynamics
• central government agencies
• Hungary

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Tibor Keresztély (Corvinus University of Budapest), who provided assistance with some of the statistical analyses.

Notes

¹The procedure was performed with enter method too. The results (in terms of parameter estimates and associated p values) were identical with those yielded by the stepwise method.