Breaking out of silos: explaining cross-departmental interactions in two European bureaucracies

ABSTRACT

The view that silos are endemic in organisations in general and the European Civil Service in particular has become increasingly widespread. Yet, silos are rarely investigated theoretically or empirically. What is a silo? What are the individual and organisational factors associated with silos? We propose a functionalist approach to silo definition and identification, which links individual and organisational tasks to expected intra-organisational interactions: we operationalise silos as clusters of employees lacking communication with other parts of the organisation, and analyse civil servants and departments as bipartite networks of communication using stochastic blockmodelling. We explore the existence of silos in two European bureaucracies, which differ in mission, size and workforce composition: the European Commission and the General Secretariat of the Council. We do not find evidence of silo-isation in either bureaucracy, but rather task-based patterns of interaction. Our approach can be extended to include other theoretical perspectives, e.g., socialisation effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Administrative silos
• blockmodels
• coordination
• European Commission
• General Secretariat of the Council

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive feedback, which greatly improved the paper. The authors would like to express our gratitude to staff in the two organisations who completed the survey or who agreed to be interviewed as part of the research for the two projects, ‘European Commission: Facing the Future’, and ‘Understanding the EU Civil Service’, on which this article is based. We greatly appreciate their willingness to share their experience with us and the time taken. We are most grateful to the members of the research team, especially Michael W. Bauer, Renaud Dehousse, Brigid Laffan, and Andrew Thompson, as well as to Vanessa Buth, Nick Wright, Henry Allen, Helen Fitzhugh, Suzanne Doyle, Timea Suli, Graeme Crouch, Luke Jackson, Antoine Mandret and Pippa Lacey, for their very considerable contributions to one or both projects, and especially to Dr David G Knott and Françoise Girard, the European University Institute, the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer, and the University of East Anglia for providing the funding which enabled us to undertake the research. We thank our fellow panelists at the EUSA 17th biennial conference in Miami for useful insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Supporting data and materials for this article can be accessed from the Harvard Dataverse at the link https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/M4DWZ3.

Notes

1 Administrators (ADRs) represent the largest staff category in the Commission, accounting for over 40% of personnel. Administrators are generally involved in drafting policies, analysis or advice, though translators and interpreters are also recruited as ADRs. Just under 30% of staff are assistants (ASTs), who perform an executive or technical role. Other staff are engaged as contract agents or are recruited locally.

2 For more information see shorturl.at/jlzU8.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesca Pia Vantaggiato

Francesca Pia Vantaggiato is Lecturer in Public Policy at King’s College London, UK.

Hussein Kassim

Hussein Kassim is Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Sara Connolly

Sara Connolly is Professor of Personnel Economics at University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.