Abstract: This introduction explores several approaches to the analysis of administrative culture. It argues that we should go beyond an often simplistic equation of culture to the informal dimensions of an administrative organization. Instead, administrative culture emerges from the interrelations between the formal and informal aspects of administration and, in turn, shapes both. This argument builds on Niklas Luhmann’s concept of complementary »expectation structures«. It has been developed in the study of the public administration of the nation state, which has been the unquestioned framework for research on administrative cultures. There is an intellectual surplus in testing the approach with the formation and transformation of international public administration. The introduction also proposes an investigation into personnel, communication, and knowledge management in international organizations as avenues for further research on the administrative cultures of International Organizations. PubDate: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: This article analyses the ILO’s administrative practice on agricultural issues in the interwar period. On the surface, the ILO did not succeed in assuming a prominent position in the agricultural question. However, the article goes beyond this failure by focussing on the newly founded states of East Central Europe. It interprets the work of the tripartite actors and the experts from the region and works out how these actors shared a common conception of developed and underdeveloped countries with the Western internationalists and how they tried to overcome their weak position through statism and social engineering (e.g. land reforms). PubDate: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Throughout the interwar period, officials of the League of Nations Secretariat travelled across the world to conduct activities for the international organization. Building on the emerging literature on the work of the first generation of international civil servants, this article will show how these missions became an integral part of the work of the League’s Information Section to conduct a form of diplomacy, and bring the work of the League in the public eye. In the reports they wrote, officials tried to capture the state of public opinion on the League and described what they did to improve it. PubDate: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The establishment of a permanent international secretariat is one of the great innovations of the League of Nations. The administrative apparatus of Geneva was not simply an international office with national representatives but gradually evolved into a new kind of authority beyond the individual member states. This development, however, was much less planned than it might have seemed. Since Article 6 of the League Covenant of 1919 avoided any details on the administrative machinery of the Secretariat, its institutional structure and functioning were essentially shaped by the first Secretary General, Sir Eric Drummond, and its staff. Among them was the Austrian Egon Ferdinand Ranshofen-Wertheimer (1894–1957), who, after 1945, wrote one of the first studies on this “great experiment” in international administration. This article revisits this publication and places it in its historical context. PubDate: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The chapter discusses the administrative culture(s) of the League of Nations Secretariat in the foundational years and asks what constituted the original administrative culture(s) of the League’s international civil service. The main argument is that decisions in the formative years of the League’s Secretariat led to an internationalised Western bureaucratic model, balancing autonomy and legitimacy concerns. While efficiency was essential, acquiring an international character for the secretariat seemed rather more desirable than mandatory. These factors had a decisive impact on the administrative culture in the League’s early years (and beyond). PubDate: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The article sketches the history, the structure and the function of the International Labour Organization (ILO). In the first part the focus is on trans-national standard setting. There not only the merits and specific problems, concerning in particular the implementation of transnational labour standards, are described but also the implications of the shift from hard law to soft law are discussed. The second part is devoted to technical cooperation. Here the author’s own experiences serve as illustration of the big variety of such cooperation. It can be shown that successful technical cooperation is a precondition for successful standard setting. PubDate: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Following the adoption of the ten-year plan for implementing Agenda 2063, it is necessary to draw lessons from its implementation. The strict supervision of the executive of the African Union demonstrates a mixed appropriation by the Member States and the RECs, which seem to act according to the will of the state actors while Agenda 2063 calls for an inclusive approach. Thus, a decentralization of the AU transformation framework is fundamentally linked to the ratification at the national level of certain legal instruments as well as the operationalization of representing local authorities in the governance of the African Union. PubDate: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The Paris Peace Conference was largely about territory and geography, as Allied leaders drew three thousand miles of new borders in what was the largest such administrative endeavor in geography up to that time. This paper examines the Interallied Commission for the Delimitation of the Boundary between Austria and Hungary, a commission tasked by to demarcate the new post-Paris boundary between Austria and Hungary. It argues that Commission activities evolved as a response to local circumstances within the broader crisis created by the redrawing of boundaries. Constrained by instructions from the Ambassadors Conference, with its work subject to ratification by the League of Nations, the Commission attended not only to the technical operation of demarcating boundaries, but increasingly to securing a peace in the region that would make such demarcation possible in the present and sustainable in the future. PubDate: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: This article reconstructs the course of WHO-establishing activities and analyses how the WHO’s administrative culture was a continuation of its interwar predecessor, the League of Nations Health Organization, with the momentum of the war’s aftermath allowing for several overdue re-arrangements. Based on documentation of the WHO, the League of Nations Archive, as well as private records of key players, the article first traces strategic considerations by key players from only partially corresponding expert clusters, all entitled and aspiring to establish their version of the best public health agency possible. The establishing interactions between key experts and officials, but also personnel pooling logic and the early WHO’s approach to managing diversity of its staff speak for a considerable transfer of practices in administration between the predecessor and successor organizations.Despite the UN authorities’ programmatic statements, documents on the founding years of the WHO reveal an unbroken continuity of many intact administrative practices, functional bodies, and work focuses from the LNHO. These were largely defined by new labels and added to the legitimacy that the WHO needed in its formative years. Analyzing these continuities from the interwar decades of public health internationalism, the article spotlights the junctures where deliberate changes were undertaken disguised as the zero hour, allowing to resolve the previously unmanaged issues. The text thus contributes to a more complex and comprehensive picture of how international bodies of a global scale survive and live on, even after their presumed and declared death. PubDate: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The European Danube Commission is distinguished by the presence of a substantial administrative body associated with a decision-making body made up of diplomats. Administrative action is one of the tasks assigned to it, such as the monitoring of regulations which requires the establishment of a transnational public administration. The originality of the administrative model of the European Danube Commission lies in the need to invent a bureaucratic functioning respecting the primacy of the diplomatic function. This article puts forward the idea that the solutions chosen by this commission contributed to the birth of an administrative practice of international organizations. PubDate: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: This paper examines the use of management consultants in the German Ministry of Defence in 1981 and 1982. After an affair concerning the procurement of the Tornado fighter aircraft, the Minister of Defence, Hans Apel, hired a team from the consulting firm McKinsey to develop a new organisational concept. This paper examines the special features of the German procurement and defence administration as well as the reasons for the failure of projects of administrative innovation. Focus is placed on the role of management consultants in the implementation of organisational innovations and their relationship to the actors within the ministerial administration. PubDate: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Until the late nineteenth century the British Civil Service relied on handwritten documents which were hand copied by armies of clerks and filed. The next stage was that handwritten documents were copied by armies of typists and then filed. The third stage was that documents were, largely, typed by their authors and distributed via email or other means, at which point the system of filing seems to have broken down. The two major inflection points were roughly 100 years apart, and both the move to the typewriter and the move to email were motivated by a wish to save money. PubDate: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: In nineteenth century France, an administrative practice underwent a spectacular expansion: the assessment of all civil servants, regardless of their ministry of affiliation. This article analyzes this innovation. In the first section, the political and administrative context of this assessment is presented. The second section describes the chronology of the expansion of performance appraisals and the content of the forms used: the competencies of the agents were dissected on all levels (attendance at work, technical abilities, and personal and family life). Finally, the last section will attempt to analyze the modalities, drivers, and effects of the expansion of this practice. PubDate: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Using the example of the administrative use of mobile services, which go by the term ‘mobile government’ (M-Government), this article examines innovative solutions in the public service of the 21st century. The regional focus of the analysis is on the German administration. It is shown that the innovative potential of adopting mobile services in public administration lies in the fact that they break up and at the same time modify the contact structure in the administration and between the administration and citizens or companies by replacing the office with a dynamic network of virtual relationships between administrative employees and administrative addressees. M-Government does not mean saying goodbye to the static office model, but it does add a new, qualitatively different dimension to administration. The concept of mobility on which this article is based is based on a spatial understanding, but detaches it from its originally traffic-related context. Mobile administration is intended to express the fact that administration and its interaction contexts become location-independent through the use of mobile services. PubDate: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Using the example of the new disciplinary punishment ordinance of 1903, the article examines the shaping of innovations in the Austro-Hungarian army around 1900 on the basis of communication within the administration. It is shown that the military administration operated in a vertical and horizontal multi-level system that was characterised by forms of cooperation and negotiation processes. The middle and lower levels of administration played an important role in shaping the new norms by being involved in the process as internal experts. This approach enabled the adaptation of innovations to practice, but at the same time prevented radical changes. PubDate: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: The social sciences have shaped how the science of public administration perceives innovations. Therefore, economic concepts of productivity and competitiveness frame the way innovations in public administrations are perceived. In contrast, this introduction develops a model for the historical analysis of innovations in administrative organizations. Using the concept of innovation, this model focuses on three levels of change processes that are analytically distinct but often occur together: (1) discourses of novelty, (2) actors of change, and (3) administrative practices. PubDate: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Reform concepts such as the »New Steering Model« (NSM) became prominent in the German administrative discourse of the 1990s. This article examines the examples of the Speyer Quality Contest and the Carl Bertelsmann Price. These intermunicipal performance contests awarded municipalities for the appropriation of NSM principles, thus popularizing the approach in administrative theory and practice. Simulated competition served as a tool for the relevant stakeholders to negotiate notions of quality and innovation. Actors such as the Joint Office for Administrative Simplification, the University for Administrative Sciences Speyer, and the Bertelsmann Foundation pushed frameworks that conceptualized the municipality as a non-commercial professional service firm. Cities, in turn, hoped to find ways to deliver public services with waning funds. While neither the NSM nor practices of simulated competition dominated the public administrative discourse beyond the early 2000s, they speak to a temporary belief in managerial practices in the public sphere. PubDate: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: Modern hospitals are not only places of treatment, healing and scientific research, but bureaucratic colossi whose administrative and organizational structures changed fundamentally through the gradual implementation of new innovative office technologies in the first half of the 20th century. Against this background of media technological change the article aims to trace the fundamental transformation of administrative practices in hospitals between 1890 and 1932, using the Charité Berlin as an example, and paying attention to the ways of transmission and adaption of these new office technologies such as typewriters, photocopiers, file folders, card index and punch card systems into clinical administration. PubDate: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
Abstract: We will focus on the intensifying technologization of government affairs and the ensuing question: does this lead to a bureaucratically dominated technocracy' The coining of the concept of ›technocracy‹ is attributed to the engineer William Henry Smyth in 1919: »The rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers«. We will examine past and present debates on possible adverse effects of technocracy on the scope for democratic governance and thus the position of political leaders and citizens in decision making. PubDate: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT
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