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Publications (246)
This study explores the influence of age diversity within teams on civil servants’
perceptions of organizational change. Age diversity is examined through two
dimensions: age variety, which refers to the range of different ages within a team,
and age polarization, which denotes the extent to which age groups are segregated
or clustered within a tea...
In this paper, we position generalised trust as central to the debate on elites’ assessments of trust in EU multi-level governance. We leverage one of the most influential factors in explaining political trust in single-government studies to understand variations in trust towards political authorities at various levels. Departing from existing stud...
Despite recurrent observations that media reputations of agencies matter to understand their reform experiences, no studies have theorized and tested the role of sentiment. This study uses novel and advanced BERT language models to detect attributions of responsibility for positive/negative outcomes in media coverage towards 14 Flemish (Belgian) ag...
The relationship between trust and distrust in public governance is still an open question. In the literature, three different perspectives on how trust and distrust are related are intensively debated: (1) trust and distrust as two ends of the same conceptual continuum; (2) trust and distrust as opposites, but with neutral ground in between; and (...
Trust is expected to play a vital role in regulatory regimes. However, how trust affects the performance and legitimacy of these regimes is poorly understood. Our study examines how the interplay of trust and distrust relationships among and toward political, administrative, and regulatory actors shapes perceptions of performance and legitimacy. Dr...
Trust between constituent actors within the European Union (EU)'s multilevel regulatory regimes is decisive for regulatory success. Trust drives information flows, increases compliance, and improves cooperation within these regimes. Despite its importance, systematic knowledge regarding the drivers of trust within regulatory regimes is limited. Thi...
As worldwide institutions acknowledge the necessity of digital, open, and collaborative governments, this timely book offers a comprehensive exploration of digital transformation, intergovernmental collaboration, collaborative governance, and public sector innovation.
"Collaborating for Digital Transformation" highlights how collaborations between...
Existing research investigating regulatory agencies' reputation‐conscious behavior have primarily focused on reactive behavior in the context of reputational threats. Additionally, this literature has primarily focused on agencies' responses to such threats and external audiences' perceptions of agencies reputation, although reputation resides in b...
This article examines the impact of partnership design on technological innovation in public‐private innovation partnerships. It develops two competing hypotheses on how specific partnership characteristics lead to innovation in health care services. The study compares 19 eHealth partnerships across five European countries and uses fuzzy‐set qualit...
Innovation through collaboration has been increasingly adopted to tackle complex social issues. As a result, the development of public sector innovations is to a lesser degree an ‘in-house’ matter and public sector innovations are increasingly more developed in collaborative arrangements that force organizations to interact across organizational bo...
What happens to organizational rigidity when public organizations faced reputational threats over time? Do they take external criticism as incentives to become less rigid and more innovative and flexible through employee involvement and empowerment? Or do reputational threats paradoxically contribute to the very rigidity that is often stereotyped a...
The news media frame political debate about public agencies, and enable legislators with incomplete information to monitor and act upon agency (mal)performance. While studies show that the news media matters for parliamentary attention, the contingent nature of this relation has been understudied. Building on agenda‐setting theory, this study theor...
Public sector innovation theory argues that the extent to which governments innovate is a question of factors such as capacity, collaboration, leadership, orientation, size, and autonomy. However, public sector organizations cannot be treated as uniform entities. Different units in an organization may have different challenges, networks, and exposu...
Involving users in innovating public services is an increasingly common, but challenging practice, as users often have different viewpoints on their own role in the process. Particularly in complex innovation arrangements such as public-private collaborations, governments and service innovators need to be aware of users’ perceptions of their involv...
Question‐order bias is a well‐known weakness of surveys commonly used in public administration research. However, most research on question‐order bias uses question‐order experiments that are relatively small, performed in one context, and rarely replicated. We carry out six question‐order experiments in six large‐scale Belgian surveys conducted du...
Public-private partnership (PPP) has been positioned as a relevant contracting method for developing large-scale infrastructure projects, which entail potentially high-magnitude negative impacts on the environment. The effectiveness of their Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is crucial to achieving sustainable development of these large-scale i...
Public–private partnership (PPP) has been positioned as a relevant contracting method for developing large-scale infrastructure projects that entails potentially high-magnitude negative impacts on the environment. The effectiveness of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) is crucial to achieving sustainable development of these large-scale infr...
In recent years, collaborative innovation of public services has become a growing research field. However, how collaborative arrangements lead to innovation remains quite unclear. We propose that collaborative innovation is dependent on processes of divergence and convergence, which are enhanced by four conditions of collaborative innovation: diver...
Overall, Belgium’s governance of the pandemic showed elements of continuity and some—perhaps lasting—changes. The early phases of the pandemic triggered cooperative intergovernmental relations to take containment measures and urgent health policies, with an uncontested leading position at the federal level. Yet, with respect to economic measures an...
The extraordinary measures taken to constrain infections with the coronavirus may have altered the known psychological processes preventing stress and strain in the public workplace. We use survey data of a large public organization in Belgium to look at the capacity of affective organizational commitment, perceived job autonomy, and workplace soci...
Public service innovation involves a process of creative exploration of new ideas, knowledge and perspectives. The article poses that creative exploration emerges from the combination of a climate for creativity that is active inside the organization, and collaborations with diverse actors that are present outside the organization. We test the effe...
Across Europe, public employment services are experimenting with more holistic and cross‐sector collaborations to tackle the wicked problem of long‐term unemployment. These collaborations operate in a context characterised by tensions produced by multiple demands for accountability. Based on case studies of the accountability relations and challeng...
Over the past few decades, social, economic, and political developments have forced public organizations to continuously adapt to changing circumstances, casting them in ongoing cycles of organizational change. The continuous introduction of various types of change in an employee’s work environment may generate substantial levels of role ambiguity,...
SAMENVATTING In deze bijdrage gaan we op zoek naar verkla-ringen voor de variatie in vertrouwen in verschillende overheids-niveaus om de COVID-19-crisis aan te pakken (lokaal, regionaal, nationaal, Europees) tijdens meerdere fasen van de pandemie (van april 2020 tot mei 2021). Om dit verschil in vertrouwen van burgers in overheden om de pandemie aa...
Les spécialistes de la comparaison soulignent que l’administration publique doit être comprise en termes de modèles d’organisation et de prise de décision liés au contexte. Les agences situées dans un même contexte afficheront plus de points communs que celles situées dans un autre contexte. En parallèle, des données empiriques attestent de la vari...
Governments worldwide are relying on the COVID-19 vaccines as the solution for ending the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting crisis. Although scientific progress in the development of a vaccine has been astonishing, policymakers are facing an extra hurdle as increasingly more people appear to be hesitant in their intention to take such a vaccin...
Recent scholarly wisdom suggests that public sector organizations (PSOs) should not always innovate alone. Collaboration with diverse actors is often proposed so that more and better innovations can be developed. However, it remains unclear what capacities PSOs need in order to participate in collaborative arrangements for innovation and to collabo...
In the road infrastructure sector, public-private partnership (PPP) projects involve the implementation of project finance principles through the signing of a long-term contract between the public authority and a group of sponsors assembled in a special purpose vehicle (SPV). However, although PPP sponsors play a very important role in SPV formatio...
This report outlines the steps taken to design and implement a stakeholder
survey on trust and distrust in European regulatory governance and
ultimately create a large, multi-actor, multi-level, multi-sector, and crosscountry
dataset. Specifically, the report provides information about the
mapping, ethical considerations, survey question and scale...
The study of organizational task for understanding how organizations behave and evolve has been one of the classic topics in organization theory and public administration. Reputation scholarship has appeared as a promising perspective to understand internal and external organizational dynamics. Reputation scholars, too, emphasize the critical impor...
The COVID‐19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to study which factors drive compliance and how the evolving context in society –virus fluctuations and changing government measures – changes the impact of these factors. Extant literature lists many factors that drive compliance – notably enforcement, trust, legitimacy. Most of these studies, ho...
In contemporary public governance, leaders of public organizations are faced with multiple, and oftentimes conflictual, accountability claims. Drawing upon a survey of CEO’s of agencies in seven countries, we explore whether and how conflictual accountability regimes relate to strategic behaviors by agency-CEO’s and their political principals. The...
The extent to which public organizations contribute to crosscutting policy programs is a question of organizational commitment, resource allocation, and monitoring. In this paper, we triangulate survey and interview data to study the explanatory power of organizational factors to understand the extent of organizational adaptation. In line with the...
The original publication of the article was published with incorrect affiliation link and Table 7.
Different public sector innovation literatures tend to focus on either contractual stimuli or collaborative interactions as sources of innovation. This article argues for a combined approach that integrates these literatures. Using an fsQCA design that exploits rich survey and interview data on 24 PPPs in Belgium and the Netherlands, we confirm the...
This deliverable offers a systematic and comprehensive review of the literature on trust and regulation and their relations in three parts. Section 1 provides a brief overview of trust and distrust; their relationship; and antecedents (drivers) and positive and negative consequences. This second part of provides an overview of phases and processes...
An important rationale for the creation of semi‐autonomous agencies is to create some distance between politics and administration. As such, agencies are expected to shield policy implementation from the daily concerns of political life. However, political actors and politically controlled ministries still influence agencies in various intended and...
We know that European regulatory networks tend to broaden the gap between regulators and executives in the member states. But what is their impact on inter-agencies relationship at the national level? The scope of issues addressed by European regulatory networks may cover the competences of several independent regulatory agencies in the domestic ar...
Comparative scholars emphasise that public administration should be understood in terms of context-bound patterns of organising and decision-making. Agencies in the same context will display more commonalities than those in another. At the same time, there is good empirical evidence for organisational-level variation in decision-making. For instanc...
A crucial challenge for the coordination of horizontal policy programs—those designed to tackle crosscutting issues—is how to motivate government organizations to contribute to such programs. Hence, it is crucial to study how practitioners in implementing organizations view and appreciate the coordination of such programs. Assisted by Q‐methodology...
The purpose of this commentary is to continue and advance the discussion on the relevance of a reputational approach in the fields of regulation and governance. The authors build on Capelos et al.’s (2016) important study in Regulation & Governance, and discuss several themes that had until then received fairly little empirical and comparative atte...
A key argument in recent theorizing on the drivers of bureaucratic behaviour is that agencies seek to establish and maintain a unique reputation. While recent years have witnessed substantial empirical support for this claim, the field lacks comparative examinations of the dynamics of reputation and its management throughout crisis periods. This ar...
Video on our latest article in Governance: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gove.12404
Hiving off the non-essential: analysing which public organizations outsource administrative overhead
This study contributes to our understanding of the characteristics of public organizations that are more likely to outsource administrative overhead. Despite the climate of ongoing crisis that urges public organizations to focus their resources on c...
Employees frequently have ideas and opinions on the execution of tasks or on the organization itself. Yet, sometimes employees remain silent and withhold this valuable input from their organizations because they fear experiencing conflict or controversy , causing both performance and employee morale to suffer. This article tests to what extent such...
In the last decade, reforms in the public sector have been implemented at an ever-increasing pace. Hereby, organizations are repetitively subject to mergers, splits, absorptions, or secessions of units; the adoption of new tasks; changes in legal status; and other structural reforms. Although evidence is largely missing in the literature, there is...
Public organizations were once seen as the epitome of stability and implacability. More recently, however, public organizations have been subject to fast-paced environmental change. One common response to the challenges posed by these volatile environments has been the adoption of various organizational changes to make public organizations more ada...
Collaboration between public sector organizations is typically understood as a response to complexity. Agencies collaborate in order to address complex, cross- cutting policy needs that cannot be met individually. However, when organizational size is a constraining factor in public service efficiency, collaboration can also reduce costs by capturin...
How agencies perceive, process, and prioritize multiple (potentially conflicting) audiences’ expectations of components of their reputations is a core interest of bureaucratic reputation theorists. Agencies must choose which dimension(s) to stress towards specific audiences, a process referred to as ‘prioritizing’. Boon, Salomonsen, Verhoest, and P...
This chapter addresses the main changes in the governance of public sector organizations by focusing on administrative reforms. The main finding is that there is a loose coupling between administrative doctrines and actual changes. There is no convergence to one European reform trend. A special focus is on contribution of EGPA-related research on t...
Why do public sector organisations target different stakeholder audiences in their reputation management? Despite the recognition that reputation management is an audience-based exercise, the field lacks studies that systematically analyse which audiences matter for reputation management by different public service organisations. This article exami...
Research on regulation has focused on explaining the independence of sector regulators and assessing the effects of regulations on markets. This paper broadens the scope by studying and explaining how regulatory actors interact at the de facto level in a multi-actor regulatory arrangement when making regulatory decisions in the telecommunications s...
The research objective of this paper is to identify the key factors that affect the cost performance of all types of transport infrastructure projects. The method used is the fuzzy set QUALITATIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS (fs QCA), which allows identifying combinations of factors that affect the cost performance. Results show that 30% of the projects,...
Research on regulation has traditionally focused on studying the delegation of regulatory competencies from political principals to an independent regulatory agency. In this article, we argue that this delegation is nuanced by different factors that affect whether a specific regulatory decision is formally delegated. We examine and explain formal d...
Een spoorlijn, een kanaal en een snelweg die tussen dezelfde twee steden lopen, beïnvloeden elkaar. Een container op de weg zit niet op het water, een gezin in de trein is een gezin minder in de auto. Toch plant Vlaanderen haar infrastructuurinvesteringen vandaag de dag nog geregeld alsof deze verbinding er niet is. Departementen, agentschappen, ve...
Through recurrent structural reform programmes governments are on a quest to design public organizations that will stand the test of their environment. One of the approaches to uncertain or sensitive issues has been to create various forms of (semi‐)autonomous organizations with substantial strategic discretion. However, while governments repeatedl...
In the last decade a considerable number of PPP contracts in Europe turned out to be instable and were renegotiated. This paper studies which combinations of conditions in terms of macro-level business environment and governmental PPP support and at project-level (remuneration scheme, risk allocation, project age and contract duration) contribute t...
This article seeks to explain the frequency and tone of media attention for public organisations. Expectations are formulated on the impact of fundamental organisational features on the frequency and tone of coverage of public organisations. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to analyse the nuanced interplay between legal...
Agencification, referring to the creation of semi-autonomous public organizations at arm’s length from government, has been a major trend. After highlighting the features of public agencies in their different appearances in Europe, we discuss how NPM and Post-NPM have changed the motives for agency creation and agency governance. The basic dimensio...
Within the field of public administration, the experience with large-scale international comparative survey-based research is expanding. However, while such research might render extremely interesting data for comparison and analysis, such resource and time-intensive research bring also challenges, in terms of methodological risks, data quality iss...
The starting point of this article is the weak usage of rail freight in Belgium and Europe, both as a
sustainable mode of land transportation in itself as well as a part of the intermodal chain. The
results are obtained by transversal research on rail freight transport in Belgium, taking into account
the European context. This interdisciplinary res...
In 2004 Flanders, the northern region of Belgium launched a range of large public–private partnership (PPP) projects for a total value of 6 billion euros. Ten years later, PPP has become a well-embedded procurement method for long-term public infrastructure projects. This article makes a critical ‘round-up’ of PPP experience in Belgium based on the...
This study contributes to our understanding of the characteristics of public organizations that are more likely to outsource administrative overhead. Despite the climate of ongoing crisis that urges public organizations to focus their resources on core tasks, little is known about the characteristics of organizations that hive off the delivery of n...
There is a recognized need to incorporate sustainability considerations in infrastructure projects delivered through public–private partnerships (PPPs). The aim of this study is to explore how such incorporation can be encouraged. The research is based on a documentary analysis of 25 Flemish PPP infrastructure projects and two follow-up single-case...
Across the globe, governments are engaging in Shared Service Center (SSC) models to rationalize their internal overhead processes. Scholarship is increasingly recognizing the challenges that governments face when embarking on an SSC reform. This study examines one of the most prevalent, yet undertheorized, risks: the role of resisting organizations...