Tom Christensen

University of Oslo · Department of Political Science

This chapter examines current administrative reforms in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. It addresses how Nordic central government executives perceive reform processes, trends, contents, and management instruments. The database is a survey of top civil servants in ministries and central agencies. The chapter reveals that the Nordic c...

This study examines vaccine allocation policy during the COVID-19 pandemic by applying a hierarchical, a negotiation, and a cultural perspective. It addresses how vaccine allocation principles under conditions of scarcity are translated into practice in the case of Norway. A main finding is that the policy was informed by instrumentalism as well as...

n A. Ladner and F. Sager eds. Handbook on the Politics of Public Administration. Chapter

The article explains how the unprecedented pandemic management decision to lock down the country came about, using the case of Norway and drawing on unique interview material from political and administrative executives. Urgency and precaution were the government’s primary considerations in March 2020, with proportionality and due process only peri...

Government responses to the Covid‐19 pandemic in the Nordic states—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—exhibit similarities and differences. This article investigates the extent to which crisis policymaking diverges from normal policymaking within the Nordic countries and whether variations between the countries are associated with the ro...

This article focuses on the role of experts in the Norwegian decision-making process in central government during the crisis management of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is based on a structural-instrumental and a cultural perspective. The main findings are that managing the pandemic led to a centralization of power in the hands of the political leaders...

This volume examines three interconnected themes in political science: the nuts and bolts of government, the complex and evolving relationship between politics and administration, and continuity and change in government. Government ministries and agencies are vital components of the executive branch of government that play fundamental roles in the...

This is a study of the demographic profile of civil servants in the Norwegian central government from 1976 to 2016. The relationship between structural features and democratic features is examined, based on theories of representative bureaucracy and responsible bureaucracy. The main result is that the civil service is not representative of the citi...

This chapter reviews experiences of PM over the past decades. We ask how does it work in practice, compared to the ideals of PM. Conceptual problems, technical problems as well as politi�cal and value problems are addressed, The chapter starts with a short theoretical and conceptual section applying perspectives from organization theory discussing...

Governance capacity and legitimacy as two important dimensions in crisis management are crucial for preparing for, making sense of, handling, and learning from crises like epidemics/pandemics. We compare governance capacity and legitimacy of the government in China in response to the SARS and COVID-19 pandemics. Our comparison of the handling proce...

This study focuses on the long-term development of crisis management on the central level in China. Drawing on archival and interview data, it describes and analyzes how governance capacity and the formal structure of crisis management have changed, but also how culturally based legitimacy has altered over the past seventy years. These processes of...

The paper opens the “black box” of decision-making in the center of the core executive; it is a close-up study of political, bureaucratic, and expert actors’ interaction leading up to the Norwegian government’s decision in March 2020 to enforce a lockdown in response to COVID-19. The study shows that uncertainty, urgency and precaution were the fac...

Governments are required to be fair in regulating market players, but their behaviors are often distorted by political connections with firms. In this study, we use the natural experiment of overcapacity reduction in China's industrial firms to examine to what extent their ownership matters in regulatory stringency. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) w...

This paper addresses the use of ICT tools in central government, what can explain the variation in the use of such tools and the effects of them on perceived coordination quality. The data base is a survey to civil servants in Norwegian central government. Structural and cultural perspectives are applied to understand the variation in scope and eff...

This article addresses the Norwegian government’s meaning-making, crises communication and reputation management during the Corona pandemic crisis. It argues that reputation management can be seen as a combination of governance capacity and legitimacy reflected in a well performing crisis communication and meaning-making. Under the slogan “working...

In this study, we analyze data from 176 Chinese universities to examine the use of reputation symbols in official websites. We find that Chinese universities prefer professional and performative symbols more than moral symbols. Reputation symbols are mainly observed in teaching, research, history, and strategy categories, whereas their use in inter...

Corruption among village and township cadres is a serious problem in China’s governance of rural poverty. Based primarily on government websites, but also newspapers and interviews, the article analyzes categories, types and the degree of corruption as well as forms of accountability. The findings show that there is more corruption among village ca...

This paper addresses how the Norwegian government has handled the corona pandemic. Compared to many other countries Norway performs well in handling the crises and this must be understood in the context of competent politicians, a high trust society with a reliable and professional bureaucracy, a strong state, a good economic situation, a big welfa...

Purpose Compared with the worldwide reform trend of transcending new public management (NPM) during the past two decades, China's service-oriented government (SOG) reforms are a relatively different reform approach. After building an SOG was politically identified in 2004, China launched three rounds of SOG reforms in 2008, 2013 and 2018. The purpo...

This article focuses on perceived coordination quality among Norwegian civil servants. It explains how they assess the quality of coordination in their own field of work along different dimensions. To what degree have such perceptions changed over the past 10 years and what can explain the variations in perceived coordination quality from a structu...

This article aims at addressing the relationship between expertise and politics by examining a reorganization process of Statistics Norway. The puzzle is why a minor reorganization with low political salience, in a consensus-oriented political administrative setting with high level of trust between ministries and agencies, and high autonomy for age...

This article provides a greater understanding of the service-oriented government (SOG) reforms that China carried out at the central level in 2008, 2013, and 2018. These reforms involved two common post-NPM structural measures – namely, super-ministries and cross-ministerial networks or leading groups. Using a mythical, an instrumental, and a cultu...

Public sector reforms often take place in heterogeneous reform environments. Key political, administrative and societal actors often advocate different definitions of problems and solutions. A major leadership challenge is to choose a reform strategy that ensures the requisite level of support, even when the initial conflict structure is highly com...

Based on a survey of civil servants in the Norwegian central government, this article describes perceptions of coordination capacity and examines to what degree the variations in perceived coordinating capacity can be explained by structural and cultural features. In particular, it focuses on the significance of wicked policy areas. Overall the coo...

Drawing on organization theory, Christensen discusses how blind spots are related to internal ‘organization is mobilization of bias’ factors and how different mechanisms sustain or undermine those factors. Increasing complexity and hybridity may also lead to blind spots. However, the chapter shows that blind spots are also related to inter-organiza...

This chapter examines the civil servants’ perceptions regarding their capacity to prevent and handle crisis based on surveys of Norwegian ministries and central agencies conducted in 2006 and 2016. We ask if there has been a change in their perceptions after the terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011. We also analyse variations in crisis management ca...

Reputation management or branding, has become increasingly important for universities in the last decades. This is partly reflecting increasing social embeddedness and the global pressure toward increasing formalization and rationalization of the universities. Accordingly, the book tries to answer the following questions: What is typical for the re...

The times are long gone when universities were closed entities dominated by a selected group of professors. Modern universities cater to a wide variety of stakeholder groups and are hence socially embedded. This makes universities ‘social accountable’: they provide information, project an image of themselves and are connected in different ways to a...

This book discusses how modern universities increasingly use reputation management in relation to internal and external challenges. Universities are increasingly characterized by social embeddedness, relating to many external stakeholders and international markets of students, researchers and research projects. This implies global pressure to stand...

In this chapter, we briefly describe the most important administrative structures of the crisis management systems of the countries under study.

Post-New Public Management: a new administrative paradigm for China? From three theoretical perspectives – instrumental, cultural and mythical – this article analyses the reasons for the worldwide emergence of post-New Public Management reforms and summarizes the typical features of those measures. In particular, it explores the link between post-N...

Reputation management or branding is increasingly important for public organizations. Based on organization theory perspectives and reputation management theory, reputation profiles of four agencies—from the financial and education sectors—are compared. The data used were retrieved from the websites of the agencies at two points in time (2006 and 2...

This article describes and analyzes the decision-making process related to the establishment of Norway's National Police Emergency Response Center (NPERC). Following the July 22, 2011 terrorist attacks, Norway's Inquiry Commission recommended the establishment of a NPERC at one physical site. The goal was to enhance governance capacity and contribu...

This chapter addresses the need to combine organization theory with public administration research based in political science, starting from the concept of bounded rationality. This implies a theoretically informed approach to empirical studies of democratic governance and decision-making in formal public administration organizations. A transformat...

This article examines the reform of the police in Norway between 2012 to 2015 drawing upon central public reports and official documents leading up to the reform. These include the report from the official Inquiry Commission into the police response to the terrorist attacks in Oslo and at Utøya in July 2011, a report issued by a public commission i...

Scholars are aware that the higher education sector in China is highly affected by its administrative system, but the questions of how and to what extent the Chinese administrative system impacts academic resources allocation have yet to be answered. By examining the empirical data from 2003 to 2010 of China’s National Excellent Doctoral Dissertati...

Societal security poses fundamental challenges for the doctrines of accountability and transparency in government. At least some of the national security state’s effectiveness requires a degree of non-transparency, raising questions about legitimacy. This paper explores in cross-national and cross-sectoral perspective, how organisations seek to man...

The times are long gone when universities were closed entities dominated by a selected group of professors. Modern universities cater to a wide variety of stakeholder groups and are hence socially embedded: they provide information, project an image of themselves, and are connected in different ways to actors in the environment who are important pr...

Rising and changing citizen expectations, dire fiscal constraints, unfulfilled political aspirations, high professional ambitions, and a growing number of stubborn societal problems have generated an increasing demand for innovation of public policies and services. Drawing on the latest research, this book examines how current systems of public gov...

From three theoretical perspectives – instrumental, cultural and mythical – this article analyses the reasons for the worldwide emergence of post-New Public Management reforms and summarizes the typical features of those measures. In particular, it explores the link between post-New Public Management and public-sector reforms in China and argues th...

What makes a well-functioning governmental crisis management system, and how can this be studied using an organization theory–based approach? A core argument is that such a system needs both governance capacity and governance legitimacy. Organizational arrangements as well as the legitimacy of government authorities will affect crisis management pe...

This article examines the failed implementation of a security project initiated by the Norwegian government in 2004, prior to the terrorist attack in Oslo 2011. Sustaining societal safety and ensuring adequate crisis management is a typical 'wicked problem', extending across government levels, policy sectors and organizational borders and creating...

A new opera house: combining entrepreneurship, garbage can features and windows of opportunity This study looks at the decision-making that culminated in the building of a new opera house in Oslo. The decision was finally taken in 1999 and the new opera house was finished in 2008. To analyse the decision-making process we use a ‘revised garbage can...

A key premise of recent administrative reforms was that performance management would make public organizations more accountable for results. The article discusses the relations and tensions between performance management and different forms of accountability by focusing on the reform of the welfare administration in Norway and Germany. We find that...

This article addresses the following questions: How are administrative and managerial accountability combined, and to what extent does it depend on agency characteristics? We study the performance management between parent ministries and five state agencies in Norway in the area of hospital administration, welfare administration, and immigration. F...

This paper looks beyond more traditional evaluation activities to focus primarily on evaluation up front. It suggests that the early appraisal of an investment case or a project should apply essentially the same evaluation criteria that will be used in ex post evaluation, and thus increase the likelihood of a successful project outcome. However, th...

The challenges of coordination in national security management – the case of the terrorist attack in Norway The article addresses a ‘wicked problem’ : Organizing for internal security and societal safety. It examines the central emergency and crisis management under the terrorist attack in Norway in July 2011, with a special focus on the coordinati...

The article addresses a ‘wicked problem’: Organizing for internal security and societal safety. It examines the central emergency and crisis management under the terrorist attack in Norway in July 2011, with a special focus on the coordinating role of the Ministry of Justice (MJ). Our analysis is based on an in-depth qualitative analysis of relevan...

Human society can be roughly divided into three spheres and each has different public values. While public values should be at the heart of public administration and social development, they are often significantly weakened by their philosophical ambiguity and immeasurability. This article seeks to clarify the nature of public values, how they are...

This study looks at the decision-making that culminated in the building of a new opera house in Oslo. The decision was finally taken in 1999 and the new opera house was finished in 2008. To analyse the decision-making process we use a ‘revised garbage can model’, as presented by Kingdon, which combines the concept of political entrepreneurship thro...

Analyzing the legislative process of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act in Britain, we investigate the different uses of “accountability” in the committee debates. Based on the minutes of the Public Bill Committee from 2010 to 2011, we examine the contested accountability relationships in relation to the Secretary of State for Health, the Monitor,...

China's health care system, under the direction of the central government, has undergone continuous reform in recent decades. Many problems have been encountered, with successive measures attempting to deal with shortcomings and failings of previous reforms. To what extent can implementation failures account for the recurring problems, and what exp...

This paper starts with a theoretical discussion on the relationship between performance and accountability in public organizations with a special focus on administrative reforms. Accountability theory, based in the work of Dubnick/Romzek, Bovens, Behn, Bouckaert, Halligan and Pollitt, is discussed and related to different aspects of performance. Ho...

One of the most significant European higher education reform initiatives of the last decade is the introduction of a European Qualification Framework (EQF) emphasising Learning Outcomes (LOs) in higher education. The EQF is offered as a reform to contribute to increased transparency and mobility, and also implies a certain degree of standardization...

One of the largest public sector reforms in Norway is the welfare administrative reform of 2005. The aims are to get passive beneficiaries back into work and to make the administration more user-friendly, holistic and efficient. The aims are to be achieved by increasing the administration’s capacity to address “wicked issues” by cutting across exis...

Welfare reforms involve trade-off between different accountability types, such as political, administrative, legal and social accountability. This variety of accountability types is used to investigate consequences of reforms in three different welfare services in Norway; social services, hospitals and immigration. The study finds that more complex...

This article examines why major reforms so often disappoint. It starts with an explication and analysis of perspectives for understanding why reforms often do not work out as hoped-rational comprehensive decision making and garbage can decision making, the latter in a "pure" version and in a modified version of the garbage can widely identified wit...

This article addresses the challenges that the terrorist attacks on 22 July 2011 in Norway created for central government and, more particularly, for the political and police leadership. The emphasis is on ‘meaning making’, focusing on how the leaders played out their reactions in the media and towards the public. When explaining the different aspe...

This paper analyzes the response to the Icelandic volcano ash crisis of 2010. We examine how the original response was determined by the formal organization of the European air traffic control system, how the crisis was defined, what characterized the or new regulatory regime, and how one can explain the development and handling of the crisis. The...

This article examines changes in the formal organization of two universities and two schools within these universities, the University of Oslo and Stanford University. We focus on role differentiation, rule formation, and resource seeking structures and describe organizational developments along these dimensions. We find that both these universitie...

Accountability can be conceptualized as institutionalized mechanisms obliging actors to explain their conduct to different forums, which can pose questions and impose sanctions. This article analyses different ‘crises’ in immigration policies in Norway, Denmark and Germany along a descriptive framework of five different accountability types: politi...

Competing principles of agency organization – the reorganization of a reform This article analyses the changing principles of structural organization of the governmental agencies in the welfare administration in Norway. Through the use of instrumentally oriented organization theory and empirical data based in public documents and interviews, we ana...

In this article we address working across border in central government, focusing on the case of Norway. The first research question is descriptive: How much do civil servants participate in project and working groups inside ministries, across ministries, and between ministries and central agencies, and have there been changes over time? The second...

This article analyses the changing principles of structural organization of the governmental agencies in the welfare administration in Norway. Through the use of instrumentally oriented organization theory and empirical data based in public documents and interviews, we analyse how welfare administration changes through the implementation process wh...

The neoinstitutional theory of global ideas formulated by organization theory experts at Stanford University and also espoused by some Scandinavian researchers postulates a formalized, rationalized, and standardized organizational template created through cultural and macrosocial processes that spreads around the world. This template is said to fit...

This article explores the attitudes of officials in the upper echelons in Chinese provincial and local government toward the origins of administrative reform. The authors examine the somewhat dichotomous argument that reform imitates the West or is indigenous and contend that both influences are present. Data drawn from a survey of party cadres and...

This paper focuses on civil servants in the central Norwegian civil service whose main tasks are budgeting, supervision and accounting. The main research questions are: (a) What is their typical demographic profile? (b) How has their demographic profile changed over time? (c) What are the effects of having budgeting, supervising and accounting as a...