It’s About Time: Temporal Dynamics and Longitudinal Research in Public Administration

CALL FOR PAPERS
Research Symposium: “It’s About Time: Temporal Dynamics and Longitudinal Research in Public Administration”

Symposium editors
Zuzana Murdoch, University of Bergen. Email: Zuzana.Murdoch@uib.no
Muiris MacCarthaigh, Queen’s University Belfast. Email: M.MacCarthaigh@qub.ac.uk
Benny Geys, BI Norwegian Business School. Email: Benny.Geys@bi.no

Symposium information

A persistent paradox lies at the heart of public administration scholarship. On the one hand, public administration scholars maintain a keen interest in the ins and outs of changes over time in public organizations. This includes questions about administrative and institutional reforms, divisional mergers/separations, leadership changes, or large-scale crises (e.g. pandemics, climate) and societal developments (e.g. digitalization, immigration). Likewise, many theories in public administration and public management are dynamic in the sense that they relate to changes over time in the attitudes, values, perceptions, and/or motivations of public-sector employees (Stritch 2017). On the other hand, public administration as an empirical research field continues to be “dominated by case studies and description in general” (Gill and Meier 2000, 193), and often fails to give due attention to inter-temporal dynamics and relationships (Ritz et al. 2016; Pandey 2017; Stritch 2017). This unduly restricts our ability to fully understand, theorize and model the changes over time that are fundamental to many research questions in public administration.

The central purpose of this Symposium is to push for a longitudinal turn in the study of public administrations and their staff. We argue that more concerted efforts to take time seriously when studying key public administration questions is absolutely critical to:

• a) move our understanding of individual- as well as organization-level temporal dynamics beyond the insights from in-depth case studies or repeated cross-sectional studies;
• b) allow novel opportunities for multi-level longitudinal studies connecting changes at higher levels of observation (such as organizations or countries) to outcomes at lower levels of observation (such as individuals).

Naturally, establishing the longitudinal datasets required to take time seriously involves a substantial investment of time and resources. This has in the past often proven exceedingly costly, leading to the lack of a “basic data infrastructure for the field” (Gill and Meier 2000, 159). Recent years, however, have witnessed considerable progress towards developing such an infrastructure of research as well as communities of scholars seeking to collaborate on such endeavours. One example relates to the development of detailed datasets mapping public sector organizations over their entire life cycle (MacCarthaigh et al. 2012). Path-breaking work in this direction was undertaken in Norway by Vidar Rolland and Paul Roness (for the time period 1947-2011), which inspired similar initiatives in Ireland (Muiris MacCarthaigh, period 1922-present), Belgium (Koen Verhoest, period 1983-present), Estonia (Külli Sarapuu, period 1990-2010), Lithuania (Vitalis Nakrošis & Mantas Budriatis, period 1990-2010), and Hungary (Gyorgy Hajnal, period 2002-2009). Similarly, the Structure and Organisation of Governments project (SOG-PRO; www.sog-pro.eu) collected detailed annual information about structural developments in the central governments of France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK between 1980 and 2015.

In parallel to such organization-level datasets, more individual-level data has become available due to periodic surveys among large samples of civil servants in several countries. Examples include the American State Administrators Project (1964-2018; Yackee and Yackee 2021), US Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (2002-2021; Fernandez et al. 2015), Norwegian Administration Surveys (1976-2016; Christensen et al. 2018), German Political-Administrative Elite survey (2005-2021; Ebinger et al. 2021), Australian Public Service Employee Census (2012-2022; https://www.pc.gov.au/about/governance/employee-census), and three large-scale surveys among European Commission staff in 2008, 2014 and 2018 (Kassim et al. 2013; Murdoch et al. 2019). Although such surveys are generally conceived as repeated cross-sectional data collection efforts, recent methodological contributions enable the extraction of panel datasets from some of these data sets for at least a subset of respondents (Murdoch et al. 2019; Geys et al. 2020). Such data collection efforts and methodological advances thus open the door to longitudinal research designs at both the organizational and individual levels.

To showcase the wide range of possibilities that come into view when applying a time dimension to public administration research, the Symposium is open to theoretical as well as empirical contributions that extend our knowledge of temporal dynamics in public administrations at both the individual and organizational levels. Methodological contributions where scholars “present and illustrate methods” are likewise welcome, since solid progress can only be achieved by also addressing “the problem of implementation” (Gill and Meier 2000, 192). Hence, contributions to the Symposium can address questions including (but not constrained to):

•  To what extent and how can we optimize organizational design by accounting for the temporal characteristics of activities and tasks (e.g. their pace, frequency, regularity)?

•  When and how can public sector networks deal with differences in temporal rhythms and life cycle stages among its members?

•  How – if at all – do major organizational reforms, policy changes and/or societal developments affect the attitudes, values, perceptions, and/or motivations of public-sector employees? What are the short- and long-term dynamics of such effects?

•  To what extent, when and why might organizational membership in public administrations have socialization effects or affect individuals’ public service motivation?

•  How – if at all – do different leadership styles in the public sector influence performance-related employee outcomes such as cooperation, job satisfaction, user orientation, and innovative behaviour?

•  To what extent and how can we track individual respondents in repeated cross-sectional surveys of the same target population?

•  What are key methodological concerns – and solutions – when dealing with time dependence and dynamic relationships, inertial systems, long-run impacts of shocks, and questions of causality as an issue of temporal ordering in public administration research?

Review Process and Timeline

In preparation for the Symposium, a paper development workshop will be organized at the University of Bergen (Norway) on 27-28 October 2022. The objective is for participants to get feedback on their manuscripts as they prepare them for submission to the Symposium. Please note that acceptance to participate in the workshop does not guarantee acceptance of the manuscript in the Symposium!

June 2022: Open Call for contributions.

September 15, 2022: Deadline to submit (near-)complete draft manuscripts for participation in the Symposium workshop. Submission should be via e-mail, copying in each of the symposium co-editors.

September 25, 2022: Decision on draft manuscripts for participation in the Symposium workshop communicated to authors.

October 27-28, 2022: Symposium workshop at University of Bergen (Norway). Authors of successful draft manuscripts are very strongly encouraged to participate.

January 15, 2023: Deadline to submit final manuscripts via Public Administration Review’s online editorial system. Manuscripts undergo the journals’ normal peer review process overseen by PAR Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Hall.

Late 2023/early 2024: Planned publication date in Public Administration Review.

References

Christensen, T., M. Egeberg, P. Lægreid and J. Trondal (2018). Sentralforvaltningen. Stabilitet og endring gjennom 40 år (Central government administration. Stability and change over 40 years). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Ebinger, F., S. Veit and B. Strobel (2021). Role models in the senior civil service: How tasks frame the identification of senior bureaucrats with active and reactive roles. International Journal of Public Administration, 1-12.

Fernandez, S., W.G. Resh, T. Moldogaziev and Z.W. Oberfield (2015). Assessing the past and promise of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey for public management research: A research synthesis. Public Administration Review 75: 382-394.

Geys, B., S. Connolly, H. Kassim and Z. Murdoch (2020). Follow the Leader? Leader Succession and Staff Attitudes in Public Sector Organizations. Public Administration Review 80(4): 555-564.

Gill, J. and K.J. Meier (2000). Public Administration Research and Practice: A Methodological Manifesto. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 10(1): 157-199.

Kassim, H., J. Peterson, M.W. Bauer, S. Connolly, R. Dehousse, L. Hooghe, and A. Thompson (2013) The European Commission of the 21st Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MacCarthaigh, M., P.G. Roness and K. Sarapuu (2012). Mapping Public Sector Organizations: An Agenda for Future Research, International Journal of Public Administration, 35:12: 844-51.

Murdoch, Z., S. Connolly, B. Geys, and H. Kassim (2019). Do International Institutions Matter? Socialization and International Bureaucrats. European Journal of International Relations 25(3): 852-877.

Pandey, S.K. (2017). Theory and method in public administration. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 37(2), 131-138.

Ritz, A., G.A. Brewer, and O. Neumann (2016). Public service motivation: A systematic literature review and outlook. Public Administration Review, 76(3), 414-426.

Stritch, J.M. (2017) Minding the Time: A Critical Look at Longitudinal Design and Data Analysis in Quantitative Public Management Research. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 37 (2), 219-244.

Yackee, J.W. and S.W. Yackee (2021) The American State Administrators Project: A New 50-State, 50-Year Data Resource for Scholars, Public Administration Review, 81: 558-56.