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Reforms as reputational signals

Boekbijdrage - Boekabstract Conferentiebijdrage

Ondertitel:an examination of the longitudinal relation between organizational reputation and structural reform intensity
In this study we theorize and test how the media reputations of public agencies are related to their likelihood of experiencing structural reforms. This paper contributes to the literatures on organizational reform/terminations and bureaucratic reputation in several ways. First, the literatures on organizational reform and termination have shown how reforms are seen by political-administrative leaders as instruments to achieve certain pre-defined goals (structural-instrumental perspective) and/or as unlikely interruptions in between periods of organizational stability and incremental change (institutional perspective) (Christensen & Laegreid, 2007; Kuipers et al. 2018). At the level of antecedents, the focus has been on a series of structural, cultural or environmental variables that either insulate agencies from interventions or pressure/incentivize political-administrative actors to engage in reforms (MacCarthaigh & Roness, 2012). The role of organizational reputation – or: how public organizations are perceived by their stakeholders (Carpenter, 2001) – has remained unexplored. In order to make sense of public sector performance, political-administrative actors rely on information shortcuts in their decision-making processes (Nielsen & Moynihan, 2017). Most public sector activities are limited in the extent to which they can be captured by measurable performance outputs (Van Dooren et al., 2015). Reputation serves as a crucial information shortcut for actors to process information in the evaluation of the performance of public organizations (Bovens & ’t Hart, 2016). Poor reputations and crises reflect, channel and amplify latent feelings of discontent with regard to the performance of an organization. Situations in which the organization’s legitimacy is at stake set the stage for strategic reorientations and critical decisions about the future of the organization (Alink et al., 2001). Second, the literature on bureaucratic reputation started with Daniel Carpenter’s observation that organizations can forge autonomy by developing favorable reputations that are recognized in stakeholder networks (Carpenter, 2001). While case-based studies demonstrate how well-reputed agencies avoid political interventions, and while large N studies show a positive relation between agencies’ general reputations and their levels of discretion, no studies to date have provided similar evidence for the relation between reputations and the likelihood to experience reforms. Third, this study contributes methodologically by relating a validated approach to measuring reputation as reputational history (Salomonsen et al., 2021) – based on supervised machine learning techniques to detect sentiment in texts towards 15 agencies over a period of 15 years – to a dataset on the structural reforms experienced by these agencies (Belgian State Administration Database, e.g. Kleizen et al., 2018).
Boek: European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) general conference, 30 August – 3 September, 2021, virtual event
Pagina's: 1 - 25
Jaar van publicatie:2021
Trefwoorden:P3 Proceeding
Toegankelijkheid:Closed