Varieties of Managerialism Inside the State. The Long-Term Transformations of Management Structures in the French and German Central Governments

Abstract

This article applies an organizational, longitudinal and comparative perspective to study the varieties of managerial activities that have been historically developed inside the state since the early 1980s. Its aim is to assess the extent to which these activities have been influenced by New Public Management reforms while also evidencing the fact that many other types of management have been developed overtime. Based on an analytical typology categorizing the diversity of managerial tasks and on an original large-scale dataset mapping internal structures in the French and German central bureaucracies and their transformations from 1980 to 2014, the article shows that managerial activities (notably in charge of support functions) were already well rooted in the two central governments. It also measures the late but significant effects of NPM reforms in the two countries, visible in the growth of steering and controlling activities which are even more visible in the French than in the German case. At last, it explores the likelihood of isomorphism in the organization of managerial activities either among ministries in charge of the same policy tasks or across managerial activities due to their inherent dynamics of diffusion.