@article{FleischerWanckel2023, author = {Fleischer, Julia and Wanckel, Camilla}, title = {Job satisfaction and the digital transformation of the public sector}, series = {Review of Public Personnel Administration}, journal = {Review of Public Personnel Administration}, publisher = {Sage}, address = {London}, issn = {0734-371X}, doi = {10.1177/0734371X221148403}, year = {2023}, abstract = {Worldwide, governments have introduced novel information and communication technologies (ICTs) for policy formulation and service delivery, radically changing the working environment of government employees. Following the debate on work stress and particularly on technostress, we argue that the use of ICTs triggers "digital overload" that decreases government employees' job satisfaction via inhibiting their job autonomy. Contrary to prior research, we consider job autonomy as a consequence rather than a determinant of digital overload, because ICT-use accelerates work routines and interruptions and eventually diminishes employees' freedom to decide how to work. Based on novel survey data from government employees in Germany, Italy, and Norway, our structural equation modeling (SEM) confirms a significant negative effect of digital overload on job autonomy. More importantly, job autonomy partially mediates the negative relationship between digital overload and job satisfaction, pointing to the importance of studying the micro-foundations of ICT-use in the public sector.}, language = {en} } @article{FleischerWanckel2023, author = {Fleischer, Julia and Wanckel, Camilla}, title = {Creativity in policy capacity}, series = {Public administration review}, journal = {Public administration review}, publisher = {Wiley-Blackwell}, address = {Oxford}, issn = {0033-3352}, doi = {10.1111/puar.13676}, pages = {15}, year = {2023}, abstract = {Creativity is a crucial part of policy capacity in governments. Existing studies on creative behavior in the public sector assess employees' openness to new ideas and creative solutions, and they confirm the relevance of organizational and individual determinants for pro-creativity attitudes. Yet we lack systemic evidence on the explicit level of work-related creativity among policy officials in government organizations. At the same time, novel technologies and particularly social networking services change the working environment of policy officials radically, alter organizational features, and may also yield crucial individual effects. Our study analyses "policy creativity" of policy officials in three European governments. We demonstrate the importance of organizational and individual features, including the stress triggered by using social networking services. Our study captures officials' creativity explicitly and adds to debates on creativity and innovation in the public sector as well as the micro-level foundations of the digital transformation in the public sector.}, language = {en} } @article{FleischerBezesJamesetal.2022, author = {Fleischer, Julia and Bezes, Philippe and James, Oliver and Yesilkagit, Kutsal}, title = {The politics of government reorganization in Western Europe}, series = {Governance : an international journal of policy and administration and institutions}, volume = {36}, journal = {Governance : an international journal of policy and administration and institutions}, number = {1}, publisher = {Wiley}, address = {Hoboken}, issn = {0952-1895}, doi = {10.1111/gove.12670}, pages = {255 -- 274}, year = {2022}, abstract = {The reorganization of governments is crucial for parties to express their policy preferences once they reach office. Yet these activities are not confined to the direct aftermath of general elections or to wide-ranging structural reforms. Instead, governments reorganize and adjust their machinery of government all the time. This paper aims to assess these structural choices with a particular focus at the core of the state, comparing four Western European democracies (Germany, France, the Netherlands, and United Kingdom) from 1980 to 2013. Our empirical analysis shows that stronger shifts in cabinets' ideological profiles in the short- and long-term as well as the units' proximity to political executives yield significant effects. In contrast, Conservative governments, commonly regarded as key promoters of reorganizing governments, are not significant for the likelihood of structural change. We discuss the effects of this politics of government reorganization for different research debates assessing the inner workings of governments.}, language = {en} } @article{YesilkagitBezesFleischer2022, author = {Yesilkagit, Kutsal and Bezes, Philippe and Fleischer, Julia}, title = {What's in a name? The politics of name changes inside bureaucracy}, series = {Public administration}, volume = {100}, journal = {Public administration}, number = {4}, publisher = {Wiley-Blackwell}, address = {Oxford}, issn = {0033-3298}, doi = {10.1111/padm.12827}, pages = {1091 -- 1106}, year = {2022}, abstract = {In this article, we examine the effects of political change on name changes of units within central government ministries. We expect that changes regarding the policy position of a government will cause changes in the names of ministerial units. To this end we formulate hypotheses combining the politics of structural choice and theories of portfolio allocation to examine the effects of political changes at the cabinet level on the names of intra-ministerial units. We constructed a dataset containing more than 17,000 observations on name changes of ministerial units between 1980 and 2013 from the central governments of Germany, the Netherlands, and France. We regress a series of generalized estimating equations (GEE) with population averaging models for binary outcomes. Finding variations across the three political-bureaucratic systems, we overall report positive effects of governmental change and ideological positions on name changes within ministries.}, language = {en} } @article{FleischerBezesYesilkagit2023, author = {Fleischer, Julia and Bezes, Philippe and Yesilkagit, Kutsal}, title = {Political time in public bureaucracies}, series = {Public administration review}, volume = {83}, journal = {Public administration review}, number = {6}, publisher = {Wiley-Blackwell}, address = {Oxford}, issn = {0033-3352}, doi = {10.1111/puar.13740}, pages = {1813 -- 1832}, year = {2023}, abstract = {Structural duration conveys stability but also resilience in central government and is therefore a key issue in the debate on the structure and organization of government. This paper discusses three core variants of structural duration to study the explanatory relevance of politics. We compare these durations across ministerialunits in four European democracies (Germany, France, The Netherlands, and Norway) from 1980 to 2013, totaling over 17,000 units. Our empirical analyses show that cabinets' ideological turnover and extremism are the most significant predictors of all variants of duration, whereas polarization in parliament as well as new prime ministers without office experience yield the predicted significant negative effects for most models. We discuss these findings and avenues for futureresearch that acknowledge the definition and measures for structural change as well as temporal aspects of the empirical phenomenon more explicitly.}, language = {en} } @article{FleischerDanielsenNebyetal.2024, author = {Fleischer, Julia and Danielsen, Ole A. and Neby, Simon and Nykvist, Rasmus}, title = {The state as a marketizer vs. the marketization of the state}, series = {Public organization review : a global journal}, journal = {Public organization review : a global journal}, publisher = {Springer Science + Business Media B.V.}, address = {Dordrecht}, issn = {1566-7170}, doi = {10.1007/s11115-024-00769-x}, pages = {16}, year = {2024}, abstract = {Governments engage in corporatization by creating corporate entities or reorganizing existing ones. These corporatization activities reflect an interplay between political agency and environmental pressures, including (changing) notions of state-market relations. This paper discusses two ideal-typed organizational models of corporatization: the state as a marketizer and the marketization of the state. Whereas the first emphasizes the role of political design and agency in corporatization, the second emphasizes the role of (actors in) the environment for corporatization. Both models are assessed across five corporatization episodes in Norway and Sweden, where we also demonstrate the interplay between political agency and environmental pressure.}, language = {en} }