Autonomy of International Bureaucracies: On the Actor-Level Autonomy in the WTO Secretariat

2014

Masteroppgave offentlig politikk og ledelse- Universitetet i Agder, 2014 The research question in this study addresses actor-level autonomy as enacted by civil servants within an international bureaucracy, namely the WTO Secretariat. The objective is to identify underlying mechanisms arguably responsible for inciting patterns of behaviour among civil servants. This study is premised on the assumption that autonomy may be studied by examining behavioural patterns of the incumbents and that such behavioural patterns largely are a consequence of mechanisms of pre-socialization, re-socialization and organizational affiliation. The study consists of two main parts. The first part is descriptive …