Search results for "seconded national expert"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Is the European Commission a hothouse for supranationalism? : theorising and exploring the world of Commission civil servants
2005
Does the European Commission (Commission) manage to transform and re-direct the roles played by Commission civil servants? To test the old neo-functionalist claim on loyalty transfer among civil servants, this article provides fresh survey and interview data on seconded national experts in the Commission. The transformative powers of the Commission are tested by assessing the extent to which seconded national experts adopt supranational role perceptions. Theoretically, the emergence of supranational role perceptions is accounted for by considering (i) processes of pre-socialisation outside the Commission, (ii) processes of resocialisation inside the Commission, and (iii) organisational inco…
Instrumental calculation, cognitive role-playing, or both?: self-perceptions of Seconded National Experts in the European Commission
2011
This is the authors’ final, accepted and refereed manuscript to the article Most work studying micro-processes of integration – i.e. how agents develop identities and decision-making behaviours within a particular institution – offers explanations based on either instrumental rationality or socialisation. This article proposes a two-dimensional framework that allows analysing under which conditions both logics of social action co-exist. Our empirical analysis employs a unique dataset from a 2011 survey of all 1098 currently active Seconded National Experts (SNEs) in the European Commission. We find that a) instrumental cost-benefit calculation and cognitive role-playing (as semi-reflexive s…
Representative Bureaucracy and the Role of Expertise in Politics
2015
This is an open access journal from Cogitatio http://www.cogitatiopress.com The vast majority of existing studies on bureaucratic representation focus on bureaucracies’ permanent and internal staff. Yet, the rising sophistication of modern democracies and the technocratization of political life are gradually inducing an increased reliance on external experts to assist in the development and implementation of policy decisions. This trend, we argue, raises the need to extend studies of bureaucratic representation to such external and non-permanent experts in governmental affairs. In this article, we take a first step in this direction using seconded national experts (SNEs) in the European Com…
The (micro) processes of integration as dialectic of structure and agency : the case of seconded national experts within the European Commission
2008
Masteroppgave i offentlig politikk og ledelse - Universitetet i Agder 2008 Micro-processes of integration – i.e. how agents develop identities, properties and decision-making behaviours preferred by a particular institution – have been a topic of significant scholarly debate. Most previous work builds on one underlying theoretical framework and thereby excludes (potentially important) elements lying outside it. My thesis attempts to contribute to the ongoing debate by developing a more holistic understanding of these processes, based on the dialectics of structure and agency and thereby positions actors’ decision-making behaviour on a continuum between ‘structural idiocy’ and ‘structural en…