Tracing administration

Alarming reports of burdensome administration from different professional groups in the public sector are increasingly attracting attention in media.

Research also shows that we spend significantly more time on administration today than we did 30-years ago, especially among groups as teachers, doctors, nurses, and police officers.

This project aims to trace internal and external demands that lead to administrative work for professional groups at three levels within the public sector; the state, region and municipality, and study how these demands are developed, communicated, translated and interpreted by the actors involved.

The project will also study the driving forces, ideas, and structures in the processes where demands are transformed into administrative work.

Further, the project will compare demands and their administrative consequences among a set of public sector organizations.

The project is qualitative and data from documents as well as interviews with employees and managers at different levels will be collected.

The project’s main contribution is new theoretical and empirical knowledge about processes and mechanisms that shape administrative work in the public sector, a field that more or less has been a black box in organizational research.

The project has a high societal relevance as the increasing administration has major consequences for society in the form of inefficiency and a deteriorating working environment for employees in the public sector.

An important task in the project is therefore also to develop strategies and methods that can reduce the administrative work.