The politics of agencification

13Starting in the 1980s, the creation of new agencies, or the “agencification” of existing ministerial directorates is considered as the characteristic dynamic of an organizational mode of reasoning that has spawned a considerable volume of academic literature. [32] This dynamic has two dimensions: a monofunctional logic that aims to isolate a certain strategic function (financing, regulation, implementation, etc.) within a public policy in order to attribute it to a specialized organization; and a logic of autonomization that aims to increase, to some extent, the leeway afforded to these new entities. And yet the global phenomenon of agencification assumes a remarkable variety of forms, [33] as confirmed by each foray into a concrete national context. Certain authors prefer to use the term “quangos”, which they define in terms of a “world of quangos” that stretches along a “continuum from central government agencies, like the Next Steps in the UK and the agentschappen in the Netherlands, to specifically created external bodies and beyond into the world of contracting out, privatization and regulation”. [34]

14The ways in which such bodies are analyzed, described, and categorized are themselves complex since there are multiple dimensions according to which one might measure the specialization and autonomy conferred upon them. Schematically, we can distinguish three types of agencies.

15At one end of the continuum, the first type concerns the transformation of ministerial directorates into “agencies”, often called “executive agencies”. Remaining within the purview of a ministry, but created to implement specific public policies, these agencies are endowed with a certain autonomy as far as management of personnel and budget is concerned. The Next Steps reform of 1988–1991 in Great Britain, which transformed ministerial departments into executive agencies, is emblematic of this trend: the managerial autonomy these new agencies enjoyed in relation to central administrations and their presiding ministers was enshrined in performance agreements. [35] Often influenced by the principles of New Public Management, comparable if less systematic developments have been seen in other European countries (the Netherlands, Spain, and France with the creation of services à compétence nationale, SCN, from 1997 on). Having had agencies in charge of public policies for some time already, the Scandinavian countries have also moved to strengthen their managerial autonomy.

16At the other end of the continuum we find independent regulatory agencies, responsible for a particular sector of public policy. Their ascendancy and the explosion in their numbers – well documented in the literature [36] – serve to illustrate the rise of the regulatory state, as analyzed by Giandomenico Majone. [37] Research shows that these regulatory agencies have seen their number grow in Western Europe in the sectors in which they were initially set up (electricity, telecommunications); a similar proliferation can now also be observed in economic domains (financial markets, competition policy, central banks), and also in healthcare (medicine), risk management (food, sanitation, environment) and fundamental rights. [38] In France, this phenomenon can be equated with with the development of independent administrative authorities (autorités administratives indépendantes, AAI). In this context, it is not managerial autonomy that is important so much as the definition of more formalized rules of autonomy such as legal status, the (highly constrained) ways in which such authorities may be created, reformed, and abolished, the protection of their directors via contracts, the irrevocability of their membership, and the powers conferred on the administrative council, etc.

17It is between these two categories that the most diverse landscape in terms of agencified organizations is to be found, the rise of which is not linked to a wave of administrative reform, but is the result of a gradual, iterative, and often longstanding process. Here we are dealing with organizations that take charge of (or, more often, are involved in) a wide variety of state public policies, thus structuring a particular domain of public policy, but assume very diverse functions (production and performance of services, expertise, policing and control, financing, the pooling of resources, etc.). [39] These agencies generally have a legal status and a greater autonomy, but to various different degrees and across different dimensions, such as accountability to ministers, budget management, personnel management, implementation of public policies, etc.

18Whilst the “agency” format covers multiple empirical realities, it is nevertheless credited with a great many virtues, ascribed to one or the other of its two components in the doctrinal tracts (professional, but also academic) that promote them.

19On one hand, the extent to which New Public Management served to advocate the fragmentation of vertical bureaucracies through the creation of small autonomous administrative units has been widely demonstrated. [40] The acclaim for specialization rested upon particular benefits that the process was supposed to deliver: specialization would bolster the effectiveness of a policy by assigning its implementation and operation to an organization exclusively dedicated to the task. It would ensure that the objectives of public policies were protected, theorized by some authors in terms of “credible commitment”. Correlatively, the creation of a dedicated agency was also seen as a way of producing ad hoc expertise on a particular public sector or problem. This emergence of new fields of expertise is particularly related to agencies in the domain of “risk” in the broad sense (sanitary, food, nuclear, environmental), where the emphasis is placed on the separation between risk assessment (expertise) and risk management (the policy itself). Similarly, in matters of economic policy, the liberalization of the industries that were once state monopoly networks (electricity, gas, telecommunications, postal services, railways) has led to the establishment of market and competition control by regulatory authorities. The independence of central banks constitutes another emblematic illustration of this turn in economic doctrine. Yet as Élodie Lemaire’s contribution to this issue shows, specialization is advocated in other sectors of public policy too – in the case she discusses, the organization of policing policy.

20On the other hand, autonomy is also advocated in the name of keeping politics at arm’s length. According to this line of thinking, the agency is supposed to act so as to obviate and “protect the people” from the electorally oriented behaviors of supposedly “versatile” but sometimes “demagogic” (“political”) governors, who are thus to be deprived of any capacity to interfere in the day-to-day operation of the policies overseen by these “agencified” services. Thanks to the “agency”, certain public policy decisions and directions are shielded from politics. Inspired by a new organizational vision which draws on economic theories of organization, such reforms thus revive the idea that a good many issues must be removed from the influence of short-term political calculation, from the electoral cycle, and from the influence of interest groups. With the agency in place, they will be protected in the name of long-term public policy that becomes more coherent over time, oriented more toward the common good, and supposedly serving as a guarantee that rights will be upheld. [41] On the basis of a suspicion of politics, agencification is thus promoted as a new step toward the depoliticization of administrative organizations, with certain tasks entrusted to experts or technocrats.

21The depoliticization justification has of course been the object of numerous criticisms. [42] Agencification is often denounced as a technocratization of policy and a prejudicial weakening of popular sovereignty. This is the argument made by the American political scientist Alasdair Roberts, for example. Roberts sees in agencies the imposition of a “disciplinary logic” [43] which embeds eminently political economic choices in organizational forms that are autonomized and thus shielded from political scrutiny. These issues are central to Benjamin Lemoine’s contribution concerning the creation of the AFT, which reveals the limits of the depoliticization argument.

22We should also note that other more prosaic motifs have been enlisted as justifications for agencification. In doing away with the regulatory constraints that weigh upon internal ministry bodies, agencies can offer more flexibility in preserving or even increasing budget allocation, but also in the recruitment of staff on private contracts.

Merger policies

23From the 2000s onwards, it was no longer agencies but mergers that would come to seem constitutive of a homogeneous dynamic in the transformation of state structures. Mergers were described as contributing to a global reform movement that these authors baptized “post-NPM” or “whole-of-government approach”. [44] They argued that there was a set of initiatives designed to strengthen governmental coordination, centralized steering, and integration – in short, a reactive politics of organization that sought to counteract the excess of NPM reforms and the fragmentation they had brought about. [45] Examples of what some have described as “merger mania” [46] have been seen in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. These mergers are presented as movements of organizational transformation in the sense of a process of vertical or horizontal reintegration of systems, with a particular focus on interministeriality and the strengthening of forms of cooperation. [47]

24The program of “joined-up government” launched in 1999 by Tony Blair’s Labour government via a white paper on the modernization of the administration (White Paper: Modernising Government) is a prime example of an administrative reform that champions mergers and the process of integration. The program of “joined-up government” proposes to tackle “wicked issues” such as social exclusion, urban renewal, or drugs, the resolution of which calls for intersectorial procedures. [48] The reform played out in the creation of interministerial units (policy action teams) responsible for certain so-called “cross-cutting” issues; in the development of interministerial seminars and networks; in measures of horizontal integration by way of mergers or through the development of digital technologies; and, finally, in placing particular emphasis on policy delivery, concerned to integrate reception services into a “one stop shop”. During the same period, the Canadian government promoted “horizontal management”, [49] in a context of drastic reorganizations ascribed to budgetary savings. These policies do not stem merely from a desire for coordination. They also reflect systematic policies of reorganization of large-scale public bodies via mergers – as illustrated by those carried out in the hospital sector [50] and in the social policy sector in the US, the merger of the employment service and benefits agency carried out by the Labour Party in the UK (which led to the creation of a one stop shop for employment called Jobcentre Plus), [51] or in the merger, in Norway, of the Ministry of Labor (DOL) and National Insurance (NIA) within a new ministry for Employment and Social Security (NAV). [52] These reorganizations, presented as a “second generation of reform”, have given rise to competing labels, including the expression “joined-up government” after the British experience, “post-NPM”, or “whole-of-government”. [53]

25Although the French state has clearly been less systematically affected than English-speaking countries by the movement towards specialization via agencification, France nevertheless also saw a proliferation of organizational reforms championing the dynamics of organizational integration in the 2000s, and in particular a wave of mergers that was instigated in 2007 within the framework of the RGPP. The ANPE and ASSEDIC were merged to create Pôle emploi; [54] the General Directorate of Taxes (Direction générale des impôts, CGI) and the General Directorate of Public Accounting (Direction générale de la comptabilité publique, DGCP) were merged to create the General Directorate of Public Finances (Direction générale des finances publiques, DGFIP); [55] and universities too were persuaded to enter into mergers. [56]

26Here again, just as the “agency” form became a rational myth as the result of a body of professional and academic studies that legitimated it, so too the “merger” was constituted as an organizational standard credited with numerous virtues. First is the promise of economies of scale, budgetary savings, reduction of transaction costs, and improvements in efficiency. Mergers are perceived as reorganizations that make it possible to do away with redundant duplication of work and unnecessary overlaps and facilitate the pooling of functions, particularly transversal so-called “support” functions. [57] Seen as a way to improve efficiency, they supposedly allow the same service to be provided at a lesser cost thanks to “one stop shops”. Establishing large technical networks is also associated with this integrated form of organization, as is the professionalization of support functions. Another efficiency benefit associated with mergers is the anticipated possibility, in creating superministries or metaorganizations, of moving and “reallocating” agents more easily, since the new merged entities will offer greater margins of maneuver and will create a larger market of human resources, which may be an important concern in a context where budgets are tight. Authors such as Andrew Dunsire, Christopher Hood, Meg Huby, and Martin Kitchener, however, remark on the paucity of empirical verification of the supposed economies of scale achieved through such reforms. One of the methodological difficulties here is that of knowing how to isolate and measure the extent to which mergers improve efficiency – for they are often undertaken in a context where public bodies are also undergoing a reduction in resources or responsibilities.

27The second justification for mergers is the reverse of that of agencies. Whereas agencies are seen to specialize and strengthen effectiveness due to a narrower division of functions, mergers, conversely, draw their legitimacy from their supposed potential for confronting new public policy problems that are often aggravated by the logic of specialization, which tends to result in fragmentation and organizational silos. Mergers are often justified by a process of integration that allows such problems to be placed in their proper “transversal” context, by bringing together public policies that are judged to be overly autonomous. For this reason, certain studies compare mergers to a process of despecialization. This reading is arguable, however. Not only are mergers and specialization not opposites, but in fact they constitute two forms of rationalization that can, on the contrary, go hand-in-hand. Multiple mergers undertaken within the framework of the state may go together with the creation of new agencies that autonomize new functions (the creation of an agency for state purchasing, a national agency for secure documents, an agency for one-off payments of agricultural subsidies, etc.). The agencies are newly created by merging different, hitherto separate services. The argument that “professions or skills” are being brought together is, in fact, frequently invoked in mergers (as in the case of Pôle emploi or that of the DGFIP in France). Yet such an argument does not prevent the discovery, along the way, that the anticipated synergies were in fact extremely hypothetical (as professions or skills that are supposedly “close” to each other ultimately turn out to be quite different).

28Frédéric Pierru and Christine Rolland’s article, and that of Philippe Bezes and Patrick Le Lidec, which both appear in this issue, echo these considerations and beliefs associated with mergers. Their analyses of two reforms, the creation of ARS and the transformation of the territorial state, both instigated within the framework of the RGPP, bear witness to the influence of this ideological wave of reorganization via mergers within the French context. Nonetheless, their authors undertake to reveal the complex mechanisms that run through these merger policies and thus challenge the overly simplistic readings offered by some of the international literature.

Agencification and rational theories of delegation

30The analysis of public sector reorganizations focused on the creation of agencies has been developed particularly in the many North American studies which focus on the “politics of structural choice” and bear the imprint of “rational choice”. These studies emphasize that the creation or transformation of a public organization is not guided principally by choices of effectiveness or efficiency, but that it is an eminently political act. It is an act, however, that depends upon rationales, which the authors writing within this school of thought – very much influenced by principal-agent economic theories or by the theory of transaction costs – do not necessarily always analyze in the same way; rather, their analysis changes depending on what they see as the predominant issue. For simplicity, two sub-currents can be distinguished here. On the one hand, in studies that draw on the foundational studies of Terry M. Moe, the question of control is uppermost. [58] The creation and “design” of federal agencies in the US is embedded within the constraints of the separation of powers, which involves multiple political compromises between interested parties around the central issue of the control of these organizations, whose power is delegated and based on expertise. The conflicts between the presidential executive and Congress are obviously of cardinal importance here. To this Moe adds two ingredients. First, the weight of electoral uncertainty leads incumbent governments to strengthen the autonomy of the institution they have created (or reformed) so as to prevent any subsequent majority from challenging their preferred public policy orientations (or to render any such intervention more costly). Second, interest groups directly concerned with the agencies and their policies continually seek to influence the “design” of agencies, supporting Congress in its efforts to remove them from the control exerted by the presidential executive. Moe thus considers that the designs of federal agencies are always “imperfect” because they are subject to influence, and thus effectiveness becomes a secondary objective in the formation of state structures. This approach, central in the US, has fueled numerous recent studies there on the development of federal agencies, particularly centered on the extent of agencies’ autonomization and issues of control linked to a series of political factors (majority, coalition, political stripe, etc.). [59]

31Elsewhere, authors such as Gary J. Miller, following in the footsteps of Douglas North and Barry Weingast, [60] give greater weight to another all-important issue: the political concern about credible commitment within the framework of electoral constraints which are liable to render government commitment to public policy objectives “inconsistent” over time because they are “changeable”. [61] This reasoning stems from the fact that public policies, as defended in an electoral campaign for example, are entrusted to a newly-created specialized organization so as to maximize the chances that they will be carried through correctly, on the basis of reliable professional expertise – but also as a symbolic gesture to make it known that the issue is being taken in hand. The delegation of this task to a dedicated organization will also offer a guarantee that the measures will outlast a potential change in government, manifesting once more the concern to seek protection from uncertainty and political influence. This theorization in terms of “credible commitment” rapidly found favor because it was mobilized in studies on the emergence of the regulative state [62] and the rise of the now widespread independent regulatory agency. [63] Against the political interventionism considered to be the prerogative of governmental authorities, these studies defend the idea that agencification is guided by the concern of the ruling powers to “tie their own hands” so as to shelter public policy decisions from electoral contingencies and guarantee a certain stability and predictability for the implemented policy.

32These are interesting perspectives: on one hand because they lay the groundwork for a true theory of politics based around a few key concepts (control, uncertainty, credible commitment); on the other hand because they make the effort to identify and to characterize truly political rationales at work in choices of structure. Even so, they are also open to criticism on a number of essential points. Unsurprisingly, given their connection to economic theories of institutions, they privilege, ex ante, very straightforward political behaviors that are aimed at optimization and are linked to the supposedly stable preferences of political leaders alone. Their decisions, all too often considered within such theories as unique moments of decision-making, seem to be entirely informed by the theory of the agent and driven by a clear, rational, and highly instrumental vision of the organizational form that they create. It is as if leaders pay extreme and hyper-rational attention to the minutest details of the administrative organizations whose creation or reform they endorse. Furthermore, these studies also overestimate the rationality of organizational forms leading to two major oversights. On one hand, these forms are not intrinsically rational but are constructed, diffused, and legitimated by their advocates as “rational myths” or “cultural models”. [64] On the other hand, in spite of their importance, the autonomy and independence of agencies are more often presumed than real and measurable, with the (rare) qualitative attempts at measurement often marred by their excessive formalism. A third criticism concerns the disconnection from historical contexts and environments, both institutional and interorganizational. Choices of agencification ultimately seem to be embedded in bureaucratic universes, and multiple studies have shown that these environments exert a strong influence on the choices of political actors. [65] They also enforce tight institutional constraints. The state is above all a set of segmented organizations which make up a range of institutions, characterized by rules that are costly to challenge, numerous veto actors, and norms and values which influence organizations. These approaches notoriously underestimate the manifold interactions that take place during the fabrication of a new format for the division of labor, and the power struggles – concerning new boundaries and hierarchies – of which these formats are the outcome. Many studies – including some belonging to the same rational choice paradigm – emphasize the extent to which studies on processes of agencification have given too much weight to political forces rather than to internal bureaucratic power plays. [66] In his genealogy of the 1988 Next Steps reform that led to the agencification of ministerial directorates, for example, Oliver James shows that the reformers were not members of the political executive, but groups of high-ranking Whitehall officials, along with consultants whose “bureau-shaping” logic he describes. These officials wished to shore up the autonomy of ministerial departments by transforming them into agencies responsible for the implementation of public policies, the better to dedicate themselves to the more “noble” and properly “political” activities of the design, steering, and control of public policy that put them in contact with political actors. This division of labor led to the delegation of the “dirty work” of the implementation of public policies to specialized organizations. One last criticism relating to studies on agencification is that they overemphasize the issue of delegation and autonomization and neglect to analyze questions of specialization. However, more policy-sector based studies on agencies in the health sector [67] and the economic and banking sphere [68] associate the creation of a dedicated agency primarily with the production of expertise regarding a particular public policy problem. Moreover, a series of recent studies on processes of agencification, beginning with the seminal work by Daniel Carpenter, [69] focus particularly on the crucially important role this specialized expertise plays in the strategies that agencies develop in order to construct and maintain their “reputation” (according to Carpenter, a symbolic belief deliberately cultivated in political actors, ministers, control bodies, interest groups, and the public) for the uniqueness of their abilities, knowledge, obligations, and mission. [70]

The politics of merger policies: a historic turn in search of a theory

33In contrast, works on the mergers of public organizations seem less consistent in their theoretical framing, oscillating between approaches that review a wide series of factors and a consistent historical argument that – according to an implicit functionalist reasoning – sees such factors as a barometer of reaction against the fragmentation brought about by the neo-managerial wave of agencification. The contrast between the explanations put forward for agencification and those put forward for mergers is striking. Whereas the former are highly developed in theoretical terms and place emphasis on the political variables as well as the issue of delegation, the latter instead privilege a far more diverse range of explanations, which, moreover, do not stray far from the justifications given for mergers. A review of the academic literature on mergers confirms this. First, we find numerous case studies which privilege eclectic theoretical frameworks. Karen M. Hult focuses on interorganizational power struggles; [71] Tom Christensen et al. combine a perspective centered on the decision-makers with a culturalist approach that emphasizes institutional oppositions, along with the influence of the environment; [72] Martin Kitchener privileges the construction and diffusion of rational myths and the role of agents of change in the health sector. [73] John Halligan [74] and Glyn Davis et al. identify the combined influence of many factors: the strengthening of control over the governmental apparatus, changes of priority in the orientation of public policy, the need to realize economies of scale by reducing redundant duplication – while indicating that it would be practically impossible to disentangle the rationales at work here:

34

“It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to accurately desegregate the motives which inspire any given machinery change [because political leaders] think across categories rather than within the neat boxes necessary for a viable typology of machinery decision.” [75]

35Similarly, Christopher Pollitt identifies six motifs in reorganizations, motifs in which the symbolic dimension is far from absent: to mark a change in the intensity of commitments; to create an impression of reformative dynamism; to adapt to changes in the environment; to make savings; to be more effective or better coordinated; to take charge of new governmental functions and new public policies; and to respond to problems encountered by the political executive. [76] While this profusion of proposed explanations is not in itself problematic, it reflects a primary difficulty: among empirical studies, of which there are many, there are few which precisely describe and gauge the influence of the mechanisms at work in mergers. Rationales are too often identified ex ante and ultimately are little analyzed in context, in their full depth. Such rationales are not the product of universal laws of organizations. Produced within and by social practices, historically inscribed within a certain context, they deserve to be examined in relation to the transformations of the public sphere, the professional and managerial world, and the world of experts and intra-state struggles.

36In any case, the policy behind the decision to merge structures does not seem easy to theorize in a systematic way, nor easy to conceptualize. It is symptomatic, therefore, that some studies prefer to analyze mergers as reflections of wider processes in the transformation of states, their authors emphasizing that they belong to a historical turn: the changing modes of state regulation and the advent of the post-Fordist “Schumpeterian Workfare State” of which Bob Jessop is so fond; [77] a general movement of vertical and horizontal integration; [78] and the emergence of new forms of interministerial cooperation within states, such as the “whole-of-government approach” and “holistic governance”. [79]

37These studies often raise a second difficulty in the form of a paradox. Mergers have long been interpreted without setting their significance in historical context, as ordinary forms for dealing with the division of bureaucratic labor within a framework of the disaggregation and reaggregation of structures. By way of opposition, in the 2000s, as mentioned above, this view of mergers evolved somewhat. For many authors, [80] the “whole-of-government approach” is indeed related to a new politics of state reform which came after the reforms inspired by New Public Management (and was even sometimes constructed in reaction against the latter), and which focuses on new issues: strengthening coordination, attention to cross-cutting public policy problems, governmental integration. Yet, looking more closely, the actual timing of these reorganizations via merger seems to contradict the hypothesis that mergers are reactive in nature. This is the implicit thesis of Martin Kitchener and Linda Gask in their analysis of hospital reforms. Although they confirm the idea of a fashionable organizational model, they are careful not to oppose mergers to neo-managerial reforms, referring instead to “NPM Merger Mania”, and emphasizing the convergence of mergers with neo-managerial instruments: the same borrowings from private-sector recipes; the same focus on cost and staff reduction. [81] Also in the health sector, Richard W. Scott, Martin Ruef et al. analyze mergers as a manifestation of the movement of integration that developed in parallel with the move towards the introduction of market logic and privatization. Analyzing the transformations of the New Zealand state, Martin Lodge and Derek Gill also challenge the idea of a “turn”, emphasizing the continuity of certain themes with the principles of NPM (budget savings) and also raising the point that the fragmentation of the public sector (linked to the development of public institutions and enterprises) came well before the 1980s. [82] On the one hand, then, the processes of specialization/integration seem to constitute a fundamental longstanding movement that has more to do with long-term transformations of the state than with the fits and starts of the reforms of the 1980s-2000s. It is at this scale that we must reflect upon and analyze mergers. But in doing so it is essential, on the other hand, to identify precisely the mechanisms at work – otherwise we risk conferring a universal explanatory power on the idea of a post-NPM turn, something that it cannot possibly possess.

The four political dimensions of the politics of organization

39This special issue defends the thesis that the politics of organization are better understood and analyzed when they are situated in the context of the various political commitments that prevail over them and the multiple uses of organizational forms. The politics that runs through the constitutive policies of reorganization is not the product of one single way of thinking. It is bound up in a set of relations (with the electoral field, the bureaucratic apparatus, the clients of public policy, experts and their expertise, etc.) that defines different political issues. Grasping the variety of political investments involved in reorganizations allows us to demonstrate the complexity, the ambiguities, and even the tensions at the heart of the reform of structures, and also to better understand how reform coalitions might cluster around new state architectures.

40Drawing on the theories outlined above and on the various factors identified in the case studies, it is possible, somewhat systematically, to distinguish four logics at work, by comparing two dimensions: the nature of the issues (cognitive or material), and the magnitude of the processes undertaken (limited/confined or broad/publicized). In making this analytical distinction (cf. Table 1), the resulting four types of manipulation of state architectures are not exclusive of one another, but are often co-present. Yet characterizing them in this way allows us to situate political actors in configurations where they are in permanent interaction with other groups: high ranking officials of the different bureaucratic segments concerned; experts seeking to promote an organizational standard; interest groups seeking to influence the choice of structures; the electoral public targeted by the reform, etc.

41The first manifestation of politics in reorganizations anchors structural reforms to electoral competition, but conceives of this link on the basis of rationales that are less sophisticated than the high expectations of decision-makers involved in the theory of structural choice. For our first question ought to be about the kind of attention that political leaders pay to reorganizations. That they are undeniably engaged in policies of reorganization, considered as one technique of government among others, tells us nothing about the intensity of their involvement. What is at stake in these reorganizations – which relates to the intricacies of administrations – is, to say the least, of no particular interest to citizens, even if, conversely, it is extremely salient in the eyes of officials and interest groups in direct contact with these administrations. This means that, although there may be something to gain from publicly adopting a reforming approach, in general such matters have little electoral resonance, and will thus not engage elected politicians with overflowing diaries who must choose between numerous more politically visible issues. But this does not mean that the question of competition for power is absent here. Analyzing the creation of ministerial portfolios and the merger of ministries within Whitehall from 1971 to 1984 at a macro level, Christopher Hood, Meg Auby, and Andrew Dunsire, for example, defend the idea that mergers of ministerial portfolios are linked to the well-known model of “court politics”. For them, the creation of a large ministry serves first and foremost to symbolically reward an allied party or person according to their electoral influence or the extent of their support. [84]

42Following on from this argument, Philippe Bezes and Patrick Le Lidec in their contribution to this themed issue show that the reconfiguration of the state’s territorial administrations (ministerial field unit) is strongly linked to the political influence and differential mobilization of ministers. Political heavyweights are therefore key variables when we seek to understand the outcome of a reform. On a different but complementary basis, political commitment to reorganizations can also be interpreted as indicating symbolic reactivity to public policy problems that loom large on the governmental agenda, and/or to issues which public opinion sees as important. The creation of a new entity can be part of a publicity move designed to publicly demonstrate the attention that authorities are paying to a public policy problem, and to attest to the will to “do something”. [85] This symbolic dimension is highlighted by Benjamin Lemoine when he analyzes the creation of the AFT as a political signal addressed to investors and financial markets. Similarly, Élodie Lemaire shows how the creation of small specialized units in police commissariats reflects the hierarchy of legitimate public policy problems and the publicizing of governmental priorities (vehicle offences, domestic violence, etc.). In this case, the reorganizational “stop and go” can be linked to electoral cycles, with each majority in power keen to flag its priorities in the fight against crime through the creation of dedicated structures. The creation of ARS, studied by Frédéric Pierru and Christine Rolland, also illustrates this demonstrative aspect of public policy. The merger was presented as a response to questions of healthcare, a salient electoral issue in Sarkozy’s presidential campaign: including control of healthcare expenditure, the struggle against medical deserts, and improvement of access to care. Moreover, the political weight of the health minister Roselyne Bachelot influenced the adoption of a reorganization over which she kept firm control, to the point of detaching it from the structure of the RGPP. In all these cases, the politics of organization carries a strong symbolic dimension that can be analyzed in terms of the construction of images and signals addressed to “public opinion” in general, or to more specific sections of the public.

43The second way in which politics is implicated in reorganizations relates to what we might call the politics of governance. Reorganizations can be analyzed, as we have said, as constituent policies. For Harold Seidman, changes in administrative structures constitute “an instrument of politics, position and power”. [86] Decisions in matters of the division of labor and the transformations of the administrative boundaries that they bring about have powerful redistributive effects on authority and power. They change the position of organizations within administrative systems, transform hierarchical chains and the distribution of responsibilities, justify the appointment of new directors, and influence both the circulation of information and the modes of coordination and control. [87] In so doing, they modify the way in which political power is exercised.

44Élodie Lemaire demonstrates this in her study of the process of specialization in the French police force. The proliferation of specialized units both reflects and affects the way in which the police are governed. Their creation is a way for commissaries not only to prove their political loyalty, but also to govern differently within the commissariat: dedicated brigades reduce the autonomy of police officers and enable greater control over them by segmenting their activity into small domains that are more easily measurable and thus controllable. The issue of control is also at the heart of Benjamin Lemoine’s contribution on debt management. Controversies over the correct “distance from politics” in the choice of “design” for the AFT reflected the importance of the questions of steering and control. The process of the Agency’s creation was shot through by expectations and conflicts around the prospective political governance of the organization according to the institutional rules (and its greater or lesser proximity to the Ministry of Finance) that would define it, as was the degree of marketization of the practices and norms of debt management. Frédéric Pierru and Christine Rolland’s article on the creation of the ARS places the question of the redistribution of the power and regulation of the French “health system” at the heart of this reorganization via merger. Although a consensus emerged on the project of the creation of the ARS, the different visions of the modes of “integration” maintained by the many actors involved (professionals, administrators and politicians belonging to the state, health insurance, and private associations and doctors) found themselves in competition over the “definition of good sectorial government” and the forms of professionalism that should prevail within it. The reform of the territorial administration of the state raises comparable issues. In their contribution, Philippe Bezes and Patrick Le Lidec emphasize the importance of rivalries over the control of the territorial services of the state, an important concern in the merger of devolved services at the regional and departmental level. The originality of this article here is that, whilst numerous studies emphasize questions of reward, leading those in power to add more and more organizations and tiers in order to distribute more positions, political actors may also have an interest in drastically reducing the number of their interlocutors such that politicians can achieve a real grip on public policy through repeated interactions with a small number of high ranking officials. The merger serves to “pyramidize” the organization, as it offers the executive power the benefit of tighter control and a rationalized hierarchy centered on a smaller number of trusted collaborators.

45Third, politics is present in that the actual issues of public policies are, of course, not absent from the motives that drive reorganizations. Initially difficult to discern, exploratory empirical work needs to be undertaken in order to identify them. Such investigation is all the more important in that the literature on the politics of structural choice has rather neglected the dimension of policy in its characterization of politics. For the focus placed on organizational formats leads one to pay more attention to the rules, reallocations, and institutional arrangements than to the substance of the policies embedded in organizations. The interest of a political sociology perspective here is that it encourages us to explore them and bring them to light. Certain studies are useful in the exploration of this dimension. In articles dedicated to the creation of mega-ministries in Australia [88] and to reorganizations in the so-called Westminster systems (Great Britain, Canada, Australia), [89] the authors bring to light one of three ways in which political influence is exerted over structural reorganizations. Modification of the division of labor allows for the rehierarchization of the priorities of public policy by redistributing power and encouraging a challenge to the organization of clienteles. The intervention into the division of labor thus also doubles as a more or less discreet choice of policy direction. In their work on the creation of health safety agencies (the Établissement français de greffes and the Agence nationale d’accreditation et d’évaluation en santé), Daniel Benamouzig and Julien Besançon show that their emergence in France corresponds to a resumption of control by the central administration of activities which up until this point were delegated to private or third-sector actors. This strengthening of the presence of the state via agencification also brings with it new knowledge and a new vision of public policy, thus expressing jurisdictional shifts and conflicts. For François Buton and Frédéric Pierru, the establishment of new agencies has permitted the importation (initially to the margins of the state) and subsequent institutionalization and bureaucratization of an originally North American discipline of government: applied epidemiology, rather frowned upon by the central administration. [90] On a related subject, in studies of the creation of the Agences de sécurité sanitaire des aliments (SSA) in France and the Food Standards Agency in Great Britain, Thomas Alam shows how the SSA sector was historically a subsector of food policy, maintained by a configuration of “weak” actors and institutions and housed within the Ministry of Agriculture. [91] When the mad cow disease crisis broke out, the entrepreneurs of the Health Ministry, the “Kouchner boys” (Martin Hirsch and Dider Tabuteau), used the crisis of Bovine Spongiform Encephalitus (BSE) as a resource to subvert existing power relations, shifting jurisdictions and reorienting public policy. The creation of the AFSSA in 1998, under the co-supervision of the Ministry of Health, marked a reorientation of the politics of health safety, now reformulated in terms which give more prominence to consumer associations and health professionals. Similarly, mergers can serve as a vehicle for the orientation of policies. In his exploration of the creation of the Ministry of Labour and Pensions through the merger of the UK Employment Service and Benefits Agency, Jay Wiggan shows clearly how this transformation was part of a neoliberal strategy to reorient employment and social security policy. It was designed to promote the introduction of logics of “activation” on the labor market, targeted at traditional job seekers and economically inactive users of social security services. [92] Reorganizations not only affect the way in which public policies are conceived and implemented, they also shape their objectives and instruments by imposing new categorizations of the organization of labor, the distribution of tasks, the fields of expertise to mobilize, and the professions to be promoted or legitimated.

46Each contribution to this issue illustrates the importance of the issues of public policy embedded in structural reforms. Benjamin Lemoine shows how the creation of the AFT affected the content of the policy for the issuance of debt, steering it toward a certain financial orthodoxy and a focus on the liquidity of debt, just as it enduringly established a normalized relationship between the state and the financial markets via the mediation of the AFT technicians. For Élodie Lemaire, specialization is also associated with the belief in the effectiveness of small brigades to target ever more differentiated crimes (discrimination, violent robbery, etc.). For their part, Frédéric Pierru and Christine Rolland associate the dynamic of integration and the creation of the ARS with two significant reorientations in health policy: the rise of a management conception of health policy centered around the notion of “risk management”, but also the valorization of certain medical specialties (biomedicine and epidemiology) more compatible than others with the dynamic of integration and with the two categorizations of the system implicit within it: an industrial rationalization and an emphasis on the continuity of care beyond the system. The specific issues of sector-based public policies are not as prominent in Philippe Bezes and Patrick Le Lidec’s article, since the reform via merger of the territorial administration of the state is primarily, in terms of its agenda, a constituent and transversal policy of administrative reform. As such, it does, however, express a significant reorientation of the content of reform policies, in shifting priority back to questions of integration, interministerial transversality, and coordination in relation to prior neo-managerial dynamics linked to the Loi organique relative aux lois de finances (LOLF) which reinforced ministerial silos and distilled a discreet form of agencification. [93] What is more, the new regional organizations created by merger (the Direction régionale de l’environnement, de l’aménagement et du logement [DREAL], the Direction régionale des entreprises, de la concurrence et de la consommation, du travail et de l’emploi [DIRECCTE], etc.) are, like the ARS, criss-crossed by public policy issues, in a certain sense “encapsulated” in the negotiations over the new frontiers of the territorial state. The DREALs are certainly the local manifestation of the project of the broad Ministry for Sustainable Development, an ambiguous and plurivocal notion but one that emphasizes the political will to take into account new environmental questions (climate change, biodiversity, carbon tax) that require going beyond the compartmentalized sector-based administrations that would traditionally compete with one another over these matters (infrastructure, ecology, industry). [94] Their creation reflects these priorities, even if it obviously does not mean that the many public policies which occupy these entities will all be reoriented. [95]

47The final dimension of the politics of organization is certainly the most classical. It relates to the power struggles and jurisdictional battles that constitute the heart of ordinary bureaucratic operations. Described by James Q. Wilson as “turf wars” [96] between bureaucratic segments, they form the weave of what Graham T. Allison calls “bureaucratic politics”, within a state viewed as a “conglomerate of large organizations and political actors which differ considerably as to what the government should do”. [97] Accordingly, to intervene in the division of labor in state bureaucracies – that is to say, to shift the formal boundaries of organizations – can only exacerbate phenomena of competition and jurisdictional struggles between component bodies, given the multiple effects of such restructuring: effects on the dependency of administrative organizations upon their environment, on the position that they occupy in hierarchies, on the identities of their agents, etc. What some sociologists have called “institutional work” [98] is thus, when applied here to the politics organization, inseparable from “boundary work”. [99] From this perspective, the processes that accentuate specialization (agencification) and those that favor integration (mergers) generate different power struggles. It is easier to specialize than to merge because of the opposite effects these reforms have on the market of top positions. Even if it brings about a discreet devaluing of certain jobs, the segmentation of organizations is easier in practice since it broadens the market of top managerial positions. Conversely, mergers force a reduction in and a re-evaluation of top managerial positions, making competition more acute between individual and collective actors (in the French context, between corps in particular). Élodie Lemaire’s article illustrates the relative ease with which a policy of specialization can be implemented, in this case an increase in specialized brigades in the police commissariats. She writes that “specialization is a form of positive capital in terms of police prestige”, for the small units allow individuals to escape the generalist model and to move up into investigative services and activities hitherto reserved for senior officers. Similarly, Benjamin Lemoine shows the extent to which the specialization of the debt service together with the absence of any real separation of the agency from the state apparatus was presented as a “modernization” to be “credited” to the state, and which the high-ranking officials of the agency supported all the more strongly because the designation “agency” improved their performance in the public sale of loans while maintaining, or even strengthening, their internal political capacities.

48However, a section of the literature on mergers and the establishment of coordinative structures emphasizes the difficulties associated with them. These transformations provoke quite intense interorganizational power struggles for control [100] because they affect many dimensions: the degree of integration between the units merged and the hierarchical tiers, the nature of interdependencies between these units (vertical and/or horizontal) and their symmetry, the degree and nature of internal conflicts, the “status” of the merged services which are reevaluated, the new connections that are made, the environment and client networks, etc. The denser the institutional field, the more the remodeling of outlines and boundaries fuels conflicts and the defense of territory: the constitutive negotiations of “bureaucratic politics” really come to the fore. [101] In this regard, Frédéric Pierru and Christine Rolland bring to light the struggles between two competing conceptions of the ARS: state versus health insurance, one political and decentralized, the other technocratic and centralized. The REATE (la réforme de l'administration territoriale de l'État), as analyzed by Philippe Bezes and Patrick Le Lidec, corresponds to an archetypal case of mergers with very high institutional density, insofar as there are numerous ministries concerned, all with a historical territorial anchorage, at variable levels and degrees of institutionalization depending on their age. When it is the case not of one merger but a series of pairings between many bodies, the numerous power struggles – to defend existing boundaries or to obtain new divisions in which position and autonomy may be preserved – entail multiple transactions and bargains.

The institutional embedding of the politics of organization

49The set of contributions in this issue emphasize the different political dimensions of what we have called the politics of organization, depending on the use that those in power make of organizational formats and the way in which these formats constitute both resources and constraints for them. The four contributions share another point of view, however. The transformations of the division of labor constitute organizational phenomena that are fascinating to study, as long as we do so “in context”, setting them within the institutional dynamics – political, administrative, professional, and social – that traverse them, shape them and endow them with meaning. In other words, reorganizations and the political commitments that underpin them do not occur in an institutional void. They operate within institutional realms, which constitute a repository for ways of perceiving the organization (through its categories, symbols, ideologies, modes of functioning, etc.) and its structure (norms, resources, a certain distribution of power, veto points, etc.). Conversely, these realms constrain reorganization enterprises by favoring, or on the contrary curbing – but in any case, influencing – initiatives for structural transformation.

50This essentially classic institutionalist dimension evidently raises the question of change. What challenges do the new divisions of labor pose? To what extent do they express or reproduce the weight of existing power relations, or of historical administrative institutions? To what extent do they shift the equilibriums of power stabilized in former periods? Is the creation of the ARS a total transformation of the organization of the French health system? By replacing the prefect at the center of the system, isn’t the new organization of the territorial state a reactivation of an old historical logic? Does the creation of the AFT radically challenge French ways of financing debt? Do specialized police brigades in the commissariats constitute a classical mode of police organization or do they express an unprecedented contemporary development? Each of the contributions to this issue proposes a reflection on the import and the limits of the transformations that affect a particular segment of the French administration. Benjamin Lemoine emphasizes the weight of the French administrative configuration in the appropriation of the “debt agency” organizational standard and in the specific French calibration of the “distance from politics”. Similarly, Élodie Lemaire underlines the contemporary specificity of specialization in the commissariats, linking the development to performance-based neo-managerial reforms taking place elsewhere. Frédéric Pierru and Christine Rolland demonstrate the limits of the process of integration that they study, suggesting that certain levels of administration are more exposed and less resistant to reorganizations than others; while Philippe Bezes and Patrick Le Lidec explore the conditions and limits of the institutional change of the French territorial state, one that is particularly dense and well-defended.

51More broadly speaking, the four contributions reflect the embedded or integrated nature of the forms of division of labor within state institutions. The sociology of the politics of the division of labor proposed by this issue reveals the extent to which administrative architectures are totally interdependent with numerous other structurations of public organizations, such as the orientations and objectives that emanate from the political system and national reforms instigated by those in power; political hierarchies and forms of loyalty; public policies that inform the activity of structures; the groupings that make up public administrations (institutions, professional groups, etc.) but also the realm of positions, mobility, and careers which these architectures in part define. Formalising state structures (investissements de forme) means interacting with many other practices, meanings, ideals, and interests. In short, organization (the division of tasks, functions, and boundaries) is immersed in the different components (political, professional, social) of the institution.

52This embedding can be seen in at least two points common to the different contributions. First, the historical perspective is a decisive factor in terms of situating the reorganizations studied here within long-term institutional change. This includes the slow process of the integration of the health system or of the transformation of the territorial state in France; the historical process of the marketization of French debt; the long timescale of police reform and the transformations of police management since the 1980s. The interwoven nature of many dynamics within the politics of organization, which reflects the reality of a multi-layered institutional complex, is the second property common to the contributions.

53Élodie Lemaire shows clearly that the reforms that led to the creation of specialized police units cannot be analyzed independently of the effects of the reform of institutions and careers, nor of the transformation of the hierarchy of public policy problems that resulted from the circulation of a new security doctrine, these three dimensions being tightly bound up together. In the same way, Benjamin Lemoine emphasizes how the establishment of the AFT must be seen to lie at the crossroads between international reconfigurations (in the context of an internationalization of economies, of increased competition to attract capital when the management of debt had already been outsourced to agencies in many countries in accordance with the orientation advocated by international organizations), transnational circulations of organizational standards (the agency form), and in a particular national configuration marked by the specific influence and will of the Treasury directorate to keep this activity within its purview. Frédéric Pierru and Christine Rolland also highlight the embedded nature of processes of reorganization, the creation of the ARS having been literally shaped by competition between organizations (the state versus health insurance) and by the multiple dynamics (particularly professional, but also bureaucratic) that structure the healthcare field. Finally, the contribution of Philippe Bezes and Patrick Le Lidec places organizational change at the crossroads of four mechanisms: mechanisms that are external to the administration, such as the diffusion of ideas and the way in which they are appropriated by the political elite; mechanisms internal to the administration; changes in organizational form advocated by institutional entrepreneurs with reforming agendas; and changes that are shaped by jurisdictional struggles and negotiation between institutions. [102]