Conference Agenda

Public administration faces challenges in attracting, selecting, and retaining Generation Z employees. This presentation examines the key issues related to succession strategies, aging, and various recruitment practices. It is based on a study that is part of a large-scale international and Hungarian research project (2024). The representative research involved data analysis, questionnaires distributed to EUPAN members and the Hungarian public administration, and in-depth interviews.

Few European countries have dedicated aging strategies, and many still rely on traditional HR recruitment practices. To adapt to generational shifts, public administration must integrate technology into recruitment and develop targeted aging strategies, which are essential for attracting and retaining younger employees while ensuring a balanced and sustainable public sector workforce.

The presentation provides an overview of solutions adopted for managing an aging workforce.

Over the past three decades, public administrations in France and internationally have undergone significant managerial reforms driven by New Public Management principles (Hood, 1991). These reforms have led to a proliferation of performance management tools—indicators, audits, dashboards, and reporting systems—designed to enhance public sector efficiency (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2017). While much research has focused on the top-down design and diffusion of these tools, their concrete reception by frontline public agents remains underexplored (Lipsky, 1980; Bezes, 2020). Yet, these professionals are key to the delivery of public services, operating under growing managerial pressures, resource constraints, and external stressors such as rising incivility from the public (Jansen _et al._, 2021; Peeters & Campos, 2022).

This study adopts a bottom-up perspective to analyze how street-level bureaucrats appropriate, circumvent, or resist management control tools in their everyday practices (Malmi & Brown, 2008). Through an exploratory ethnographic investigation (Moisdon, 2015; Brodkin, 2011; Van Maneen, 2011) in several French public administrations, we examine how these agents navigate the tensions between managerial imperatives and public service missions (Bouckaert & Halligan, 2008). Our approach focuses on the lived experiences of these professionals, analyzing how they adapt, negotiate, or reinterpret control mechanisms within their specific work contexts (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003).

By doing so, this research sheds light on the micro-level dynamics that shape the implementation of administrative reforms, beyond the intentions of policymakers (Lipsky, 1980; Hill & Hupe, 2009). It contributes to filling a gap in public management and control literature by offering insights into the coping strategies and adaptations developed by frontline agents. The findings offer practical recommendations to better integrate these actors into modernization and simplification strategies for French public administrations.

This research fills a critical gap in the literature on public management and control by shedding light on how frontline agents navigate the complex and often contradictory demands placed on them by managerial reforms. By focusing on the bottom-up perspective, this study offers practical recommendations for better integrating these professionals into modernization and simplification strategies in public administrations, thereby enhancing both the effectiveness of management tools and the quality of public service.

In the ever-changing field of governance challenged to adapt and be ahead of the curve, administrative and political sciences could also be challenged in their methods on how to evaluate, study and perceive their subjects of study, namely, politicians, public officials and the like. Taking social constructivism as a starting point, individuals participate in their realities by different processes, mainly through participating in the processing and construction of knowledge – as active participants. What follows from this starting point is that individuals holding institutional positions have been the target of academic studies regarding, for instance, their perceptions, relationship between scientific and expert knowledge, consideration about public values and finally their use of power. This theoretical article aims to contribute to the revision of the constructivist point of departure to discuss what agency we are assigning to our research objects.

Utilizing a synthesis of two central constructivists, Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann, I will present a revision of constructivist agency to discuss the premises through which academic research assigns agency. The article contributes to academic literature by discussing methods that arise from the synthesis, to create an elaborate framework that allows for a nuanced analysis of agency. The nuance is located at analyzing, for instance, the interview data of the politician or the public official in a way that does not seek out “underlying assumptions” or critique their imperfect view on public values by discourse analysis methods.

In short, a revised analysis of constructivist agency places emphasis on an overview of contingency in which the agency operates, while still giving a jumping-off point for the agency perceivable in that contingent context. This way, what is achieved, is avoiding the totalizing nature of over-emphasis of contingency and context, which removes agency, but also situates agency and its limitations in its relevant context. The institutional context of politicians and public officials makes for an exemplary case, as their agency is contextualized by a varied set of legal limitations, mandates as well as norms and guidelines – still without removing the possibility for agency of the individual.

Equity is of key concern for public service delivery. However, existing research shows that minority groups are discriminated against in the allocation of public services. To improve social justice, public professionals must recognize how societal structures unequally affect minority and majority groups, thereby justifying the need for tailored approaches to address these disparities (Sowa & Selden, 2003). Sociological research shows that people often misperceive inequality and that learning about existing societal inequalities could lead to changes in beliefs about the causes of inequality and policy preferences (Mijs & Hoy, 2022). This study examines a novel cognitive framework (Amemiya et al., 2023) by testing how two types of evidence – between-group comparison and within-group change – of actual inequalities influence professionals’ equality beliefs and their behavioral intentions to promote social justice. We conduct a between-subject survey experiment among at least 1,200 professionals in the education sector, manipulating the type of evidence presented regarding actual inequalities of opportunity related to gender and socioeconomic class. By examining how informational interventions could affect public professionals’ causal attributions of inequality, we aim to generate Behavioral Public Administration insights that directly contribute to advancing social justice.

References

Amemiya, J., Mortenson, E., Heyman, G. D., & Walker, C. M. (2023). Thinking structurally: A cognitive framework for understanding how people attribute inequality to structural causes. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(2), 259-274.

Mijs, J. J., & Hoy, C. (2022). How information about inequality impacts belief in meritocracy: Evidence from a randomized survey experiment in Australia, Indonesia and Mexico. Social Problems, 69(1), 91-122.

Sowa, J. E., & Selden, S. C. (2003). Administrative discretion and active representation: An expansion of the theory of representative bureaucracy. Public Administration Review, 63(6), 700-710.