Volume 6 (2021): Edizione 1 (December 2021)

The social sciences have shaped how the science of public administration perceives innovations. Therefore, economic concepts of productivity and competitiveness frame the way innovations in public administrations are perceived. In contrast, this introduction develops a model for the historical analysis of innovations in administrative organizations. Using the concept of innovation, this model focuses on three levels of change processes that are analytically distinct but often occur together: (1) discourses of novelty, (2) actors of change, and (3) administrative practices.

In nineteenth century France, an administrative practice underwent a spectacular expansion: the assessment of all civil servants, regardless of their ministry of affiliation. This article analyzes this innovation. In the first section, the political and administrative context of this assessment is presented. The second section describes the chronology of the expansion of performance appraisals and the content of the forms used: the competencies of the agents were dissected on all levels (attendance at work, technical abilities, and personal and family life). Finally, the last section will attempt to analyze the modalities, drivers, and effects of the expansion of this practice.

Using the example of the new disciplinary punishment ordinance of 1903, the article examines the shaping of innovations in the Austro-Hungarian army around 1900 on the basis of communication within the administration. It is shown that the military administration operated in a vertical and horizontal multi-level system that was characterised by forms of cooperation and negotiation processes. The middle and lower levels of administration played an important role in shaping the new norms by being involved in the process as internal experts. This approach enabled the adaptation of innovations to practice, but at the same time prevented radical changes.

The present paper analyzes the implementation of the simplification law in Hungarian public administration between 1900 and 1910. The law was enacted in 1901 in a bid to »simplify, facilitate, and speed up« administrative processes and mitigate encounters between different administrative units. The law created an extended debate on the possible directions of simplification and resulted in a mixed reception, including an oftentimes contested implementation. The paper investigates the logic behind the reform both in terms of the legal and practical formulation of revised regulations and in terms of the actual implementation of the directives on the local level. I argue that “simplification” was a buzzword for the homogenization and rationalization of public administration that was considered inept to accommodate the new and expanding tasks of the state by the turn of the century. ›Simplification,‹ hence, resulted in a more complicated system, an oxymoron quickly flagged by contemporaries. The simplification law is understood in the present paper as a case of innovation, and the paper thus contributes to our understanding of innovation processes in public administration. The paper asks how the simplification law was implemented based on the micropractices of administrators, what were the practical consequences of the law in relation to the purposes of lawmakers, who were the main agents that influenced the process, and how they could press their own agendas in the process. These questions are approached through the lens of the materiality of public administration, in which people, objects, and material processes can explain the outcome of innovation initiatives, as in the case of the implementation of the simplification law.

Modern hospitals are not only places of treatment, healing and scientific research, but bureaucratic colossi whose administrative and organizational structures changed fundamentally through the gradual implementation of new innovative office technologies in the first half of the 20^th century. Against this background of media technological change the article aims to trace the fundamental transformation of administrative practices in hospitals between 1890 and 1932, using the Charité Berlin as an example, and paying attention to the ways of transmission and adaption of these new office technologies such as typewriters, photocopiers, file folders, card index and punch card systems into clinical administration.

This paper deals with the role of pneumatic tube systems in public administration in the twentieth century. Based on archival sources and considering examples as different as ministries in Zagreb and Bucharest, the British military administration in the 1940s, the customs and train stations on the Swiss-Italian border as well as governmental buildings in Bonn and Bern around 1970, this article shows in what ways pneumatic mail tubes were interpreted as fostering (or not) innovation in public administration and how clerks were actually dealing with this (not always effective) communication system.

This paper examines the use of management consultants in the German Ministry of Defence in 1981 and 1982. After an affair concerning the procurement of the Tornado fighter aircraft, the Minister of Defence, Hans Apel, hired a team from the consulting firm McKinsey to develop a new organisational concept. This paper examines the special features of the German procurement and defence administration as well as the reasons for the failure of projects of administrative innovation. Focus is placed on the role of management consultants in the implementation of organisational innovations and their relationship to the actors within the ministerial administration.

Reform concepts such as the »New Steering Model« (NSM) became prominent in the German administrative discourse of the 1990s. This article examines the examples of the Speyer Quality Contest and the Carl Bertelsmann Price. These intermunicipal performance contests awarded municipalities for the appropriation of NSM principles, thus popularizing the approach in administrative theory and practice. Simulated competition served as a tool for the relevant stakeholders to negotiate notions of quality and innovation. Actors such as the Joint Office for Administrative Simplification, the University for Administrative Sciences Speyer, and the Bertelsmann Foundation pushed frameworks that conceptualized the municipality as a non-commercial professional service firm. Cities, in turn, hoped to find ways to deliver public services with waning funds. While neither the NSM nor practices of simulated competition dominated the public administrative discourse beyond the early 2000s, they speak to a temporary belief in managerial practices in the public sphere.

Using the example of the administrative use of mobile services, which go by the term ‘mobile government’ (M-Government), this article examines innovative solutions in the public service of the 21st century. The regional focus of the analysis is on the German administration. It is shown that the innovative potential of adopting mobile services in public administration lies in the fact that they break up and at the same time modify the contact structure in the administration and between the administration and citizens or companies by replacing the office with a dynamic network of virtual relationships between administrative employees and administrative addressees. M-Government does not mean saying goodbye to the static office model, but it does add a new, qualitatively different dimension to administration. The concept of mobility on which this article is based is based on a spatial understanding, but detaches it from its originally traffic-related context. Mobile administration is intended to express the fact that administration and its interaction contexts become location-independent through the use of mobile services.

We will focus on the intensifying technologization of government affairs and the ensuing question: does this lead to a bureaucratically dominated technocracy? The coining of the concept of ›technocracy‹ is attributed to the engineer William Henry Smyth in 1919: »The rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers«. We will examine past and present debates on possible adverse effects of technocracy on the scope for democratic governance and thus the position of political leaders and citizens in decision making.

Until the late nineteenth century the British Civil Service relied on handwritten documents which were hand copied by armies of clerks and filed. The next stage was that handwritten documents were copied by armies of typists and then filed. The third stage was that documents were, largely, typed by their authors and distributed via email or other means, at which point the system of filing seems to have broken down. The two major inflection points were roughly 100 years apart, and both the move to the typewriter and the move to email were motivated by a wish to save money.

The article reports on the workshop »born digitals und die historische Wissenschaft – Annäherungen an eine Quellenkunde für genuin elektronisches Archivmaterial«, which was organized by the State Archives of North Rhine-Westphalia in Duisburg on August 30th and 31st, 2022. The workshop established a dialogue between archivists and historians to address the epistemological, methodological, and technological challenges and opportunities of archiving and analyzing digital administrative records. The article situates these debates in a longer history of efforts to document administrative practices. Thus, the article highlights that the established archival order of written records was the contingent outcome of three interlinked transformation processes that occurred around 1900 in administrations and archives: 1) loose paper files started to replace records bound together in books transforming the file as the primary medium for documenting administrative practice, 2) the chronological organization of records in the registry gave way to an order based on subject categories, 3) archivists started to establish the principle of provenance as a principle of structuring archival collections. Thus, rather than treating digitalization as a crisis, it is seen as a transformative period of documentation practices, which brings its specific opportunities and challenges.

Antonio Serra is one of the first authors to write that society and economy will benefit from a diversified economy, an physical infrastructure for better connectivity between people (for trade), investing in an educated citizenry, and good government. To him government is the prime institutional arrangement that has the ability to lift people up. In this article his ideas are discussed and shown how they foreshadowed the thoughts of colleagues in France, Germany, and Italy in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. His thoughts also envisions what is called a welfare state.