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Why do some public organizations survive for many decades, whereas others are terminated within a few years? This question of organizational survival has long intrigued public administration scholars. To explain longevity, public administration research has focused on organizational design features and adaptive capacities. The results have been inconclusive. This article explores an additional explanation for survival and demise: the density dependence theory as formulated in the field of organizational ecology. The underlying premise of this theory is that certain environments can only sustain a certain number of similar‐type organizations. A rising number of organizations fuels competition for scarce resources, which inevitably leads to the demise of organizations. Density theory has often been tested in the business literature, but has been rarely applied to public sector organizations. In this article, we test whether this theory can help explain organizational survival in a population of US federal independent public agencies (n = 142). Our results show that density matters. This is good news for public administration research: the inclusion of density boosts the explanatory power of traditional variables such as design and adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public management is a domain of research that is now roughly three decades old. Researchers in this area have made important advances in understanding about the performance of public organizations. But questions have been raised about the scope and methods of public management research (PMR). Does it neglect important questions about the development of major institutions of the modern state? Has it focused unduly on problems of the advanced democracies? Has it made itself irrelevant to public debates about the role and design of government, and the capacity of public institutions to deal with emerging challenges? This set of eight short essays were prepared for a roundtable held at the research conference of the PMR Association at the University of Aarhus in June 2016. Contributors were asked to consider the question: Is PMR neglecting the state? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An adequate assessment of crisis management failure (and success) requires a validated causal theoy. Without such a theory, any assessment of crisis management performance amounts to little more than a "just so" story. This is the key argument of this paper, which describes how hindsight biases and selective use of social science theory gave rise to a suggestive and convincing - but not necessarily correct - assessment of NASA's role in the Columbia space shuttle disaster (l February 2003). The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) identified NASA's organizational culture and safety system as a primary source of failure. The CAIB report reads as a stunning indictment of organizational incompetence: the organization that thrilled the world with the Apollo project had "lost" its safety culture and failed to prevent a preventable disaster. This paper examines the CAIB findings in light of the two dominant theoretical schools that address organizational disasters (normal accident and high reliability theory). It revisits the Columbia shuttle disaster and concludes that the CAIB findings do not sit well with the insights of these schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some public organizations grow old and others die young? Since Herbert Kaufman first posed this question, considerable research has been devoted to answering it. The findings of that research suggest that the design of new public organizations affects, to a significant degree, their survival chances. In this article, we test whether and how “design factors” affected the durability of the so-called New Deal organizations initiated under FDR's first term. Our findings confirm that design factors do matter, but their effects change over time. We draw out some potential implications for institutional design and sketch a renewed research agenda to determine why some public organizations survive environmental pressure whereas others succumb to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of modern crises, the European Union (EU) has increased its efforts to build common crisis management capacity across the continent. As the EU seeks to both coordinate national crisis and disaster authorities and build its own supranational capacities, it is worth asking whether the EU is capable of designing an effective European homeland security apparatus that will fit member state expectations as well as its unique supranational character. In this article, we apply a bureaucratic politics perspective to explore and assess how the EU's governance structures and policymaking processes constrain and facilitate its efforts to build transnational crisis management capacity. We discuss how institutional and policymaking characteristics may affect the EU's ongoing effort to enhance security and safety for the inhabitants of European states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the demise of the space shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board sharply criticized NASA’s safety culture. Adopting the high-reliability organization as a benchmark, the board concluded that NASA did not possess the organizational characteristics that could have prevented this disaster. Furthermore, the board determined that high-reliability theory is “extremely useful in describing the culture that should exist in the human spaceflight organization.” In this article, we argue that this conclusion is based on a misreading and misapplication of high-reliability research. We conclude that in its human spaceflight programs, NASA has never been, nor could it be, a high-reliability organization. We propose an alternative framework to assess reliability and safety in what we refer to as reliability-seeking organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, crisis management has become reprioritized in both the public and the corporate sector. The authors argue that crisis simulations can and should be a crucial feature of preparatory efforts to deal with crises. Drawing from crisis management literature, and their own experience with crisis simulations, they explore how different types of crisis simulations can help crises managers to prepare for "traditional" disasters as well as modern crises and contingencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the possible contributions of crisis researchers to the efforts of the U.S. and Europe to prepare for future crises. Definition of crisis that can encompass a variety of theoretical perspectives; Challenges in the main operation of each phase of crisis management; Insights concerning the existence of crisis; Barriers to building a capacity to facilitate the diffusion of academic and practical knowledge.