Administrative Culture in the European Commission: The Cases of Competition and Environment

A Not So Technocratic Executive? Everyday Interaction between the European Parliament and the Commission

“…This pattern is also recorded in studies of inter-departmental conflict in Commission policy-making (see e.g. Cini 2000;Cram 1994;Hooghe 2000;Vestlund 2012). Since departments tend to be organised according to policy sectors and sub-sectors, this translates into a sectoral pattern of conflict.…”

The political functions of expert knowledge: knowledge and legitimation in European Union immigration policy

“…Directorates display pronounced differences in terms of their ideologies, organizational cultures and policy styles (Cini 1995), as well as their ways of 'framing' issues (Mörth 2000;Surel 2000). Nonetheless, there are also a number of structural-institutional and ideational features that are shared across Directorates.…”

“…Sociological approaches tend to delineate organizational boundaries in terms of an organization's shared culture or ideology (Shore 2000;Cini 1995;Beyer 1981;Brunsson 1985). Following this approach, the Commission may be best characterized as a multi-organization (Cram 1994;Hooghe 1997), whose…”

Tradition and innovation: Europe's accumulated executive order

“…Arguably, therefore, her observations might be quite compatible with studies showing that the organisational setting is important as regards explaining more 'operationalised' preferences in actual decision situations. For example, several studies have portrayed decision-making at the Commission very much as politics between various DGs (Coombes 1970: 203;Cram 1994;Cini 2000;Hooghe 2000;Mo¨rth 2000). Had the Commission been structured according to geography so that each member state had been served by a particular DG, and if these DGs had in addition been staffed by people from their respective 'client countries', we would expect the various national interests to be at the forefront of Commission decision-making.…”