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The Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the basic institutional rules attributed powers to the Autonomous Communities with which to design and structure their public administration, based on a model of institutional isomorphism. At present, the autonomous public sector is of unequal nature in terms of organisation, motivated by decisions taken in its regulation during the process of transformation and innovation of the res publica in recent decades. This paper aims at reviewing the processes of administrative change and modernization, where a reflection on the evolution of organisational theory from a neo-institutionalist perspective is assumed. Hence, professional public management arises as a tool able to help public administrations face current challenges that put at risk their sustainability in the 21st century, especially during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, institutionalism and professionalization, beyond seeming to be mutually exclusive concepts, must be combined from a neo-weberian perspective. This study analyses the public political-administrative subsystem in the Autonomous Community of Cantabria to check the correlation between the degree of politicisation of the senior civil service and the legislation on professional public management in the last decades of institution-building in this Autonomous Community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutionalism is a theoretical approach to the social sciences, particularly political science, which studies society from its formal and informal institutions and their effectiveness. In other words, we refer to an analytical tool that allows us to understand the behavior of organizations. The objective of this document is to provide a theoretical-conceptual framework regarding institutions and their study in organizations to generate a chronological comparability in terms of the changes that are accentuated in institutionalism and its relationship with organizations. This implies incorporating the documentary research technique in order to know the trajectory of the New Institutionalism, its typology and its institutionalized forms in organizations based on isomorphism, coercive, mimetic and normative. At this point, our hypothesis supports that the theoretical-conceptual scaffolding of the New Institutionalism gives us a tool for the analysis of organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic and political changes of the last decades have driven important changes in public management; some of them have been reflected on the adoption of the quality approach based on models of standardization such as ISO 9000. On the basis of these assumptions, this article seeks to identify the features of the institutional change derived from the incorporation of said practices in the governmental sphere, as well as its possible setbacks. The analysis of the changes in public management from the introduction of quality techniques considers the conception of change from the neo-institutional approach and the explanatory category of isomorphism is applied to explain how those techniques are adopted in public organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]