The governance dynamics of the emergent European administrative order : explaining the strategy process of EU Agencies

Over the 1990s and the 2000s, subsequent waves of institutional-administrative reforms have established at the European Union (EU) level a variety of ‘public agencies’, characterised by a certain degree of autonomy from both the European Commission and the individual Member States. The research project aims at studying the under-investigated phenomenon of the process of strategy formation in EU agencies, thus contributing to both the field of public management (about the strategy process in semi-autonomous organisations) and the field of EU studies (about the impact on European governance of the organisational behaviour of EU agencies). The research question has been formulated, in most simple terms, as: how does strategy form in EU Agencies? The overall thrust of the research is exploratory and theory-building. The research design is a longitudinal multiple case study. The design school of thought in strategic management and, quite surprisingly, the entrepreneurial school have turned out to provide useful interpretive frameworks for accounting for the dynamics of the strategy process in EU agencies. Implications for public management, general management, and the contemporary debate on EU governance are discussed.