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Organizational Demography

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance

  • 173 Accesses

Synonyms

Mortality; Organizational survival; Structure of government; Termination

Definitions

Termination:

An organization is considered terminated if it is fully abolished, merged with another organization, or split into different autonomous new entities.

Transition:

An organization experiences a transition if it is either terminated, absorbed by another organization, or succeeded by another organization with a new name, at a new level of operation, or with other new structural characteristics.

Introduction

Do bureaucracies become immortal beyond the control of elected politicians, as popular wisdom (or fear) often suggests? Since Herbert Kaufman (1976) started to investigate this very question, a new strand of research has emerged to study the demography of public organizations, somewhat in line with population ecology approaches in the business literature. Scholars on both sides of the Atlantic studied the transformation of government by looking at the creation and termination of...

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References

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding for the project SOG-Pro by the Dutch National Science Foundation (project number 464-13-113), see also http://www.sog-pro.eu/sog-pro.html. Arjen Boin, Muiris MacCarthaigh, and the convenors and participants of the Permanent Study Group ‘Governance of public sector organizations’ at the EGPA annual conference in Toulouse, August 2015, provided us with valuable comments on earlier versions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, Leiden University, Turfmarkt 99, 2511 DV, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Sanneke Kuipers, Kutsal Yesilkagit & Brendan Carroll

Authors
  1. Sanneke Kuipers
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  2. Kutsal Yesilkagit
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  3. Brendan Carroll
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sanneke Kuipers .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA

    Ali Farazmand

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Kuipers, S., Yesilkagit, K., Carroll, B. (2017). Organizational Demography. In: Farazmand, A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_3207-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_3207-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-31816-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-31816-5

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