PhD Profile: Chris Hagen Magnussen

Public sector reforms have increasingly become the subject of academic attention and research. The importance of public leaders during reform implementation processes is implicitly considered important. Despite a rich political science and organizational theory literature on both reforms and leaders in the public sector as such, their specific role as change agents and implementers in such reform processes is still less researched.

Reforms of public organizations can be initiated by different actors and coalitions, motivated by different needs and brought about for different reasons. The final design of the reform content, on the other hand, must necessarily be attributed to the political level, because it is the politicians who have the final authority to make decisions about reform. On the other hand, the responsibility for turning political decisions and intentions into actual change lies with the organizational level and those who are appointed to lead the organization. Given such a view, it will matter who these reformers are, in that different reformers implement different reforms. With this as a starting point, the leader's role, room for maneuver and behavior must be examined and interpreted, in the search for explanations of possibilities and limitations for a successful reform implementation. Such an actor focus can be seen on the basis of individual experiences and interpretations at the micro level. However, the leaders 'behavior can not only be explained on the basis of these actors' learned experiences, perception and translational competence, it will also be influenced by the structures and cultures within which they operate, the informal norms and values ​​within the organization will also mean something. Furthermore, expectations in the institutionalized environment, for example due to exogenous shocks or international trends, must also be taken into account. This necessitates research that can capture both "bottom-up" understandings of leaders' behavior and informal/formal roles in reform processes, but also "top-down" interpretations of such situations. The partly lack of focus on leadership roles and behavior during public reform processes, seen in the light of both top-down and bottom-up approaches, forms the basis for this PhD project.

This is investigated through a case study of the Norwegian 2016 police reform. The approach used in this study will be a combination of a quantitative and qualitative approach, and the project is affiliated with the research group Political Organization and Multilevel Governance, Department of Administration and Organizational Theory at the University of Bergen.