Inside the European Commission: The Dynamics of Institutional Change

Institutions that lack the capacity for adaptation and change, for introducing new methods and new processes, for dealing with new situations and challenges, are lost. Change has been at the heart of the European Commission in the past decade. This panel reports on four ambitious book projects that have focused on institutional changes within the Commission. The changes in the European Commission they analyze include political, demographic, linguistic, and managerial shifts as a result of enlargement and administrative reforms, changes in the composition and morale of the Commission workforce, in the accountability mechanisms, the political-administrative relationships, and in the underlying organizational culture of the European Commission.

In this panel NEW will meet OLD. Two authors of classic studies on the European Commission in the 1990s will comment on these new studies of the EU Commission .

The authors of the classics are:

• Michelle Cini, author of ‘The European Commission: Leadership, Organisation, and Culture in the EU Administration’, (Manchester University Press, 1996)
• Edward Page, author of ‘People who run Europe’ (Oxford University Press, in 1997)

 The new studies are:

• Carolyn Ban, author of ‘Management and Culture in an Enlarged European Commission: From Diversity to Unity?’ Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
• Didier Georgakakis, author of ‘The field of eurocracy. Political sociology of the EU staff and professionals’ (with Jay Rowell) Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
• Hussein Kassim, co-author of ‘The European Commission of the Twenty-First Century’, Oxford University Press, 2013 (Co-authored with John Peterson, Michael W. Bauer, Sara Connolly, Renaud Dehousse, Liesbet Hooghe, and Andrew Thompson)
• Anchrit Wille, author of ‘The Normalization of the European Commission: Politics and Bureaucracy in the EU Executive’, Oxford University Press, 2013