One Commission or Several? Staff Groupings and Values

Are the same values and beliefs shared by all Commission employees, regardless of status and staff grouping, and does it matter? Drawing on original data from a large-scale survey and data from a programme of interviews conducted in 2014, we test against the data the claim made by Suvarierol et al (2014) that commitment to EU values are correlated with type of contract and that staff self-select according to their enthusiasm for the European project, as well as our favoured hypothesis – that motivation is poorly correlated with commitment to European values and to career aspirations within the Commission, and that differences in these values do not imply that the workforce lacks coherence or common sense of purpose.