Bureaucracy and public administrations

On the face of it, bureaucracies may look quite similar in terms of their top-down organization and the tasks they perform, but bureaucracies are ultimately made up of people, and people introduce variation. To understand how bureaucracies work, it is therefore essential to compare them across time and space, between nation states and within them, across different levels of government. This chapter utilizes institutional theory to systematically organize the accumulated knowledge in comparative public administration. It emphasizes the necessity of triangulating different institutional approaches to comprehensively understand the workings and effects of bureaucracies across time, space and government levels. Additionally, the chapter delves into the significance of informal and customary aspects within bureaucracies, paving the way for new directions in the comparative study of public administrations.