Does culture affect public service motivation? Evidence of sub-national differences in Switzerland

This article explores societal culture as an antecedent of public service motivation. Culture can be a major factor in developing an institution-based theory of public service motivation. In the field of organization theory, culture is considered a fundamental factor for explaining organization behavior. But our review of the literature reveals that culture has not been fully integrated into public service motivation theory or carefully investigated in this research stream. This study starts to fill this gap in the literature by using institutionalism and social-identity theory to predict how the sub-national Germanic and Latin cultures of Switzerland, which are measured through the mother tongues of public employees and the regional locations of public offices, affect their levels of public service motivation. Our analysis centers on two large data sets of federal and municipal employees, and produces evidence that culture has a consistent impact on public service motivation. The results show that Swiss German public employees have a significantly higher level of public service motivation on the whole, while Swiss French public employees have a significantly lower level overall. Implications for theory development and future research are discussed.

Principal-Agent Theory and the World Trade Organization: Complex Agency and ‘Missing Delegation’

This paper analyses the World Trade Organization within a principal-agent framework. The concept of complex agency is introduced to focus on the variety of actors that comprise an international organization. Special attention is paid to the relationship between contracting parties’ representatives and the Secretariat. In the empirical part, the paper analyses the role of the Secretariat in assisting negotiations and presents evidence of declining influence. It is shown how principal-agent theory can contribute to addressing this ‘puzzle of missing delegation’. The paper concludes with a cautionary note as to the ‘location’ of international organizations’ emerging pathologies and calls for additional research to address the relationship between material and social sources to explain behaviour of the key actors within the complex agency.

The World Trade Organization at Work: Performance in a Member-Driven Milieu

This article discusses performance in the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Applying the framework by Gutner and Thompson and inspired by principal-agent theory, it is argued that existing studies have underspecified the institutional milieu that affects performance. The WTO represents a member-driven organization where Members are part of the international organization (IO) (e.g., through rule-making) and at the same time act outside the IO (e.g., through implementation). Thus, a narrow reading of the IO (focusing on the civil servants and the Director-General and his staff) will not suffice to understand IO performance in the WTO context. Selected evidence is presented to illustrate aspects of the WTO’s inner-working and the institutional milieu of performance. In addition, the article discusses a number of performance parameters, including the relationship between Secretariat autonomy and performance, the role of information, and the mechanisms of performance aggregation. The article ends by cautioning against quick fixes to the system to improve performance.