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Within seemingly weak states, exceptionally effective subunits lie hidden. These highperforming niches exhibit organizational characteristics distinct from poor-performing peer organizations, but also distinct from high-functioning organizations in Western countries. This article develops the concept of interstitial bureaucracy to explain how and why unusually high-performing state organizations in developing countries invert canonical features of Weberian bureaucracy. Interstices are distinct-yet-embedded subsystems characterized by practices inconsistent with those of the dominant institution. This interstitial position poses particular challenges and requires unique solutions. Interstices cluster together scarce protobureaucratic resources to cultivate durable distinction from the status quo, while managing disruptions arising from interdependencies with the wider neopatrimonial field. I propose a framework for how bureaucratic interstices respond to those challenges, generalizing from organizational comparisons within the Ghanaian state and abbreviated historical comparison cases from the nineteenth-century United States, early-twentieth-century China, mid-twentieth-century Kenya, and early-twenty-first-century Nigeria.

Using the before-after natural experiment occasioned by the Arab Spring in Libya, we explore how market and non-market activity affect foreign firm legitimacy in times of political turmoil. Although all MNEs in Libya had to cultivate strong ties to Qadhafi to succeed during his 40 years of rule, we found that those that also invested in social-benefit projects and in social ties with families with few ties to the Qadhafi family earned a broad-based legitimacy that helped them survive Qadhafi's overthrow. Our findings contribute to the political risk and political behavior literature the notion that the pursuit of firm legitimacy in general, and especially in the eyes of social-sector actors, is an effective hedge against political risk. More theoretically, our findings support the addition of a social-sector-based path to firm legitimacy in the host country that complements and may at times substitute for, the government-based path to foreign firm legitimacy. Practically, our findings suggest that MNEs' facing severe political risk can improve their prospects for survival by investing in relationships with influential social groups and by offering goods or services that are perceived as socially valuable.

Comparative studies of corruption focus on the selection and incentives of policymakers. With few exceptions, actors who are in charge of implementing policies have been neglected. This article analyzes an original data set on the bureaucratic features and its effects on corruption in fifty-two countries. Two empirical findings challenge the conventional wisdom in literature. First, certain bureaucratic factors, particularly meritocratic recruitment, reduce corruption, even when controlling for a large set of alternative explanations. Second, the analysis shows that other allegedly relevant bureaucratic factors, such as public employees' competitive salaries, career stability, or internal promotion, do not have a significant impact.

Bureaucratic compliance is often crucial for political survival, yet eliciting that compliance in weakly institutionalized environments requires that political principals convince agents that their hold on power is secure. We provide a formal model to show that electoral manipulation can help to solve this agency problem. By influencing beliefs about a ruler's hold on power, manipulation can encourage a bureaucrat to work on behalf of the ruler when he would not otherwise do so. This result holds under various common technologies of electoral manipulation. Manipulation is more likely when the bureaucrat is dependent on the ruler for his career and when the probability is high that even generally unsupportive citizens would reward bureaucratic effort. The relationship between the ruler's expected popularity and the likelihood of manipulation, in turn, depends on the technology of manipulation.

This article addresses the influence of politicians, managers, and the dispositions of street-level bureaucrats in shaping actions at the frontlines of policy implementation. We investigate these for the implementation of employment policy reforms in Denmark. Our findings show a large percentage of caseworkers emphasizing actions that are consistent with the national employment reform goal of getting clients into jobs quickly. The influence of politicians and managers in bringing this about is relatively limited in comparison to the influences of caseworkers' understanding of policy goals, their professional knowledge, and their policy predispositions. Our main contribution is an unpacking of the political and managerial influences on caseworkers' policy emphases. We find direct effects and, more notably, indirect effects that operate on the influence of caseworkers' perceptions of policy goals and their knowledge. These findings provide a more nuanced and positive assessment than much of the implementation literature of the way that higher level policies are translated into actions at the frontlines.

Social workers are classic street-level bureaucrats. This article provides a critical examination of Michael Lipsky's account of discretion within street-level bureaucracies. While concurring with the main thrust of Lipsky's critique of management control of discretion, I argue that he gives insufficient attention to the role of professionalism in his analysis and the impact this has on the relationship between front line managers and workers and the nature of discretion. I employ a qualitative case study of adult social work within a local authority to illustrate and develop this argument. The study, which draws primarily on interviews with local managers and practitioners, suggests that the professional status of social workers influences both the nature of their discretion and the way in which this is managed. I conclude that Lipksy's work needs to be augmented by an understanding of the role of other perspectives, such as professionalism, in examining manager—worker relations and discretion in the street-level bureaucracies within which social workers practise.

This article explores how organizations balance the pressures to pursue efficiency through standardization with the need to remain responsive to local needs. The study combines rich ethnography with detailed loan data to show that both standardization and flexibility through relational ties provide substantial organizational benefits but also carry significant costs; thus, no strategy is inherently superior, and their coexistence generates the best results. Such coexistence, however, creates contradictions that must be managed. Here, I use microfinance as a strategic setting and gain analytic leverage from the random assignment across branches of loan officers who exhibit significant heterogeneity in rule enforcement styles: some enforce rules strictly, whereas others frequently bend them to respond to client needs. I find that loan officers with relational styles exercise discretion productively to enhance organizational performance. Yet their effectiveness is contingent on the presence of rule-enforcing peers, as evidenced by the significant underperformance of branches with a high concentration of officers of either type. In contrast, branches that contain discretionary diversity, or a balance between enforcement styles, perform best. This is not due to diversity per se, but because loan officers process decisions in local credit committees. Committees that contain discretionary diversity generate a productive tension that induces participants to justify decisions along broader organizational goals, thus maintaining a productive balance between standardization and flexibility. Implications for organizational theory and practice are discussed.

We investigate how aspects of \"civil service\" systems of personnel management interact with bureaucratic discretion to create expert bureaucracies populated by policy-motivated agents. We construct a dynamic model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship-specific) policy expertise and may or may not be interested in policy choices per se. The legislature makes sequentially rational grants of discretion, which serve as incentives for expertise investment and continued service only for policy-motivated bureaucrats. Bureaucratic policy preferences and the legislature's agency problem vis-+ -vis bureaucracies develop endogenously in the model. Bureaucratic expertise can be supported in equilibrium only at a cost of its politicization; \"neutral competence\" is inconsistent with strategic incentives of bureaucrats. We identify several conditions that support the development of an expert bureaucracy in equilibrium, including security of job tenure and control over policy issues for policy-motivated bureaucrats.

Reports of the demise of the bureaucratic form of organization are greatly exaggerated, and debates about bureaucracy's functions and effects therefore persist. For many years, a broad current of organizational scholarship has taken inspiration from Max Weber's image of bureaucracy as an \"iron cage\" and has seen bureaucracy as profoundly ambivalent— imposing alienation as the price of efficiency. Following a path originally sketched by Alvin Gouldner [Gouldner, A. W.1954. Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Free Press, Glencoe, IL], some recent research has challenged this view as overly pessimistic, arguing that bureaucracy need not always be coercive but can sometimes take a form that is experienced as enabling. The present article challenges both Weber's and Gouldner's accounts, arguing that although bureaucracy's enabling role may sometimes be salient to employees, even when it is, bureaucracy typically appears to them as ambivalent— simultaneously enabling and coercive. I offer an unconventional reading of Marx as a way to make sense of this ambivalence.

Few empirical works have examined the process through which CEO dispositions relate to organizational outcomes. In this study we examined the relationships between CEO values and organizational culture, and between organizational culture and firm performance. Data were collected from different sources (26 CEOs, 71 Senior Vice Presidents and 185 other organizational members), and include organizational financial performance data collected at two points in time. In support of our hypotheses, CEO self-directive values were associated with innovation-oriented cultures, security values were associated with bureaucratic cultures and benevolence values were related to supportive cultures. In turn, cultural dimensions showed differential associations with subsequent company sales growth, an index of organizational efficiency and assessments of employee satisfaction.