“Complex public organizations are seen “through a glass but dimly” by their manifold audiences.” (Carpenter and Krause 2012: 27). What is usually more directly observable and easier to value by an audience is personnel. The proposed paper takes this and the higher public visibility of executives as a starting point to theoretically combine job market signaling (Spence) as personnel micro level with bureaucratic reputation (Carpenter) as organizational macro level. With this theoretical model, recruitment and promotion of civil servants in the top ranks of German federal ministries are analyzed as organizational strategy to maintain or increase their reputation.
Prior studies on agencies head’s reputation show that personal reputation is portable between different positions. Bringing experts on change-affected subjects into office might be seen as a signal for an effort to improve agencies’ field-specific competence and openness towards relevant audiences. Accumulation of reputation by recruitment is therefore presented as a strategy to quickly adjust organizational reputation to environmental developments. However, this strategy also entails some risks and draw-backs. For analytical reasons, audiences are clustered into three general groups:
(1) politics as principals, (2) polity or other agencies as collaborators and competitors, and (3) the public as receiver of created goods or policies. Based on the respective mission of an agency, those audiences are getting more diversified. It becomes evident that trying to include experts from different societal fields may reduce reputation for other audiences like politics or other agencies. On these grounds, it can be assumed that each appointment is carefully considered in the light of a trade-off between calling in bureaucratic or non-bureaucratic expertise.
In the empirical part of the paper personnel-related reputation strategies will be analyzed. Multiple signals could be correlated to different facets of organizational reputation. Therefore, not a single measure for reputation is created, but one for every (generalized) audience. This will allow to compare reputation between different agencies, and between different pivotal situations (e.g. organizational re-arrangements, crises, elections). It is furthermore a direct measurement of part of organizational reputation instead of the usual indirect way by manifestations in the media. The analysis covers all top civil servants currently in office for a comparison of all German federal ministries to show the capabilities of the proposed measurement. Furthermore, selected examples for pivotal situations since 1990 are analyzed to better understand the dynamics of personnel- related reputation strategies. Indicators like experience, bureaucratic background, competencies, or political craft are drawn from career data based on a research project on political and administrative elites in federal ministries in Germany that analyses biographical data. Socio-structural characteristics and career patterns of ministers, state secretaries, and division heads in the core executive are included as well as their political experiences and party affiliations.
