Social Ties and Intergovernmental Collaboration

Current studies on social networks in public administration have mainly focused on the impact of senior managers’ interface with multiple actors in their environment for the performance of their organizations and for policy success. By comparison, we know much less about the processes that underlie the formation of civil servants and managers’ social ties. The few studies that unravel the shaping of civil servants’ social networks tend to focus on socialization and the development of friendship and advice ties within governmental units. Conversely, little is known about the shaping of civil servants’ inter-governmental social ties. Studying the formation of civil servants’ inter-governmental social ties is important given the likely implications of such networks, and their scarcity, for information flows across government, policy innovation and inclination for collaborations that transcend organizational silos and turf battles. The shaping of cross-boundary social ties has been extensively studied in relation to business corporations. This literature proposes that people’s social ties are a function of formal and informal opportunity structures. The latter are most notably shaped by individuals’ membership in different “social foci” (Feld, 1981) – business units, functional roles, geographical locations and so forth. As a result, social ties across organizational and functional boundaries tend to be scarce, whereas within social foci networks are dense, resulting in "structural holes" (Burt, 2004) between cliquish clusters of social networks. Additionally, within social foci, individuals’ choice of social ties is shaped by their social identification with and attraction to people with whom they share similar group-based identities and experiences, that is homophily. It has further been shown, in relation to business organizations, that the structure of employees’ career paths shapes the homogeneity/heterogeneity of their social networks, and, as a result, their inclination to share information and knowledge within versus across business units and formal roles. Thus, organizational boundary spanners tend to be those whose distinct and flexible careers afforded them with more opportunities for building a diverse and discrete social network that connects them, directly or indirectly, to structurally and geographically distant others. Building on the above insights, this study examines the effect of variation in civil servants’ career structures for their social identities (as members of a ministry versus the civil service as a whole), and for their inclination for intergovernmental collaborations. To do so, we employ a survey, which includes experimental and observational components, which is about to be fielded in the Israeli central government. Participants are members of a Cadets program for would-be managers, which are centrally recruited and extensively trained over a two-year period, and thereafter dispersed across central government. We compare the social ties, social identification and inclination for intergovernmental collaboration of six cohorts of the Cadets program with a fairly comparable sample of civil servants from the same ministries, and the same level of education (MA) in similar disciplines (social science and law). While selection biases in enrollment to the selective and prestigious Cadets program cannot be fully eliminated, our survey includes multiple controls that are intended to ameliorate these concerns.