It is well known that the shape and size of public sector organization and public bureaucracies changes over time. Comparative explanation of how and why is still relatively underdeveloped. Much of the comparative analysis to date has focused on explaining the reception and differential implementation of ideas of New Public Management (NPM), and variations in attempts to address the shortcomings of NPM. Sustained comparative case-study inquiry may be able to leverage greater explanatory power in order to help us build theory that can then be tested more extensively. This paper exploits the fact that two countries possess full time-series databases of national state administrations, the Norwegian State Administration Database, http://www.nsd.uib.no/civilservice, and the Irish State Administration Database, http://www.isad.ie. These two case studies are situated in very different legal and administrative traditions. In Ireland, a common law country with a Whitehall tradition, organizational change is frequent, relatively lightly governed by law, and exhibits considerable diversity in both structural and legal form. In Norway, Nordic legal traditions which have affinities with the Rechtsstaat tradition mean that structural change is less common, grounded in statute, and controlled by rational system design. This paper examines changes in two areas of organizational configuration: public commercial enterprise, and non-commercial agencies, with a view to establishing the dimensions of organizational innovation and the variety of relationships between departments and other bodies. The objective is to explore what factors explain the initiation and implementation of organizational change, such as response to new policy challenges, changes in economic environment, pressures emanating from the international environment, and shifts in government partisanship.
