The paper questions the fashionable ideas, that bureaucratic organization is an obsolescent, undesirable and non-viable form of administration, and that there is an inevitable and irreversible paradigmatic shift towards market- or network organization. In contrast, the paper argues that...

How can sociology contribute to the understanding of the social and political transformations that are affecting contemporary Europe? The article proposes that sociological accounts of European integration should focus around the basic problem of internal differentiation and external adaptation...

This paper draws on material from a recently-published book that considers the extent to which Europeanization advances multi-level governance within member states and, if so, of what type(s), and through what processes. The empirical focus is on EU cohesion policy and particularly the domestic...

How can students of the European Union get from describing recent advances, to speculating about what are possible new directions and research agendas? How promising are terms such as “governance” and “the new governance” for improving the understanding how the Union is overned and...

This collection of articles examines some of the legislative cornerstones of the emerging EU Area of Freedom, Security and Justice in light of the research question whether the relevant decision-making processes in the Justice and Home Affairs Council may best be understood from a Rationalist or...

Case studies indicate that national governments may be partly split so that national (regulatory) agencies operate in a ‘double-hatted’ manner, serving both ministerial departments and the European Commission. Applying large-N questionnaire data this paper follows up these studies by...

The EU is frequently understood as a special kind of governance system characterized by its strong degree of interpenetration of different levels of government and a plethora of interactions between EU institutions, administrations from national and subnational levels, as well as organized...

The European Union’s Open Method of Coordination (OMC) is a method that in principle assumes that coordination of policies can be achieved without the use of “hard law”. This paper addresses the question what the OMC represents as an instrument for European integration in the context of...

Economic globalisation fosters transnational systems of governance that are seen to threaten nationally based systems of democracy. These developments raise several questions, both of a theoretical and of an empirical nature. First, what are the prospects for democratising transnational...

This study offers an organisation theory approach arguing that the differentiated organisatational constellation of the European Union contributes to a differentiated penetration of domestic government decision-making processes. It is argued that the European Commission mainly activates the...