Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 31st NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Panel: Systemic issues of PA revealed during turbulent time Author(s) Sanja Vrbek University of Ljubljana Ljubljana Slovenia Sanja Vrbek, Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, SloveniaTina Jukić, Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia Title Covid-19 as the litmus test of public organisation resilience in turbulent times: lessons learned from the Slovenian context File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Sanja Vrbek Abstract The COVID-19 crisis has been an unprecedented event for which most public sectors across the globe were not prepared. In order to secure their basic functioning and unhampered service delivery, public organisations had to react quickly and adapt to the new situation. This often required changes of their processes and services, reorganisation of their structure and new or intensified use of technology. Although the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on public sectors has preoccupied academic interest in the last two years, it failed to approach the issue of organisational change in a systematic and holistic way. Thus, the research focus has often been partial concentrating on specific organisational aspects/features, as if they are independent and not part of a larger, closely connected and interdependent system. The paper aims to address this gap by dissecting the impact of the COVID -19 crisis on the overall organisational setup of two Slovenian public organisations at the central level of governance – the Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for Public Legal Records and Related Services AJPES and the Administrative Unit Ljubljana. The key criteria for the selection of these cases are: 1) public organisation at the central level of governance and 2) service delivery as part of the organisational mandate, implying communication (and collaboration) with external and/or internal stakeholders. Moreover, the theoretical framework taken as the basis for their analysis is the Nograšek and Vintar (2014) framework ? an upgrade on Leavitt's diamond model. On this basis and contrary to the general perception about the enormous transformational power of the COVID-19 crisis, the paper registers rather limited long-term impact at the central public organisation level ? albeit due to different reasons in the case studies analysed. At the theoretical level, the research raises the question of a potential need for a new adaptation of the Leavitt's diamond model for turbulent times.
