30th NISPAcee Annual Conference
"Crises, Vulnerability and Resilience in Public Administration"
June 2-4, 2022
Bucharest, Romania
Panel: COVID-19 and Organisational Changes in Public Administration
Chairs:
David Špaček, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, [email protected]
David Špaček is an associate professor at the Faculty of Economics and Administration, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.
Jens Weiss, Hochschule Harz, Germany, [email protected] Jens Weiss is a professor at the Harz University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
Pavel Horák, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, [email protected]
Pavel Horák is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Masaryk University.
Sanja Vrbek, Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, [email protected]
– Report
We initiated and organised the panel in order to spark a broader discussion on the impact of COVID-19 on the public sector and to get additional input for our joint research project ‘Impacts of COVID-19 on organisational change and digitalisation in public administration’ (funded by the Slovenian Research Agency ARRS under grant No J5-3105 and the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) under No 21-47171L).
We received 9 paper proposals for the panel. We accepted all of them and provided the authors with recommendations for the preparation of their papers. Due to the number of authors who actually registered for the conference, two conference sessions were allocated to our panel.
At the beginning of the first session, we presented the aims of our panel and our joint project, as well as the findings of our preliminary research on the impact of national measures on public administration in Slovenia and Czechia. This was followed by a presentation of a study on the extent to which selected central authorities in Romania have implemented the concept of the learning organisation. The second part included two papers, the first outlining the results of a bibliometric analysis of the COVID-19 research in public administration, the second summarising the findings of a biographical analysis of research published on the topic of trust in public institutions in EU member states during the pandemic.
The panel provoked an inspiring debate in which important points were raised that will contribute significantly to our project and will help the authors to improve their papers. The panel also provided a good platform to connect researchers in future joint research and publication initiatives. We think and believe that the panel was inspiring and fulfilled its goals. We would like to thank the authors for joining us and NISPAcee for giving us the opportunity to moderate the panel.