Objectives:

COVID-19 has disturbed existing political-administrative systems (Di Mascio et al. 2020). Most countries failed to properly respond to it (OECD, 2020). Literature suggests that the pandemic may contribute to significant changes in organisations that are necessary to solve turbulent problems (Ansell et al., 2020). But research on impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on public administration is still rather narrowly focused, dealing primarily with public finance/budgeting or national governance and policies meant to cope with the pandemic.

Responses to COVID-19 indicate that the pandemic may contribute to significant changes at the organisational level. Some authors (e.g., Dwivedi et al. 2020, Nagel 2020) argue that the crisis has already forced many organisations to undergo significant transformation, to rethink key elements of their business processes and their use of technology to maintain operations. Some of these changes are likely to leave permanent traces on their organisational design (Foss 2020). Although exploring and explaining change has become a central concern and an enduring quest for organisational scholars (Nasim and Sushil 2011), the focus has been placed primarily on organisational change induced by internal factors. Changes in the wake of COVID-19 have been predominantly approached in the context of the business/private sector and management (Aristovnik et al. 2020). For instance, there is no literature review in the field of public administration similar to the review of Verma and Gustafsson (2020) about COVID-19 research trends in the field of business and management.

The gaps outlined above clearly call for research to address them. Thanks to the panel, we would like to identify and discuss changes that have occurred or are on the agenda in public administration as a consequence of COVID-19 and deal with the following research questions:

·What types of organisational changes resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic can be identified in public organisations?

·What is the nature and depth of these changes?

·What are their consequences for PA / PM theories and practices?

Answering these questions may be helpful for advancing the theory as well as the practice of organisational change and its management in the public domain.

Requirements for contributors

We would like to invite theoretical, review and empirical papers that deal with organisational changes in public administration that were driven by / occurred due to COVID-19 and related measures and have impacted technologies, people, processes, structure and, potentially, also culture in PA.

In the panel we would like to put a special emphasis on organisational changes in central authorities (including organizations subjected to them like deconcentrates) their or in agencies existing on the national/central level).

We would like to attract papers that concentrate on answering the following research questions:

·What types of organisational changes resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic can be identified in public administration?

·What is the nature and depth of these changes?

·What are their consequences for PA / PM theories and practices?

Paper proposals may however also concentrate on other relevant research questions.

Paper abstracts should include a short description of the topic and its theoretical support, the research question(s) and method, and an indication of the research findings.

From participants of this panel a full paper is required before the conference.
Deadline of the full paper submission is 20^th of May 2022.

You can find manuscript guidelines on THIS LINK.