Published 24.3.2025

For the next two years, Prof. Dr. Ines Mergel will serve as a guest professor at the University of Vaasa’s research group Public Policy and Governance. She is currently a full professor of public administration at the University of Konstanz’ Department of Politics and Public Administration in Germany. She will collaborate with PPG’s faculty on publications, grant proposals and advising doctoral students.

Ines Mergel’s research focuses generally on topics related to the digital transformation of the public sector. While she aims to remain technology agnostic – avoiding the technology waves that are run through government – she defines digital transformation as “the cultural, organizational, and relational changes” of the transformation of public bureaucracies.

These changes can be labelled the digital underpinnings which have become necessary to adjust to changes in work practices through the introduction of digitally transformed administrative services or new work practices, such as Agile that are necessary to rethink the existing administrative processes in the digital age. She is focusing, for example, on the resistance to change but also helps public managers understand how to overcome these barriers to change in public bureaucracies.

Using examples from Western bureaucracies, she has already studied the institutional arrangements that public bureaucracies are testing to advance the digital transformation: some public bureaucracies have proactively implemented organizational arrangements, such as innovation, policy or digital labs. In these extermination spaces outside the line organization, public servants can actively explore news ways of working instead of exploiting existing bureaucratic and administrative routines. The challenge remains how open innovation or agile work practices can support the work along the line organization and how the insights gained in labs can be transferred into the routines of bureaucracies.

One of her current research interests lies at the intersection of agile and adaptive bureaucracies, new administrative routines and work practices, and the need for positive public administration. The current narrative in the literature, but also among politicians and citizens seems to focus on how deficient public bureaucracies are and how slow they change to adapt to societal needs. In one of her projects she is using appreciative inquiry to understand what elements are well working and which elements of the bureaucracy we can reorganize to adjust better to the needs of both, public servants and the publics they are serving.

Connect with Ines via LinkedIn.