doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9299.2010.01882.

ADMINISTRATIVE PROFESSIONALS AND THE

DIFFUSION OF INNOVATIONS: THE CASE OF CITIZEN
SERVICE CENTRES

YOSEF BHATTI, ASMUS L. OLSEN AND LENE HOLM PEDERSEN

This article examines how administrative professionals affect the diffusion of one-stop shops in
the form of integrated citizen service centres (CSC) in a Danish local government setting. CSCs
are an example of a new organizational form: functionally integrated small units (FISUs). The
diffusion of the CSCs among municipalities is used to analyse how administrative professionals
act as drivers in the process of organizational level innovation. Furthermore, it is examined how
institutional, political and economic characteristics of municipalities influence the likelihood of
adoption. The findings highlight that a high concentration of administrative professionals indeed
make the adoption of CSCs more likely. Additionally, the findings confirm three commonly stated
hypotheses from the diffusion of innovations literature, namely that need based demands, wealth
and the regional supply of CSC increase the likelihood of its adoption.

INTRODUCTION
What determines the diffusion of organizational level innovations across jurisdictions? In
the early diffusion literature, highly skilled and professional staff were hypothesized to
be positively associated with the motivation and ability to innovate (Mohr 1969; Walker
1969; Rogers 2003). Walker (1969, p. 883), for instance, pointed to professional staff as one
of many ‘slack resources’, which provide organizations with the luxury of experimenting
with the adoption of new programmes or policies. Recently, a growing empirical body
of diffusion literature has pointed to the facilitating role of legislative and administrative
professionals due to their skills (Mintrom 1997; Sapat 2004; Shipan and Volden 2006),
incentives (Teodoro 2008, 2009), norms (Moon and deLeon 2001; Yang 2007) and networks
(Mintrom 1997, Mizruchi and Fein 1999; Balla 2001).
The present paper adds to this newer literature on professionals in the diffusion
processes as it investigates the effect of administrative professionals on the likelihood
of adopting a new organizational form in a local government context. This is done by
studying the diffusion of citizen service centres (CSCs) in Danish municipalities 1987–2005.
CSCs can be seen as a reflection of an alternative, theoretical organizational form – the
functionally integrated small units (FISU) model – which has been described as a solution
to problems of functional fragmentation (Fountain 1994; Seidle 1995; Bent et al. 1999).
The contribution of the article is twofold: First, it examines the role of administrative
professionals in the diffusion of the new organizational form. By focusing on this distinct
subset of public employees, we are able to highlight how the skills, incentives and
shared norms of a particular professional group may bring about organizational level
innovations in a local government setting. As it will turn out, administrative professionals
have a robust impact on the spread of CSCs in Danish municipalities. Second, it adds
to the general diffusion literature that empirically tests the determinants of adoption of
innovation, in this case in the field of municipalities (Knoke 1982; Tolbert and Zucker
1983; Gregersen 2000; Moon and deLeon 2001; Dahl and Hansen 2006). By including

Yosef Bhatti and Asmus L. Olsen are in the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. Lene Holm
Pedersen is in the Danish Institute of Govermental Research, Copenhagen.

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578 YOSEF BHATTI ET AL.

variables commonly discussed in the existing literature, we provide a new venue for
testing the generality of previous findings. The analysis confirms the importance of
regional emulation (Walker 1969; Gray 1973; Berry and Berry 1990; Shipan and Volden
2006), economic wealth (Walker 1969; Pallesen 2004) as well as need driven demands
(Walker 1969; Sapat 2004) for organizational level innovation.
It should be emphasized that by innovation, we refer to Walker’s (1969) definition,
which states that an innovation is to be understood as a policy, programme or idea
which is new to the organization adopting it. Thereby, the focus is when an organization
does something new – not whether this innovation is new or merely imitative from a
field level perspective. Hence, by the term ‘innovation’ we refer to organizational level
innovation. This is in line with most of the existing diffusion literature (Rowe and Boise
1974, p. 285; Berry and Berry 1999). In the section that follows, the case of CSCs in
Danish municipalities is presented. Next, the administrative professionals hypothesis and
alternative hypotheses are presented with departure in the existing literature. Then the
estimation method and the measures are discussed before the analysis of diffusion is
carried out. Finally, the results are discussed and put into perspective.

THE DANISH PUBLIC SECTOR AND CSCs AS A NEW ORGANIZATIONAL FORM

The empirical field of investigation is Danish municipalities. Though formally a unitary
state, Denmark is an interesting case for diffusion studies as the municipal level enjoys a
high degree of autonomy (like for instance the state level in the US which is the context for
a large part of the diffusion literature). First, fiscal decentralization to the municipal level
is considerable, including the right of taxation and expenditures amounting to around 50
per cent of overall public spending. Second, the municipalities have relative discretion in
service provision and the organization of the administrative and political level. Hence, the
possibility of decentralized institutional or policy experimentation which has motivated
diffusion studies in mostly federal systems (Shipan and Volden 2006), also apply to the
context of Denmark.
During the period under investigation (1987–2005), the Danish public sector was
organized on three levels. The highest level was the state, where overall national policy
strategy was established and where some general services such as the police and army
were organized. On the next level, the 16 regions were mainly responsible for hospitals,
the environment and some specialized social services. The remaining, and thus the vast
majority, of public services were carried out at the lowest administrative level, namely the
municipality. The municipal sector consisted of 271 entities with an average population
of slightly less than 20,000. The average size of a municipality was about 159 square
kilometres and the average budget slightly more than 10,000 US dollars per inhabitant
per year (Ministry of Interior and Health 2008).
The idea of CSCs was introduced at the municipal level in 1987 and spread to other local
entities. Hence, the introduction of CSCs occurred voluntarily without any formal pressure
from the government. Local Government Denmark (the interest group and member
authority of Danish municipalities) promoted experiences from the municipalities that
adopted the idea but did not exert any pressure on its members to adopt it. Hence, the idea
of CSCs was available to municipalities at an early stage but whether they chose to adopt
it was entirely voluntary. The maps in figure 1 show the spread of the organizational
form in Denmark since CSCs were presented in the municipal arena for the first time
in 1987 (Laursen 2006). Over the course of 18 years, the organizational form has spread

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FIGURE 1 The prevalence of CSCs in Danish municipalities in 1987, 1993, 1998 and 2005, respectively

widely throughout the country such that slightly less than 50 per cent of municipalities
had adopted it by 2005.
The idea behind CSCs can be described as providing citizens with one entrance point
where they can access a variety of public services. The CSCs aim to provide services
for the citizen on the spot, and they are often organized in a way where the aim is that
one person can serve all customers. Furthermore, they have a unified leadership at the
production level and the case-work is mostly completed in the CSCs rather than being
passed on to other administrative units (Pedersen 2009). The services carried out in a CSC
can include the handling of forms, replacement of passports and driving licences and so
on (Local Government Denmark 2006).

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Among one-stop shops one can differentiate between: (1) information counters, which
guides the citizen to the relevant services; (2) convenience stores, where many different
transactional services are located in a single office or on one web site; and (3) true one-stop
shops, which integrates concerns of specific client groups or specific events, and the
services are integrated rather than just co-located (Kubicek and Hagen 2001). The Danish
CSCs can be characterized as true one-stop shops, and may also be seen as examples
of functionally integrated small units (FISUs), as they attempt to integrate the citizen-
oriented services in the municipalities. The FISU model is an alternative organizational
form that was firstly described in the 1960s. It envisions small, but complete production or
service units, and is thus characterized by social compactness, unified supervision at the
intended production level, merged production functions and output closure. The synergy
of these factors is seen as making this form of organization distinct from other attempts
to increase cooperation and coordination (Rainey 1990). The downside of this type of
organization could be that the focus on comprehensive administration comes at the costs
of specialization.
Thus, the present study is an analysis of the factors driving the diffusion of this new
organizational form, which is hoped to solve the problems of an increasingly fragmented
public sector.

RESEARCH HYPOTHESES
Following Walker’s definition (1969, p. 881), an innovation may simply be defined as a
policy, programme or idea which is new to a political entity. The process by which an
innovation spreads in a social system is denoted as ‘diffusion’ (Rogers 2003). The literature
has isolated a number of economic, political and institutional correlates of diffusion, that
is, factors that promote or inhibit the spread of innovations among jurisdictions (see, for
example, Mohr 1969; Walker 1969; Gray 1973; Berry and Berry 1990; Sapat 2004). Since no
unified theory has emerged for studying the correlates of innovation, looser frameworks
which combine both internal (economical, societal or political) factors and external factors
(emulation, learning and competition among jurisdictions within a social system) have
gained dominance in the literature (Walker 1969; Berry and Berry 1999).
In line with the majority of modern empirical diffusion studies, we employ an explo-
rative approach to the adoption of innovations with hypotheses derived from theoretical
extensions of existing contributions, including both internal and external factors, rather
than from grand theory (Berry and Berry 1999). First, we develop the argument underlying
our central hypothesis concerning the influence of administrative professionals on the
likelihood of adoption. Second, we discuss and propose five general alternative hypothe-
ses for the most prevalent factors in the existing literature. The inclusion of the alternative
hypotheses allows us to test the most debated causes of adoption in yet another venue as
well as it allows us to achieve an appropriate specified model.

Administrative professionals and the diffusion of innovations

Part of the literature on the diffusion of innovations has recently turned to the facilitating
or constraining role of professional skills, incentives norms and networks in the diffusion
process (see, for example, Balla 2001; Moon and deLeon 2001; Sapat 2004; Shipan and
Volden 2006; Teodoro 2009). We consider a particular interesting group of actors, namely
administrative professionals. Administrative professionals are public employees with a
university degree in economics, political or other social sciences, which have increasingly
gained importance in the municipal labour market (Bhatti et al. 2009).

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The literature is far from unified in its view on professions (compare, for instance,
Roberts and Dietrich 1999 and Teodoro 2009). In the present study we emphasize the
importance of occupation as well as degrees of theoretical and analytical skills (see
also Andersen and Pedersen 2010). Among people occupied with teaching, for instance,
university teachers are seen as having a higher level of professionalism than school
teachers, who again hold a higher level of professionalism than pre-school teachers.
This is due to the fact that the university teachers possess more theoretical knowledge
and more training in analytical skills, even if university teachers may have different
areas of specialization and different intra-occupational norms. Similarly, in the health
sector physicians have a higher level of professionalism than nurses, who again hold
a higher level of professionalism than health assistants. One can argue that physicians
have different specializations (for example, surgery vs. medicine); nevertheless they hold
the same overall occupation and their level of professionalism is seen as higher as
they have more theoretical knowledge than for instance nurses or health assistants. In
administration – the area at scrutiny here – university trained administrators are seen as
more professionalized than administrators with a vocational training, which traditionally
has been the occupation employed in the Danish municipalities. They have high level
of analytical knowledge and share the same occupation (see, for example, Dahler-Larsen
and Ejersbo 2003), namely administration.
It should be noted that the administrative professionals in this study do only partly
qualify as professionals in the sense of the sociology of professions (Roberts and Dietrich
1999; Andersen 2005, p. 25). Here professions are not only defined as belonging to
an occupation with a certain level of theoretical knowledge but also with firm intra-
occupational norms. While the administrative professionals in this study have similar
occupations and hold significant theoretical knowledge, their norms may differ since
they have different educational backgrounds. However, this is essentially a question that
should be subject to a more through empirical analysis.
Drawing on the existing literature on administrative professionals (Balla 2001; Moon
and deLeon 2001; Sapat 2004; Shipan and Volden 2006; Teodoro 2009) we argue that
this group is particularly likely to act as facilitators of innovations for two main supple-
mentary reasons: Their analytical skills and theoretical knowledge, and their incentives.
Furthermore, we briefly discuss the theoretical possibility that shared professional norms
and professional networks could work as a causal operator for adoption.
First, in order for a municipality to bring about the adoption of an innovation, certain
skills and knowledge are needed. We argue that administrative professionals, due to
their university degree, have relatively strong theoretical knowledge and analytical skills
which are important for the adoption of organizational innovations, including CSC.
As innovations are characterized by being some sort of disjuncture from the standing
operation procedures and routines within an organization (Roberts 1992, p. 57), the ability
to persuade relevant actors, motivate subordinates and build coalitions becomes crucial
(Teske and Schneider 1994). Furthermore, as any other disjuncture does, the adoption
of innovations encompasses uncertainty and a need for risk-taking. Hence, necessary
information and ability to reduce that uncertainty and promote risk-taking should
facilitate the adoption of innovations (Rogers 2003). Walker (1969) pointed to the skills of
professional staff as one of many ‘slack resources’, which provides organizations with the
luxury of experimenting with the adoption of new programmes or policies. In line with
this, Sapat (2004) finds that the ‘ability and capacity of institutional actors’ positively affects
the adoption of environmental innovations to administrative agencies. The importance of

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knowledge and ability to define and solve problems as means for adopting innovations is
also well known in the policy entrepreneur literature (Roberts 1992; Teske and Schneider
1994; Mintrom 1997). Hence, also within this perspective, administrative professionals act
as facilitators of innovation as they serve as bureaucratic entrepreneurs (Roberts 1992).
Second, administrative professionals have the necessary incentives to seek and success-
fully adopt innovations. Following Teske and Schneider’s (1994, p. 338) description of city
managers’ entrepreneurial incentives, we argue that administrative professionals enhance
their professional reputation and career possibilities through the successful adoption of
professionally approved innovations. That is, administrative professionals are largely
recruited to take up an entrepreneurial role (Munck 2003) and thus their performance is
widely evaluated on their ability to carry out innovations. Teodoro (2008, 2009) found evi-
dence that diagonally recruited professional bureaucrats (that is, from outside of the orga-
nization) are potential suppliers of policy innovation, as they indeed are evaluated on their
reputation for supplying organizational innovation. Thus, administrative professionals
may have strong incentives to signal their credentials through the adoption of innovations.
Finally, we briefly review the possibility of shared norms and professional networks
among administrative professionals as an alternative explanation for the adoption of
innovations. As Brehm and Gates (1997) have suggested, professional socialization moti-
vates administrators to pursue their professions’ favoured policies. If administrative
professionals could be considered a unified profession; they could bring about a diffusion
of innovations from their professional communities to the municipal organizational field
(Balla 2001; Yang 2007). Furthermore, diffusion as a mechanism of shared professional
norms and networks would equally capture the notion of normative isomorphism as pro-
posed by Dimaggio and Powell (1983). Some studies have indeed attempted to capture
such an effect through both organization membership of formal professional networks
(see, for example, Balla 2001; Yang 2007) as well as the manager’s educational background
(see, for example, Budros 2004). Professionalism in terms of networks has been studied
by Balla (2001), who examines the link between professional networks and health policy
diffusion. Rabe (1999) has found that entrepreneurial administrators borrow innovations
from ‘policy communities’ related to their professions. A similar idea has also been
touched on by Walker (1969, p. 895) who refers to ‘occupational contact networks’, which
spreads knowledge of innovations among jurisdictions. However, as we have noted in
the beginning of the chapter, the object of our study is not a unified profession with firm
intra-occupational norms (Roberts and Dietrich 1999; Andersen 2005, p. 25). Accordingly,
suspect that shared norms and professional network are of less importance when explain-
ing the role of administrative professionals in the adoption of innovations. In sum, with
reference to their level of analytical skills theoretical knowledge and incentives adminis-
trative professionals can be hypothesized as facilitators of the adoption of innovations,
including that of CSC.
Hypothesis 1: The greater the concentration of administrative professionals, the higher
the likelihood of adoption.

Alternative hypotheses
In the following discussion we propose five alternative hypotheses for the adoption
of CSC – for specifically regional emulation (Walker 1969; Gray 1973; Berry and Berry
1990; Shipan and Volden 2006), organizational wealth and size (Mohr 1969; Walker
1969; Moon and Norris 2005; Dahl and Hansen 2006), problem severity and needs

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(Walker 1969; Sapat 2004) and the political composition of local councils (Berry and Berry
1990; Shipan and Volden 2006). Political entities do not act in a vacuum. On the contrary,
most political entities are highly interdependent, that is, the adoption of innovations may
foster emulation in the form of mimicry, learning or yard-stick competition (Shipan and
Volden 2006). Often such interdependence is tested in terms of regional or neighbouring
diffusion patterns (Berry and Berry 1990, 1999).
First, emulation is likely to trigger a regional pattern of adoption as proximity
increases the likelihood of interaction, joint formal organization and shared norms among
municipalities (Knoke 1982, p. 1316). Thus, the existence of formal regional municipal
organizations, employee transfers (Heugens and Lander 2007) and regional cooperation
in service provision are just a few illustrations of the factors driving regional mimetic
isomorphism (Dimaggio and Powell 1983). Thus, the argument is therefore basically a
relational one, stressing that the likelihood of adoption by imitation is a function of the
amount of interaction (Strang and Meyer 1993, p. 488), which, all things considered, makes
neighbouring or regional mimicry more likely (Dahl and Hansen 2006, p. 449).
Second, emulation may take the form of learning. That is, to look for innovations which
have succeeded elsewhere. Often political entities learn from nearby states as they can
more easily be analogized to proximate states, with which they often share economic or
political environments (Berry and Berry 1999). Third, as political entities compete with
mostly neighbouring states over citizens and firms, their adoption or non-adoption of a
specific innovation may be highly contingent on the adoption practices of neighbours.
In the case of CSCs, their adoption may be viewed as an improvement of the municipal
services, which could put pressure on neighbouring states to supply the service as well.
The presence of regional or neighbouring emulation has been confirmed empirically in a
municipal context in a number of studies (see, for example, Knoke 1982; Gregersen 2000;
Dahl and Hansen 2006). In a Danish municipal context regional emulation is particularly
likely due to the presence of regional municipal communities. These organizations, which
exist at the regional level, are interest organizations which have the coordination of
interests among the municipalities in a particular region as their primary responsibility
(Blom-Hansen 2002).
Hypothesis 2: Municipalities emulate other municipalities within their region.
Third, organizational wealth and capacity is generally believed to give room for
innovation (Mohr 1969; Walker 1969; O’Toole and Meier 2004; Ni and Bretschneider
2007). Walker (1969, p. 883) has argued that organizations with numerous ‘free floating’
or slack resources enjoy the luxury of experimenting with the adoption innovations, as
they are less vulnerable toward the risks of adopting such innovations. Thus, innovation
may be a ‘the politics of good times’ (Pallesen 2004). At the same time, municipal wealth is
a proxy measurement of the wealth of its citizens, whose demands to the service delivery
might be positively related to income (see, for example, Brown 1988).
Hypothesis 3: The greater the municipal wealth, the higher the likelihood of adoption.
Another factor often debated in the literature is organizational size (Walker 1969; Dahl
and Hansen 2006). A large municipality should increase the likelihood of adoption, since
it often has a greater organizational capacity to do so (Walker 1969; Moon and Norris
2005). In addition, there is a potential economy of scale, since fixed costs are spread over
a large number of citizens. On the other hand, greater organizational capacity might lead
large municipalities to develop idiosyncratic organizational forms. In the case of CSCs,

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the need for a coordinating centre is greater in a large administration than in a small one.
The organizational size is also an important control for administrative professionalism
(Walker 1969), since the concentration of professionals is greatest in the largest cities (Dahl
and Hansen 2006).
Hypothesis 4: The larger the organizational size, the higher likelihood of adoption.
Furthermore, the possible need for solving a problem may drive the adoption of inno-
vations (Walker 1969; Gray 1973; Gregersen 2000). In the case of CSCs a number of factors
may be seen indicating ‘problem severity’ or a genuine ‘need’ for the one-stop-government
service provided by CSCs. This would be the case for municipalities. The coordinating
and integrating functions of CSCs would be of greatest benefit in municipalities with
large groups of weak clients, as they typically have more frequent contact with the
administration and have a greater need to be guided through bureaucratic procedures.
Hypothesis 5: The greater need for the specific innovative organizational form, the
higher likelihood of adoption.
Finally, ideological factors are regularly studied in the policy diffusion literature, where
party politics or interest organization pressure easily can be identified (see, for example,
Berry and Berry 1990; Shipan and Volden 2006). NPM reforms in general have been
associated with a liberal ideology (Christensen et al. 2007). One might argue that CSCs are
more in line with the conservative-liberal programme of generating a more efficient, user-
friendly public service, which was initiated with the Danish governmental modernization
programme in 1982.
Hypothesis 6: The more conservative/liberal a municipality is, the higher is its likeli-
hood of adoption.

ESTIMATION
In order to estimate the effects of the covariates on the probability of adopting CSCs, the
most appropriate framework is an event history model with a binary dependent variable
(Beck et al. 1998; Beck 2001). The unit of analysis is the individual municipality. The
dependent variable, the diffusion of CSCs, is a binary variable denoting whether or not a
CSC was established in the municipality a given year (Laursen 2006). The advantage of
such an analysis is not only that it is possible to model covariates but also that it exploits
the variation across the entire period.
The event history model is estimated with logistic regression where the value 1 is given
for the dependent variable in the year the CSC is adopted. In all previous years, the
dependent variable is zero for the case. After adoption, the given municipality drops out
of the analysis. If, for instance, a municipality adopts after nine years, it appears as nine
observations in the analysis, scoring 0 each of the first eight years and 1 in year nine. What
is modelled in the event history model is if and when a municipality adopt – a positive
logistic coefficient implies that the covariate is positively correlated with adoption and
vice versa. The model thus exclusively relates to transfer of the organizational form. That
is, the statistical model informs us about how certain covariates affect the probability of
adopting CSC, but not how CSC is transformed and translated afterwards (Clark 1985;
Berry and Berry 1999, p. 189).
A challenge in the binary choice event history models is modelling temporal depen-
dence. Since we are only interested in the coefficients of the substantive variables and not

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the hazard rate per se, an appropriate way to deal with this problem is to include temporal
dummies as suggested by Beck et al. (1998, p. 1271). The relevance of temporal dummies
in our specification is justified by a likelihood ratio test of the joint significance of the
dummies (p < .05).

MEASURES
As commonly done in the diffusion literature (see, for example, Sapat 2004; Dahl and
Hansen 2006; Yang 2007; Teodoro 2009), the dependent variable, adoption of CSCs, is
based on self-reporting by the municipalities, that is, when a municipality reported to
have opened its first CSC. The drawback of this measure is the organization may develop
gradually. There may be an element of judgement in defining precisely when the CSC
was actually formed. This is likely to cause some random error in the dependent variable,
which can decrease the efficiency of the estimates (King et al. 1994). However, the results
would still be unbiased apart from the unlikely case that the judgment is correlated with
our key independent variables. The uncertainty induced by the measurement challenges
is something we share with most studies in the field (see, for example, Sapat 2004; Dahl
and Hansen 2006; Yang 2007; Teodoro 2009).
The ‘administrative professionals hypothesis’ (hypothesis 1) is measured by the number
of DJØF members per 1000 capita in the municipality. DJØF is a trade union that organizes
most employees within the fields of law, administration, state governance, research,
education, communication, economics, political and social science, that is, administrative
professionals in the municipal context. We include all DJØF employees, regardless of
whether they are managers or consultants, since our proposal causal operators do not
depend on the professionals occupying a managerial position. The indicator is directly
calculated on the basis of DJØFs own register of members. It should be noticed that the
percentage of organization is very high and that trade union membership is therefore a
very good indicator of the level of administrative professionals in the municipalities.
Though their educational background at first seem diverse, DJØF members are generally
recruited for similar executive positions or specialized functions, and are assigned to tasks
such as long term planning, evaluation and fiscal monitoring. Hence, in the context
of the municipal job market, they may be described as a relatively unified occupational
profession. At the same time, administrative professionals are a rather exclusive profession
in the municipal organizational field. Of the approximately 360,000 municipal employees
in 1998, less than 0.5 per cent were administrative professionals.
In order to avoid spuriousness in the estimation of the ‘administrative professionals’
effect, a number of specific control variables for hypothesis 1 are added to the model. First,
‘public employees’ and ‘bureaucrats’ separate the explanatory power of administrative
professionalism from other distinct characteristics of the municipal workforce. Second,
the level of education of inhabitants in a municipality is also included to preclude the
possibility that an association between administrative professionalism and the adoption
of CSCs is a spurious reflection of population-specific variables. It is indeed plausible that
a highly educated citizenry simultaneously leads to a professionalized administration and
a positive atmosphere for innovations.
In order to operationalize the regional emulation hypothesis (hypothesis 2), a variable
is constructed to measure the cumulative percentage of municipalities in a region which
had adopted CSCs prior to the year in question. The idea is the more CSCs in a region;
the greater will be the pressure for an individual municipality to create its own CSC.

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Hence, the variable basically measures a cumulative regional pressure, highlighting the
already mentioned interaction argument for regional mimicry. Though regional emulation
seems particularly likely in a Danish context due to the presences regional municipal
communities, we also include a similar variable for the percentage of neighbours which
had adopted CSCs to control for the potential influence of proximity.
Economic wealth (hypothesis 3) is measured by municipal taxation per capita (after
governmental redistribution), controlled for per capita expenses (Ministry of the Interior
and Health 2008). Expenditures per capita are included as a control, since high municipal
taxation revenue in itself may not guarantee a surplus, if the municipality also has
high costs. The organizational size hypothesis (hypothesis 4) is easily operationalized
with population size data from official statistics (2008). A similar operationalization for
organizational size has previously been applied in both an American (Moon and Norris
2005) and Danish (Dahl and Hansen 2006) municipal context.
As for the need hypothesis (hypothesis 5), a social indicator, the so-called ‘social index’,
is added to the model (Ministry of the Interior and Health 2008). The social index is a
government issued summary measure of social conditions in the municipality, capturing
among other things the number of unemployed, immigrants, ghettoes and so on. A coor-
dinating centre, such as a CSC, is of greatest benefit in a municipality where we can expect
many contacts with the administration and where the clients have complex problems.
Weak clients typically have more frequent contact with the administration and have a
greater need to be guided through bureaucratic procedures. Furthermore, they often have
more complex problems, requiring a coordinated service, which CSCs can deliver. Thus,
one would expect municipalities with the greatest number of ‘weak clients’ with complex
problems to have a greater tendency to set up a CSC. A similar explanation has shown
explanatory power in a study of the diffusion of organizational changes in the social ser-
vice administration among municipalities (Gregersen 2000). In order to capture possible
reversed effects on the adoption of CSCs where there are many ‘weak clients’ a squared
version of the social index is also entered in to the model. Municipal size in square kilome-
tres is also included (Ministry of the Interior and Health 2008) as the need for a CSC should
intuitively be greater in a municipality with a large area. CSCs are not necessarily situated
at the city hall but are sometimes used as disaggregated access points to the public sector.
The need for alternative access points increases when distances are greater, since the time
cost to citizens of physically accessing the administration rises with the average distance.
Finally, as an operationalization of the ideological factor (hypothesis 6), the share of
the vote for the liberal/conservative parties in the last local election is entered into the
model. This controls for possible ideological reasons for adoption. Summary statistics for
the variables applied in the analysis are given in table 1. A full correlation matrix can be
found in the appendix. It should be noted that, for most of the independent variables
(except ideology and regional imitation), data was typically only available for the last
13 years under investigation. To avoid losing cases, we imputed 1987–1992 data simply
by using the value of the last available year. This strategy can be criticized from the
perspective that the variables will probably be slightly attenuated. If control variables are
estimated with error, the main independent variables may pick up some of the variance,
leading to anti-conservative evaluations of the hypotheses.
In the present case, this should not be a problem. Our main independent variable,
the ratio of administrative professionals, was among the variables with imputed years.
Hence, the estimate should, if anything, be attenuated, leading to a conservative hypothesis
test. In order to avoid any uncertainty, we ran a regression excluding 1987–1992 with

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 ADMINISTRATIVE PROFESSIONALS AND DIFFUSION 587

TABLE 1 Summary statistics for the variables

Variable Variable type Mean Std. Dev. Min Max N

Adoption of CSCs Dependent variable .033 .179 0 1 3949

Administrative professionals Hypothesis 1 .204 .185 0 1.51 3931
Public employees per capita Extra control for H1 16.3 2.87 11.9 31.3 3949
Bureaucrats per capita Extra control for H1 2.37 .502 1.45 5.52 3949
Education level Extra control for H1 13.5 4.77 6.8 40.8 3949
Regional imitation Hypothesis 2 18.0 16.5 0 95 3949
Neighbouring imitation Extra control for H2 .191 .245 0 1 3949
Tax base per capita (1000s) Hypothesis 3 109 12.4 95.2 155 3949
Expenses per capita (1000s) Extra control for H3 32.9 8.43 20.7 68.0 3949
Inhabitants (1000s) Hypothesis 4 17.7 40.6 2.15 501.7 3949
Social index Hypothesis 5 .760 .256 .35 2 3949
Area (1000s) Hypothesis 5 .160 .092 .009 .564 3949
Conservative/liberal share of vote Hypothesis 6 .425 .132 0 .774 3949

substantively identical results for all variables of primary interest. The professionalism
coefficient even increased by more than 50 per cent, as we will return to in the next section.
Thus, the results are robust to non-imputation and even seem to be conservative for our
main dependent variable.

ANALYSIS
Now the analysis of the diffusion for the period under investigation (1987–2005) can be
carried out. As indicated above, the model is estimated by logistic regression added tem-
poral dummies (Beck 2001) (see table 2). Due to the unbalanced nature of the dependent
variable, with only 3.3 per cent of the cases scoring the value one, we also ran rare-events
corrected logit, implemented by the ReLogit package in Stata 9 (King and Zeng 2001). This
did not make any substantial difference to the results in table 2. Furthermore, the main
independent variables of interests are very robust against alternative specifications. We
experimented with a range of alternative controls for economic surplus and bureaucrats
but the administrative professionalization and the regional imitation variables remained
stable around 1.3 and .02, respectively.
The analysis provides robust evidence in favour of the ‘administrative professionals’
hypothesis (hypothesis 1): the more professionalized an administration is, the higher the
likelihood of adoption of CSCs. Figure 2 illustrates the likelihood of adoption a given year
as the DJØF variable moves from its minimum to its maximum.
As indicated above, the ‘administrative professional’ variable is imputed for the early
part of the period due to lack of data. This might result in a slightly attenuated estimate.
When only 1993–2005 are analysed, the coefficient increases to 2.22 (standard error .645)
and the marginal effect to .041. This indicates that our imputation of the missing values is
conservative with respect to hypothesis 1. We also tried only to include only those DJØF
members occupying a managerial position. In that case the effect dropped dramatically
and became statistically insignificant. This implies that it is professionalization of the
administration as such which matters and not professionals occupying a superior position.
The analysis provides strong support for our assumption that administrative profes-
sionals, due to their distinct analytical knowledge, skills and incentives facilitate the
adoption of innovations. Unfortunately, the data at hand does not allow us directly to
distinguish between the unique effects of the three proposed causal operators but they

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588 YOSEF BHATTI ET AL.

TABLE 2 Determinants of diffusion of CSCs, 1987–2005

Coefficient (b) Marginal effects

Administrative professionals (H1) 1.34∗ (.548) .023

Public employees per capita (control) .094 (.093) .002
Bureaucrats per capita (control) −.883∗ (.378) −.016
Education level (control) .001 (.023) .0000
Regional imitation (H2) .022∗ (.009) .0004
Neighbour imitation −.028 (.499) −.0005
Tax base per capita (1000s) (H3) .044∗ (.017) .0008
Expenses per capita (1000s) (control) −.009 (.040) −.0002
Inhabitants (1000s) (H4) −.003 (.002) −.0001
Social index (H5) 6.76∗∗∗ (1.85) —
Social index squared (H5) −2.38∗∗ (.847) —
Area (1000s) (H5) 2.03 (1.26) .036
Conservative/liberal share of votes (H6) 1.66 (.945) .029
Intercept −14.6∗∗∗ (2.60)

N 3931
log likelihood −498.9
LR χ-squared 151.1
Pseudo r2 -squared (McFadden) .132

Note: The coefficients in the left column are the unstandardized logistic coefficients. Standard errors are shown
in parentheses. In the right column, marginal effects with all variables at their means are shown (social
index squared held at the mean of social index squared). Temporal dummies are not shown due to space
considerations but were jointly significant at p < .05. We ran regressions with and without the municipalities of
Copenhagen and Frederiksberg due to their dual status as municipalities and regions. The results did not differ
substantially. The municipality of Bornholm was excluded, since it underwent a major amalgamation during
the period. Multicollinearity was evaluated using Stata ‘collin’. Apart from the squared term, some signs of
multicollinearity can be found due to the strong correlation between expenses per capita (the only variable apart
from the squared term with a VIF above 10) and public employees per capita (see also table A1 in the appendix).
However, none of the variables changed significance levels when the other was excluded from the specification.
Significance levels: ∗ p < 0.05; ∗∗ p < 0.01; ∗∗∗ p < 0.001.

are all plausible operators in the case of Danish CSCs. The knowledge factor fits well
with findings in the contracting out literature, where administrative professionals have
been found to be instrumental for the contracting process because of its complexity
(Bhatti et al. 2009). In the present case complexity is caused by the risk and uncertainty
related to innovations, as they are defined in terms of being a sort of disjuncture from
the standing operation procedures and routines within an organization (Roberts 1992,
p. 57). Clearly, administrative professionals are widely perceived to have the skills and
knowledge to adopt and successfully implement innovations. Accordingly, this has been
the argument underlying the increasing administrative professionalization of the Danish
municipalities’ top-level bureaucracies in the period under study (Munck 2003; Lykkebo
2006). Interestingly, the results hold, even though the general number of public employees
and bureaucrats are explicitly controlled for. Hence, the relationship cannot be attributed
to the general size of the administration or bureaucratic capacity as has been argued to
matter in some of the previous literature (Walker 1969; Sapat 2004). On the contrary,
the finding highlight that one should look closer at how this bureaucratic capacity is
compounded of distinct groups with varying degrees of professionalism. This need for
‘decomposing’ the different bureaucratic capacities has also been found in a recent study
of the correlates of contracting out (Bhatti et al. 2009).

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 ADMINISTRATIVE PROFESSIONALS AND DIFFUSION 589

.1 .08
Probability of adoption
.02 .04 0.06

0 .2 .4 .6 .8 1
Administrative professionals

Predicted probability 95% upper limit

95% lower limit

FIGURE 2 Computed effect of administrative professionals variable from its minimum to maximum (confi-
dence intervals are calculated by the delta method using SPost for Stata).

Furthermore, we argued that administrative professionals may enhance their profes-

sional reputation and career possibilities through the successful adoption of professionally
approved innovations. Hence, besides the ability to innovate, the finding indicates that
administrative professionals may have significant incentives for successfully seeking the
adoption of innovations. The incentives operator proposed by Teodoro (2008, 2009), that
administrative professionals gain traction in the adoption of innovations when job market
characteristics provide them with incentives for bureaucratic entrepreneurship, seems a
particularly plausible case. It resonates well with the administrative professionals in a
Danish municipal context, who are recruited into the municipalities from outside and
are, as such, expected to be able to contribute with something new and innovative. The
traditional municipal bureaucrat was typically trained within the municipal organization
or in institutions specifically established to feed the municipal job market, but in contrast
administrative professionals have much less constrained qualifications and job market
possibilities: They are university educated and recruited for both the private and public
sector. As such their skills are expected to differ from those present inside the organization.
Hence, administrative professionals may have strong incentives to signal their credentials
through the adoption of innovations.
Finally, we argued that the finding that administrative professionals matter is probably
less due to professional norms and networks, which in many empirical studies have
been identified as important sources of institutional or policy innovations (Balla 2001;
Yang 2007). That is, professional socialization motivates administrators to pursue their
professions’ favoured innovations (Brehm and Gates 1997). Functionally integrated small
units (FISUs) have been seen as a solution to problems of fragmentation and are therefore
strongly supported by public administration experts, underscoring the crucial role of
integration for achieving citizen or customer-oriented government (Fountain 1994; Seidle
1995; Bent et al. 1999). This means that the model should hold a good deal of legitimacy
among certain professionals. This being said, the norms and network argument is
weakened for theoretical reasons by the fact that administrative professionals are only
unified in terms of occupational status and not educational background, which may cover
many different social sciences with possible conflicting norms and networks. For instance,

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590 YOSEF BHATTI ET AL.

economist and lawyers may have very different norms on matters concerning a trade-off
between efficiency and legal rights. This argument would be in line with empirical studies,
which have found no significant variations in leadership values between administrative
professionals and other municipal managers (Dahler-Larsen and Ejersbo 2003).
Though the main focus of the analysis was public labour and administrative pro-
fessionals in particular, interesting findings can be extracted from the investigation of
alternative hypotheses derived from the general diffusions of innovations literature. The
regression provides evidence in favour of the regional emulation hypothesis (hypothe-
sis 2), which suggested mimicry, learning or competition to foster innovations to cluster
geographically. The results support the findings of, for instance, Dahl and Hansen
(2006) by suggesting that CSCs diffuse in regional clusters, even when other factors
are controlled for, that is, regions have strong independent explanatory power (see
also Knoke 1982; Gregersen 2000). It should be noted that the result is highly reliant
on an appropriate specification of the model to preclude the possibility that apparent
regional imitation is due to homogeneity within regions. To take this possibility into
account, social and economic variables were thoroughly controlled for, while the neigh-
bouring imitation variable precludes the possibility that the effect is merely due to local
imitation.
Also the taxation variable is positive (hypothesis 3). The results are interesting, since
they indicate that adoption can be associated with the ‘politics of good times’ (Pallesen
2004). This means that municipalities with the greatest resources/capacity adopt. Similar
findings have been made by Moon and deLeon (2001), showing that reinvention pro-
grammes are not typically promoted by poorer municipalities. Conversely, it contradicts
earlier findings of the spread of bureaucratic standards in a Danish local government
setting (Dahl and Hansen 2006). Nevertheless, the conclusion that wealth and capacity in
the most general terms increases the likelihood of innovating is probably the most well
documented in the literature (Berry and Berry 1999).
There is no evidence in favour of the population size hypothesis (hypothesis 4). This
is contrary to much of the existing literature (Dahl and Hansen 2006) and it may seem
surprising, since larger municipalities could have a greater need for coordinated services
and a greater capacity to provide them due to their ability to bear relatively high fixed
costs. Nevertheless, it is important to include this variable in the specification in order
to preclude that the effect of administrative professionals is a reflection of the higher
concentration of professionals in big cities.
There seems to be some evidence in support of the importance of the pure functional
pressure/need (hypothesis 5), since the municipalities with the most demanding clients
are more likely to set up CSCs when other relevant factors are controlled for. Hence,
need seems to matter. At first sight, this might seem paradoxical since it was established
earlier that the municipalities with the greatest surplus have the strongest tendency to
adopt. However, functional need and economic surplus/capacity are not necessarily
in opposition to each other, since a challenging clientele does not preclude economic
surplus. This is in line with Gregersen (2000) who has found a ‘need’ driven demand for
innovations to be important among later adopters in a municipal context. Finally, there
is no evidence that political ideology plays any role (hypothesis 6). This is not entirely
surprising, since local government politics in the Scandinavian countries is often seen as
less ideologically driven than national politics. Hence, adoption in the present case rather
seems to be a matter of professionalism and functional needs as well as capacity.

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 ADMINISTRATIVE PROFESSIONALS AND DIFFUSION 591

CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the determinants of adoption indeed seemed to confirm the important role
of administrative professionals. The more professional a municipal administration is, the
higher the likelihood of adopting the CSC. These results add to the growing body of
literature arguing that professionalism matters due to knowledge (Mintrom 1997; Sapat
2004; Shipan and Volden 2006) incentives (Teodoro 2008, 2009) and norms (Moon and
deLeon 2001; Yang 2007). It is likely to be of great importance that the administrative
professionals are recruited from outside the municipalities in contrast to the traditional
municipal administrators who were largely trained on the job. This creates an incentive
for the professional administrator to demonstrate her ability to do something new and
innovative in the municipality. In addition, she may have distinct skills due to a longer and
more specialized education. This may be important in order to minimize the uncertainty
related risk from adopting innovations that occurs because innovations often entail a
disjuncture from the standing operation procedures and routines within an organization.
Though as both causal operators are plausible, it should be emphasized that this study
cannot tell us anything definitive about which of them that matters (the most). Here is a
clear motivation for further research on the impact of administrative professionals. Also,
the analysis focused exclusively on how administrative professionals affect the probability
of adopting CSC. A natural further step in the study of administrative professionals would
be to explore how the innovations are translated and transformed after their adoption.
Equally interestingly as the support for the main hypothesis, regional emulation was
also significant in the regression, indicating that a distinctively regional pattern was
pronounced over the examined period: even when neighbouring imitation was accounted
for. This is in line with the findings from the large body of literature examining mimicry,
learning or yard-stick competition in terms of regional or neighbouring diffusion patterns
(Berry and Berry 1990, 1999).
Two further alternative hypotheses were confirmed, namely the influence of organi-
zational wealth/capacity and need driven diffusion. The former result resonates with
Walker’s (1969, p. 883) argument that organizations with slack resources can experiment
with innovations, since they are less vulnerable toward the risks of innovating. The later
result, however, indicates that need may also facilitate innovation (Walker 1969; Gray
1973; Gregersen 2000), as it turned out that municipalities with the greatest need for one-
stop-government services also have the highest likelihood of adopting CSCs. The results
indicate that need and capacity are not mutually exclusive but can affect innovation
simultaneously.
A vital question is the broader scope for our findings. In which contexts are they likely
to apply? What we have studied is the spread of an organizational form, not a policy idea.
The importance of administrative professionals should be greatest in cases where the
administration has some leverage in the political system (Shipan and Volden 2006). Diffu-
sion of organizational forms and administrative practices are examples of that, since they
are typically relatively depoliticized. Our findings, however, are not necessarily restricted
to these areas; since administrators may play facilitating or restricting roles even in areas
that are highly politicized (for instance administrators play an important role in part of
the contracting out literature; see, for example, O’Toole and Meier 2004, Bhatti et al. 2009).
It is our hope that future research will continue to examine administrative professionals
in the context of other innovations in order to further examine the variables and their
underlying mechanisms.

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592 YOSEF BHATTI ET AL.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We thank the Danish Independent Research Council which provided the funding for
this study. Earlier versions of the article were presented at the Scancor 20th Anniversary
Conference, Sessions VII, Panel: Analysing organizational change in the public sector,
Stanford University, California, November 21–23, 2008 as well as at internal seminars
at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen (May 2008) and at the
Danish Institute of Governmental Research (September 2008). We thank all the partici-
pants for their comments. Our gratitude also goes to Kasper M. Hansen, Kurt Houlberg,
Søren Winter, Barry Bozeman, Eskil Heinesen and the Journal’s referees for intriguing
suggestions. Michael Laursen and DJØF graciously provided access to their data on CSCs
and administrative professionals, respectively. The usual disclaimer applies.

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594 YOSEF BHATTI ET AL.

APPENDIX

TABLE A1 Correlation matrix for the variables included in the analysis

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13)

Adoption of —
CSCs (1)
Administrative 0.09 —
professionals (2)
Public employees (3) 0.06 0.35 —
Bureaucrats (4) 0.04 0.35 0.82 —
Education level (5) 0.08 0.27 0.24 0.18 —
Regional 0.07 0.22 0.57 0.54 0.20 —
imitation (6)
Neighbouring 0.05 0.11 0.42 0.39 0.20 0.68 —
imitation (7)
Tax base per capita 0.08 0.35 0.78 0.71 0.45 0.60 0.44 —
(1000s) (8)
Expenses per capita 0.06 0.35 0.93 0.80 0.20 0.60 0.42 0.77 —
(1000s) (9)
Inhabitants 0.05 0.38 0.14 0.10 0.80 0.07 0.08 0.08 0.16 —
(1000s) (10)
Social index (11) 0.09 0.26 0.24 0.25 0.15 0.15 0.10 0.06 0.38 0.39 —
Area (1000s) (12) −0.02 −0.02 −0.09 −0.27 −0.21 −0.22 −0.15 −0.17 −0.05 0.13 −0.18 —
Conservative/liberal 0.01 −0.04 −0.04 −0.07 0.18 0.10 −0.01 0.13 −0.08 −0.18 −0.36 0.04 —
share of vote (13)

Note: The coefficients are the pair-wise correlations.

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