The work in the organization and administration group concentrates on the various forms of organisation, policy and management in the public sector. The group focuses on processes of change and the relationship between administration and surroundings, and examines how new forms of organization and work methods in the public sector affect politics, democracy and efficiency.

The typical theoretic approaches are organizational theory, policy/evaluation theory and institutional theory with special emphasis on the borderland between organizational theory and policy theory in relation to public administration. The group aims to elucidate how the administration affects policy formation, implementation and evaluation, as well as organization and work methods in administrative organizations. A part of the group focuses especially on the local perspective.

The theoretic points of departure are policy theory, bureaucracy theories (including professional bureaucracies), New Public Management theories, evaluation theory and, not least, different versions of neo-institutional theory.

The main empirical fields are currently the health sector (hospitals), education (vocational education and Folkeskolen), interests groups, voluntary organizations, and the use of experts in politics.

A common thread in many of the projects is the interest in examining processes of reform and change through case studies and thematizing the interaction between institutional change and the individual organizations' reactions to the changes. Without abandoning the traditional focus of organization and policy theory on efficiency and internal management, the projects prioritise the issue of legitimacy: How can the administrative organization help solve the problems in terms of legitimacy in a time characterized by new forms of policy and organization that assign new roles to users, media and politicians, and introduce new forms of cooperation with voluntary organizations, interest groups and private corporations?