Agent-based administration growth models
Excessive growth of administrative staff is a well recognized phenomenon that spans many types of organization within both the public and private sectors. It is often considered to be a plague. Whereas some qualitative explanations are well known, few or no quantitative approaches in terms of dynamical modeling have been pursued.
Our group explores how agent-based models can be constructed given the external forces from new laws/rules and policies and the internal forces that arise from the career ambitions of administrative staff. The latter are closely related to the well-known Parkinson law (1955), which describes how the number of workers in organizations grow. We investigate how agent-based implementations of such models can be linked to historical data for different staff categories at Swedish universities provided by the Swedish Higher Education Authority (UKÄ). One area of particular interest is the identification of critical parameters that define stability in terms of administrative growth.
The group is part of COSHE, the Computational Science for Health and Environment theme at CEC.
Contact
Carsten Peterson
E-mail: carsten [dot] peterson [at] cec [dot] lu [dot] se
Phone: +46 46 222 90 02
Involved researchers
All links go to the Lund University research portal.