Masteroppgave offentlig politikk og ledelse- Universitetet i Agder, 2014The research question in this study addresses actor-level autonomy as enacted by civil
servants within an international bureaucracy, namely the WTO Secretariat. The objective is to
identify underlying mechanisms arguably responsible for inciting patterns of behaviour
among civil servants.
This study is premised on the assumption that autonomy may be studied by examining
behavioural patterns of the incumbents and that such behavioural patterns largely are a
consequence of mechanisms of pre-socialization, re-socialization and organizational
affiliation. The study consists of two main parts. The first part is descriptive and addresses
actor-level autonomy, whereas the second part is explanatory and seeks to identify the driving
forces behind the emergence of supranational, departmental and epistemic behavioural
dynamics.
The main conclusions drawn from this study is that the WTO Secretariat may reinforce and
shape behavioural patterns in particular, and that these are related to the emergence of actorlevel
autonomy. Furthermore, the Secretariat is invested with the power to influence the
outcomes of global policies through various formal and informal channels. Additionally, the
study finds that pre-socialization is largely responsible for evoking supranational behavioural
logics, and that re-socialization primarily impacts on departmental and epistemic behavioural
dynamics, whereas organizational affiliation is unequivocally linked to departmental
behavioural logics