Alldeles för byråkratisk?
En studie av Djurskyddsmyndighetens organisation
The Swedish Animal Welfare AgencyOrganizational theoryWeberRothsteinIdeal typesCriticismBureaucraticPublic administrationDjurskyddsmyndighetenOrganisationsteoriWeberRothsteinIdealtyperKritikByråkratiskFörvaltning
The purpose of this essay is to describe the organization of the Swedish Animal WelfareAgency during the time it was in operation. The Swedish Animal Welfare Agency was established in 2005 by the government who saw it as necessary in order to strengthen the protection of cruelty to animals in Sweden. However, the agency was shut down already in2007 and its responsibilities as an agency was moved back to the government and the department of agriculture. During its time in operation, the Swedish Animal Welfare Agency, received much criticism, among other things because of its interpretations of the law which were seen as too focused on details and thus ?bureaucratic?. In order to describe the organization of the agency the theoretical approach of this study is based on three of Bo Rothstein?s ideal administration models; the legal bureaucratic, thepolitical oriented and the user oriented model. The purpose is to see which one of these ideal administrations the Swedish Animal Welfare Agency was most like, through an organizational perspective. There will also be a comparison over time, from the establishing to the shutting down of the agency in order to see if the organization of the agency had changed over time. The method used for this paper is a qualitative text-based analysis where the central arguments concerning the organization of the agency will be highlighted and interpreted from the different criteria of the administration models. The study showed that the organization of the Swedish Animal Welfare Agency can be described as a legal bureaucratic administration. The comparison over time showed that the organization of the agency did not change, it could be described as legal bureaucratic when it was established as well as when it was shut down. This shows that the criticism of the agency of being too ?bureaucratic? might be justified but the legitimacy of the agency?s organization was based on bureaucratic principles.