AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

This research work examines conflict of interest papers written by the EU and the OECD in collaboration with their subsidiary organisations and expert consultation. An attempt is made to evaluate them against the main features of European public administration. This is accomplished by examining two other papers, also produced by EU and the OECD, in order to uncover first, the contextual attributes of European governance, and second, its consistency with conflict of interest guidelines and recommendations. In other words, the structure of the work is built on two main pillars: conflict of interest data and related concepts (principles, norms, themes), plus the context of European public administration, together with its key developments and characteristic traits. The data pertain to the period from the 1990s until 2010. To summarise, four papers are divided into two groups: the first group represents wider contextual descriptions of European governance, and the other deals directly with the phenomenon of conflict of interest in the administration of public affairs. The results draw an ambivalent picture. The context of European governance has partly remodelled its practices to follow mainstream managerial trends, and partly retained its fundamental core; such developments have a compound impact on the effective application of the conflict of interest model in practice. The Critical Management Study with its poststructural stream is chosen to be the main theoretical underpinning. Carol Bacchi’s ‘what is the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) technique of policy analysis both supplements the Critical Management Study through its poststructural stance, and is used as a methodological tool.