Summary:

This paper aims to contribute to scholarly knowledge about public-sector mergers by analyzing a recent merger in the Norwegian welfare bureaucracy. The merger studied is one of the largest oriented reforms in recent Norwegian public administration history. The government decided in 2005 to merge the employment and national insurance services into a new entity called the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Service (NAV). We examine how instrumental problem-solving in the merger was conditioned by external forces, internal negotiations and cultural features by focusing on the first step in the implementation of the merger – the transition process that took place in 2005–2006. We examine the framing of the transition process, the activation of participants and agendas, and organizing the NAV at the central level. A main finding is that the scope for instrumental problem-solving is most of all conditioned by internal conflicts, to some extent by external control and to a lesser extent by cultural features.