European Civil Service in (Times of) Crisis: A Political Sociology of the Changing Power of Eurocrats (Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology)

Summary

This book, part of the new wave of political sociology in EU studies, examines the dialectics of construction/deconstruction of the European civil service through a succession of empirically grounded case studies. Breaking with the usual representations of 'Eurocrats', it sheds light on a hidden aspect of the current European crisis: a crisis of social reproduction which affects the European civil service in a heavy context of management reforms, enlargements, institutional changes and the euro crisis. This in turn has a number of consequences in terms of internal tensions, power, and more broadly, the capacity of EU institutions to create convergence between diverging national and economic interests, and to embody a European future.