The Termination of Public Organizations: Theoretical Perspectives to Revitalize a Promising Research Area Christian Adam & Michael W. Bauer & Christoph Knill & Philipp Studinger Published online: 8 August 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007 Abstract While many studies deal with comparative public sector reform, the fundamental question of whether and to what extent states are actually able to abolish parts of their administrative structure remains untackled. Despite some efforts to solve this puzzle, the topic remains underestimated. This article identifies the main conceptual and theoretical problems associated with existent research on the termination of public organizations. Furthermore, the article systemizes various causal factors of termination into two broad dimensions: “organizational stickiness” and “political incentives.” Taken together, these constitute a typology, which is able to guide future empirical investigation of the termination of public organizations. Keywords Termination . Public organizations . Policy termination . Administrative reform Introduction Despite the huge amount of literature on comparative public sector reform, little research deals with the fundamental question of whether and to what extent states are able to reduce, i.e. to abolish or terminate parts of their administrative structure. This can be traced to several reasons. First, the study of organizational termination remained a rather small subfield within the policy termination literature. Second, the analysis of the more encompassing topic of policy termination never really took off and remained itself a rather obscure part of the policy cycle literature (Daniels 1997). In other words, the deficits of the broader policy termination project reduced the scholarly expectations about the worth of studying issues of organizational termination considerably. Today, the main question therefore appears to be: is it still justified or was it premature to neglect the termination of public organizations as an independent field of study? Public Organiz Rev (2007) 7:221–236 DOI 10.1007/s11115-007-0033-4 C. Adam : M. W. Bauer : C. Knill (*) : P. Studinger Department of Politics and Management, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany e-mail: Christoph.Knill@uni-konstanz.de