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Through a comparative case study of two units in Germany’s federal bureaucracy, it shows how ambiguous audience expectations pressure their reputational profiles and how they resolve tensions by balancing weaker professional/procedural standing with stronger performative and moral reputation.",{"@graph":14,"@context":64},[15,34,55],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & 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Review of Administrative Sciences  \n2024, Vol. 90(1) 100–115 © The Author(s) 2023  \nArticle reuse guidelines:  \n[sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[DOI: 10.1177/00208523221132228](DOI: 10.1177/00208523221132228)[ ](DOI: 10.1177/00208523221132228)[journals.sagepub.com/home/ras](journals.sagepub.com/home/ras)  \nJulia Fleischer   \nUniversity of Potsdam, Germany  \nAndree Pruin  \nUniversity of Potsdam, Germany  \nAbstract  \nIn recent years, governments have increased their efforts to strengthen the citizen-orientation in policy design. They have established temporary arenas as well as permanent units inside the machinery of government to integrate citizens into policy formulation, leading to a “laboratorization” of central government organizations. We argue that the evolution and role of these units herald new dynamics in the importance of organizational reputation for executive politics. These actors deviate from the classic palette of organizational units inside the machinery of government and thus require their own reputation vis-à-vis various audiences within and outside their parent organization. Based on a comparative case study of two of these units inside the German federal bureaucracy, we show how ambiguous expectations of their audiences challenge their organizational reputation. Both units resolve these tensions by balancing their weaker professional and procedural reputation with a stronger performative and moral reputation. We conclude that government units aiming to improve citizen orientation in policy design may benefit from engaging with citizens as their external audience to compensate for a weaker reputation in the eyes of their audiences inside the government organization.  \nCorresponding author:  \nFull Professor and Chair in German Politics and Government, University of Potsdam, August-Bebel-Straße 89, 14482 Potsdam, Germany  \nEmail: fl[eischer@uni-potsdam.de](eischer@uni-potsdam.de)  \nPoints for practitioners  \n• Many governments have introduced novel means to strengthen citizen-centered policy design, which has led to an emergence of novel units inside central government that differ from traditional bureaucratic structures and procedures.  \n• This study analyzes how these new units may build their organizational reputation visà-vis internal and external actors in government policymaking.  \n• We show that such units assert themselves primarily based on their performative and moral reputation.  \nKeywords  \ncitizen participation, government policymaking, organizational reputation  \nIntroduction  \nIn recent years, governments have aimed toward strengthening their collaboration with citizens in policy design, therefore readjusting procedures of policy formulation (Tõnurist et al., 2017; Romero Frías and Machado, 2018; McGann et al., 2018, 2021; Olejniczak et al., 2020) . Next to new methods and instruments in policy formulation, these efforts have also brought novel units inside ministerial bureaucracies. They come under different names and differ from other units inside the bureaucratic organization, and employ unconventional tools such as, e.g., pilots, experiments, nudging, and data analytics (Olejniczak et al., 2020; Mergel, 2019; Fleischer and Carstens, 2021; Evans and Cheng, 2021) . As a result, a ‘laboratization’ of central government has begun, which may enable novel forms of collaboration toward external actors such as citizens but also challenge interactions between government entities.  \nAs many others, the German federal government has committed itself to more citizen-oriented policy design to enable “new ways of (not only digital) collaboration, e.g., across sectors or authorities”(BKAmt, 2019: 18–19; see Kernaghan, 2005) . New units have been established to innovate the citizen orientation in policy formulation tha","cbCaij0HtxbS4JFp","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaij0HtxbS4JFp","pdf",276993,16,"English","# Abstract\n# Introduction\n## Citizen-oriented policy design and new government units\n## Organizational reputation as a mechanism in executive politics","[{\"question\":\"What practical implication is suggested for government units aiming to improve citizen orientation?\",\"answer\":\"Units may benefit from engaging citizens as an external audience to compensate for weaker reputational standing among audiences inside the government organization.\"}]","Organizational reputation in executive politics: Citizen-oriented units in the German federal bureaucracy | PDF",1792448804]