Some Reflections on Administrative Organisation in Dialogue with the Scholarship of Mario Nigro

Abstract

Sixty years after the publication of Studi sulla funzione organizzatrice della pubblica amministrazione (Studies on the Organising Function of Public Administration), this article seeks to assess the influence exerted by Mario Nigro’s reflections on subsequent doctrinal developments, as well as the contemporary relevance of the insights crystallised in his work within a transformed socio-technical context.

After highlighting the innovative character of Nigro’s approach to the analysis of the organisational phenomenon, the article focuses on the concept of organisation formulated by the Author. Through a comparison with the views advanced by contemporary scholarship, it aims to identify the shared theoretical endpoint between Nigro’s distinctive position and that of Giorgio Berti, whom Nigro criticised, as it has evolved in its most recent doctrinal elaborations: administrative organisation in the subjective sense is one and, therefore, not the sole possible expression of popular sovereignty.

Building on this conclusion and on the logical implication drawn by more recent scholarship –– namely, the carefully calibrated publicisation of private entities performing objectively administrative activities, including those operating in conditions of autonomy from public bodies — the article seeks to test the continuing validity of Nigro’s concerns regarding the risk of an «autocephalous bureaucracy» in light of contemporary developments. It further advances a complementary and symmetrical hypothesis capable of counterbalancing this phenomenon. Indeed, the likelihood of an administrative apparatus that is neutral with respect to the pursuit of public interests and unresponsive to citizens’ claims is exponentially greater today, in an era in which the advent of artificial intelligence threatens to displace human interaction as the foundation of law and rights (an element hitherto legally irrelevant precisely because it was taken for granted). The article therefore proposes extending to subjectively administrative organisations those humanising legal principles (such as the principle of fraternity) that traditionally find their natural locus within intersubjective relations governed by private law.

In its second part, this work examines the nature of organisation as a function of direction, from which Nigro derives the relationship of continuity between organisation and administrative activity. Once again, the contemporary relevance of this construction is underscored not only because it continues to underpin recent doctrinal reflections, but also because several of its defining features are discernible in emerging organisational principles and institutional developments: «elasticity» now forms part of the principle of resilience; so-called agile working reshapes the «unfolding of administrative activity»; and the «singular» and «concrete» character of macro-organisational acts would entail an obligation to state reasons that extends beyond the mere logical coherence and appropriateness of the choices adopted.