Merger in land data handling, blending of cultures

Abstract

Land administration concerns the handling of spatial and legal data on land. In many countries this is executed by two separate agencies, cadastres and land registries. Despite international literature claiming that merging such agencies is more effective for the data handling, in practice staff within land agencies tend to struggle with such mergers. This article reviews the case of the Swedish land administration merger to study this phenomenon. The review uses cultural theory to understand individual perspectives on mergers, and uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis to uncover co-existing values before and after the merger. Surprisingly the post-merger agency exhibits a stronger preference for hierarchical rules and peer control in data handling than the pre-merger agency, even though staff relations have remained relatively flat. Hence, values of staff members may change in different ways than what one would require for a change toward integrated data handling.