Rethinking Public Administration Reform: Institutional Layering of Bureaucratic, Managerial and Community Logics Over Time in Nigeria's Tax Administration

ABSTRACT The reform of public institutions has attracted sustained attention in both scholarship and policymaking. Increasingly, however, there is growing recognition that reforms are rarely implemented in an institutional vacuum. Instead, new reforms are layered onto existing arrangements, producing hybrid institutional landscapes shaped by prior reform trajectories. Drawing on institutional logics theory, this study examines how contemporary reforms interact with what the paper terms ‘community logics’, a form of relational governance rooted in shared norms, reciprocity and collective responsibility, through a case study of the Nigerian Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS). Based on interviews with tax officials, advisers, and other stakeholders, the study argues for recognising community logics as a distinct mode of institutional organising and for acknowledging their ambivalent role in both enabling and constraining reform. The study contributes to public administration and development by advancing an understanding of public organisations as communities, rather than solely as rule‐bound bureaucracies, and by showing that even technically justified reforms can strain legitimacy if they are incompatible with existing institutional settlements. It also offers several implications for policy and practice in countries with similar institutional characteristics.