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AGENCIES: HOW GOVERNMENTS DO THINGS THROUGH SEMI‐AUTONOMOUS ORGANISATIONS ‐ Edited by Christopher Pollitt, Colin Talbot, Janice Caulfield and Amanda Smullen

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2006.00612_12.x
AuthorAndrew Massey
Date01 August 2006
Published date01 August 2006
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© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006 Public Administration Vol. 84, No. 3, 2006 (783–810)
AGENCIES: HOW GOVERNMENTS DO THINGS THROUGH
SEMI-AUTONOMOUS ORGANISATIONS
Christopher Pollitt, Colin Talbot, Janice Caulf‌i eld and Amanda Smullen
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 304 pp., £50 (hb) ISBN: 1403933227
It may be thought by some that the executive agency – in Britain and else-
where – ‘ has had its day ’ . The gradual re-absorption of some agencies back
into their parent department (an example being the Civil Service College,
now rebranded as the National School of Government) and a growing sense
in the practitioner literature that the whole concept is a little ‘ passé ’ suggest
that times have moved on. A perusal of this book will convince the reader
otherwise; it is a cornucopia of theoretical and comparative empirical infor-
mation regarding the concept, practice and role of agencies, with an espe-
cially useful four-country comparison.
The authors f‌i rst locate agencies within their temporal and theoretical
context, noting that they are often the product of either mimetic isomor-
phism or coercive isomorphism. They go on to provide a useful six-point

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