POLICY BUREAUCRACY: GOVERNMENT WITH A CAST OF THOUSANDS ‐ Edited by Edward C. Page and Bill Jenkins
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2006.00612_1.x |
| Author | Paul ’t Hart |
| Published date | 01 August 2006 |
| Date | 01 August 2006 |
Public Administration Vol. 84, No. 3, 2006 (783–810)
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
POLICY BUREAUCRACY: GOVERNMENT WITH A CAST
OF THOUSANDS
Edward C. Page and Bill Jenkins
Oxford University Press, 2005, 214 pp., £45 (hb) ISBN: 019928041X
Page and Jenkins have done students of bureaucracy and public policy-
making a great favour by researching and writing this book. It exposes the
world of hitherto largely unstudied, taken for granted, sets of actors on
public organizations and public policy-making processes, namely the many –
hence the subtitle – middle-ranking offi cials working in UK government
departments and agencies who do the bulk of thinking up, preparing,
advising on, administering and evaluating public policies and programmes.
The authors have interviewed more than 125 of them across a range of UK
ministries, asked them what they were doing in their jobs, how they were
doing it (what their expertise and contribution consisted of, what problems
they ran into, how they related to their superiors, the minister, colleagues in
other ministries, and so on), how they came to hold these jobs, and how
they expected their careers to evolve. And they have reported their fi ndings
in a concise book, made lively by many extensive quotes from the inter-
views that offer readers ample evidence of the bewildering variety of sub-
jects that these ‘ invisible ’ bureaucrats deal with on a daily basis. Opponents
of big government will be bewildered by the sheer scope of British central
government ’ s policy interventions, even in the post-Thatcher era, whereas
others can perhaps take comfort that conscientious, dedicated and reason-
ably skilful people are looking after the public interest in real life. That, at
least, is how the authors depict ‘ their ’ bureaucrats.
The book indeed paints a benign picture of bureaucracy at the middle
level. No would-be Sir Humphreys, wont to manipulate their political mas-
ters, are to be found in it. It is even quite critical of rational choice inspired
theories of bureaucratic behaviour which posit that bureaucrats are driven
by the desire to maiximize their self-interest, whether they take that to be
budget/size maximization (Niskanen), interesting and infl uential issue
domains (as in bureau-shaping theories), or maximum autonomy from
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