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Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on May 27, 2009
Parliamentary Affairs 2009 62(3):528-532; doi:10.1093/pa/gsp010
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© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Policy Bureaucracy: Government with a Cast of Thousands

Rodney Lowe

University of Bristol and the Cabinet Office

Correspondence: r.lowe@bristol.ac.uk

EDWARD PAGE and BILL JENKINS, Policy Bureaucracy: Government with a Cast of Thousands, Oxford University Press, 2005, 214 pp, ISBN: 0 19 928041X, £45.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Academic studies of policy-making have had three recent obsessions. The first is with the charismatic policy activists, waiting like beach bums with their surfboards ready to ride ‘the next big wave’ of political fashion. The second, more traditionally, is with top officials at the apex of the 4000 strong Senior Civil Service. The third is with the restricted membership of policy networks. This leaves as terra incognita the world of the middle-ranking civil servant, where the bulk of work to develop and maintain (and not just deliver) policy is done. It is not a small world but contains some 100,000 officials, in both the junior ranks of the Senior Civil Service and the four grades below (Grades 6 and 7, and Senior/Higher Executive Officers). This, at least, is the argument of Page and Jenkins in Policy Bureaucracy: Government with a Cast of Thousands. Given the potential ennui their subject might . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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