| Review of: | Policy Bureaucracy: Government with a Cast of Thousands by Edward C. Page, Bill Jenkins |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Kwangho Jung |
| Reviewed in: | Governance |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 20, Issue 03, Pages 545-556 |
Book Reviews
This book, relying on extensive (140 of them) interviews with British civil servants, explores a variety of policy roles for middle-level bureaucrats. Despite many important studies concerning bureaucracy and policy processes, a variety of specific policy activities, particularly among mid-level bureaucrats, have been neglected in studies of public administration and public policy. Many research questions had therefore remained unanswered.
Page and Jenkins explore these neglected policy roles of middle-level bureaucrats through interview research and by drawing on sociological theories of bureaucracy developed by Max Weber and Alvin Gouldner. According to Page and Jenkins, "Much policy work is usually conducted with few direct and specific instructions from ministers and senior officials. Since ministers do not give a detailed steer of all the things in the policy process, bureaucrats should produce precise legal clauses, specific regulations, and various forms of protocols about how policies should work in practice" (79). In the book, three types of policy roles emerge: (1) a production role in making policy drafts and documents, (2) a maintenance role in tending and managing policies, and (3) a service role in offering knowledge and skills to those involved in the policy process.
Chapter 2 provides a basic description of middle-ranking officials with diverse career pathways and frequent mobility. Chapters 3 and 4 show how policy bureaucracies perceive policy work to be different from other forms of civil service work such as casework, operations, and implementation (55-56). This is where Page and Jenkins introduce their three roles and the interactions among them. Chapter 5 demonstrates how much policy work is conducted with few direct and specific instructions from ministers. Rather policy work is guided by five factors in the UK bureaucracy: the perceived thrust of government policy, experience derived from frequent interaction with a minister, departmental priorities derived from departmental practice over the years, the use of government documents, and a consensual solution to a policy problem.
Chapter 6 challenges prevailing academic frameworks of how bureaucrats influence policymaking. The chapter contends that agency theory does not fit well with explaining the trade-off between hierarchy and expertise. The finding that "the middle-ranking officials do their best to develop policy tools or measures that will meet what they perceive as their political masters' priorities and intentions" (183) seems to contradict bureaucratic behaviors derived from agency theory. The relationships between ministers and middle-ranking officials in the Whitehall bureaucracy involve the cooperative aspects of policy roles. The civil servants are viewed as good stewards and team players.
An inherent tension between expertise and hierarchy in bureaucracy is a classic question in the study of modern bureaucracy. There are many theoretical models to explain the tension in political systems across different countries. Page and Jenkins suggest that the norm-based approach is particularly relevant in explaining the conflict between hierarchy and expertise in the UK bureaucracy, where both invited authority and improvised expertise are key factors to resolving such conflict. Both the substantial delegation of policymaking to the civil servants and ministerial approval are seen to be a solution to the tensions among them. The Whitehall-based policy bureaucracy seems to contrast with Weberian conceptions of bureaucracy. As Page and Jenkins write, "The informal relations and flattened hierarchies in UK policy making contrasts with the apparent 'top-down' model based on the Prussian bureaucracy at the turn of the century" (181). Indeed, the tensions between hierarchy and expertise vary across countries.
Page and Jenkins believe that understanding bureaucratic reality does not necessarily conform to the application of theoretical models and the testing of hypotheses with empirical data. They argue that survey research is not necessary to unravel the nature of policy bureaucracy and emphasize instead that interviews with civil servants are likely to provide more relevant and context-specific facts regarding policymaking activities among civil servants and their political masters. The information or data from this book tend toward the impressionistic and anecdotal, and no hypotheses are tested.