Analysing Bureau-Shaping Models: Comments on Marsh, Smith and Richards

Abstract

In a recent article in this Journal Marsh, Smith and Richards (MSR) note the massive recent changes in the organization of British government and the attention the bureau-shaping model has received both at a theoretical level and as an explanation of changes. They suggest that the model has breathed new life into debates about the behaviour of officials and is important in the context of the ‘Next Steps’ agency reform. They state two aims of their article: ‘First, it is a critical contribution to the literature on the bureau-shaping model’, and secondly it examines ‘the model's utility as an explanation of the changes that have occurred in British central government in the past decade’. They also use their arguments as part of an assault upon rational choice and empirical political science more generally in favour of interpretative sociology. However, in this Note, we respond to their work on the bureau-shaping model and rational choice.