HOWARD, Cosmo <br/><br/>
Bureaucrats in the social policy process :  administrative policy entrepreneurs and the case of working nation 

 - Oxford :  Blackwell Publishers Limited,  September 2001 
<br/><br/> Much of the contemporary literature on Australian social policy tends to focus on broad environmental and institutonal variables and to downplay the importance of the social policy decision-making process and its participants. Yet the study of specific cases in social policy-making reveals that senior admnistrators often have a significant impact on the  direction of social policy reform.The income support reforms adopted as part of the fomer Federal Labor government`s Working Nation package illustrate the potential for bureaucrats to influence the direction of change. Senior administrative officers within the former Commonwealth Department of Social Security played a crucial role in promoting reforms which increased the generosity of the means test on unemployment payments.These bureaucrats behaved as policy entrepreneurs and worked in a strategic manner to garner support for and reduce oppositon to their proposals whithin the decision-making process