Abstract
Policy work is a theme rarely tackled in edited scholarly volumes. Highlighting significance of policy work in public policy-making, this chapter reviews how policy processes can be understood as a pattern of specialised work.
To this end, the chapter first delineates the main characteristics of policy work and proceeds to review the major conceptual approaches to it. The chapter then gives an overview of empirical literature on the work of policy, and concludes with some suggestions for future research on it.
In essence, the chapter argues that policy work encompasses much broader and diverse sets of practice-related activities than commonly assumed and advocated in policy analysis. It is therefore timely to re-orient, both conceptually and empirically, scholarly thinking of what nature of work policy practitioners do in reality, to reach beyond the confines of governmental instrumentalism and science-led (purely rational) problem solving.