What kind of work is policy-making, and what kinds of knowledge do public administrators draw on in practice? This paper draws on an ethnographic study of civil servants working in England’s Department of Health to offer an account of public administration work as directed towards building connections between ideas and actors to make policies “happen”. The knowledge which is critical to this work is a shared “policy know-how” about how to enact policy-making in this context. However, rational-technocratic accounts of the work of public administration as problem solving informed by expert knowledge claims and analysis were also found to play an important role in the civil servants’ work, both as a legitimating device and a source of meaning and faith for individual actors seeking to make sense of their work.
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