How do bureaucrats decide how to implement the law? This central topic in public administration and bureaucratic politics is the focus of Zachary Oberfield’s new book that examines street-level policy implementation by police and welfare case workers. While the book is about employees in public bureaucracies, the question it addresses about how members of an organization come to understand and undertake their jobs is much larger. (For example, as a professor, how to I understand what I am to do when asked to write a book review?) Oberfield frames the study as helping to explain the relative importance of the organizational experience, such as training, oversight, the nature of assigned work, acculturation, peer influence, and learning—and the bureaucrat’s own proclivities (dispositions) in shaping policy. Bluntly, does bureaucracy make the bureaucrat, or is the bureaucracy made by those individuals who are recruited and retained in it? In the end, the author makes a compelling case for the role of bureaucrats’ own individual orientations in understanding how the law is carried out.

Teasing out the relative importance of public employees’ prior beliefs from their organizational experience demands a different sort of data from that most often brought to bear in studies of bureaucratic politics, because it requires understanding who bureaucrats are when they arrive and how they change over time. And herein is the key strength of Becoming Bureaucrats: Oberfield observes two cohorts of emerging bureaucrats—one is welfare case workers and the second is police officers—from the earliest stages of their recruitment into government over more than two years of government service (or, in exceptional cases, until their exit from government). These data take the form of extensive interviews, supplemented by quantitative survey data analysis and the author’s own ethnographic account of his experience as a newly hired welfare case worker.

The raw interview material, skillfully supplemented by Oberfield’s analysis and his description of his own experience, provides the contextual understanding that helps to evaluate who these bureaucrats really are. In that way, the book is like Herbert Kaufman’s The Forest Ranger (RFF Press, 2006) and other classics of public administration that skillfully bridge the gap between abstract accounts and the real individuals who implement the law. A common trajectory in Oberfield’s account of the two sets of new bureaucrats is that individuals enter into their respective agencies for their own reasons, report being shaped by their training experience and early supervisors, and then move into their everyday jobs where peers and the nature of their interactions with their “clients”—welfare applicants or those who might violate the law, respectively—become central in how bureaucrats decide how to carry out their jobs.

Oberfield deploys his novel survey data—albeit from a relatively small number of bureaucrats—to show that there is general agreement about these patterns and also that there is a surprising degree of individual-level stability in personal motives for service and approaches to the job, despite the common arc of organizational experience just described. In this way, while the author argues that individual-level factors appear more important than organizational influences in shaping behavior—implying that selection and recruitment dominate organizational “treatment”—it is difficult to tease this apart from the possibility that even organizations that can only weakly control recruitment nonetheless tend to attract a mostly homogenous group of individuals who are amenable to the culture and environment required by the organization. That is, an organization may shape work in part by creating a task environment that only certain sorts of people will find amenable.

More generally, while it is interesting that bureaucrats have their own enduring motives and reasons for entering service, it is also telling in Oberfield’s account that a great deal of “the action” of government performance is in the nature of the tasks that individuals are asked to complete. Welfare case workers, for example, have to decide which applicants to reject and which to accept on the basis of the nature of the application and supporting material. Thus, a different question that follows from this important work is whether agency leaders are able to effectively get what they want from their subordinates, or if in fact bureaucrats’ dispositions imply (policy) agency loss between bureaucratic leaders and the field. Restated slightly, can an organization make bureaucrats do their will even if it cannot change who they are inside? To answer that question, however, would require supplementing data about the lowest-level bureaucrats with information about the preferences and choices of their superiors, both at the field level and higher up in their respective organizations. (It would also likely require some ability to measure how discretion is used, its own extremely thorny empirical problem.)

None of this, however, should take away from what is an impressive piece of scholarship in a neglected area of study in political science. Despite our desire and need for abstraction, the people who implement the law need to be studied and understood, just as any model of democracy needs an understanding of individual voters. Oberfield’s innovative perspective and data provide important new insights into how the interplay between the people who inhabit bureaucratic roles and their organizations shape those individuals and how the law is therefore carried out.