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This thesis examines the motivations of bureaucrats in two government agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency in the US, and the Environment Agency for England and Wales. The model employed in this work is a Trifocal Model which utilises Rational Choice, Institutional and Cultural approaches in answering the thesis question. The aim of this work is two-fold: one aim is to explain motivations in two agencies; the second aim is to suggest why the existing literature in the field of bureaucracy often fails to capture the diversity of bureaucratic motivations. The claim is that the adherence to one particular paradigmatic approach prevents scholars from attaining a comprehensive understanding of motivations. This work focuses on two elements of the Trifocal Approach, namely institutional and cultural explanations. Rational Choice explanations are given a limited explanatory role in this work, in large part because of the restricted usefulness of an approach which takes the preferences of agents as given. This thesis uses a scientific approach to the analysis of qualitative data, allowing other researchers to make use of, and indeed to question, the findings presented below. The argument in this thesis suggests why scholars must pay more attention to what those people within bureaucracies tell us about themselves and their motivations. To take the preferences of agents as givens is to ignore much of what is most important about the study of politics that is, where preferences come from, and how they shape the political behaviour we observe in bureaucracies. This thesis will show that public sector reforms are often flawed, often failing to consider the interplay of cultural and institutional effects, and how these effects have a bearing on the motivations of staff in organisations undergoing reform. Furthermore, cultural and institutional factors must be considered whenever one considers the question what is it that motivates bureaucrats.

This thesis replicates Herbert Kaufman's study of the administrative behavior of federal bureau chiefs at the state level. Kaufman asserted that bureau chiefs are not as autonomous as we depicted. Their behavior is confined by the legal, institutional, political and operational constraints. This thesis supports Kaufman's findings--except that it's more optimistic about the occurrence of innovative changes in public agencies. This study looks at six state agency heads of the State of Virginia. Their behavior is examined from the conception of "responsibility." Chapter One argues that responsibility connotes two aspects of meaning: objective and subjective. Objective responsibility is ensured through the constraints placed on bureaucrats. Contents of these constraints are examined in Chapter Two. The findings show that these agency heads are behaving in ways consistent with the limits set by the constraints. / Master of Public Administration