If organizational structure shapes the behavior of particular institutions and the individuals within them, this has broad implications for those seeking to explain the policymaking role of bureaucracy. If bureaucrats make decisions that authoritatively allocate values, and organizational environment helps determine how those decisions are made, then organizational theory holds the potential to explain a good deal of how and why bureaucracy fulfills its political role. One of the key contributions of organizational behavior scholarship to bureaucratic politics theory is James Q. Wilson’s classic, Bureaucracy: What Government
Agencies Do and Why They Do It (1989). Wilson posed a similar question to Allison, though it was more focused toward administrative matters. Instead of asking why governments do what they do, Wilson asked why bureaucracies do what they do. Wilson argued that bureaucrats have discretion in their decision making, and that a complex set of factors determine how that discretion is exercised: “When bureaucrats are free to choose a course of action their choices will reflect the full array of incentives operating on them: some will reflect the need to manage a workload; others will reflect the expectations of workplace peers and professional colleagues elsewhere; still others may reflect their own convictions. And some will reflect the needs of clients” (1989, 88). Before Wilson’s contribution, numerous scholars had argued that discretion in decision making, in effect, made bureaucrats into policymakers, and bureaucracies into political actors. Wilson’s work provided a richly detailed study of how and why this discretion was exercised to produce government action.