Following Hood (1986), Hall (1993) and Linder and Peters (1990), public policy instruments are defined sociologically as
A device that is both technical and social, that organizes specific social relations between the state and those it is addressed to, according to the representations and meanings it carries. It is a particular type of institution, a technical device with the generic purpose of carrying a concrete concept of the politics/society relationship and sustained by a concept of regulation (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007: 5