Abstract: Regulation Inside Government analyses the army of inspectors, auditors, grievance-chasers, standard-setters, and other bodies overseeing contemporary public organizations. On the basis of a pioneering two-year inside study of British Government by a team of leading scholars, this book provides an original analytical perspective on regulation within government. Given the limitations of orthodox constitutional checks on executive government, the courts, and elected politicians, regulation inside government deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. As one of the first comprehensive accounts of regulation inside government, this book begins to fill the gap. The empirical data for the study sets out the full range of modes of control applied to the public sector. The authors examine the relationship between formal oversight, of the traditional regulatory sort, with other forms of control based on competition, mutuality, and contrived randomness. They conclude that there is a failure in contemporary public management to deploy each of these modes of control to their full potential.

Keywords: audit, Britain, government, inspection, modes of control, oversight, public management, public sector, regulation