The grand truism of sociology is true also of Canberra: the Australian federal state apparatus is ‘socially constructed’. Every part of it, including its legal, economic, and formal organisational structure, is a product of the society that gives it money and legitimacy. It is by deploying (and reproducing) these resources of money and legitimacy, among others, that the federal state interacts with markets and with other aspects of its environment, and functions as a coordinating medium for the whole social system.

These rather bland generalisations remind us again that sociological research must begin with a basic presumption that is an axiom of the discipline itself. It has to be assumed that the total experiential and educational baggage of the individuals who work in this ‘social location’ (for our purposes the top Canberra bureaucracy) is the product of a continuing process of socialisation - of what used to be called, in an older language, their ‘primary and secondary socialisation’. And this includes all later educational experience and, most importantly in the case of people who have spent decades of their lives in the workplace, all later and ongoing occupational socialisation as well. Just as the economist begins with the assumption that ‘the economy’ is the measure of resources known and unknown, so we must begin with the assumption that the perceptions and actions of our top public servants have a systematic relationship to the society of which they are such obviously important members.