Despite the high level of concentration in the UK economy, the politics of firms has been largely neglected. The emergence of government relations divisions in very large companies is discussed and their functions are reviewed. However, very large firms are also actively involved in business interest associations. Very large firms may develop distinctive corporate political philosophies and a typology of such philosophies is presented. Government seeks to modify the behaviour of firms by providing a range of industrial policy incentives, but the available evidence suggests that the impact of such incentives is limited. Lack of mutual trust and understanding between firms and government, and the persistence of a concept of the autonomous firm, leads to pessimistic conclusions about the likely success of attempts to manage industrial decline.

This article examines how issues of policy implementation affected the formulation and adoption of personal information policies in the United States and Britain. The analysis suggests that when implementation questions are raised during policy formulation, programmatic goals will be compromised to the interests bureaucracies have in implementation. In this case, the goal of protecting the privacy of personal information was sacrified to an implementation framework that protected bureaucratic needs. This poses a dilemma for policy analysts: when implementation questions are left unresolved in policy design, bureaucratic concerns dominate the implementation stage; yet, when implementation questions are resolved in policy design, bureaucratic concerns dominate the formulation stage.

The paper argues that the monetarist ‘experiment’ of the first Thatcher government in Britain (1979–83) has been unsuccessful. Alternative monetarist philosophies and their specific application to Britain are outlined. These propositions are then re-examined in the light of the actual experience of economic policy in Britain, and are found to be inadequate. Inflation in Britain has come down, but ironically after a period when money supply grew quickly – well above the government's target ranges. Unemployment has also risen much more severely than monetarists predicted. ‘Monetarism’ in Britain can be interpreted less in terms of theoretical and empirical economic analysis as in terms of value judgements about the size of the public sector and about paying a high cost in unemployment to stabilise prices.

A public policy-oriented research project in Australia is used to point out the connections between typical social science motivations, such as moral criticism, truth-seeking and policy-guidance, and the research styles which such motivations produce, such as advocacy, impracticality and expediency. Each style's reliability, fundamentalism and policy applicability are discussed and suggestions are made for testing research validity. Finally, it is shown how policy makers can interpret advice from the different sorts of social scientist more intelligently.