This book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of power relations within a heavily bureaucratised organization attempting to introduce post-bureaucratic structures, policies and systems. The organisation in question, the New South Wales Police Service, was rife with corruption; postbureaucratic reform was seen as a means of enhancing social control through the facilitation of democracy. Despite institutional change, the book reveals how at a deeper social and political level the Service remains authoritarian and closed. The author's review of the power in organizations literature demonstrates that it is largely made up of to two streams of power analysis: the idealist and the pragmatist streams. Those within the former tradition concern themselves primarily with how power relations should be constituted, while the latter describes the actual workings of power - what it is and does. The author illustrates how the Services reform program failed because