The experiences that I set out in the Introduction do not have immediately obvious connections. Why are the same concepts – culture and values – useful for analysing such different phenomena as the difficulty of reforming the National Health Service under Tony Blair's government and the election victory of Donald Trump? There is a risk that ‘culture’ and ‘values’ are both abstract and potentially woolly terms, which don't have enough bite to them to drive real understanding. Therefore this first chapter sets out what I mean by culture and values. There are several different concepts in play here, and understanding how they differ will be important to the arguments in the following chapters. It is also vital to see how they are connected. In reality the ways policy makers, organisations that interact with policy, and individual citizens act stem from a mixture of cultural and value-driven factors, as well as other elements. That mixture depends on the specific situation and the wider context, and disentangling its separate elements is not always practically possible or useful.

There are three elements to the concepts of culture and values as used in this book. They are:

• the set of written and (especially) unwritten rules that define the institutions within which people operate and which enable them to work together with each other and with wider society;

• the set of beliefs about how the world works and about ethical principles like fairness and justice that affect how policy is made and implemented; and

• the set of practical and psychological shortcuts that everyone uses to navigate complexity and incomplete information.

Each of these elements operates at two levels: the level of policy makers themselves and the level of society as a whole (see Table 1.1). It is the interaction of all the elements at both levels that creates the environment of culture and values that I discuss in the rest of the book.

Unwritten rules in institutions and society

The first of these elements will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a large organisation. There is a set of rules about how things can and can't be done: which group makes which decisions, who signs off expenditure, how new employees are recruited.