Policy alienation: A comparative case study of public professionals implementing policy programs

Nowadays, many public professionals feel estranged from the policy programs they implement. This is worrisome, as for a successful implementation, some identification with the policy is required. In this article, we frame these identification problems in terms of policy alienation, based on the sociological concept work policy alienation, and show how this can be used in policy implementation research. Further, by comparing two Dutch professionals groups, we observe six factors which are important for explaining policy alienation. Last, we show the relevancy of the policy alienation framework for analyzing the impact of identification problems on policy performance.