ABSTRACT
It is important to resituate the process that led to the rise of an elite governing social welfare policy into its proper context. Nevertheless, a renewed sociology of elites focused clearly on the ends of action allows us to see how a coherent and homogeneous group was established at the sectoral level devoted to the central role of the state in determining and carrying out social welfare policy. By showing successively how the budgetary constraint was not only overcome but transformed into a programmatic resource, how new instruments of public action were forged, and how the cognitive and normative frameworks for public action were transformed we can attest to the emergence of a programmatic elites at the highest levels of the state. In the place of generalist technocrats, there are sector-specific programmatic elite whose principal rivals are other similarly specialized groups within the state—a far cry either from an all-pervasive "power elite" or even an undifferentiated "autonomous state".
