The bureaucratic environment is widely recognized as an important influence on administrative behavior. Nonetheless, few studies of public agencies have attempted to measure the significance of administrators' perceptions of this environment; perception shapes the understanding and interpretation of the information that premises policy decisions. This study examines the nature of the subjective environment, based on perceptions and beliefs about the influential actors who occupy the objective one. The purpose of this work is to extend the efforts of the cognitive process theorists by developing an empirical representation of the subjective environment that accommodates individual differences, assessing its relation to other beliefs and to organization activitities, and evaluating its impact on the initiation of policy changes. Evidence supporting suspected impact calls for an extension of bureaucratic theory to account for the contribution of perceptual biases to administrative behavior.
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