Malcolm K. Sparrow is Professor of the Practice of Public Management at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is Faculty Chair of the Master of Public Policy Program, and of Executive Programs on regulatory and enforcement strategy, corruption control, and counter-terrorism. A mathematician by training, he joined the British Police Service in 1977, serving for ten years and rising to the rank of Detective Chief Inspector. He left the police to take up a faculty appointment at Harvard in 1988.

• List of figures and tables; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. The Nature of the Control Task: 1. Which way up, and does it matter?; 2. A different kind of work; 3. Defining problems: setting the scale; 4. Defining problems: picking the dimensions; 5. Patterns of thought and action; 6. Puzzles of measurement; 7. Structures, protocols and interactions; Part II. Special Categories of Harm: 8. Invisible harms; 9. Conscious opponents; 10. Catastrophic harms; 11. Harms in equilibrium; 12. Performance-enhancing risks; Conclusion.

'I was amazed, reading Malcolm Sparrow's book, at how powerfully a careful, focused definition of a problem can open the way to novel solutions. Sparrow makes clear that we often need to reverse direction, shifting the focus from promoting the general good to addressing specific harms. He shows how to do that, and how to proceed from there. It is a joy to read someone who, through practical experience, really knows what he is talking about.' Professor Tom Schelling, University of Maryland, Nobel Laureate in Economics