Rod Rhodes is professor of government at the University of Southampton (UK) and director of the Centre for Political Ethnography.

He has also been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, editor of 'Public Administration: an international quarterly' from 1986 to 2011, and Treasurer of the Australian Political Studies Association, 2004–2011.

The idea that British government should be seen as a fragmented or differentiated polity rather than a unitary state has been hugely influential and widely debated.

[2][3] With Patrick Dunleavy, Rhodes argued the conventional debate about the British executive, with its focus on the relative power of the prime minister and cabinet was too limited.

The term refers to sets of formal and informal institutional linkages between governmental and other actors structured around shared interests in public policymaking and implementation.

For many policy arenas, these sectors are interdependent, so decisions are a product of their game-like interactions, rooted in trust and regulated by rules of the game negotiated and agreed by the participants.

This is because they hold that the starting point of enquiry must be to unpack the meanings, beliefs, and preferences of actors in order to then make sense of understanding actions, practices, and institutions.

Bevir and Rhodes thus provide an elaborate philosophical foundation for a decentred theory of governance woven together by the notions of beliefs, traditions and dilemmas.

The product is a story of other people's constructions of what they are doing, which provides actors’ views on changes in government, the economy, and society.

A tradition (or episteme or paradigm) is the set of theories against the background of which a person comes to hold beliefs and perform actions.

In his own work, he used ethnography as a tool for exploring the beliefs and practices of government actors (see Rhodes, 2007, 2011,2014, 2021 and 2024 in Select Bibliography).

The "interpretive turn" to studying British government is discussed in a symposium in: Rhodes, R. A. W.; Dowding, Keith; Bevir, Mark; Finlayson, Alan; Hay, Colin (May 2004).