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Acknowledgement
I am very grateful to the two anonymous referees who commented on an earlier draft of this article.
Notes
1. Halliday (Citation2003) has also criticised Adler's development of Mashaw by arguing that managerial, consumerist and market models can be seen as aspects of new public management and therefore better understood as a single model.
2. The doughnut metaphor is useful because it demonstrates that rules (as one manifestation of the ‘belt of restriction’) and discretion are inextricably linked, rather than, as some writers have contended, binary opposites (see Tata Citation2007).
3. I am grateful for the comments from one of the anonymous referees who have alerted me to the alternative possibility that policy makers might deliberately maximise discretion in order to pass the responsibility for making possibly difficult decisions to ‘front‐line’ decision‐makers.
4. By suggesting that it is difficult to penetrate the ‘black box’ of decision‐making, the argument is not being made that it is impossible. Far from it, socio‐legal scholarship has continually sought, and succeeded, in exploring and explaining discretionary decision‐making in a range of legal settings. See, for example, Hawkins (Citation1992).
