In France, the equivalent to PPBS was the ‘Rationalisation des choix budge´taires’ (RCB), launched with great fanfare in 1968 by the government of Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas as part of his ‘new society’ program of reform. On various occasions, French officials from the Department of Finance visited Washington to learn about PPBS. When the RCB was launched, responsibility for overseeing its implementation was located in the Department of Finance. In the 1960s, with the growth of public spending, senior bureaucrats and economists in Finance came to see the General Plann- ing Commissariat as an ally of spending departments in the pursuit of more resources. The RCB was thus a way to challenge the monopoly of the Planning Commissariat by creating a rival planning capacity at the centre of govern- ment. To gain the support of sectoral departments, the RCB was implemented in a decentralized way under the guidance of an interdepartmental committee. Crozier was the only academic on that committee. The idea was to use the methods of applied sociology to gain better empirical knowledge of how organizations react to reform, so that the RCB could be adjusted to particular contexts and situations. In the end, however, the RCB failed to deliver on its ‘hyper-rationalist’ promises and was subsequently abandoned as official government policy.