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This article seeks to enrich the analysis of public action, or policy, by blending it with an ethnographic method. To this end, it defines four levels of public action: 1) the targets of policy; 2) “street-level” practitioners and 3) their immediate supervisors; and finally 4) those at the origin of the policies in question. In a first section, it demonstrates that the analysis of public policy has gradually evolved toward a position of greater realism through a (limited) reduction of its initial ethnocentrism, by an (incomplete) critique of the model of “economic man”, and finally through a (relative) methodological shift. It further demonstrates that, although it is as yet little applied, ethnography is a type of knowledge that is useful for the study of public policy: it allows us to overcome the problem of positional ethnocentrism and to mobilize all of the tools of social science without ignoring certain essential dimensions of actors such as their age, gender, and social trajectory. Ultimately, this article illustrates this hybrid approach through examples of methods and results obtained in the study of French public policy in the hospital sector in the 2000s.