Beyond Organizational Design: Contextuality and the Political Theory of Public Policy

Abstract

Since its emergence in the early 1970’s, implementation research has gone through an intellectual life cycle which seems uncomfortably familiar. Pioneering efforts blazed a trail to fields of burgeoning research activities. Schools of thought started to form around points of controversy which were made easily visible through conspicuous tags such as “up/down”, “inter/intra”, “formal /informal”. Genuinely original scholarships thrived alongside fairly repetitious and eclectic studies. We how seem to face a situation where implementation research is well and alive but where it might also run the risk of becoming the victim of its own success. True enough most of the original societal impetus for this type of inquiry is still there. Even in the age of large budgetary deficits and slow growth economies public programs are as big as ever, and politicians face as substantial problems now as they did ten years ago in translating policy commitments and societal aspirations into real world effects. Of course there is wide-spread disillusionment after a decade and a half of extensive exercises in knowledge utilization for public policy. But little or nothing suggests that politicians should be less prone to draw upon whatever policy relevant studies they might feel are of use to them in political and administrative battles or that social scientists now should be more inclined than in the early 1970’s to withdraw into adademic ivory towers.