Nonincremental Policy Making: Notes Toward an Alternative Paradigm

Schulman, Paul R.

doi:10.2307/1955293

Cited by 77 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Income tax policy (Witte, 1985), case-by-case evolution of jurisprudence (Shapiro, 1965), governmental deregulation of industries (Jones and Thompson, 1984), and school desegregation (Hochschild, 1984) are among the cases raising the question: under what circumstances are bold strokes through Gordian knots required if intricate systems are to be significantly improved? Schulman (1975Schulman ( , 1980 observes that implementation sometimes may require large, long-term commitments with rapid scaleups that are not incremental; his example is the Apollo program. McCurdy (1990) concludes that the space station program has experienced major difficulties because it evolved through political bargaining.…”

Section: Neo-incrementalist Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reframing incrementalism: A constructive response to the critics

Weiss

Woodhouse

1992

Policy Sci

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The concept of incrementalism has been widely cited over the past three decades, yet it has not served as the basis for a cumulatively developing line of empirical and theoretical inquiry. As a result, the highly promising incrementalist framework has contributed surprisingly little to improving our understanding of how decision-making processes can better adapt to humans' cognitive limitations. One indicator of the lack of progress is that policy scholars have never made a sustained attempt to explain how practitioners can become better incrementalists. To see whether the concept's original formulation may be obscuring the way to further progress, we summarize and appraise four enduring criticisms of inerementalism: its alleged lack of goal orientation, conservatism, limited range of applicability, and negative stance toward analysis. While questioning the validity of the critics' claims, we nevertheless propose a way to reframe the incrementalist endeavor, with the intention of stimulating both its critics and defenders to get on with the task of learning more about how individuals, organizations, and societies "can proceed relatively intelligently despite the fact that humans rarely have a good understanding of complex social problems and policy options.The concept of incrementalism, developed by Charles E. Lindblom, has been one of the most widely cited ideas in the policy sciences. In the three decades since its inception, however, the concept has not served as the basis for a cumulatively developing line of empirical and theoretical researchJ Curiously, it has failed to stimulate scholars either 'to articulate other strategies that avoid the impossible aspiration to synopsis [or] to give a more precise formulation to disjointed incrementalism as one such strategy' (Lindblom, 1979: 525). Nor is it clear that incrementalist ideas have been very helpful to practitioners.The fame achieved by incrementalism suggests that the concept captures important elements in political and organizational life; but its deeper implications apparently have not been understood well enough for other scholars to actively work with it. We conjecture that the unfulfilled promise of incrementalism could be due in part to the way the concept was originally framed, and that it may be possible to refocus the concept to make it more generative for future research on policy making.Toward that end, this paper briefly summarizes the main facets of the concept of incrementalism, reviews the primary criticisms advanced against the decision strategy, and appraises the validity of the criticisms, z We find that the criticisms of incrementalism by and large are invalid. But because the misunderstandings are widespread and enduring, and because the failure to develop this line of scholarship is so striking, we suggest that it makes sense to

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Section: Neo-incrementalist Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reframing incrementalism: A constructive response to the critics

Weiss

Woodhouse

1992

Policy Sci

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“…Dror, 1964;Etzioni, 1967Etzioni, , 1986Schulman, 1975;Lustick, 1980;Gregory, 1989;Weiss & Woodhouse, 1992). It has been criticized for its conceptual slipperiness (Berry, 1990) and the supposed underlying conservatism.…”

Section: "I Always Thought That Although Some Purpose Was Served By mentioning

confidence: 99%

Half a century of “muddling”: Are we there yet?

Allison

Saint‐Martin

2011

Policy and Society

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Abstract:Half a century after the publication of Lindblom's seminal article "The Science of Muddling Through", we revisit the heritage of incrementalism in this special issue, analyzing its legacy in public policy and public administration. The articles discuss the extent to which recent theoretical developments have transformed the original idea, reinforced it, or possibly rendered it obsolete. In this introductory article, we provide a short overview over the core elements of incrementalism and assess how the concept is used in scholarly publications and research today. We thereby focus on incrementalism as an analytical concept rather then a prescriptive theory. We argue that even after a half a century of "muddling", we are not yet through with incrementalism. Some of the ideas that underpin the concept of incrementalism continue to drive research, often in combination with more recent theoretical approaches to the policy process. After half a century, incrementalism is still part of the policy scholar's tool kit.

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“…Braybrooke and Lindblom describe a number of practices which differ widely from the normative rationalist ideal and which prove to be fruitful to their users when coping with the difficulties of decision-making. This makes their work very important, especially since several studies have endorsed their conclusions about the actual practices of decision-making (Wildavsky, 1974;Bailey and O'Connor, 1975;Schulman, 1975).…”

Section: The Rationalist Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Negative incentive steering in a policy network

Vught

1985

High Educ

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In this article the process of developing a policy for the recent comprehensive retrenchment operation in the Dutch university system is analysed from a theoretical point of view on decisionmaking. The article especially addresses the question whether some empirical evidence can be found for the rationalist view of collective decision-making, which states that a process of social communication should eventually lead to a unanimous and rational consensus concerning the selection of the optimal policy.The actual analysis concerns the way a retrenchment policy has been developed in a process of social communication between the most important actors: the Minister of Education and Science and the thirteen Dutch universities. It is assumed that the various communicative linkages between these actors can be interpreted as a policy network in which both governmental and. non-governmental actors operate.The article concludes that in the Dutch university policy-network a complicated balance of interdependencies exists and that several sub-networks can be distinguished. It is also concluded that the Minister, while recognizing the interdependencies in the network, was able to use a special kind of (negative) incentive, inducing the universities to act as he wished.This negative incentive steering, however, also persuaded the universities to go to the utmost in their consultation efforts, thus trying to reach the rationalist ideal of collective decision-making. The final conclusion therefore is that the rationalist view of collective decision-making does not appear to be unrealistic. The article ends with a warning against a common mistake made regarding the normative appearance of the rationalist perspective.

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Nonincremental Policy Making: Notes Toward an Alternative Paradigm

Cited by 77 publications

References 14 publications

Reframing incrementalism: A constructive response to the critics

Reframing incrementalism: A constructive response to the critics

Half a century of “muddling”: Are we there yet?

Negative incentive steering in a policy network

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