Policy: Appearance and Reality

“Gracious me! I’ve been talking prose for the last forty years and have never known it”. That exclamation was by M Jourdain in Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. I and my fellow applied social scientists, with no notable exceptions, would have to confess the same ignorance, with regard to policy, not prose, for the last forty years. We have been that way since Lerner and Lasswell announced the emergence of ‘The Policy Sciences’ in 1951, in a book with that title. In policy situations we have gone on doing what we know best to do as social scientists. We have consistently evaded the question of what it is about the ‘policy sciences’ that make themdifferent from the other social sciences. We have been successful in that evasion, I suggest, because we have been sensitive to, and responded appropriately to, changes in context as we move from private to public organizations and from executive to administrative levels. In attributing the reasons for different practices to these contextual differences we have been guilty, I further suggest, of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. In what follows I will argue that the significant differences are conceptual, not merely contextual. I will go on to suggest how we might now try to realize Lasswell’s vision “that the policy science orientation… will be directed toward the knowledge needed to improve the practice of democracy… to affirm the dignity of man, not the superiority of one set of men” ([Lerner and Lasswell, 1951], p. 10). That next step takes us beyond what we mean by policy to challenge what is meant by science when people talk of policy, or economics, as a science. This issue was also discussed in Chapter 2.