Power, Politics, and Public Policy A Matter of Caring.
This book is a compilation of papers presented at the ‘94 Caring Research Conference held in Ottawa, Canada. Anne Boykin, editor, wrote, “It is hoped that this book will reinforce the commitment to caring that needs to direct our ways of being in the world.” The intended audience encompasses nurses worldwide who advocate on behalf of human care and caring.
The book is organized into three sections: theory (five articles), practice (six articles), and education. There are diagrams and figures throughout and text is made more readable by its organization, use of italics, bullet points, and tables, but the book has few pictures. Each article is well referenced (mainly from the 1980s and 90s; a few date earlier than the 1950s). Even though all articles adhere to the conference’s theme, I was kept engaged by the variety of writing styles. Articles encompass literary, anecdotal, historical, qualitative research, concept analysis, theory development, quantitative research, and philosophical styles.
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The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol and Public Policy.
America’s most recent moral crusade, the war on drugs, has been pronounced a failure by critics from the left, right, and center and now is favored almost exclusively by politicians, law enforcement agencies, and other groups with a stake in its continuation and a seeming imperviousness to information. In The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol, and Public Policy, Kenneth Meier provides evidence that the war on drugs has been a failure in the states but also demonstrates that this most recent attempt to expunge sin is akin to earlier failed attempts to regulate personal behavior. The analyses presented in the book underline the irrationality of many U.S. anti-drug policies but also demonstrate that forces in the policy environment make it difficult for us to learn from our policy mistakes. The book’s ultimate substantive contribution is a sophisticated, balanced, and well-reasoned analysis of the forces underlying the adoption, implementation, and effects of policies to regulate drugs and alcohol. Antidrug policies are exposed clearly as good politics but bad public policy. The frustrating fact, though, is that the results suggest that we seem unable to stop ourselves from embarking on Quixotic anti-sin campaigns despite our history of failure in the arena. Americans may be doomed to a future of badly designed and implemented policies intended to regulate sin.
Aside from this substantive contribution, Meier’s book represents an important addition to the study of public policy through his careful application of three approaches to policy analysis: cross-sectional quantitative analysis, quantitative historical analysis, and qualitative historical analysis. Meier applies each approach in this research, and the results are impressive. The study is contextually rich and empirically rigorous; rather than pursuing one line of inquiry and accepting its limitations, Meier acknowledges the weaknesses and strengths of each and uses them in complementary fashion. The volume of quantitative and qualitative data used for the analysis is enormous, and the overall effect of the blending of three forms of analysis is to provide a study that takes advantage of the best aspects of each approach while accounting for the weaknesses of each through the use of the others. This is not to say that one cannot find places to quibble with measures, model specification, and the like, but the breadth of evidence Meier brings to bear, and its consistency, renders such criticisms trivial.
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Theory of Strategic Action for Public Policy
Strategic scenarios, concepts that assist business managers in developing market interventions, represent the action component of strategic management. In some fields of public policy (especially national defense and electoral politics) scenarios have been discussed for years. For the most part, however, a theory of action involving specific scenarios has not been given attention by scholars of public policy and administration. In this article, the literature of these fields, along with that of business strategy, is reviewed and synthesized for the purpose of beginning the process of developing a theory of action for managers of public policy. Two concepts in particular – the agency power matrix and the change scenario – are presented as necessary components of this theory. When completed, the theory of strategic action should be viewed as an integral part of the literature of strategic management.
Strategic management literature written for business firms provides executives with a sequence of sophisticated procedures for achieving corporate objectives in their chosen markets. Beyond procedures, however, this particular body of literature also conceptualizes possible scenarios that the firm may choose to follow (Leontiades, 1982; Tourangeau, 1981). Scenarios are stimulated courses of action that map alternative moves by the firm and likely reactions of competitors. In short, strategic management procedures allow business executives to plan and implement courses of action in the form of “if … then” propositions.
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