INCREMENTALISM: A Framework for Human Services Organizations

INCREMENTALISM: A Framework for Human Services OrganizationsAuthor(s): Lelia B. Helms, Carole A. Singleton and Alan B. HenkinSource: Canadian Social Work Review / Revue canadienne de service social, Vol. 1 ('83), pp. 93-105Published by: Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41669086 .

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Review '83 93

INCREMENT ALISM

A Framework for Human Services Organizations

Lelia B. Helms, Carole A. Singleton and Alan B. Henkin

I I UM AN SERVICES AGENCIES, like other public social institutions, may have been remodeled and restructured while the ideas consonant with them have not. 1 The realities of fluctuating priorities and demands and high levels of goal conflict in these organizations suggest a need for alternatives to rational-comprehensive models. If policy processes in such environments continue to depend on the strategic latitude consistent with sub-optimal choices and gradual changes, the utility of rational-comprehensive models - sustained by preferences for progressive, synoptic and intellectually based rationalism - is questionable.

The purposes here are to explore the theroretical foundations of incrementalism from policy analysis and public administration perspectives, to consider the approach in the context of human services agencies and delivery systems, and to present an alternative middle-ground strategy called mixed-scanning.

Analytical Context Human services agencies live with a plethora of ambiguities,

including conflicting individual priorities, needs dispositions and organizational expectations. Additional confounding variables such as levels of trust, individual integration within the organization, and personal orientations to events have an impact on the policy process.2 Substantial policy changes or deviations from established policy require the maintenance of organizational flexibility, and a capacity for transformation which facilitates continuous adjustment to changing circumstances. Even where organizational adaptability to gradual change can be assumed, enduring categorical priorities may undermine a policy process which supplants operational norms.

Résumé Les organisations de services humains sont fonction de la latitude

stratégique assurée par des processus politiques à valeurs variables qui répondent aux exigences de la souplesse et de la stabilité opérationnelles. Les auteurs examinent les fondements théoriques de la méthode de progression selon les perspectives de l'analyse des politiques et de l'administration publique et ils relient les concepts qui en ressortent à l'expérience sous-jacente du processus politique des entreprises de services humains.



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Human services endeavours increasingly depend on partnerships between government, service provider and client in order to meet responsibilities which have become more complex and unprogrammed in recent years. Expanded participation in decision-making has increased the probability of conflict, as a broader range of perspectives, values and standards enter the policy environment and residually effect service delivery systems.

The framework for incrementalism recognizes the complexity of organizational and environmental processes. It is an effort to describe and to begin to explain the policy process in social institutions, and to suggest the potential of incrementalism as a strategic tool for addressing necessary compromises. Any policy process that rejects the concept of sub-optimal change ignores the requisite for stability in human services enterprises.

Incrementalism has several shortcomings readily acknowledged by Charles Lindblom, its major proponent. He noted that incrementalism is "much less valid in times of war, serious crisis, and radical changes. And its small scale rationality can sometimes add up to large scale irrationality."3 The strength of the approach remains linked to the capacity of human services agencies to institute rapid forms of incrementalism wherein many small changes occur over an abbreviated period of time. The actual pace of change in these agencies, coupled with a tendency to give little weight to new evidence and research from the social sciences and history and a proclivity to consider political factors pre-eminent, make incremental approaches all the more worthy of attention.

The rational-comprehensive approach to policy-making was taken to task by Lindblom in a systematic critique of the traditional, analytic approach to decision-making. Lindblom suggested an alternative incremental model consisting of eight related attributes which combine to provide a framework or strategy for problem-solving:

a. Choices are made in a given political universe at the margin of the status quo. b. A restricted variety of policy alternatives is considered and these alternatives are incremental, or small, changes in the status quo. c. A restricted number of consequences are considered for any given policy. d. Adjustments are made in the objectives of policy in order to conform to given means of policy, implying a reciprocal relationship between ends and means. e. Problems are reconstructed, or transformed, in the course of exploring relevant data. f. Analysis and evaluation occur sequentially, with the result that policy consists of a long chain of amended choices. g. Analysis and evaluation are oriented towards remedying a



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negatively perceived situation, rather than toward reaching a preconceived goal. h. Analysis and evaluation are undertaken throughout society, that is, the locus of these activities is fragmented or disjointed.4

The framework of incrementalism for policy-making presumes the complexity of institutional and environmental social processes and the consequent impossibility of determining in advance exactly what the results of policy might be. It describes the way in which decisions are actually made within organizations. Incremental policy-making is a strategy for decision-making designed to reflect the "give-and-take" among organizational participants. It incorporates the concept of political interaction (or partisan mutual adjustment) where matters for discussion among organizational decision-makers consist primarily of modifications to existing programs rather than of solution to problems involving significant change. It acknowledges that decision-making is always conditioned by scarcity in the key resources of time and information as well as by the need to minimize risk and uncertainty to decision-makers and organization alike. However, it also presumes the necessity and utility of feedback and the consequent process of continuous mutual interaction and adjustment of participants in the decision-making process. This responsiveness is a form of tinkering which is facilitated by operating at the margin of change.

Incrementalism encompasses three basic strategic components for decison-making in complex organizational settings. First, an incremental decision-making strategy substitutes marginal experimentation for a priori policy analysis, and substitutes sensitivity to feedback for co-ordinative or comprehensive planning. It acknowledges that "the tension between analysis, which seeks out error and promotes change, and organization, which seeks stability and promotes its current activities, is inevitable."5 Second, Lindblom introduces the term "partisan mutual adjustment"6 to describe the market-like mechanisms by which policy co-ordination develops. Co- ordination is achieved "epiphenomenally, as the by-product of autonomous efforts by various actors to achieve their objectives through ad hoc accommodations with other actors."7 Competing organizational decision-makers are said "to match the allocation of resources to aggregate preferences much more satisfactorily than centrally sponsored attempts to achieve co-ordination through standardization, schedules and plans."8 An incremental approach accommodates the tension between analytic and organizational needs by emphasizing the policy process and the benefits of interaction by organizational actors over any intrinsic policy substance. Third, it provides a smaller scale but systematic strategy for organizational learning and open-ended policy development.

The works of Lindblom and other incrementalists are based on two fundamental premises about the nature of the policy process.



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First, understanding a social problem is not always necessary for its amelioration - a simple fact still widely overlooked.9 Second, all analysis is incomplete, and all incomplete analysis may fail to grasp what turns out to be critical to good policy. . . . The choice between synoptic (rational- comprehensive) and disjointed incrementalism ... is simply between ill-considered, often accidental incompleteness on one hand, and deliberate, designed incompleteness on the other.10

Since its introduction into the literature of public administration over two decades ago, the incremental theory of decision-making continues to be attractive as strategy for, as well as a theory of, decision-making. As a decision-making strategy designed to produce limited, practicable, acceptable decisions, it permits human services administrators to introduce a measure of manageability into policy- making by emphasizing process over substance, and by recognizing that short-term accommodations drive out long-term solutions.

The Policy Environment of Human Services Agencies

The policy environment conditions the decision-making strategy available to policy-makers in social institutions at two levels: external (social, political and economic) influences and internal (organizational) considerations. It is argued here that the policy environment of human services agencies is strongly predisposed toward the choice of incremental rather than rational-comprehensive problem-solving techniques.

The policy analysis literature describes several organizational and environmental limitations upon the choice of a decision-making strategy. These include a series of factors which condition the utility of applying an incremental or a rational-comprehensive decision-making approach to certain categories of problem. When considering the appropriateness of incrementalism, the external environmental characteristics which must be assessed include: threshold or critical mass effects, the structural decomposability of the particular problem, sleeper effects, the issue attention cycle, and the concept of policy space. The organizational characteristics which must be assessed include: redundancy of organizational resources, the distribution of power, and the maturity of the organization. The ability of a policy- maker to integrate these factors into consideration of which policy strategy to employ will enhance the quality of the policy outcome.

A. Environmental Determinants: Threshold or Critical Mass Effects

Certain types of policy enterprises do not appear to be well adapted to incremental decision-making strategy.11 These are enterprises charged with responsibility for new policy or overseeing large-scale shifts in policy resources. This small but significant class of policies not



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conducive to incremental decisions has several distinguishing features. These include new policy situations or issues where the application of a new technology or major political or social problems requires a large- scale, risk-taking effort to overcome start-up costs or threshold effects and to approximate acceptable levels of performance. One example is policy dealing with protection for the public from radiation pollution resulting from the malfunction of nuclear power plants. This is a case where a trial-and-error learning approach to policy development is not acceptable. In such a case, policy must be comprehensively and centrally designed against all worst-case scenarios. This class of policy decisions is characterized by an order of magnitude sufficient to foreclose the incremental approach.

Policy in human services agencies is characterized by few threshold or critical mass effects, since these effects are primarily associated with the development of new policy areas or major changes. Indeed, the impact of threshold and critical mass effects is most clearly seen in reverse. The practical difficulty of assembling a coalition sufficient to decide upon and then to implement a policy option is frequently associated with the magnitude of the change under consideration. When major change is contemplated in, for example, a state service delivery system or in regulatory mechanisms, the proposal may founder through fragmentation and proceduralization. Major reforms are unable to assemble sufficient impetus to overcome existing interests and inertia. Human services administration, as a chronologically and structurally mature policy area, is precluded from disruptive shifts in policy. The difficulty of assembling a coalition of a critical mass sufficient to overcome the threshold effects of organizational inertia explains, in part, the obstacle to developing and implementing policies involving substantial change, and the resulting bias toward an incremental and additive approach to policy.

B. Environmental Determinants: Degree of Structural Decomposability

The task environment to which policy is addressed may require very different forms of response and decision strategies. Some policy problems cannot be readily broken down into component parts, and, consequently, are responsive to rational rather than incremental decision-making.

Consider two societies, each endeavoring to use and protect water resources as efficiently as possible. Assume that both societies are trying to cope with an equal water-land-population ratio and that both confront similar degrees of uncertainty as to how the water resources of their societies could and should be exploited. The water resources of one society, however, are divided among many separate watersheds, no one of which contains more than 10% of the water resources of the society as a whole. In contrast, 90% of the second society's water resources are concentrated in one watershed, for example, a large river.12



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In this case, a strategy of incremental decision-making is more attractive and applicable in the former structurally decomposed task environment. Centrally co-ordinated and comprehensive policy will provide better policy outcomes in the latter.

The organization and delivery of human services may be viewed as conceptually centralized but functionally decentralized. The operational or implementation level operates in a decomposed task environment more suited to incremental than rational strategies of decision-making. Components of the system are structurally decomposed, geographically dispersed and internally competitive. Furthermore, there may be an organizational incentive to preserve the diversity and fragmentation of the external environment in an effort to control, or to minimize the impact of, as much of the environment as possible.

C. Environmental Determinants: Sleeper Effects Sleeper effects offer a third class of environmental characteristic

which must be considered in assessing the utility of various policy- making strategies.13 Sleeper effects appear only over the time, and usually result from a delayed reaction or from the effect of the gradual build-up of a causal chain. It is not the positive or negative consequences of sleeper effects, but the delay or miscuing in feedback and consequent policy adaptation which are of concern in a decision- making strategy.

Two types of sleeper effect pose difficulties for policy-makers. The first results from a long lag time in producing reliable feedback. Here, sleeper effects mislead by appearing late and distorting the evaluation process. A second category is the case in which too much feedback overwhelms the responsible decision units and causes policy adaptation where such changes may be unwarranted.

The difficulty of understanding policy impacts and of building sufficient time delay into policy evaluation and assessment mechanisms is common to all decision-making strategies. It is accentuated by the nature of human services delivery processes where both forms of sleeper effect have an exaggerated impact on policy- making. Since both are generic in terms of the structure and substance, neither one is susceptible to correction by employing a specific decision-making strategy.

Long lag time characterizes the assessment and evaluation of most delivery programs. Programs as broadly defined as facilitating public access to information on direct services available, or as narrowly focussed as changing income-based program eligibility standards from one level to another, cannot be accurately evaluated within the practical limits of time, cost and resources which constrain policy- making. The long-term sociological, behavioural and economic effects of such programs are often only discernible, if they can be discerned at all, in the next generation. Yet the structure of the policy-making



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situation responds to the most immediate, vocal and voluminous feedback for evaluation and adaptation. Consequently, it is difficult to assess with accuracy and confidence the longitudinal impact of specific human services policy and feed that information back into the policy evaluation cycle.

As a result, the other facet of sleeper effects dominates policy- making in human services organizations. Over-reaction conditioned by too short a feedback cycle, causes policy to change before results can be meaningfully assessed. The responsiveness that is built into the organizational structures of human services institutions frequently miscues the evaluation phase. Policy modifications occur more as a result of the structures and processes of human services agencies than as a result of any intrinsic substantive value or effect. Short-term issues drive out long-term assessment. The result is a bias toward incremental policy-making.

D. Environmental Determinants: Issue Attention Cycle Issue attention cycle effects are a fourth environmental component

conditioning the choice of a policy-making strategy in human services agencies.14 Within our political system, public opinion and attention to social problems oscillate freely, frequently enlarging, then declining in sudden shifts. As a dependent policy system, the human services are subject to the vagaries of public opinion. However, unlike public opinion "public policy is not similarly free to move smoothly along a continuum insofar as its scale is concerned."15 Instead, policy responses depend upon and conform to a number of organizational parameters, such as the yearly cycle of budget, personnel contracts and scheduling, which mold policy reactions into step-wise patterns of increments or decrements.

The issue-attention/policy-response cycle has certain identifiable stages. The first is underscaling in which public concern defines a specific underserved area as important. In health services delivery, underscaling is illustrated by the period from the mid-1950s to 1965 in which a role for the government of the United States in increasing the supply and distribution of medical personnel was slowly defined. During this period, existing policy patterns were viewed as unsatisfactory. Pressures for change increased. Barriers to change were identified. However, the bureaucratic bias to prefer stability, slow change and greater predictability dominated.

To redress public concern with underscaling and organizational inflexibility, policy planners envisage large-scale changes to overcome threshold effects, and to demonstrate urgency and purpose. Such rational-comprehensive change requires extensive, centralized administrative co-ordination. There is a capture point at this stage where public concern is translated into specific commitments of goals and resources. 16 Emphasis upon crisis or drama is often used to create momentum to motivate participants, to co-ordinate policy and to respond to public expectations. Passage of U.S. social security



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legislation in the mid 1930s was such a capture point. The Great Depression dramatically awakened public opinion regarding unemployment and old-age insurance which, coupled with Roosevelt's "all or nothing" entrepreneurial strategy, yielded an anticipated outcome and provided the expanded constituency needed for a new policy approach.

Once developed, however, rational-comprehensive policy solutions enter the third stage of overscaling. Results may be overpromised and unattainable. Control of expectations slips from policy-makers hands. Education, for example, may be susceptible to such overscaling when it is sold to the public as a means for social equalization or economic mobility. By overpromising, educators undermine their basis of support when delivery proves elusive and the cycle begins again. It is the disequilibrium in the relationship between the issue attention cycle and organizational capability which biases policy-making toward incrementalism as more resistant to such swings in public attention and as holding longer term promise of adequate policy outcome.

E. Environmental Determinants: Policy Space The environment conditioning the choice of an incremental or a

rational approach to problem-solving is further influenced by the density of the policy space into which a new policy, or a policy change, is injected. This recently articulated concept of policy space requires looking at policy as its own autonomous environment.17

The range of choice in policy-making depends very much on the degree to which the policy area in question has been addressed previously.

As policies proliferate, they exert strong effects upon each other, increasing reciprocal relations and mutual causation: policy A affects B, B has its effects on C, and C back on A and B. An immediate effect of new (policy) amid this increased interdependence is that (its) consequences are more numerous, varied and indirect and thereby more difficult to predict.18

The greater the number of policies in a policy sector, the greater the number of agreements or clearance points before a policy choice can be articulated. Policy sectors containing numerous, previously defined policy components present obstacles of consultation, delay, compromise and even veto to policy-makers attempting change. Density directly limits the freedom to manoeuvre by multiplying clearance points and predisposes to incremental decision-making.

Directly related is the fact that major policy change most frequently occurs in newly defined policy sectors. Being first to occupy a policy space is desirable in two ways: first in maximizing rational- comprehensive approaches to problem-solving; second in determining ground rules and procedures to which later policy must accommodate. Thus timing determines the freedom to select policy options.



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Finally, the density of policy space appears to effect the appearance rather than the substance of policy change. As policy sectors are increasingly crowded, the resulting policy specificity enhances the visibility of policy and its potential for causing dissatisfaction among those dealing with it. Such broadened impact, in turn, generates a greater number of initiatives for change but decreases the probability of actual innovation. In a real sense, the denser the policy space the more widespread the push for reform but the fewer the adoptions because change is diffused by complexity.19

F. Organizational Determinants: Effects of Organizational Redundancy

Organizational characteristics also influence the choice of decision- making strategy. Incrementalism relies upon the pursuit of short-term goals by different units in an organization, and upon the resulting conflicts and mistakes among organizational actors for the refinement of policy. The short-run duplication of resources and effort is less wasteful in the long term than is a strategy of streamlined decision- making focussing on immediate, narrowly efficient solutions. Organizational redundancy appears to enhance the quality of policy when an organization has adequate resources.20

The distributed functions of human services agencies create a basic redundancy of organization and of program, and limit efforts to co- ordinate policy in any rational-comprehensive approach. Repetitive delivery systems for social services have provided the means for high levels of responsiveness through access and variety adapted to locally defined needs. The more crowded with institutions and programs the human services enterprise becomes, the more vital it is perceived to be, and more incrementally it operates.

This approach is challenged, however, as resources become limited. Organizations facing conditions of little or no slack may be required to centralize decisions. "The less redundant are an organization's resources, the smaller the proportion of those resources will it rationally be willing to invest in learning processes that promise marginal improvements in future policies.21 The result maybe greater organizational error and vulnerability.

G. Organizational Determinants: Effects of the Distribution of Power

The usefulness of incrementalism as a decision-making strategy also depends upon the distribution of power within the organization. If this strategy is to work well, it relies upon the availability of a bargaining arena and the participation of those affected. Feedback and co- ordination are achieved by competition and interaction. The market mechanism, which translates values and preferences into patterns of resource allocation or policy output, relies on a reasonable distribution of resources and input within the decision-making organization. When too much inequality of power exists, the self-correcting mechanism of



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the internal market cannot operate very efficiently, and the effectiveness of the self-adjusting mechanism of incremental decision- making is skewed in favour of the powerful.22

Several aspects of the nature and distribution of power in human services organizations suggest the appropriateness of incremental strategies in decision-making. As professionals, human services personnel may be specialists both in the nature of their knowledge and the organization of their expertise. This circumscribes the power relationship between staff and administration in many areas of mutual concern and increases pressures for more consultative exchanges. Authority is based upon interactive, or bargaining, processes among groups affected. This most frequently entails a modicum of compromise and changes at the margin of policy. The pluralistic bases of these organizations insure a distribution of power and access sufficient to perform a veto function over most major policy shifts.

H. Organizational Determinants: Effects of Organizational Maturity

Some relationship between organizational maturity and policy approach has been found, although much work remains to be done in this area.21 Preliminary findings substantiate the pattern of incremental decision strategies in organizations of specific ages or levels of maturity.

a. The less mature an agency, the greater the changes in its policy action. The more mature an agency, the less changes in its policy actions. b. As agencies get older, the magnitude of change in

appropriations decreases and moves from a period of oscillation to a period of acceleration. This suggests that youthful agencies change their patterns of policy actions rapidly and sporadically, but that more mature agencies settle into a pattern in which the rate of change in their actions moves in a predictable and steady direction. c. As agencies get older, they get larger (in terms of total

personnel) but the magnitude of change decreases.23

Aging appears to produce similar organizational effects and policy consequences.24 Age increases budget and personnel, creates stability of goals, and enhances the organization's ability to respond skillfully to changes in the social environment. Organizational maturity and stability increase reliance upon familiar strategies of incremental decision-making. Only in the new and the threatened or dying organization can a departure from the incremental policy pattern be discerned.

Mixed-scanning Alternative Seeking some middle-ground decision-making strategy which may

be "less exacting than the rationalistic one but not as constricting in its perspective as the incremental approach, not as Utopian as rationalism



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but as conservative as incrementalism," Etzioni proposes the strategy of mixed-scanning where active participants in the decision-making process differentiate contextuating (fundamental decisions) from bit (item) decisions.25 It is suggested that each of the two major elements of the mixed-scanning strategy compensates for the shortcomings of the other. Specifically, bit decisions, which are made incrementally, are set within contexts conditioned by fundamental decisions. Etzioni suggests, furthermore, that

We expect most fundamental decisions to be followed by incremental ones that tend toward the same general direction . . . fundamental decisions are often 'prepared for' by bit decisions.26

Mixed-scanning may indeed serve the action-oriented dimension of human services organizations insofar as it provides important alternatives to rationalistic decision-making models; the latter seldom provide the guidance mechanisms for relating means to goals. Deterrents to action imposed by requisites for comprehensive analyses (where all important, relative factors are taken into account) would also diminish where the mixed-scanning approach was employed. In the context of human services organizations, moreover, policies developed using rational strategies may not withstand the test of operant reality when there is even marginal expectation for organizational transformation.

The utility of mixed-scanning depends on maintaining the balance of bit and contextual scanning which may be difficult in social institutions with limited resources and less than malleable operating environments. As a policy framework, mixed-scanning may hold more promise where complex policy questions are involved. Under current conditions in human services, incremental approaches appear preferable in any effort to minimize losses associated with choices among decision- making strategies. The usefulness of mixed-scanning in human services agencies may depend upon future efforts at reality-testing of the strategy in collectivities devised along the lines of classical organizational principles.

Conclusion Proponents of policy analysis and managerial science in human

services often dismiss incrementalism as "muddling through" and tinkering with the status quo. Instead, the promise of a rationalistic approach, which deals with problems on more complete, scientific and theoretical basis, is held out as preferable. The glitter of such an approach would, however, appear to be predominantly intellectual. In the practical world of substantive decisions, the question remains: "Is the general formula for better policy-making one of the more science and more political ambition, or a new and improved muddling?"27

The environment and organizational framework of policy-making in human services organizations appear to predispose strongly toward



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incrementalism in decision-making. This results from the underlying structure of the policy process in human services organizations as an effect, not a cause. Approaches to decision-making are fundamentally constrained by pluralistic, competitive and cumultive policy processes. Efforts to realign the policy process to accommodate the rational- comprehensive model must be preceded by an understanding of the political, social and economic frameworks in which that process is embedded. For practitioners, the key policy question remains one of adjusting the desired policy outcomes to the structural and procedural constraints of the organization. We must take care not to demand asa policy outcome that which is structurally impossible.

Incrementalism offers a productive resource for thinking through policy problems by forcing us to integrate the substance with the structure of decision-making. Incrementalists are criticized for having "overdeveloped powers of political calculation and underdeveloped powers of social imagination."28 It may be preferable, nonetheless, for human services organizations to inch forward cautiously with a direction in mind, as well as an understanding of obstacles to new policy and the means for circumvention, than to repent at leisure during a post-facto assessment of the outcomes of alternative approaches.

Lelia B. Helms , Carole A. Singleton and Alan B. Henkin are members of the faculti ) of the University of Iowa, Division of Foundations , Postsecondary and Continuing Education , in Iowa City.

REFERENCES

1 Keller, George. Academic Strategy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. 2 March, James G. and Johan O. Olsen. Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations.

Universitetsforlaget (Norway), 1979. 3 Keller, op. cit. p. 112. 4 Braybrooke, David and Charles E. Lindblom. A Strategy of Decision. The Free Press,

1963, pp 81-110 5 Wildavsky, Aaron, Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis. Little, Brown and Company, 1979, p. 36. 6 Lindblom, Charles. The Intelligence of Democracy. The Free Press, 1965. 7 Lustick, Ian, "Explaining the Variable Utility of Disjointed Incrementalism: Four Propositions." American Political Science Review, Vol. 72, (June 1980), p. 343. 8 Ibid., loc. cit. 9 Lindblom, Charles, "Still Muddling, Not Yet Through." Public Administration Review, (Nov. -Dec., 1979), p. 525. 10 Ibid., p 519. 11 Schulman, Paul R., "Non-incremental Policy-Making: Notes Towards an Alternative Paradigm." American Political Science Review, Vol. 69, (1975), pp. 1354-1370. 12 Lustock, Ian, op. cit, p. 347.



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13 Salamon, Lester M., "Follow-ups, Letdowns and Sleepers: The Time Dimension in Policy Evaluation," in Charles O. Jones and Robert D. Thomas, eds., Public Policy- Making in a Federal System. Sage Yearbooks in Policies and Public Policy. Sage Publications, 1976, pp. 257-284. 14 Downs, Anthony, "The Issue Attention Cycle and the Political Economy of Improving Our Environment." Royar Lectures, University of California, Berkeley, April 13-14, 1970.

15 Schulman, Paul, op. cit. p. 1356. 16 Hirschman, Albert O. Development Project Observed. The Brookings Institute, 1967, p. 18. 17 Wildavsky, op. cit, pp. 64-66. 18 Ibid., p. 64. 19 Ibid., passim 20 Landau, Martin, "Redundancy, Rationality and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap" in Francis E. Rourke, Bureaucratic Politics in National Politics. Little, Brown and Company, 1978, 3rd Edition, pp. 422-436. 21 Lustick, Ian op. cit. p. 348. 22 Downs, Anthony. Inside Bureaucracy. First develops this idea in some detail. Careful analytical studies confirming the basic premise developed by Downs are to be found in Randall B. Ripley and Grace A. Franklin, eds., Policy-Making in the Federal Executive Branch. The Free Press, 1975. 23 Ripley, Randall and Grace Franklin. Policy-Making in the Federal Executive Branch. The Free Press, 1975, pp. 118-126. 24 Ibid., p. 172. 25 Etzioni, Amitai. The Active Society. The Free Press, 1968, See also Etzioni, Amitai, "Mixed Scanning: A Third Approach to Decision-Making." Public Administration Review, (December, 1967), 385-392. 26 Ibid., p. 288. 27 Lindblom, "Still Muddling, Not Yet Through," p. 517. 28 Keller, op. cit. p. 113.



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INCREMENTALISM: A Framework for Human Services Organizations