ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how readily top-down policy preferences mesh with disaggregate, bottom-up patterns of behavior and what political officials can do to support the administrative implementation. The separation contrasts the problems of coordinating the detailed technical understandings that are necessary to deciding how to run a policy with the problems of resolving internal disagreements over whether to take up a policy. Organizational adoptions of policy and choices of action stem only in part from individual-level preferences, attitudes, and perceptions of external pressures. Options that are high in both dimensions would come closest to being “self-implementing” as a consequence of active and volitional support among careerists and relatively few and easily achieved agreements to achieve adoption. Careerists intended the manual to refine and communicate relevant procedures, “to identify the process and context and issues of project management” for new transit starts “before policy changed positions and the process again”.
