ABSTRACT
As the first edition of this book was nearing completion, Laurence Lynn published an article, “A Place at the Table: Policy Analysis, Its Postpositive Critics, and the Future of Practice” (1999), in which he argued that postpositivist criticisms of traditional policy analysis were “ideological rather than analytical” and “detached from the inconvenient realities of policymaking and management.”1 Lynn (p. 411) instead presented traditional policy analysis as being “fueled by intuition, argument, and ethical prompting; clearly engaged with the world of political action; and often identified with interests and values otherwise unrepresented at the table.” And he concluded that postpositivists have much work to do before they could be considered relevant to the “practical challenges of democratic governance that arise in the many roles that working policy analysts perform” (p. 411).
