ABSTRACT
The governmental systems studied have produced information in quite different ways, processed it through their decision-making structures in country-specific fashion, and encouraged its use by persons of quite different training, and to different ends. These components all suggest the strength of the concept and its fruitfulness as a means of structuring comparative organizational analysis. Decision making in this context is constantly evolving; it is a process of working through cycles of change in the life of a policy or program. Public sector decision making is thus a process with its own order and logic, its own time tables, pressures, and iterations. Examining organizational learning from this perspective recognizes the reality of politics, the scarcity and incompleteness of necessary information, the multiple forces beyond information that influence decision making, and the fact that information relevant to one phase of the policy cycle may be totally inappropriate to another.
