ABSTRACT
This volume concerns the discourse of policy analysts or planners with one another and with the public. The editors seek to synthesize two contrasting tendencies in public policy analysis (PPA) and planning related to this discourse so that students and practitioners can look beyond the two dominant models in the field-the rationalistic problemsolving model, which concerns the internal qualities of analysis, and the politicized context-determinant model, which deals more with external contingencies of analyses (see Editors’ Introduction). Judging that either of these approaches alone would be incomplete, they seek to combine them. The combined field is to be neither methodological nor political alone, and it is to focus on argumentation, thus avoiding the separation of “epistemological concerns (the claims made ‘within’ the argument) from institutional and performance concerns (how in deed the argument is made)” (p. 5).
