ABSTRACT
Concern about the implementation of social programs stems from the recognition that policies cannot be understood in isolation from the means of their execution. A large collection of carefully documented case studies – in education, manpower, housing, and economic development – points consistently to the same basic pattern: grand pretensions, faulty execution, puny results. 1 A reasonably broad consensus has developed among analysts of social policy that the inability of government to deliver on its promises derives only in part from the fact that policies are poorly conceived. In some instances, policies are based on poor and incomplete understandings of the problems they are supposed to address. But in the largest number of cases it is impossible to say whether policies fail because they are based on bad ideas or because they are good ideas poorly executed. 2 Increasingly, policy analysts have begun to focus on the process by which policies are translated into administrative action. Since virtually all public policies are implemented by large public organizations, knowledge of organizations has become a critical component of policy analysis. We cannot say with much certainty what a policy is, or why it is not implemented, without knowing a great deal about how organizations function. […] The translation of an idea into action involves certain crucial simplifications. Organizations are simplifiers; they work on problems by breaking them into discrete, manageable tasks and allocating responsibility for those tasks to specialized units. Only by understanding how organizations work can we understand how policies are shaped in the process of implementation.
