ABSTRACT
In the 1980s Aaron Wildavsky revisited his old friend budgeting in the company of a recent acquaintance called "cultural theory," to which he had been introduced by British anthropologist Mary Douglas. Cultural theory is fundamentally an organizational theory—or, more dynamically, "a theory of organizing and disorganizing"—and consequently should be of interest to those who study public administration and budgeting. Only repeated comparison with other budgetary processes can sort out the historically contingent from the socially invariant. Cultural theory offers a very useful framework within which to pursue such comparisons, because, as Alexander George might say, this framework permits "structured, focused comparison." Marcia Lynn Whicker implies that knowing the general characteristics of proposed re-forms, thus allowing their grouping as types, may create an independent variable simple enough to be used in a budgetary theory predicting different types of impacts.
