北京师范大学
教育研究方法讲座系列 (2):
教育政策研究
第七讲
教育政策实施过程的研究(一)
The Top-down or Bottom–up Debate
A. Theories of Policy Implementation: An Overview
1. The rational-technical and top-down approach: It indicates theoretical
orientations taking implementation as a separate stage of the policy
cycle, which is characterized as an enforcement and execution of the
state’s policy decision.
2. The interpretive and bottom-up approach: It summarizes theoretical
orientations conceiving implementation as process of interpretations,
figuring out what to do and delivering concrete services to
program/policy recipients on diverse localities and situations by
“street-level bureaucrats within different organizational setting.
3. The top-down and bottom-up synthesis and the third generation of
implementation theory: It characterizes theoretical orientations
perceiving implementation as process of constituting coalition,
structuration, networking, institutionalization, and learning within which
various parties in a specific policy domain/area strive to realize a policy,
program or project.
B. The Rational-technical and Top-down Approach:
1. Policy implementation technical control of the execution of decisions
from top down
a. Sabatier and Mazmanian define that “implementation is the carrying
out of a basic policy decision. …The implementation process
normally runs through a number of stages
i. beginning with passage of the basic status,
ii. followed by the policy output (decisions) of the implementing
agencies,
iii. the compliance of the target groups with those decisions, the
actual impact – both intended and unintended – of those outputs,
iv. the perceived impacts of agency decisions, and
v. finally, important revisions (or attempted revision) in the basic
status.” (1995, p. 153; numbering mine)
b. Accordingly, implementation is perceived as technical problems of
control over the internality and externality of the policy, which has
been specified by Sabarier and Mazmanian as follows
i. Tractability of the problem
- vailability of valid technical theory and technology
- Diversity of target-group behavior
- Target group as percentage of the population
- Extent of behavior change required
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ii. Ability of status to structure implementation
- Clear and consistent objectives
- Incorporation of adequate causal theory
- Financial resources
- Hierarchical integration with and among implementing agency
- Recruitment of implementing official
- Formal access by outsiders
iii. Non-statutory variables affecting implementation
- Socioeconomic conditions and technology
- Media attention to the problem
- Public support
- Attitudes and resource of constituency groups
- Support from sovereign
- Commitment and leadership skill of implementing officials
c. Six sufficient and generally necessary conditions for effective
implementation
i. Clear and consistent objectives
ii. Adequate causal theory
iii. Implementation process legally structured to enhance
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compliance by implementing officials and target groups
iv. Committed and skillful implementing officials
v. Support of interest groups and sovereigns
vi. Changes in socioeconomic conditions which do not substantially
undermine political support or causal theory.
2. Hierarchy and market: the mechanism of policy implementation
Weimer & Vining (2005) underline that there are two basic mechanisms
in coordinating collective action into attaining societal objectives. One is
through market mechanism and the other is state intervention through
the bureaucratic hierarchy.
a. Market mechanism: “Collective action enables society to produce,
distribute, and consume a great variety and abundance of goods
(and services). Most collective action arises from voluntary
agreements among people - within families, private organizations
and exchange relations.” (Weimer & Vining, 2005, p.30)
i. Individual rational choice: According to the above-cited premise
of liberal economic perspective, the basic decision units in
collective actions are individual choices. It is further assumed
that these basic units will act in accordance with the principles of
maximization of utility and profit.
ii. Prefect competitive market: At macroscopic level, these
individual rational choices will meet and exchange in a prefect
competitive market with the following operational
principles/assumptions (Stiglitz & Walsh, 2002, p. 228; and Stiger,
1986; p. 267))
- All participants (Firms and individuals) take market price as
given; i.e. numbers of participants are sufficiently large
- Actions by individual participants do not directly affect other
participants except through price, i.e. they act independently
and freely and not collectively;
- All participants must possess tolerable or even prefect
knowledge of the market opportunities;
- Goods are things that only the buyer can enjoy, i.e. they are
private goods. They are of the nature
+ Rivalry in consumption
+ Excludability in use
b. State intervention: State’s interventions into collective actions of
production, distribution and consumption in society involve
legitimately uses of coercive power in the name of market failure
and/or compensating the losers in market. The means employed by
the state are commonly called in public policy study the policy
instrument.
i. Conception of policy instrument: “Public policy instruments are
the set of techniques by which governmental authorities wield
their power in attempting to ensure support and effect or prevent
social change.” (Veding, 1998, p.21)
ii. Typology of policy instruments
- Regulation (Sticks): they are “means undertaken by
governmental unit to influence people by means of formulated
rules and directives which mandate receivers to action in
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accordance with what is ordered in these rules and directive.”
(p. 31)
- Economic policy instruments (Carrots): They “involve either the
handing out or the taking away of material resources, be they in
cash or in kind. Economic instruments make it cheaper or more
expensive in terms of money, time, effort, and other valuables
to pursue certain actions (either compliance or defiance to
policy measures).” (p. 32)
- Information (Sermons): They refer “to as ‘moral suasion,’ or
exhortation, covers attempts at influencing people through the
transfer of knowledge, the communication of reasoned
argument, and persuasion.” (p.33)
c. Professional power as the third logic: Eliot Freidson contends that
besides market and state, there is the third logic at work in public
policy implementation process in modern society, namely
professional power.
i. The third logic in public policy:
“For decades now, the popular watchwords driving policy
formation (and implementation) have been ‘competition’ and
‘efficiency’, the first referring to competition in a free market, and
the second to the benefit of the skilled management of firms
(governmental agencies). …I will show in some detail how
properties of professionalism fit together to form a whole that
differs systematically from the free market on the one hand, and
the …bureaucracy, in the other.” (Freidson, 2001, p.2-3)
Therefore, Freidson contends that “like Max Weber’s model of
rational-legal bureaucracy which represents managerialism and
Adam Smith’s model of the free market which represents
consumerism” (p. 180), “professionalism is conceived of as one
of the three logically distinct methods of organizing and
controlling.” (p.180)
ii. Constituents of Professionalism:
“Professionalism is based on specialized bodies of knowledge
and skill that have no coercive power of their own but only what
may be delegated to them by the state or capital. They gain their
protected (and legitimate) status by project of successful
persuasion, not by buying it or capturing it at the point of a gun.
But because of the special nature of the knowledge and skill
imputed to professionals as well as the fact that their practice is
protected, friendly commentators have long invoked the need to
trust their intention.” (p.214) Accordingly the constituents of
professionalism may comprise
- Academically respectable knowledge
- Practically credible Skill
- Socially trustful codes of ethnics and practices
- Effective authority and autonomy over the above constituents
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C. The Interpretive and Bottom-up Model
1. Michael Lipsky’s street-level bureaucracy model
a. Lipsky’s book entitled Street-level Level (1980) has been viewed as
the leading challenge to the top-down model of policy
implementation models and the starting point of bottom-up model.
b. Lipsky “argue(s) that public policy is not best understood as made in
legislatures or top-floor suites of high ranking administrators,
because in important ways it is actually made in the crowded offices
and daily encounters in street-level workers.” And “the street-level
bureaucrats, the routines they establish, and the devices they invent
to cope with uncertainties and work pressures, effectively become
the public policies they carry out.” (Lipsky, 1993, p. 382)
Accordingly, study of education policy implementation should look
into teachers’ instructional routines delivered in crowded classrooms
and school officials’ policy measures imposed upon teachers and
students.
c. Lipsky underlines that in implementing policy at street level,
front-line worker are confronted with conflict and ambiguities. These
may include
i. Inadequate resource and unsatisfactory working condition, e.g.
large classes for teachers, huge caseloads for social workers,
dangerous and hostile neighborhood for police officers.
ii. Unpredictable, uncooperative, skeptical clients
iii. Unclear and ambiguous job specification and guidelines.
d. Confronted with these inadequacies and uncertainties, street-level
bureaucrats derive coping strategies or even survival strategies to
deal with the unaccommodating working situations. Lipsky point out
that in daily “client-processing” routines, street-level bureaucrats in
fact have considerable amount of powers and discretions at their
disposal, which may lead to substantial deviations from, if not
complete alterations of, official and top-down policy specifications.
These discretions or even deviations may take the from of
i. Modification of client demand: This may include various devices
to delay, deter or practically dissolve clients’ demands in
overcrowded and overloaded working situations.
ii. Modification of job conception: This may include strategies of
lowering the service standards or even alteration of the natures
and features of the services supposed to be delivered in order to
ease the excessive demands.
iii. Modification of client conception: This may include devices of
differentiating clients into non-mandatory categories and to
provide different service, e.g. “creaming off” the deserving or
educable and “marginalizing” the undeserving and
trouble-makers
2. Martin Rein’s down-ward puzzlement model
a. Michael Rein (1983) puts forth a theoretical perspective of
implementation by questioning the controllability of the
implementation policy and injecting the concept of puzzlement and
conflict into the study of policy implementation
b. Rein does not conceptualize the policy implementation process and
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a clearly defined enforcement process, instead he contends that
“Implementation is understood as a declaration of government
preferences, mediated by a number of actors, who create a circular
process characterized by reciprocal power relations and
negotiations, then the actors must take into account three potentially
conflicting imperatives: (a) the legal imperative to do what is legally
required, (b) the rational-bureaucratic imperative to do what is
rationally defensible, and the consensual imperative to do what can
help to establish agreement among contending influential parties
who have a stake in the outcome.” (p.118)
c. Apart from the three components of the implementation process and
the three conflicting imperatives, Rein has further specifies three
types of primary actors in the implementation process. They are
i. guideline developers,
ii. interest groups, and
iii. program administrators
d. In view of such a complicate arena of implementation, Rein
underlines that “policy implementation is a matter not only of power
but of puzzlement, of ‘men collectively wondering what to do.’”
(p.117) Such puzzlement is mainly derived from the following
scenarios (p. 117)
i. The program administrators and front-line works “do not know
what is required of them (by the legislation or executive policy)
(since they are asked either to pursue uncertain or evolving
goals or reconcile incompatible requirements)
ii. “The resources at hand are insufficient for the task.”
iii. The workers “lack the knowledge and skill (and technology) to
take action.”
e. The downward spiral of puzzlement
Rein further specifies that “When the purposes of policy are unclear
and incompatible, each successive stage in the process of
implementation provides a new context for seeking further
clarification. One of the consequences of passing ambiguity an
inconsistent legislation is that the arena of decision making shifts to
a lower level. The everyday practitioners become the ones who
resolve the lack of consensus through their concrete actions.”
(p.117)
3. Richard Elmore’s organizational model
a. Elmore asserts that one of the vital features of policy implementation
is “the process by which policies are translated into administrative
actions. …(And) the translation of an idea into action involves
certain crucial simplification.” (Elmore, 1993, p. 313)
b. Elmore further points out that “virtually all public policies are
implemented by large public organization. …(And) organizations are
simplifiers; they work on problems by breaking them into discrete,
manageable tasks and allocating responsibility for those tasks to
specialized units.” (1993, p. 313) In other words, organizations
assigned with the task to carry out policies and programs may
modify, simplify or even re-orientate the policies measures to suit the
internal structures and conventional procedures of the organization.
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c. Therefore, knowledge about organizational model, which the
policy-implementing agencies subscribe to, is vital to understand the
policy implementation process. Elmore has then summarized four
organizational models commonly found in public-policy delivering
agencies. They are
i. Systems management model
ii. Bureaucratic process model
iii. Organizational development model
iv. Conflict and bargaining models
d. Different organizational models will translate a given policy in
different way. They will simplify or “localize” in accordance with their
i. central principle,
ii. power structure,
iii. decision making procedure, and
iv. implementation process
Policy Implementation as process of
translation and simplification through
large public organization
System
Management
Model
Bureaucratic
Process
Model
Organizational
Development
Model
Conflict &
Bargaining
Model
Central Principle
Power Structure
Decision Making
Procedure
Implementation
Process
Discrete manageable tasks& responsibilities
assigned to specialized units
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