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)
(A)
The Top-down or Bottom–up Debate
Theories of Policy Implementation:
An Overview
 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.
 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.
Theories of Policy Implementation:
An Overview
 The top-down and bottom-up synthesis approach: It
characterizes theoretical orientations perceiving
implementation as process of constituting coalition,
structuration, networking, learning or
institutionalization, within which various parties in a
specific policy domain/area strive to realize a policy,
program or project in a context of complexity.
The Rational-technical and
Top-down Approach
Policy implementation technical control of
the execution of decisions from top down
 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
beginning with passage of the basic statute,
followed by the policy output (decisions and specifications) of
the implementing agencies,
the compliance of the target groups with those decisions, the
actual impact – both intended and unintended – of those
outputs,
the perceived impacts of agency decisions, and
finally, important revisions (or attempted revision) in the basic
status.” (1995, p. 153; numbering mine)
Implementation as Control: Enforcement
and Execution of Policy Decisions
 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
Tractability of the problem
 Availability of valid technical theory and technology
 Diversity of target-group behavior
 Target group as percentage of the population
 Extent of behavior change required
Implementation as Control: Enforcement
and Execution of Policy Decisions
 …. control over of the internality and externality of the
policy, …
Ability of statute 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
Implementation as Control: Enforcement
and Execution of Policy Decisions
 ….. control over of the internality and externality of the
policy….
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
Implementation as Control: Enforcement
and Execution of Policy Decisions
Six sufficient and generally necessary
conditions for effective implementation
Clear and consistent objectives
Adequate causal theory
Implementation process legally structured to
enhance compliance by implementing officials and
target groups
Committed and skillful implementing officials
Support of interest groups and sovereigns
Changes in socioeconomic conditions which do not
substantially undermine political support or causal
theory.
Hierarchy and Market: The Mechanism of
Policy Implementation
 According to policy analysts of liberal-economic
perspective, such as Weimer & Vining (2005), there are
two basic mechanisms in coordinating collective
action into attaining societal objectives. One is
through market mechanism and the other is state
intervention. However, 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.
Hierarchy and Market: The Mechanism of
Policy Implementation
 Mechanism of policy implementation
 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)
 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.
Hierarchy and Market: The Mechanism of
Policy Implementation
 Market mechanism: …
 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
Hierarchy and Market: The Mechanism of
Policy Implementation
 Mechanism of policy implementation
 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 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.
 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)
Hierarchy and Market: The Mechanism of
Policy Implementation
State intervention:
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 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)
Hierarchy and Market: The Mechanism of
Policy Implementation
 Mechanism of policy implementation
Professional power:
 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)
Hierarchy and Market: The Mechanism of
Policy Implementation
 Mechanism of policy implementation
Professional power:
 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
State
Managerialism
Market
Consumerism
Professionalism
State
Managerialism
The
The Heyday
Heyday of
of
Welfare
Welfare State
State
in
in the
the 1960-70s
1960-70s
& Intervention to
Market Failures
Alliance &/or
Employees of
The State
Market
Consumerism
Professionalism
State
Managerialism
Public Sector Reform:
Privatization,
Deregulation,
Marketization
Neo-liberalist’s
Project of
Roll Back the State
In 1980-90s
Market
Consumerism
Distrusting
& Discrediting the
State employed
Professionals
Professionalism
State
Managerialism
Evaluationism
Of the
Competition State
Accountability &
Auditing Culture
Of Consumerism
Market
Consumerism
Assault on
Professionalism
Professionalism
Market
Consumerism
State
Managerialism
Professionalism
The Commons
The Interpretive &
Bottom-up Model
Michael Lipsky’s street-level
bureaucracy model
 Lipsky’s book entitled Street-level Bureaucracy (1980)
has been viewed as the leading challenge to the topdown model of policy implementation models and the
starting point of bottom-up model.
Michael Lipsky’s street-level
bureaucracy model
 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.
Michael Lipsky’s street-level
bureaucracy model
 Lipsky underlines that in implementing policy at street
level, front-line worker are confronted with conflict and
ambiguities. These may include
Inadequate resource and unsatisfactory working
condition, e.g. large classes for teachers, huge
caseloads for social workers, dangerous and hostile
neighborhood for police officers.
Unpredictable, uncooperative, skeptical clients
Unclear and ambiguous job specification and guidelines.
Michael Lipsky’s street-level
bureaucracy model
 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.
Michael Lipsky’s street-level
bureaucracy model
 These discretions or even deviations may take the
from of
Modification of client demand: This may include various
devices to delay, deter or practically dissolve clients’
demands in overcrowded and overloaded working situations.
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.
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 troublemakers
Martin Rein’s Down-ward Puzzlement
Model
Martin Rein (1983) has put 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
Martin Rein’s down-ward puzzlement
model
 Rein does not conceptualize the policy implementation
process and a clearly defined enforcement process, instead
he contends that
“Implementation is understood as (1) a declaration of
government preferences, (2) mediated by a number of actors,
who (3) 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 rationalbureaucratic imperative to do what is rationally defensible,
and (c) the consensual imperative to do what can help to
establish agreement among contending influential parties who
have a stake in the outcome.” (p.118, the alphabetical
numbering is mine)
Martin Rein’s down-ward puzzlement
model
 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
 guideline developers,
 interest groups, and
 program administrators
Martin Rein’s down-ward puzzlement
model
 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)
 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.”
 “The resources at hand are insufficient for the task.”
 The workers “lack the knowledge and skill (and technology) to
take action.”
Martin Rein’s down-ward puzzlement
model
 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)
Richard Elmore’s organizational
model
 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)
Richard Elmore’s organizational
model
 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.
Richard Elmore’s organizational
model
 Different organizational models will translate a given
policy in different way. They will simplify or “localize”
in accordance with their
central principle,
power structure,
decision making procedure, and
implementation process
Policy Implementation as process of translation and
simplification through large public organization
System
Management
Model
Bureaucratic
Process
Model
Organizational
Development
Model
Central Principle
Power Structure
Decision Making
Procedure
Implementation
Process
Discrete manageable tasks& responsibilities
assigned to specialized units
Conflict &
Bargaining
Model
Lecture 7
Policy-Implementation Process
END