This innovative approach to mediating intractable policy controversies shows how reframing the issues can succeed where simply appealing to the facts often fails. The authors, two organization theorists, show how disputes that in abstract debate or negotiation seem insoluble can sometimes be resolved pragmatically by those who actually have to design and implement the specific programs.
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This innovative approach to intractable policy controversies shows how "reframing" the issues can lead to success where simply appealing to facts often fails.
--This text refers to the
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About the Author
Donald A. Schön is Ford Professor of Urban Studies and Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Understanding controversy and paths forward,
By Paul A Monus (Lima, OH United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Frame Reflection: Toward The Resolution Of Intractrable Policy Controversies (Paperback)
This is an important book. Schon and Rein give a crystal clear explanation of why intractable policy controversies occur, and review the theory base underlying the three most common means of dealing with them: 1) "rational" policy analysis, 2)power politics, and 3)mediated negotiation. They show how each of these depends on assumptions of microeconomics, which do not hold when people hold different "basic values." The dominant tradition of policy choice, based on the rational actor model hopes to treat disputes as instrumental problems that can be solved through the application of a value-neutral policy science. The political perspective is a pluralist model in which policy making is seen as a political game of multiple rational actors, each with his own interests, freedoms, and powers. Consensual dispute resolution through joint gains is the theme of mediated negotiation. A large and important class of policy disputes has proven resistant to each of these 3 main traditions. Once the reader can understand why this is so, the authors propose a new 4th way of making sense of intractable policy controversies, which focuses on getting at the underlying structures of belief, perceptiion, and appreciation, which they call "frames." The idea is that once actors in the dispute can get a better understanding of their underlying assumptions, and frames, they can begin to shift their often tacit and untested ways of seeing the world and the issue. This can lead to better understanding of the arguments each side is making, and a reasoned approach to what "data" is relevant to the situation. Several case studies are included in the book, which illustrate how this new approach can work. For anyone struggling to do better on a seemingly unsolvable conflict, this book will help. Paul Monus bp Chemicals, Lima Ohio
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A THINKING MAN'S GUIDE TO POLICY CONTROVERSIES,
By
This review is from: Frame Reflection: Toward The Resolution Of Intractrable Policy Controversies (Paperback)
Most leadership books recycle old leadership theories by using different anecdotes to illustrate the same points as previous books. Not so with this book. I would say this is among 5 or so leadership books (that I've read) that is truly groundbreaking. It reminds me a little bit of another pathbreaking book--Howard Gardner's Leading Minds. Anyone who enjoyed that book will certainly love this one. Policy making is not my strong suit, but I feel much more informed about the subject after reading this book. Schon and Rein show how past ways of handling policy controversies are insufficient and that a new way (frame reflection) is necessary to end policy stalemates and pendulum swings in policy. I can't recommend this book enough. It is not an easy book to read though: it will take some time to digest all the ideas in this small tome. But its well worth it. Two thumbs up for this book!
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A seminal public policy/analysis text for the 21st century,
This review is from: Frame Reflection: Toward The Resolution Of Intractrable Policy Controversies (Paperback)
This seminal, challenging, and deeply thought provoking book by two eminent MIT scholars challenges prevalent conceptions of the public policy process and dominant modes of policy analysis that derive from those conceptions. This text is for readers concerned with something more than the academic study of public policy and is aimed rather at those who accept responsibility for initiating action as policy-makers or making recommendations as policy analysts in the face of "intractable policy controversies." The authors differentiate "disagreements about fact" from "policy controversies" and ariculate the notion of "frame reflection" as a requisite step in constructively addressing "policy controversies."
Just as Herbert Simon had highlighted a form of limited reason just before the mid-century mark that he characterized as "bounded rationality" and that Simon argued applied across all professional fields, so Donald Schon and his colleague Martin Rein highlight another form of limited reason that they believe applies across all professional fields as soon as one moves beyond mere analysis of facts to make professional recommendations. They characterize this limited form of reason as "design rationality." While Simon's notion of "bounded rationality" may be well understood as emphasizing realistic cognitive contraints within which professionals act, Schon's notion of "design rationality" is likewise well understood as a limited notion of reason, yet one that emphasizes possibilities for exemplary practice. Frame Reflection provides a serious study of "design rationality" as applied to public policy practice. This text proceeds simultaneously at practical levels of analysis, theoretical levels of analysis, and fundamentally re-examines the relationship between theory and practice as applied to the public policy arena. It requires study rather than a simple reading. This book is for those scholars interested in a more inclusive conception of the public policy process (that is also useful to practitioners) and to that group of practitioners who are possibility thinkers and willing to work explicitly at developing further, their policy design skills as exemplary practitioners. The book interweaves distinctive bodies of literature/levels of analysis that traditionally have studied separately empirical policy practice with levels of analysis that haved addressed the bearing of one's assumptional structures on policy consequences. The text argues that the former type of inquiry is necessary but insufficient for constructively engaging the latter. Indeed, the text argues that conventional academic approaches risk becoming misbegotten enterprises and that apart from "situated policy learning," there is little hope for resolving "intractable policy controversies." This book disputes inherited notions of properly ordered relations between theory and practice in relation to policy professionals much as Schon had made a similar argument with respect to a wider group of professional practitioners in his earlier seminal text on practical reasoning, The Reflective Practitioner. Frame Reflection was the final book written by Donald Schon before his death in 1997. It begins with an informative preface and introduction that should not be skipped. It defines its terms in the first three chapters on "Intractable Policy Controversies," "Policy Controversies as Frame Conflicts," and "Rationality, Reframing, and Frame Reflection." In the middle three chapters it considers three case studies of "situated policy learning" that illustrate the dialectical character of policy-making, policy-making as a process of distributed design with several layers of associated complexity, and that illustrate via shortcomings and success in a distinctive set of cases, reflection's place in policy practice. In its concluding section the text focuses on lessons learned. The concluding section is entitled "Toward Frame-Reflective Policy Conversation." It contains two chapters. The first of these, chapter seven, concludes with a close look at "design rationality" as illuminated in the public policy arena via study of these cases. The second, chapter eight, concludes with a stimulating analysis of "Implications for Research and Education." While ten years after its publication, this text remains as yet under-represented in the literature of the field, this seminal text -- which in passing challenges tenets of both modern and so-called post-modern thought -- may prove far more enduring than much of the contemporary literature. Along with that other policy text requiring close study and independently developed by Giandominco Majone, Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process, this text may represent the future of the field in the 21st Century better than any other policy texts of the 20th Century. Finally, as a pragmatic matter, as of this writing Frame Reflection is priced ($15) so that it ought to be attractive as a required or recommended text for anyone teaching advanced upper division or graduate courses on the public policy process or policy analysis. Particularly for undergraduates but including graduate students, even a cursory introduction to the tradition of practical reasoning (e.g. as contained in the Preface and a key chapter from Schon's The Reflective Practitioner) would be helpful for easing one into this challenging but deeply rewarding model of the public policy process and its corresponding modes of policy analysis. Having acknowledged the challenge, this book is highly recommended for any serious reader concerned with strengthening public policy processes. It is for those concerned with developing a type of reflective and analytic skill that is helpful for policy-makers or analysts when concretely engaging situated policy controversies.
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