Suchergebnisse

Public service organizations are both responsive to & part of public policy; their design, development, & maintenance are integral to public exploration of such issues as housing, health, & criminal justice. Proposed is an examination of the capacities of public service organizations for functioning constructively in the public learning process. Public learning is viewed as a dialectical situation between a problem-solving rationale & the constant emergence of new problems requiring new problem settings. People who would reform public agencies often lack the foresight to understand that their reforms themselves will become problems as conditions change. For instance, in the present mood, to treat mental health & criminal justice problems through community organizations is to forget the negative aspects of the community that prompted creation of mental hospitals & penitentiaries in a previous period. The Works Progress Administration is examined as an example of organizational learning through the evolution of public service agencies. D. Dunseath.

This article is based on a year-long study of services to the blind in the United States which was undertaken by the Organization for Social and Technical Innovation under the sponsorship of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness. The NINDB is not responsible for the findings and interpretations here. It is reprinted here by permission of the author and The Public Interest ( where it appeared in the Number 18, Winter 1970 issue). Copyright 1970, National Affairs.

This book, written by a group of distinguished scholars and practitioners, critically reappraises ideas about learning and development advanced by Albert O. Hirschman in the 1950s and 1960s. The essays--prepared for an MIT faculty seminar--show how these innovative ideas bear on the theory, policy, and practice of development in the 1990s. Hirschman, one of the great pioneers in the field of economic development, is now professor emeritus at Princeton. Paul Krugman, Lance Taylor, and Donald Schon address the different approaches and assumptions of economic theorists in relation to modelling, learning, and development policy. Emma Rothschild, Lisa Peattie, and Bishwapryiya Sanyal examine some of the changing attitudes toward economic progress. Elliot Marseille, Judith Tendler, Sara Friedheim, Robert Picciotto, and Charles Sabel draw lessons from efforts to innovate or modify institutions, policies, programs, and projects. Lloyd Rodwin examines the underlying themes that emerge, particularly those that touch on the ideas of development as a process of social learning and on ways of strengthening theory, policy, and practice in economics when it is seen as both discipline and profession. In a postscript, Albert O. Hirschman reflects on the evolution of his ideas, his cognitive style, and his propensity for self-subversion. Two appendixes detail the candid seminar discussions and Hirschman's musings in response to particular chapters and questions raised by the participants.