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434 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1977)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0434 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE One of the major problems confronting the scholarly field of public policy is to improve communication among those who are involved in policy analy- sis. Unfortunately, knowledge from policy studies is not very cumulative. Not only does much of our scholarship on public policy fail to speak to policy makers, but the analyst who studies health policies often fails to have effec- tive communication with others in the health area, and he generally fails to communicate with his colleagues who work with education, housing, defense, or social control policies. Hopefully, this issue of THE ANNALS can make a modest contribution to facilitating communication among those who work in different policy sectors. Most of the papers in this issue were presented before the 1976 annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. The Social Science History Association operates through a number of networks, and the Network on Social Theory and Social Policy organized the sessions at which most of these papers were presented. The paper which appears as the first essay in this issue, by network co- chairmen Jerald Hage and J. Rogers Hollingsworth, presents a theoretical framework for coding policy studies. An important part of that essay is a set of variables for coding or categorizing the different components of policy studies. They label their variables general variables, which trans- cend space and time and present a scheme that permits the analysis of numerous policy sectors across time and across societies. In addition, the essay proposes a number of hypotheses concerning the way in which a society's structure -for instance, centralization versus decentralization- influences the performance of various policy sectors. Thus a decentralized delivery system in education, health, and other aspects of social policy should be more innovative but less efficient than a centralized one. While the essays in this issue were prepared independently of the Hage-Hollingsworth essay, several of them do reflect similar conceptual concerns. And most of the essays are illustrative of how the Hage-Hollings- worth framework can be useful in understanding specific policy sectors. For example, several authors focus on such consumption policies as health and education, and illustrate some of the processes which Hage and Hol- lingsworth suggest at a theoretical level. Odin Anderson and Lawrence Mead in their separate essays suggest that higher inputs into the health delivery system-for example, more expenditures, more physicians-are not likely to result in more outputs in the form of better health. And short of restruc- turing the system-resulting in more centralized controls-health care costs will continue to escalate. Yet, a more centralized delivery system may reduce costs and may distribute health care resources more equitably. The importance of structural variables in shaping outcomes is also a theme in the essay by Neal Gross as well as that by Burkart Holzner and Leslie Salmon-Cox. Both essays.point out that in the 1960s there was a vii

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