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466 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1983)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0466 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Most issues of The Annals treat subjects already well endowed with definition- conventionally, pragmatically, or theoretically. The subject of this issue is not like that, and our assignment seems partly a challenge to define and justify it. There is no field, profession, or industry focused on (governmental) change per se; and the staff function of projecting or anticipating change that increasingly appears in the private sector has much more to do with strategic intelligence than with implementation. There is no general agreement that governmental change is problematic in the simple sense that there is not enough of it, though there may well be a widespread impression today of governmental inertia or intractability in general, and as to implementation of authorized change in particular. Something like inertia or intractability is no doubt a problem-the other side of the coin variously denominated predictability, regularity, even responsibility or due process, and therefore a tolerable problem within broad lizpits. But perhaps the limits can be narrowed, either altogether or in certain subjects and sectors of government. Implementing governmental change, in this view, has to do with enhancing rationality and effectiveness in governments-with institutional fine tuning. And our challenge in this volume, then, is to see what can be learned, and what is already known, about how purposeful change occurs in government, construed here primarily-not entirely-as American national government. But the claims of stability make for constant complication.' They make change problematical as a value, not just operationally. Most of the topics in this volume- most aspects and attributes of public organization-have potentially to do both with resistance to change or redirection, and with facilitation of change or redirection. A little reflection turns up opposite potentialities, diversely condi- tioned, in most public institutions. And these need balanced analysis; we rarely consider a simple, generic change to be maximized without reference to a companion star, stability-which also is not a simple notion, standing as it does for various other concerns as well. There are further complications. For example, some changes take more implementing than other changes-though few statutes or other (re)directions are simply self-executing. Insofar, then, as change, or capacity for change, is an issue, one might well focus on attributes of statutes and orders-for example, simplicity, specificity, automaticity-and also on ways of structuring public action that minimize reliance on bureaucracy, with its attendant problems of authority, communication, and interdependence; and one might in particular avoid inter- governmental management, in which the foregoing problems and other hangups seem especially to trammel implementation of allegedly national objectives.2 However, decentralization is often recommended as a way of rendering government more susceptible to change. By encouraging diversity, decentralization 1. The complication is considered in Herbert Kaufman, The Limits of Organizational Change (University: University of Alabama Press, 1971). 2. For some discussion of this, see Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron B. Wildavsky, Implementation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 9

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