Norton E. Long

The Local Community as an Ecology of Games

The local community can be usefully conceptualized as an ecology of games. In the territorial system a variety of games goes on: banking, newspaper publishing, contracting, manufacturing, etc. The games give structures, goals, roles, strategies, tactics, and publics to the players. Players in each game make use of players in the others for their particular purposes. A banker uses the politician, the newspaperman, or the contractor in his game and is, in turn, used by them in theirs. The interaction of the games produces unintended but systemically functional results for the ecology. An over-all top leadership and social game provide a vague set of commonly shared values that promotes co-operation in the system though it does not provide a government.

Power and Administration

T HERE is no more forlorn spectacle in the administrative world than an agency and a program possessed of statutory life, armed with executive orders, sustained in the courts, yet stricken with paralysis and deprived of power. An object of contempt to its enemies and of despair to its friends. The lifeblood of administration is power. Its attainment, maintenance, increase, dissipation, and loss are subjects the practitioner and student can ill afford to neglect. Loss of realism and failure are almost certain conse-

Conceptual Notes on the Public Interest for Public Administration and Policy Analysts

The related fields of political science, public administration, and policy analysis sorely need a standard for evaluating the outcomes, management structures, and processes, programs, and policies. The appropriate standard for evaluation is the much-maligned and often forgotten concept of the public interest. We can assess the public interest by projecting and evaluating consequences in terms of agreed-upon values-values our common sense tells us rank highly in measuring the quality of peoples lives. The agreed-upon consequences and the sometimes competing values must then be weighed in a structured and reasoned argument.

Planning and Politics in Urban Development

Abstract As a result of central city decay, both urban renewal and metropolitan area planning are emerging into the forefront of local politics. Realistic politicians are eyeing the vote-getting appeal of planning. Planners are increasingly abandoning their aloof role of unloved civic vestal virgins and entering the civic arena. Plans are ceasing to be the civic New Years resolution and embalmed work of art of the old master-plan days and becoming the action programs of a problem-solving community. This is clear gain for the quality of local public life and promises to make planning a vital political process rather than an esoteric activity of a professional elite.

The Citizenships: Local, State, and National

The contemporary city is regarded as an almost trivial affair, a weak and subordinate polity with an open economy. Though recognized as a tragic site of important events, it is esteemed to have little power to affect the lives of its inhabitants for good or ill. Its leaders are largely reduced to seeking handouts from superior governments. This low estate for the city is of long standing, commencing with the Greek city-states loss of independence. Yet the city of the Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman Empire played a vital role. As Max Weber (1962) maintained, the modern nation-state battered down the walls of the city. But society cannot do without cities and their civilizing mission. If one agrees with Aristotle that the informing principle of the polity is its conception of the good life, that conception will be found most truly embodied in the city, which alone enables its inhabitants to live a full life.

The Political Act as an Act of Will

The problem of order is the central problem of politics. A political society must achieve a minimum degree of stability to survive. Equally, it must functionally adapt to change. The objective situation imposes constraints but does not provide determinate answers. Like the artistic tradition, the political tradition provides materials. The combination and recombination of these materials within the constraints of the objective situation is a creative act of political will. This act, by defining and redefining the situation, permits the actors to co-operate. It cuts the Gordian knot of the cognitive problem.

The City as a Local Political Economy

The contemporary city is widely regarded as being politically and economically weak and relatively powerless. This may well be the case but it need not be. The city has lost its function in meeting the economic and spiritual needs of its people. In consequence, while it has legal citizens, it lacks real committed citizens. On the existence of such committed citizens the citysfuture depends. Turning the city into a cooperative for the economic and spiritual full employment of its people would provide a basis for a revival and a recovery of function.

Seeking the Polity's Bottom Line A Conceptual Note

Somehow we have lost sight of what ought to be the bottom line for the polity: the condition of the individual Political science, public administration, urban politics, and policy analysis have all lost sight of this concern that was once the focus of classical political philosophy. We must establish systematic inventories of the principal dimensions of the human condition against which we can make comparisons as actors, structures, and processes change.

Public Administration, Ethics and Epistemology

Public administration needs a critical, self-conscious, epistemology in order to be useful. This epistemology must be grounded in an ethic. An appropriate epistemology will focus on classifications, forecasts and theories. Case studies are a useful technique for approaching these matters, but interpretation of cases must be grounded in an understanding of the public interest, not just the interest of specific policy-makers.

Indicators of Change in Political Institutions

Political science has been largely absorbed in aimless institutional description, rather than in the attempt to explain humanly significant change. Unlike economics—war and revolution apart—it has no phenomena of the order of the business cycle, inflation, growth rates, and the like, of demonstrable human consequence, of which it seeks to give theoretical comprehension, and to develop intervention strategies from this comprehension. Without explanatory theory, it has no occasion to develop indicators except as the implicit theory of common sense suggests the value of such indicators. For the most part, such indicators as we have were developed as predictors and are without explanatory value. This state of affairs is now in the process of alteration. The reports of the Kerner and Eisenhower Commissions, however unsatisfactory, provide scenarios of significant social change, with partially explicated theory to account for it, and with some specification of the relevant variables. The movement of these variables suggest theoretically significant indicators whose values could predict significant change. Fruitful development can be expected as our capacity for evaluation highlights humanly important phenomena whose explanation will suggest the indicators necessary for the use of that capacity.