This book explores the eventful but largely forgotten history of national planning efforts in the United States, first identifying and comparing five alternative approaches to contemporary national planning, then using these approaches to assess the events of 1973-1976, a period when crisis pressures brought a vigorous resurgence of national planning activity and debate. Dr. Wilson concludes that two new approaches to planning— "learning-adaptive" and general systems—are increasingly being used in lieu of the long-established, and less flexible, rational and incremental approaches, and that these might eventually achieve a beneficial new synthesis in both federal policy practice and social science theory. He argues that the twin questions of a planned versus a planning society and of who will plan for whom are inexorably emerging as key issues in U.S. public policy. Along with its companion volume—National Planning in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography, also published by Westview—this book provides extensive new interdisciplinary research material and integrative perspectives on current planning challenges.

This annotated bibliography of more than 2,000 entries, current through 1977, sheds light on the national planning idea as a substantive issue in past, present, and future U.S. public policy; presents a bibliographic structure that suggests new emphases, relationships, and interdisciplinary approaches; and makes more easily accessible to students a

Addressed to the growing concerns about norms and values in policy assessment, this study develops a methodology for the political evaluation of public policy. It is designed to move policy evaluation beyond its current emphasis on efficient achievement of goals, focusing instead on the assessment of the acceptability of the goals themselves, emplo

"Throughout this terrific book, Wilson places this government agency-its creation, its lifespan and achievements, and its mixed legacies-in the broader context of postwar American history and, more specifically, the history of employment policy." --Jason Scott Smith, author of Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 With clarity and insight, Gregory S. Wilson recounts the story of the Area Redevelopment Administration and connects a nearly forgotten piece of American employment history to national and transnational developments in the making of social policy in the years between the New Deal and the Great Society. Communities Left Behind demonstrates how the United States has, since the Great Depression, tried but failed to address the nation's structural inequalities, and it reopens discussions about poverty and economic dislocation in a period when the country is facing new economic challenges. The ARA was created in 1961 and remained in operation until 1965. Its goal was to assist communities, especially economically distressed ones in rural or undeveloped areas of the country, in generating employment opportunities. Unstated in the creation of the ARA was its intention to serve as an economic development project mostly for Appalachia and the American South, where nearly all of its money was spent. Wilson argues that the ARA was doomed to fail from the beginning because of the requirement that federal officials not interfere with state and local priorities. It simply was not possible to implement a federal initiative in the South without running afoul of local interests. And, to further complicate matters, the issue of race loomed in the background: when ARA policies aimed to improve employment opportunities for black southerners, they were invariably sabotaged by racist politics. This ambivalent legacy of the ARA is alive today, Wilson suggests, as areas of the nation that have struggled economically since the agency's original creation-including inner cities, Native American reservations, Appalachia, and the rural South-continue to founder. Gregory S. Wilson is associate professor of history at the University of Akron and coeditor of the Northeast Ohio Journal of History.

Reforming health care, revamping the welfare system, preserving or cutting Social Security, creating employment programs for displaced employees, and revising U.S. social programs to help working parents with children - all of these endeavors and more are part of ongoing national debates about the future of social policy in the United States. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, renowned social scientist Theda Skocpol shows how historical understanding, centered on U.S. governmental institutions and shifting political alliances, can illuminate the limits and possibilities of American social policymaking both past and present.

Although state executive branch reorganization has been surrounded by controversy and expense for more than sixty years and has been occurring at an unprecedented rate during the last thirteen, much of our knowledge of it has been anecdotal, fragmentary, conceptually imprecise, and untested, asserts Dr. Garnett. His book contributes conceptual and empirical order to the study of reorganization by analyzing competing and complementary models, evaluating research methodologies, stating hypotheses, and testing those hypotheses with data drawn from more than 150 of the state reorganizations that have taken place in this century. Dr. Garnett addresses three basic questions: Why do state reorganizations occur? How are they conducted? What forms do the reorganized executive branches take? His specific action guidelines for governors and other state officials, agenda for further research, and extensive bibliography will be particularly useful.