Incomplete policy analysis

I

Graduate students in public policy analysis and management will know the idealized sequence for undertaking a professional policy analysis, e.g., first define the problem, then assemble the evidence, then analyze it so and so on until we make our recommendation. This sequence, or something like it, is cast in the present tense.

My experience is that the idealized steps are markedly not in the present tense, but rather:

Having completed the analysis, I wrote the memo with my recommendations.

The past gerund, “having completed the analysis,” indicates something finished, a hope that stands in sharp contrast to real-world policies in their persisting incompletion—a very different kind of “present tense.” The gerund also serves to situate analysis within an ongoing context without which there wouldn’t be analysis.

In turn, the prepositional object , “recommendations,” introduces its own promise that our memo will be dealt with, albeit beyond our control but still within that context of which we analysts are part. Indeed, the point of the past gerund/past tense/object formulation is to make clear that, “objectively speaking”, analysts in the present are not to blame for anything like the real-world incompletion all around us.

II

Here’s another way to look at the incompletion.

It’s also common enough that today’s accounts of policy and management be presented from not just one discipline’s perspective (say, economics), but many—including political science, psychology, organization theory, and more.

Yet what frequently gets missed are the implied hyphens, i.e., “from a socio-politico-economic-cultural-historical-psychological. . .perspective”. How so?

Consider Polonius in Hamlet: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . .”

The hyphens there function as the performative demonstration of Polonius’s long-windedness. Interdisciplinary accounts of policy analysis and management, however, insist that you take their added wordage as anything but long-windedness.

Or another example: “It is obviously a highly complex phenomenon that needs global cooperation as a response as well as a holistic approach because the potential collapses are interrelated” Each word is written as if it anchored, resolute, placed there to resist being dragged elsewhere. In fact, each word functions as a cowpat to be stepped into and distract us into something that looks like. . . longwindedness as another form of incompleteness.

Source

Moretti, F. (2013). The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. Verso: London and New York