A case of “too early to tell”?

I

It’s tempting to see policy analysis in the American setting as the bastard child of American pragmatism and British rationalism: the former with its focus on consequences and less on intentions when deciding; the latter with a focus on the sequence of steps to deciding.

One consequence of this bastardization is that intentions can also end up consequential. If as some philosophers tell us, intentionality is part of action, then intentions are part of decisionmaking. And since decisionmaking is ongoing in policy and management, consequences arising out of a sequence of decisions end up looking like steps in causation. As a result, rationalizing what is pragmatic and pragmatizing the rationalizations can be as difficult to parse–much like the dancer from the dance.

II

So what?

Start with the obvious. It’s because we demand complex organizations be rational (formally. procedural) that they have had also to become pragmatic (informally, less procedural).

Less obvious but as important: Macro-designs formalize as principles what policy analysts and managers cannot help but treat more informally as localized contingency scenarios, while front-line micro-operations treat informally what policy analysts and managers cannot help but treat more formally when they talk about emerging patterns and practices across cases.

For instance, sometimes it’s too early to decide what is even better than the reliable operations of current infrastructures in the face of turbulent conditions and buttressed by emergency preparedness. Why? Because some cases are still early days when it comes to their mix of formal and informal, e.g.:

It is easy to forget that even in the so-called advanced world, domestic running water – for toilets, cooking, personal hygiene, washing clothes and dishes – is a very recent and ephemeral phenomenon, dating back less than a century. In 1940, 45% of households in the US lacked complete plumbing; in 1950, only 44% of homes in Italy had either indoor or outdoor plumbing. In 1954, only 58% of houses in France had running water and only 26% had a toilet. In 1967, 25% of homes in England and Wales still lacked a bath or shower, an indoor toilet, a sink and hot- and cold-water taps. In Romania, 36% of the population lacked a flushing toilet solely for their household in 2012 (down to 22% in 2021). . .

Marco D’Eramo (2022). “Odourless Utopia.” NLF Sidecar (accessed on line at https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/odourless-utopia?pc=1464)