Incrementalism: Dead yet Flourishing

• Date: 01 March 2015
• Author: Jonathan Bendor
• Published date: 01 March 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12333

75th Anniversary

Article

Jonathan Bendor, having earned all

of his degrees in political science at the

University of California, Berkeley, took a

job at the Graduate School of Business

at Stanford University in 1979. He is now

Walter and Elise Haas Professor of Political

Economics and Organizations there and

professor of political science, by courtesy.

He is a member of the American Academy

of Arts and Sciences and was a fellow of the

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral

Sciences in 1999–2000 and 2004–05.

E-mail: bendor_jonathan@gsb.stanford.edu

194 Public Administration Review • March | April 2015

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 75, Iss. 2, pp. 194–205. © 2015 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12333.

Jonathan Bendor

Stanford University

Woodhouse and Collingwood’s claim is accurate, but

Bendor’s is badly of‌f the mark in an important respect:

although disjointed incrementalism no longer exists

as a clearly identif‌i ed approach to policy making, its

components, especially the “Big  ree” (local search,

iterative adaptation, and the distributed intelligence of

multiple minds) are f‌l ourishing, especially in applied

f‌i elds such as computer science and operations research.

 is is relevant for an assessment of “Muddling

 rough” because that paper is a work of applied

theory. Indeed, virtually all of Lindblom’s work from

1958 to 1963—“Policy Analysis” (1958), “Muddling

 rough” (1959), “Decision-Making in Taxation

and Expenditure” (1961), and Strategy of Decision

(Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963)—was applied

theory, as were signif‌i cant parts of  e Intelligence

of Democracy (1965) and  e Policy-Making Process

(1968). We have misunderstood what he was

about.2 More importantly, we have misunderstood

what applied theory is and what its role in public

administration might be. Our collective confusion

partly explains why this vital part of Lindblom’s

work, though much cited, did not produce a vibrant

research program.

Incrementalism: Dead yet Flourishing

Editor’s Note:  is 75th anniversary essay revisits the most cited, reprinted and downloaded article in the

history of PAR . Charles Lindblom’s “ e Science of ‘Muddling  rough’” looked critically at synoptic

decision making and introduced a new strategy, disjointed incrementalism, into the social science lexicon.

In an insightful analysis, Professor Jonathan Bendor examines Lindblom’s classic article and the aftermath

of the applied theories it advanced.

JLP

Abstract: Charles Lindblom’s 1959 essay “ e Science of ‘Muddling  rough’” is best known for the strategy of deci-

sion making—disjointed incrementalism—that it recommended.  at famous paper and Lindblom’s related work

also provided two theories: a critique of the conventional method (the synoptic approach) and an argument for using

incrementalism instead. Both are applied theories: they are designed to help solve complex policy problems. Lindblom’s

negative applied theory has stood the test of time well: the empirical foundations of its main micro-component (cogni-

tive constraints of individuals) and its central macro-component (the impact of preference conf‌l ict on policy mak-

ing) have grown stronger since 1959.  e picture regarding the positive applied theory is more mixed. As a coherent

decision-making strategy, disjointed incrementalism has almost disappeared. Yet its key elements, the major heuristics

identif‌i ed in “Muddling  rough,” are thriving in many applied f‌i elds. Intriguingly, they are often accompanied by

subroutines—especially optimization as a choice rule—typically associated with the synoptic approach.

Charles Lindblom’s “ e Science of ‘Muddling

 rough’” (1959) is one of the most famous

papers published in the Public Administration

Review. Long a cornerstone of organization theory, it

has been reprinted in more than 40 anthologies, and

as of March 14, 2014, Google Scholar reported 8,431

citations, which makes it one of the most cited articles

in the f‌i elds of public administration, organization

theory, and bureaucracy.  ough estimating impact is

an uncertain business, it seems clear that “Muddling

 rough” has had a substantial inf‌l uence on several

generations of scholars.

Today, however, it is a spent intellectual force. Even a

casual reading of the literature in public administra-

tion and organization theory indicates that the idea

of disjointed incrementalism as a coherent strategy of

decision making is not discussed much. More than

20 years ago, two sympathetic scholars asserted that

incrementalism “has not spawned a lively research

tradition leading to cumulative ref‌i nement and

amplif‌i cation of the core concepts (Woodhouse and

Collingridge 1993, 131); a few years later, another

scholar stated that “incrementalism’s fate has been [to]

just fade away” (Bendor 1995, 819).1