The policy sciences as science

The preceding evaluation of the policy sciences by Schneider, Stevens, and Tornatzky is based on a rather narrow conception of science that emphasizes quantitative and rigorous methods. It overlooks the limitations of such methods, as revealed by the results of applications, and certain adjustments to these limitations. The latter include the adoption of more modest but realizable aspirations and the synthesis of diverse methods-qualitative as well as quantitative, exploratory as well as confirmatory. It also overlooks differences and trends in epistemological preconceptions that underlie the conduct of research and the interpretation of research results. This article reviews the relevant literature in the hope that it might eventually contribute to more enlightened evaluations of the emerging discipline.     

The Literary Interview as Public Performance

The interview is a genre “coming of age,” maturing into a serious art form. This essay presents a typology for understanding this growth and how diverse patterns of literary performance have contributed to it. Five types of interviewees are discussed at length: traditionalist, raconteur, advertiser, provocateur, and prevaricator. Some speculations about national and cultural types of interviewees are also broached.     

The Numbers Wonk as Existential Hero

Did you think there was once a golden age of honest budgeting? Well, it wasn't in Britain before or during World War I, according to a classic novel about the period. The novelist Ford Madox Ford placed the hero of his tale in a government career in statistics and budgeting. It seems like a strange choice for a hero, but the dilemmas of that career are the conditions against which the protagonist must struggle to maintain his integrity.     

The world as a moral community

He is the author and co-author of numerous books, among them The Sociology of the Future; The Democratic Revolution in the West Indies; Decisions of Nationhood; Jamaican Leaders; Ethnicity, and Nation Building; Public Leadership;and Social Area Analysis.He is currently working on a book titled Foundations of the Futures Field.     

The Body Politic as Spatial Metaphor

As part of a special issue on the geographies of citizenship, this paper considers the longstanding and popular metaphor of “the body politic” for a polity. The metaphor's comparative power is successful because it imports key geographic assumptions about how polities are best organized. It makes claims about society and space (premises about location, spatial organization), nature–society relations (how the two spheres do and do not connect) and cartographic representation (the human body is the optimal representation of spatial and natural relations in a polity). We describe three ways in which geographical imaginations are constructed: organic, mechanical, and posthuman bodies politic. Our goal is twofold: first is to consider the ways the deployment of the metaphor of the body is used in political theory to convey a normative conception of citizenship; second is to bridge the gap between political theory and geography by paying special attention to the ways the body is a space. The metaphor of the body politic is a political geography that links citizenship to particular geographical and normative relationships.