Landmark among decision-making and policy analyses and template for integrating alternative frames of reference: Glenn D. Paige,The Korean Decision

That policies and decisions provide distinctive foci for the application of scholarly attention is a hallmark of the last half of the 20th century. Among landmark invocations of such attention was and is Glenn D. Paige's The Korean Decision. Landmarks represent creative achievements that lay down original formulations or findings or point the ways to original findings, and they do so with high quality of method and exposition. The Korean Decision exhibited the first and fullest use of Richard C. Snyder's decision-making approach in the study of public order decisions and it did so in ways that opened new lines of inquiry. It also rendered evident equivalencies with the decision-centered conception of the policy sciences as formulated by Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal. This reappraisal of Paige's classic work stresses explicit and implicit complementarities between one decision-making approach and the policy sciences. Several equivalencies illustrate points at which the addition or the overlap of one scheme to and with another may enrich alternative approaches to common phenomena, including observational standpoint, conceptions of the decision process, definition of decisional situations, crisis as a special occasion for decision, linkages among variables, and appraisal as a particular decision process function.