Choice Review

The bold purpose of this little book is to put the study of policy and administration on a postmodernist footing. For Fox and Miller policy is less the expression of formal organization than the "recursive practice" of highly charged "public energy fields," loosely configured "nodes" where officials, experts, journalists, and activists "socially construct" policy amidst struggles to capture meaning. The authors seek to establish conditions of rational, democratic discussion in arenas now dominated by illusory forms of symbolic politics. "Discourse theory" helps by providing criteria for rational "policy conversation." This volume crisply reviews the phenomenological and linguistic turns in recent policy analysis; as brief introductions to these fields, chapters 3-5 are extremely useful. One remains skeptical, however, about whether discourse theory is sufficient to understand policy. As current politics attempts to shrink the state, the issue of what we can legitimately talk about with respect to politics would seem at least as important as how we talk about it. Eager to unearth the proper conditions of rational discussion, Fox and Miller do not say enough about the proper domain of politics. Recommended for graduate students and upper-division undergraduates. S. Plotkin; Vassar College