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On the basis of interviews with French civil servants the article investigates the controversial question of whether the extensive administrative rule making in the Fourth Republic has limited pressure group influence or whether the direct impact of the groups has impinged on administrative autonomy. It is found that the group-bureaucracy relationship differs from agency to agency, but also that certain administrative patterns quite generally increase the access of organized interests to authoritative decision making. The search for developing standards by which to determine "the public interest" has been affected by the postwar civil service reforms and by the progressive amalgamation of the public and the private sector of the economy. The paper concludes with an examination of the corporatist and technocratic implications of certain new concepts of administrative responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we are concerned with imposing constraints directly on the admissible majority decisions so as to insure transitivity without restricting individual preference orderings. We demonstrate that this corresponds to requiring that majority decisions be confined to the extreme points of a convex polyhedron. Thus, transitive majority decisions can be characterized as basic solutions of a set of linear inequalities. Through the use of a majority decision function (which is not restricted to be linear) it is shown that constrained majority rule is equivalent to an integer programming problem. Some special forms of majority decision functions are studied ineluding the generalized lp norm and an indicator function. Implications of an integer programming solution, including alternate optima and post optimality analysis, are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives a necessary and sufficient condition for the following proposition, in which ≼ and ≼i for i = 1, ⋯, n are weak orders on a finite set X. There are real-valued functions ƒ1, ƒ2 ,⋯, ƒn on X such that, for all x and y in X and i in {1, ⋯, n} x ≼ i y if and only if ƒi (x) ≤ ƒi (y), and x ≼ y if and only if ƒ1 (x) +⋯ + ƒn (x) ≤ ƒ1 (y) + ⋯ + ƒn(y). The condition can be viewed as an extension of a simple unanimity or dominance condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the work experience of new professional social workers in a large public agency. Structural constraints rather than the social worker's knowledge and skills dictated the decision-making process in respect to clients' life situations. The role of the professional social worker under the condition of severe restraints is dubious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the traditional literature in community organization and attempts to reformulate certain ideas in a way that achieves greater clarity and utility for practice. The focus is on goals in community organization practice, varying roles of the practitioner related to these, and the relationship of these two variables to certain aspects of decision making. To have validity community organization practice must be geared to the attainment of some social welfare goal or to the solution of some social welfare problem. It entails the completion of a concrete task or the solution of a delimited problem having to do with the functioning of the community social system. It is important to note that these delimited goals are always directed toward achieving some common good, never to the attainment of personal profit or gain as a prime motive or objective. In drawing up criteria for defining the welfare field as a social institution in the society indicates that there must be "absence of profit motive as a dominant program purpose."

The article analyzes the dynamics of access among the welfare poor. Participation in political society is often considered from the perspective of the theory of democratic pluralism. This theory, which, in the 1960's, inspired a lively debate between those who found decisions controlled by monolithic elites and those who found multiple points of decision-making, has increasingly seen the empirical grounds of contention moving toward questions of participation and access to decision-making processes by non-elites. Access has been studied by analyzing the resources of individuals, the experience of new participants, the potential for manifestation of "quasi-groups," the effectiveness of group organization, and the response of competing groups, elites, and the public to the access-seeker. To comprehend the two-sided process of access-seeking, one must examine the forces that grant or block access as well as the parties that seek access. The central problem to which the empirical study of this paper is directed is the question of how difficult it is for a newly-formed group to gain a foothold in a presumably pluralistic structure of power.

The purpose of this paper is to identify, describe and appraise institutional arrangements for transferring water among uses. As the title suggests, we are concerned with decisions regarding water use where efficiency problems are important, i.e., where water is a scarce resource and demands for its use are growing and changing. We have chosen to introduce the problem in terms of an efficiency model of water use with special reference to external effects. Externalities is a concept applied to those economic effects which lie outside the decision-making scope of micro units of water users. In water use, these effects result from water supply interdependencies and income interdependencies of a more general character in the water-using community. Externalities from changing water use, their welfare implications and an indication of their effect on decision processes provide a conceptual framework for an analysis of systems of organization and is the problem of central attention in the following discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative economic policy models aim at social welfare maximization. Their basic ingredients are an objective function and a constrained structure.[1] The former reflects preferences of decision makers and is well-known as a social preference function. The latter consists of an econometric model and a set of boundary conditions on the arguments of the preference function and/or the econometric model. It is the task of economic advisors to estimate (specify) the constrained structure and optimize the preference function subject to it. Upon completion of their job, economists submit their findings to policy makers for further action.
The present paper belongs to this category of policy models and follows the works of Fox et al. (1966), HANSEN (1967), THEIL (1964), and TINBERGEN (1965). The empirical analysis is concerned with the case of Greece because of the author's acquaintance with issues pertaining to limitations, priorities and in general the functioning of that economy.
Economic policy makers in underdeveloped and/or developing economies in general, and in Greece in particular, are confronted with a serious obstacle: the so-called degrees-of-freedom problem. In brief, given the development stage of the economy and the administrative difficulties associated with it, the number of variables directly controlled by policy makers falls short of the number of targets to be fulfilled. Consequently, instead of requiring the targets to be reached exactly, as in the fixed targets case, decision makers may have to be satisfied to have them achieved as near as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of the Administrative Procedure Act on initial decisions by the Immigration and Naturalization Service is tested. This agency was chosen because of the sequence of modifications in its personnel standards and procedures. Reforms initiated by the Act have generally improved the Service's decision processes. However, the data do not support two hypotheses derived from the theory of administrative regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is reasonable to expect that a social worker will experience some degree of stress in making a child placement decision. Research undertaken thus far, however, falls to confirm this expectation, in explanation the authors describe several structural mechanisms that seemingly reduce worker uncertainty and anxiety. Possible "costs" of these mechanisms for clients, workers, and agencies are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the practice theory and associated concepts in community organization. The primary aim of this article is to analyze what makes the professional social worker in community organization any different than the politician who is concerned with organizational processes in winning his election, or the Parent-Teacher Association president who, with his constituency, stimulates and develops a community plan for a school dental clinic. Practice contributes to theory-building in two ways: first, that it orders experiences from practice and conceptualizes these practices which helps to identify the important hypotheses to be tested through research methods; the second important function is at the point of verifying theory derived from research through pragmatic application in practice situations. The professional social worker in community organization has a wide range of concepts or kinds of steps to take. As the community or problem situation changes or differs, he makes conscious choices and adapts next steps to the dynamics of the situation. Greater professional skill in practice means a broader range of theoretical concepts, more depth and clarity in conceptual understanding, and more precise discrimination in the decision-making processes where choices of action take place.