Comments
quences of which would be preferable in terms of
Why the Rational Paradigm Persists:
Tales from the Field
A decade ago, Linda Dalton (1986) posed a puzzle:
Planning academics and practitioners have both recognized
that planning decisions do not follow the rational model,
and yet they continue to espouse it. Why?
Dalton (1986) offered several explanations. In seeking
professional status, planners follow American norms for
professionalism by emphasizing specialized scientific
knowledge-in their case, expertise in applying rationality
to urban problems (see Baum 1983; Freidson 1970; Larson
1977). Planning academics, because they work in and are
evaluated in bureaucratic organizations, are forced to
emphasize quantitative productivity if they want to keep
their jobs. The first condition leads planners to espouse the
rational model even if they do not practice or believe in it.
The second, Dalton suggested, leads academics who argue
against the rational paradigm, in fact, to model it in
practice.
Yet these explanations are puzzling. While each argument
stands plausibly on its own, the second challenges the first.
If rationality is impossible in planning practice, how is it
possible in planning academics’ practice? Are they such
different worlds? Or do planners practice rationally in ways
they do not recognize?
This article addresses these questions, first, by defining
the rational model and, then, by using stories from planning
education and practice to suggest why the model persists.
. RATIONAL PLANNING AND THE RATIONAL PLANNER
Banfield’s (1955, 314) articulation of the principles of
rational decision-making offers a succinct summary of the
rational planning model:
1. the decision-maker considers all of the alterna-
tives (courses of action) open to him...;
2. he identifies and evaluates all of the conse-
quences which would follow from the adoption of
each alternative...; and
3. he selects that alternative the probable conse-
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his most valued ends (1955, 314).1
Why should planners make decisions rationally? Faludi
(1973, 49) argues, &dquo;rational planning results in growth as a
product, and...the rational planning process may itself be
viewed as a vehicle for the very process of growth.&dquo; Regard-
less of whether many would share the faith of that assertion,
it justified rationality as a means to a societal end: whatever
the goals of a society, they would be more likely reached if
members analyzed problems rationally.
The model and this justification have been criticized on
many grounds (e.g., Alexander 1992; Arrow 1958; Banfield
1955; Etzioni 1968; Faludi 1973; Forester 1989; Lindblom
1959; Simon 1976). Empirically, it does not describe how
planners, administrators, or politicians make decisions.
Attention and information are limited, and interests
constrain feasible alternatives. Often goals are fuzzy, and
criteria for evaluating consequences conflict with one
another. Forecasting is difficult. Finally, all these difficulties
are compounded when, as is usually the case, many actors
take part in making decisions. In practice, people are as
concerned about protecting their safety and interests as they
are about following a &dquo;higher&dquo; rationality.
Critics have formulated alternative models that give a
nod to certain realities while seeking to preserve the virtues
of the rational model. Disjointed incrementalism
(Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963), mixed scanning (Etzioni
1968), contingency planning (Alexander in press;
Christensen 1985), and critical pragmatism (Forester 1989)
are familiar examples. In different ways, they acknowledge
that contexts matter, in both defining and limiting choices.
Still, they aim to promote decisions that are informed and
link action to goals. Forester (1989), for example, argues for
progressive political aims, but he justifies his model as
Faludi did, with the view that planning processes lead
toward desired societal ends.
Why should a method of making decisions affect a
society in certain ways? Overtly, the connection is sociologi-
cal, involving intervention in the operations of social
institutions. These planning approaches make it possible to
identify courses of action likely to produce chosen societal
ends.
Mannheim (1940) conceived the connection psychologi-
cally. Facing fascism, he believed industrialism had severed
128
social ties and given rise to a mass society in which individu-
als were no longer constrained from acting irrationally.
Planning was for him &dquo;the rational mastery of the irrational&dquo;
(ibid., 265). He sought a society where behavior was
controlled in ways that allowed individual intellectual and
emotional expression but preserved freedom and democracy.
His society would be governed by the &dquo;substantial
rationality [of] intelligent insight into the inter-relations of
events in a given situation,&dquo; but he faced the challenge of
the &dquo;substantially irrational&dquo;: &dquo;everything else which either is
false or not an act of thought at all (as for example drives,
impulses, wishes, and feelings, both conscious and uncon-
scious)&dquo; (ibid., 53). The &dquo;irrational,&dquo; he wrote,
is not always harmful but...on the contrary, it is
among the most valuable powers in man’s posses-
sion when it acts as a driving force towards rational
and objective ends or when it creates cultural
values through sublimation, or when, as pure elan,
itheightens the joy of living without breaking up
the social order by lack of planning (ibid., 62-63).
Ideally, society would begin with &dquo;self-rationalization,&dquo; &dquo;the
individual’s systematic control of his impulses&dquo; (ibid., 55).
Practically, social order would depend on supporting self-
rationalization, as well as compensating for its absence,
through societal controls.
Mannheim held out different social aims from some
other advocates of rationality, but he made explicit an
assumption others held tacitly: rational decision-making
would change society by requiring individual members to
act in rational ways. &dquo;The rational society,&dquo; Etzioni (1968,
255) observed, &dquo;is then viewed as the society that produces a
relatively high proportion of detached men, and its family
and educational systems are studied to establish the ways in
which this is achieved.&dquo; He went on to note, &dquo;Modern
structures, are said to provide a segregated unit for each
sector of social activities [based on] the conception that the
more a society is differentiated the more it is rational...&dquo;
(1968, 256).
Friedmann (1987), tracing what might be called the
psychological history of rationality in planning, links
Mannheim with Weber and emphasizes that both saw
rationality as oppositional, in tension with irrational forces
to be controlled by regulation or, better yet, repression. Of
Weber he writes,
The principle of rationality, then, is closely related
to the notion of objectivity in scientific work. For
Weber, science was a means for mastering the
irrational, and the irrational, to which he felt
himself irresistibly drawn, could be contained
within its own sphere only through the most severe
of personal struggles. He was determined to grasp
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the irrational forces of life, among them politics
and religion, with only the instruments of reason:
the passions had to be controlled. It is interesting
to note how, in their less observed moments,
aggressive rationalists often express a quite
irrational fear of what they are evidently unable to
control (ibid., 100).
Consistently, &dquo;Weber argued passionately for an intellectual
asceticism in which factual statements would be held rigidly
apart from statements of value&dquo; (ibid., 99). This method-
ological commitment split science and politics and led, as
Friedmann argues, to the formulation of the rational
decision model.
In other words, the rational model has two references.
One is a process where information is collected and analyzed
in certain ways. The other is a practitioner (or member of
society) who can, and wants to, collect and analyze informa-
tion only in those ways. Most simply, such a planner,
following a rigid logic, would analyze issues intellectually,
disinterestedly, and unemotionally. Intuition is reckless,
because it leads to undisciplined mental leaps. Emotions
inappropriately contaminate the reasoning process because
they attach individuals to others and create loyalties that
pull away from rational analysis. Free of emotions, one can
observe and judge the world without being affected by
people in it. As a result, one is especially likely to discover an
unambiguously optimal solution for a well-defined problem.
Some revisions of the rational planning model both
recognize political interests and espouse advocacy. However,
the revisions share the model’s premise about feelings: they
confuse professional judgment, and they should (and can)
be ignored or suppressed. The following stories show how
practitioners and students, even if they might criticize the
rational analytic model, adhere to the rational practitioner
model, with this premise, for psychological reasons.
. SOME STORIES OF RATIONALITY
The Clockwork and the Snakepit
Howard Schwartz (1990) tells a story about teaching
organizational behavior in a business school. Once he asked
his students to picture the organization they knew best.
Then he described two types of organizations. He calls the
first the clockwork
In it, the organization is like a clock; everybody
knows what the organization is all about and is
concerned solely with carrying out its mission;
people are basically happy at their work; the level
of anxiety is low; people interact with each other in
frictionless, mutually supportive cooperation; and
if there are any managerial problems at all, these

are basically technical problems, easily solved by
someone who has the proper skills and knows the
correct techniques of management (ibid., 7).
The second, opposite, organization is the snakepit.
Here, everything is always falling apart, and
people’s main activity is to see that it doesn’t fall
on them; nobody really knows what is going on,
though everyone cares about what is going on
because there is danger in not knowing; anxiety
and stress are constant companions; and people
take little pleasure in dealing with each other,
doing so primarily to use others for their own
purposes or because they cannot avoid being so
used themselves. Managerial problems here are
experienced as intractable, and managers feel that
they have done well if they are able to make it
through the day (ibid., 8).
Nearly all his students said the organization they knew
best resembled the snakepit-but they wanted him to say
nothing further about it and devote the semester, instead, to
explaining how to manage a clockwork. Schwartz’ convinc-
ing explanation is that the reality these students knew was
too frightening to think about, and they preferred the
fantasy that they could replace it with a rational clockwork
they could control.
These students (who managed or expected to manage
organizations) wanted to talk about a view of human
behavior that portrayed it as rational in the following
respects: people could be assumed to act dispassionately,
disinterestedly, atomistically, and, as a result, predictably.
They liked the behavioral assumptions that could make
Weber’s (1967) ideal-typical bureaucracy a reality. Manag-
ing such an organization would be easy because it would not
require serious involvement with workers: staff would follow
written rules and rational protocols. What motivates this
rational organizational ideal, which most students agreed
they had never seen, is a wish to command and control
without coming into contact with a messy, dangerous,
debilitating reality. Students who wanted to escape a world
where their relationships made them feel bad imagined a
world where they had no relationships at all.
A Colloquium on Diversity
Two years ago, my program sponsored a colloquium on
diversity in planning. The panelists, who presented a
contrast to Schwartz’ students, illustrated an alternative
approach to the snakepit and shed light on attractions to the
clockwork.
Panelists were asked to talk about their experiences in
working with communities that were different from them.
The introductory speaker, an academic, gave an account of
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129
past waves of immigration to American cities, where
newcomers consistently chose to assimilate and problems of
ethnic differences evaporated.
Members of the first panel, however, told different
stories, focused on race-black-white relations particularly.
A white woman who works with community groups on
education issues explained that, no matter how clear
common interests in children seem before discussions begin,
people must first talk about and try to work through race-
related concerns. They need to air grievances, express anger,
and evaluate guilt before they can agree they care about
children and talk about improving education.
The second panelist, an African-American man, began by
saying that people differ in a lot of ways, that race is only
one difference of many. However, he and the third panelist
(another African-American man) went on to describe
painful indignities they had suffered simply trying to do
their jobs.
At comment time, I observed that the optimistic account
of European ethnics’ assimilation into America contrasted
with the panelists’ accounts of race. Although people differ
in many ways, the panelists seemed to say they found race to
be the most important difference, a persistent difference,
and a difference that often led to problems. They sounded
pessimistic, I said. However, all protested in response that,
while race was a problem, they struggled to work with it and
despite it, and they were hopeful about addressing issues in
their fields of housing, transportation, and education.
As I thought about what they said, and as I listened to
the second panel, I noticed how messy their presentations
were. They weren’t
rambling or thoughtless-quite the
contrary. These planners, in describing their practice,
acknowledged that racial differences, among others,
complicated their work, but they did not see the world in
clearly delineated shapes of black and white. Sometimes race
mattered in one way, sometimes in another, sometimes it
did not matter much at all. Even when they were offended
by something they encountered, they tried to understand
why people acted as they did and to find ways of working
with them, to serve what they insisted on seeing as shared
interests.
The stories revealed practitioners who, unlike the
management students, accepted the world of interests,
relationships, and feelings and struggled in the middle of it
all to design workable programs. In doing so, they presented
contrasts to two other groups and shed light on them. One
is academics who write unambiguous portrayals of race,
class, and gender. In those treatments, the meanings of these
differences are clear and uniform, and oppression is
straightforward, even where some may not feel like victims.
Those treatments of race, class, and gender can be
considered rational in that they deal with these attributes as
abstractions. Neat theoretical accounts rarely refer to specific
persons who are male or female, grew up in a particular
130
family, participate in a certain culture, and work in a
specific job.2To be sure, any description abstracts from
reality, and theoretical formulations are meant to abstract
considerably. However, much of this work is so abstract, it
is difficult to locate real persons in theoretical generaliza-
tions.
In this respect, these models of society resemble the
rational clockwork organizational model. Not only are
people linked to each other in only the most abstract ways,
but the observer is so detached from them that highly
abstract generalizations seem to suffice for accurate ac-
counts. These formulations lack the messy detail of the
world the presenters portrayed, the detail that comes from
direct encounter. It is unclear whether these theoretical
models could guide the presenters’ practice.
One explanation for such neat abstraction would parallel
interest in the clockwork: it is a defense against unruly
reality. Judging whether particular authors, in fact, theorize
with this motivation would depend on knowing them well.
At the same time, there is a possibly simpler explanation for
the rational purity of some academic theorizing: that is what
academics are expected to do. Their practice does not
involve land uses or housing conditions, but the formulation
and communication of ideas. The analogue to a comprehen-
sive zoning ordinance in the university is a theoretical
framework in which all ideas are distinct and in their place.
Interestingly, a Chinese-American woman panelist at the
colloquium passionately recounted how land use planners
destroyed San Diego’s Chinatown by rezoning the area to
single use, making it impossible for Chinese families to live
and work in the same building. These planners, the second
group that contrasted with the panelists, could not compre-
hend diversity-either that Chinese families lived differently
than the planners did or that different land uses could
coexist without danger.
Two complementary rational assumptions encouraged
that rezoning. First, planners believed they could (intellectu-
ally) analyze and decide on land use without becoming
(emotionally) involved with the Chinese community-
whatever they might learn about the community culture
should have no bearing on zoning recommendations.
Second, they accepted &dquo;the conception that the more a
society is differentiated the more it is rational&dquo; (Etzioni
1968, 256). Optimally, a zoning ordinance would tidily
segregate residential and commercial land uses.
When academics distill formal theories so they are
perfectly consistent, often they do what the land use
planners did. They separate themselves from the messiness
of everyday life and risk misunderstanding it. This is a way
academics model the rational paradigm, regardless of the
overt content of their ideas. It adds to what Dalton (1986)
described as the institutional incentives of universities. And
it encourages students, who will become planners, to expect
to see the world unambiguously.
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An
Internship Seminar
The diversity colloquium called to mind experiences of a
few years ago. When conducting a seminar for students in
internships, I was surprised to hear many rail against politics
in terms that could have come from any 1950’s planners.
Citizen involvement messed up planning because citizens
could not see things rationally and took up too much time
with irrelevant concerns. And elected officials kept injecting
interests into what should be rational decisions.
I was surprised, because I had assumed that student
thinking had moved along with what many planning
academics had come to say: politics, whether or not one
enjoys it, is part of democracy and inevitably enters into
planning. Planners must accept this reality and try to act
effectively in the political context. I shared my reactions
with other faculty members, and one outgrowth of intermit-
tent discussions was to require students to take a planning
theory and history course that, among other things, more
directly appraises politics. Still, the connection between a
planning theory course and students’ practice is uncertain.
Strikingly, many students in a later seminar spoke as their
predecessors.
In the seminar, I ask students to describe episodes from
their placements. I try to help students discover that
mundane events are significant, can be talked about, and are
worth analyzing. I call attention to what events reveal about
relationships with coworkers and supervisors, authority,
responsibility, organizational decision-making, and reactions
to these things. I do that, I explain, because I think reflec-
tion on issues like these enables students tounderstand
more deeply what they are doing and how their actions
contribute to success or difficulties.
Students in this later seminar turned aside most of my
invitations to talk about what they were doing. Some said
their work would only bore the group-these explanations
warned others not to bore the group by talking about their
own activities. Several explained they had worked before
and did not need to talk about what they were doing; they
knew what to do.
At the fourth weekly session, one student had to leave
early to attend an agency meeting. I asked what her role at
the meeting was. She would be sitting in the corner, she
said; she was &dquo;just a little peon.&dquo; I picked up that phrase, to
see if it might lead students to discuss their positions in their
departments, their perceptions of authority in the hierar-
chies, and their reactions to it. The students humored my
efforts, but no one got seriously involved in the discussion.
Later on, students cited that discussion as an example of
where I drew topics out too long, past the time when they
had said what they had to say.
When I asked students to evaluate the seminar at the end,
many said they did not think it could be useful to talk about
events at work. Many also said they wished the discussion

had been more theoretical, though they agreed about neither
what they meant by theoretical or which issues they had in
mind. As one positive example, several cited a session when
students debated the merits of historic preservation.
Other comments more specifically disagreed with the
approach of talking from experience about roles and
organizational settings. A couple of students rejected what
they called my interest in politics as irrelevant to their work.
One or two reacted strongly to my attention to interper-
sonal relations. These students were not concerned about
them. And, if students were supposed to learn about
interpersonal relations, one declared, there should be a
specific course on them, with a textbook. One student said
that I should not have asked them about their feelings; it
made them uncomfortable.
There is no simple interpretation for all this. Indeed, the
students made it clear that I did not seem as sensitive or
sympathetic a listener as I thought I was. However, among
the things apparent here is a wish that planning follow a
rational model.
Explicitly, some students disdained a concern for either
interpersonal relations or the relations of politics. A
textbook encounter with the subject of interpersonal
relations would be abstract and safe, neither messy nor
personal. The student who rejected my inquiries about
feelings apparently distinguished them from thoughts.
Thoughts can be considered abstract, autonomous, not
implicated in emotion. A thought stands by itself, for others
to look at and next to which they might put their own
thoughts. In contrast, feelings are relational; they connect
one person to another, and they arise from such connec-
tions. To ask students about their feelings is to insist that
they recognize how they are attached to others. Theoretical
concerns, as students specifically defined them, would have
nothing to do with what they personally did in the presence
of, with, or against others. Many would like planning to be
largely an independent cognitive act.
Some explanations for their preference would focus on
what they are taught. Either we do not teach them as well as
we should and perhaps can, or else some of us effectively
teach them to act as we do. Another explanation would
focus on students’ personalities. Perhaps they chose plan-
ning because their image of it, which corresponded to what
we or their coworkers model, suited them both intellectually
and emotionally (see Baum 1983, 1986).
Still another explanation, consistent with Schwartz’ story,
would look at the conditions of their practice. When
students did talk about their jobs, they often described the
work as hazardous-like the snakepit. In the first session, a
student railed against hostile community members: they
make so much trouble, they could cost a planner his or her
job. Another student described a commissioner who abused
his authority to intimidate applicants at hearings. Several
students told recurrent stories of conflicts between their
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131
professional judgments and political pressures. Agency
higher-ups, elected officials, and community leaders tried to
influence analyses and decisions. One student called a
situation criminal negligence. Another mentioned a
conversation in which a senior coworker privately said he
disagreed with agency policy but feared saying so in
meetings. Another said the walls at his office had a number
of cartoons of people with zippers over their mouths.
&dquo;Maybe,&dquo; one student suggested, &dquo;only people without
power can be idealistic.&dquo;
Some of these comments are the reactions of beginning
workers who are new to their organizations. Much is
strange, and they have little power to affect anything. And
yet they report on their seniors’ reactions, as well. The
students’ ethical and intellectual impulses are often right.
These are discouraging situations, certainly some frightening
ones. They call into question one’s choice of profession.
It would be safer to avoid thinking about feelings about
such situations, to think more theoretically about them, and
to cherish the wish that getting work done could come
down to conscientious analysis.
A Class on the Politics of Planning
A few weeks after the diversity seminar, I was surprised to
consider how typical academic practices may have taught
these students to think and react as they did. I was teaching
a class on the politics of planning, using John Forester’s
(1989) Planning in the Face of Power. I heard myself
speaking increasingly apologetically of the classical rational
model as a context for the book. I wondered out loud
whether this model meant much to my students. I explained
why I mentioned it. First, it was part of the intellectual
history of planning, including my own education, and it was
a reference point for subsequent analysis of planners’
actions. Second, I told my students, if I were still using
Altshuler’s (1965) case studies of Minneapolis and St. Paul,
they could have seen planners who, indeed, believed they
were enacting the classical model. Third, I suggested they
might work with planners who adhered to the rational
model.
I turned back to Forester’s (1989) framework in which he
characterizes four conditions of boundedness that contrast
with the classical rational model. Significantly, my students
had trouble with the concept of boundedness. I put it into
intellectual context, summarizing March and Simon (1958;
March 1982).
I reviewed Forester’s four conditions of boundedness.
When only cognitive limits bound the possibilities of
planning or acting rationally (Bounded I), a single, though
fallible, actor works in a single room, but one open to the
environment, working on an ambiguous problem with
imperfect information in a limited time. The practical
strategy is satisficing. When social differentiation enters
(Bounded II), the situation is further bounded: there are
132
several actors and several rooms, though connected by
phones; problems are subject to interpretation; information
varies in quality, accessibility, and location; and actors have
different amounts of time. Networking is an important
strategy.
In a pluralistic world (Bounded III), actors are part of
competing interest groups, operating in many rooms with
multiple definitions of problems, manipulating information,
and treating time as a source of power. Practical strategies
are negotiating, mediating, and acting incrementally. When
great inequalities in power create structural distortions in
society (Bounded IV), actors differ in power, work in rooms
of different value, define problems ideologically, deliberately
misinform others, and have unequal control over time. The
practical strategy for the less powerful is to organize.
In that context, I turned to our curriculum. It offered
students a great deal of advice about how to act in Bounded
I situations and some for Bounded II. We said little to our
students about how to act as planners when they worked in
situations of many competing actors. We occasionally told
our students that negotiating, lobbying, organizing, working
with groups, and the like were important, but we did not
teach these skills. We seemed tacitly to be teaching our
students that planning is similar to doing research.
Planning programs vary. Some give careful attention to
skills for Bounded III and even Bounded IV situations. But
in many programs, faculty members who do mainly
research, and who have chosen to teach rather than practice
planning, are the tacit models of practice given students.
They have selected academic life for various reasons. One is
pleasure in manipulating ideas. Another is a taste for
working autonomously. Still another, consistent with these,
is wanting to avoid involvement in the kinds of messy
situations planning practice includes.
In the end, most academics model a practice that,
enacted in planning, would incorporate several of the
classical rational assumptions. As researchers, particularly
when using secondary and quantitative data, they offer
understandings of the world without much direct contact
with it. To say this is not to denigrate the value of such
research. However, simply to teach and illustrate research
methods without showing how to use research in planning
practice suggests that information utilization is mysterious,
spontaneous, magical, or someone else’s concern. By and
large, academics imply that intellectual analysis, without
emotionally implicated social interaction, suffices for
influence (see Baum in press).
In addition, in working independently-one person
concerned with housing, another with economic develop-
ment, another with urban design, and so forth-academics
model the sectoral segregation and social differentiation that
Etzioni (1968) identifies with rationality. Following the
practice of academic specialization, faculty suggest that one
can understand the environment without thinking about
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health, education without the economy, and so forth.
Planning faculty members differ in their academic
practices. Some work with public agencies or community
groups. Still, much of what they do as salaried professionals
tacitly teaches the rational view that it is possible to under-
stand and make decisions about the social world without
direct involvement.
This view fosters the assumption that one can control the
world from a distance-recall the Minneapolis and St. Paul
planners. We and our students might collude in maintain-
ing this illusion because it offers reassurance that one can
plan without being vulnerable to the dangers of the world,
including others’ power. We might hold onto this belief, as
well, because it allows us to avoid responsibility for social
events. These are premises of the clockwork.
. THE RATIONAL PARADIGM AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL
ASSUMPTION
Interpreting the Stories
As a guide for collecting and analyzing information, the
rational model has virtues. Generally interpreted, it encour-
ages planners to collect a great deal of information to
understand an issue. It tells them to set goals in terms of
identified problems. It calls on planners to justify recom-
mendations in terms of the ends they are expected to serve
and to choose among alternatives on the basis of explicit
criteria.
Problems with the rational model arise from accompany-
ing assumptions concerning the practitioner that are part of
the model’s cultural
origins and history. The model
encourages planners to think of themselves as living in a
world of information without human beings, where the task
is to organize information logically, but not to organize
people (who have information, ideas, and interests) politi-
cally. A model rational planner who follows rational
guidelines for analyzing problems will see situations
abstractly, narrowly, and superficially and will likely fail to
understand what social conditions mean to the people who
live them. As a result, the planner may recommend inter-
ventions that do not fit these conditions and harm people
who might be helped. Urban renewal is the prototypical
example.
Hence, one might argue, planning teachers should
admonish students to take the virtues of the analytic model
without the constraints of the practitioner model. Such a
view assumes rationality is simply a set of abstract ideas or
intellectual premises that people can freely choose to hold or
leave aside. However, talk of a rational paradigm reflects our
learning from Kuhn (1962) that we participate in cultures
that lead us to take a particular way of thinking as the
normal approach to understanding and acting. We do so
not only because the paradigm makes sense of the matters

about which we are concerned, but also because following
the paradigm gives us meaningful relations with others who
do so.
Dalton (1986) described how social institutions reflect
and reinforce culturally normal rational principles. Planners
claim to act rationally even if they do not believe they do,
because the prevailing model of a professional emphasizes
disinterested scientific knowledge. Planning academics focus
on producing many publications and, perhaps incidentally,
give their students little personal attention, because bureau-
cratic university administrators evaluate subordinates
quantitatively.
Both examples express the common principles that actors
should have no personal involvement with those around
them. A good planner is one who has no personal interests
and who follows strict scientific norms whenever interven-
ing in the social world. A good university administrator does
not allow feelings about or general impressions of faculty
members to affect judgments about tenure or promotion
and, either by intention or just as a result of demanding so
much of faculty members, discourages them from getting to
know their students personally.
In Dalton’s (1986) analysis these are unfortunate
examples of how planners and academics are forced to act
inauthentically. If only they were free, practitioners would
make intuitive, subjective, personal judgments with a clear
conscience and publicly confess these deeds. Academics
would spend more time with their students and in their
work would embrace the messiness of society and planning
practice.
The stories I have recounted shadow something more
complicated. Not only do institutions incorporate social
pressures to follow the rational model, but many people
choose to follow it for psychological reasons unrelated to its
ostensive focus on solving substantive problems. They try to
enact it because its tacit model of social relations-rather,
nonrelations-offers safety from risky reality.
The diversity colloquium participants are practitioners
who accept the messiness of the world where they work. In
contrast, the business school students openly retreat from a
world that is frightening, and the planning students appear
to do the same. A psychological reading of these stories
would suggest that the culturally normal rational paradigm
offers a ready, unconscious defense against the anxieties this
messiness arouses.
If community groups are hostile, if bosses put agency
politics above rigorous analysis, if coworkers duplicitously
do not share information, taking the rational view that
planning is simply abstract analysis eliminates these
concerns and the feelings they evoke. This approach helps to
reconcile one’s responsibilities with one’s limited authority.
In fantasy, it extricates a planner from an uncontrollable,
perhaps upsetting, situation. It may help to avoid getting
angry, as well as making new problems by acting angrily. In
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133
fantasy, it also takes revenge on political actors by eliminat-
ing them.
Research on Planners
Research on planning practitioners supports this interpre-
tation. Hoch’s (1988) survey of American planners found
that many considered politics dangerous. Fifty-six percent
reported a seriously threatening political conflict during
their career, with 40% of conflicts pitting politics against
planning, 17% involving political loyalty, 14% raising
ethical disputes, and 14% involving political &dquo;squeezes.&dquo;
Eighty-three percent considered their antagonist stronger
than they were.
Sixty percent said they tried to prevent conflict, but only
a third were successful. When conflict broke out, planners
believed they won only 37% of the time, with their antago-
nists winning 40% of the time. Significantly, when planners
won, they credited their professional work, but when they
lost, they felt no responsibility and, instead, blamed
opponents for political strategizing. In other words, they
wanted to succeed as rational practitioners, and they saw
politics as a dangerous violation of the rational model.
Vasu (1979), also surveying a national sample, found
many planners who, after recognizing the social and political
realities of practice, chose technical rational roles. On the
one hand, 78% saw the
planning process as value oriented,
rather than technical. As the 88% who said no plan is
neutral emphasized, planning requires judging among
competing interests. And 88% argued that public planning
should be concerned with physical, economic, and social
planning-in contrast with the segregated, differentiated
rational ideal.
Yet at the same time 53%, many of them among the
large majorities in the first groups, asserted that comprehen-
sive rational planning by government is possible; that,
despite plural values and interests, planners can identify
courses of action which most or all support. And 48%
argued that planners should take technical roles defined by
neutral judgment of the public interest and apolitical
professionalism-in short, the rational model.3 Where
values are at stake, where neutrality is impossible, and where
conflict is likely, it seems safer to claim to be a rational
technician.
Schon (1983) found a planner working with a zoning
board of appeals taking just this approach. In moving
between board and developers, he tried to find designs that
satisfied both parties, along with his own standards.
However, to maximize his autonomy and control, he told
each that he was only interpreting rules, that he had no
discretion to negotiate. Engaged in covert politics, he
presented himself as a technician. He was practicing what
Argyris and Schon (1974; Argyris 1982) call a Model I
theory-in-use, that emphasizes unilaterally setting and
pursuing goals, conceptualizing situations in terms of
134
winning and losing, discouraging negative feelings, and
being rational (objective, intellectual, and unemotional).
Argyris and Schon (1974) have found Model I among
many planners. They consider it defensive in the ordinary
political sense this planner had in mind. In addition, they
find people choose it for psychological reasons-to defend
themselves against seeming wrong, imperfect, or uncertain.
Even though this rational way of acting succeeds fairly as a
psychological defense, it defeats efforts to plan. The planner
with the zoning board so convinced a developer not to try to
negotiate with a technician, the planner failed to discover a
compromise that would have satisfied the developer and
himself, and the developer withdrew his proposal. Both lost.
By keeping planners from the social and political
conditions affecting decisions, the rational practitioner
model provides psychological reassurance, but at the risk of
ineffectiveness.
N CONCLUSION
The speakers on diversity illustrate an alternative to the
rational model of planning. While they reason carefully
about issues, they do not shy away from either messy
problems or messy situations. They trust their intuition.
They recognize others’ feelings and their own-both that
they influence thinking and action and that they can express
reasonable responses to situations. They try to work
collaboratively even when others resist, but they are also
willing to organize against those who oppose them.
They are unusual,4 but not unique. They are not always
successful, and anyone might disagree with some of their
decisions. But they embrace the social and political world in
the rational spirit of trying to understand carefully, and they
succeed often enough. They are examples Dalton would
approve. And yet-this was her puzzle-why do so many
others follow the rational paradigm?
We can suggest one more answer to Dalton’s (1986)
question about &dquo;the persistence of the rational paradigm&dquo; by
clarifying the question. Planners continue to endorse at least
the spirit of the rational analytic model, not only because it
supports claims of professional status, but also because it
emphasizes the fundamental principle of guiding action by
knowledge. There is no puzzle here.
Many planners, further, try to convince themselves they
strictly follow the letter of the rational analytic model by
being model rational practitioners. Dalton (1986) asks why
planners not only espouse, but also embrace, a discredited
model of analysis and decision making. Some, she explains,
do so under institutional duress. But others-this is the
import of the stories, consistent with research on planners-
do so because of the psychological benefits of being-really,
trying to be-a model rational practitioner.
That rational model offers psychological safety. Hence we
should recast Dalton’s question: how can we enable planners
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more securely to struggle with the messiness of societal
problems?
Recently, most of our faculty became involved in research
and planning with local communities, and students work
with Thus part of the time we are in the messy world of
us.
practice, and students see and interact with us in new ways.
We have not changed our formal curriculum, though this
new practice might encourage us to do so. What we are
doing is new for us and not unique, but, as in other
programs that do similarly, it holds out one possible answer
to the question. When faculty members and students
engage
in planning, if they can examine what they do, both may
learn more about mastering the difficulties of practice.
Howell S. Baum
Howell S. Baum as Professor of Urban Studies and Planmng at Unwerstty of
Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742 USA.
. NOTES
1. Alexander (1992), Etzioni (1968), Faludi (1973), and Friedmann
(1987) offer similar summaries.
2. Two rich exceptions are Hoch (1995) and Rubin (1994).
3. Other research methods have led to different findings. Baum (1983)
found 60% of a sample of Maryland planners to describe their
planning as primarily an intellectual process. Howe and Kaufman
(1979), asking planners about their beliefs, found 27% of a national
sample to be technicians and 51% hybrids, combining technical and
political role conceptions. It is less fruitful to try to reconcile these
findings, because the methods vary, than it is to make sense of
differences between what the same planners told Vasu (1979) they
believed in general but wanted for themselves in particular. See
Baum (1986, 1988) for analysis of the empirical literature.
4. It is impossible to make firm generalizations about how common
such behavior is, but evidence that these practitioners are atypical
comes from Krumholz and Forester’s (1990) observations on
practitioners and Baum’s (1986) review of research on planners.
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exceptional in its physical and cultural complexity. It follows
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Schön, D. A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner
. New York: Basic Books.
Schwartz, H. S. 1990. Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay. New York: the older cities; and revitalizing and diversifying the
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Simon, H. A. 1976. Administrative Behavior
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Vasu, M. 1979. Politics and Planning
. Chapel Hill: University of North objectives of the EU-to establish and maintain a common
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Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. growth; and to allow the free movements of goods, people,
services and capital-were rarely given due attention until
the second half of the 1980s. Since then the EU has adopted
the explicit objective to reduce regional disparities, and over
the last 10 years, understanding of the spatial dimension of
economic and political change in Europe has steadily
increased.
Each country in the EU has responded to the problems of
spatial development in its own way, creating a bewildering
variety of planning procedures, policies, and instruments
across different countries and even regions. But increasingly,

the need for supranational coordination of these actions is

being argued. This is particularly so for the European
Commission (the executive body of the EU), whose actions
are already having great influence, directly and indirectly, on

the planning and environmental protection policies of

member states, a process which will inevitably increase in
future years (Davies and Gosling 1994).

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