The privatization idea may have lost some of its luster in recent years, but it remains relevant in today's socio-economic environment and is pursued consistently in industrialized and industrializing countries alike. Hong Kong has followed the general pattern in a manner reflecting its particular circumstances and its institutional modus operandi. The underlying logic may not appear highly compelling, from a short-term perspective, yet there are sound grounds for approaching the task positively, if viewed from a multi-year standpoint. Rather surprisingly, for such a quintessentially capitalist society, Hong Kong has not confronted the privatization challenge astutely on the political front and has handled it somewhat mechanically in managerial terms. The benefits to the community may have thus been more modest than one could legitimately expect, given the historical backdrop.

An increasing number of public managers in Hong Kong, usually but not exclusively in the middle stages of their careers, are returning to universities in order to broaden and deepen their knowledge of administrative processes and, for practical reasons, enhance their career prospects. A minority choose an MBA course, but the majority take the MP A route. While the requirements for the former vary, the latter can seldom be completed without writing a dissertation. Such an undertaking carries the expectation of generating empirically-based insights (a purely theoretical exercise seems to be the exception to the rule in programmes where practitioners participate on a meaningful scale).Mature students, with reasonable management experience, tend to gravitate towards topics which allow them to capitalise on their direct exposure to specific areas of administrative activity. This is a conservative strategy, enabling them to minimise risk and marshal limited resources effectively, but it need not be regarded as devoid of academic value because the projects pursued invariably have to be embedded in a sound theoretical framework. The juxtaposition of management realities with established models may even lead, on occasion, to a modest, yet valuable refinement of the latter.Injecting bits of theory into administrative experience should not pose serious navigational problems. However, this is not always the case. An adequate grasp of social science methodology, broadly defined, is usually required in order to complete the journey smoothly. Most public managers who resume their university education simply do not have the proper training and, those who do, normally need to be retrained. To design courses that meet this objective is a feasible task, if not necessarily an easy one. A number of textbooks have been specifically written to minimise the difficulties (e.g. O'Sullivan and Rassel, 1995).

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Decision making in the public domain, particularly at the strategic level, is as challenging as that in the private realm, perhaps even more so in some respects. The difficulties confronting actors in such a setting stem from many sources, most of them reasonably well understood and explored in a fairly systematic fashion. There are however exceptions to the rule. Uncertainty probably falls into this category in that it does not loom large on the public policy research and teaching agendas; indeed, the subject only surfaces occasionally and selectively.The limited attention accorded to uncertainty in the literature (and, by implication, in the field), as well as the classroom, cannot be an accurate reflection of its state in the external or internal organisational environment of the public sector because of its pervasive nature and profound impact on decision outcomes. Rather, it may be attributable to the perception that this is an elusive concept and perhaps one of the strictly technical variety. Whatever the underlying factors, there is arguably a need, on both purely academic and general pedagogical grounds, to place the subject on a firmer footing and that is purpose of the present paper. Conceptual UnderpinningsAt the intuitive level, the notion of uncertainty does not pose serious difficulties. One may comfortably, albeit not necessarily with a high degree of precision, equate it with imperfect knowledge and proceed accordingly in exploring its ramifications (at this level, largely of a practical nature). Uncertainty in that context may be viewed as a 'residual' (what economists term a 'coefficient of ignorance') which defies explanation given prevailing institutional and technological constraints. Imperfect knowledge, and the uncertainty associated with it is, of course, a prominent feature of policy making.The problem essentially manifests itself in two forms. First, actors in the public arena cannot be entirely confident about the validity of the information at their disposal. In addition, that information is often incomplete, particularly from a forward-looking perspective. The second source of uncertainty renders strategy formulation a rather tentative exercise. The reason for this lies in the fact that policy direction is, inter alia, a function of the available information.