The sociological investigation of public policy continues to be plagued by scholarly adherence to a conventional framework that reifies the policy process as a set of segmented and sequential stages. To overcome this problem, policy is presented as the processual, ongoing practical accomplishment of the transformation of intentions. Within this framework, the realization of intentions is shown as both constrained and enabled by (1) organizational context and conventions, (2) linkages between multiple sites and phases of the policy process, (3) the mobilization of resources, and (4) a dynamic and multifaceted conceptualization of power.Public policy has been of significant interest to sociologists since the discipline emerged with a pervasive social reform orientation in the late nineteenth century. Over the last thirty years such sociological and social scientific scholarship has influenced the formulation of numerous policies and programs by analyzing their contexts, processes, and consequences. While such efforts have been constructive and the resulting literature instructive, the contributions of this work have been limited. The single greatest limitation has been the acceptance of a view of policy that structures and distorts the reality of policy production. The continued acceptance of this conventional framework belies the messy, complex, and dynamic nature of the policy process. The conventional framework for the study of policy utilizes what Paul Sabatier and HankJenkins-Smith (1993) characterize as the "textbook approach." Using a stages heuristic, the policy process is depicted as a set of segmented, separated, functionally sequenced stages. Typical stages are agenda setting, formulation, enactment, implementation, evaluation, and feedback. The conventional model has a commonsense institutional logic to it that highlights the emergence of problems, debate about alternatives, legislative action, bureaucratic implementation, impact analysis, and calculations about continuance/alteration, in that irreversible order. It has the appearance of a planning rationality that reinforces democratic theory and legitimates technocratic authority.

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In the social sciences, power and control are typically conceptualized in terms of the capacity or right of one agent (individual or collective) to get another agent to act in some specified way or even to act against her own will (Max Weber). In various ways, the most prominent contemporary analyses (for instance, Peter Blau and Robert Dahl, among others) view power as principally one actor's control of the behavior of another actor. This approach to power captures only a limited part of the phenomenon. In reaction, Talcott Parsons (1963) redefined power as mobilization of resources to achieve collective goals, and broadened the concept to include cooperative efforts and larger institutional venues. While an improvement, this too missed key aspects involving groups, organizations, and states.

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