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Bristol University Press Policy Press Chapter Title: The policy analysis profession in Canada Chapter Author(s): Stephen Brooks Book Title: Policy analysis in Canada Book Editor(s): Laurent Dobuzinskis, Michael Howlett Published by: Bristol University Press, Policy Press. (2018) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22rbkbb.7 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Bristol University Press, Policy Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Policy analysis in Canada This content downloaded from 137.122.8.73 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:31:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 25 Part I The profession of policy analysis in Canada This content downloaded from 137.122.8.73 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:31:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 137.122.8.73 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:31:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 27 TWO The policy analysis profession in Canada Stephen Brooks Introduction Almost 40 years ago Peter deLeon, editor of the journal Policy Sciences, made the following observation: Throughout the government and private sectors, one hardly finds any office that does not have a staff ‘policy analyst’. Newly graduated baccalaureates engrave that title on their business cards and many senior government officials view themselves primarily as analysts…Clearly, policy analysis can be seen as a growth stock. Yet the pervasiveness of the genre leads one to question the heritage, present condition, and future of the discipline and the profession. (deLeon, 1981, p. 1) Most of what deLeon wrote in his 1981 editorial remains true today. Although the number of people whose business cards proclaim them to be policy analysts is very difficult to determine, it is conceivable that in both Canada and the United States their numbers approach those for physicians or lawyers.1 The number of policy analysts has surely grown quite significantly since deLeon described policy analysis as a “growth stock”. However, the strong hint of scepticism that creeps into his conclusion is not entirely fair. I argue that the policy analysis profession is at least as influential as deLeon and other leaders of what was known as the policy sciences movement hoped it would become, but in ways that they did not expect and that probably would have disappointed them. Even the approximate size of the policy analysis community in Canada is unknown (Howlett, 2009). In this respect, it is quite different from the medical and legal professions which have about 80,000 (CMA, 2017) and 95,000 (FLSC, 2014) members,2 respectively. Unlike these professions and such others as accountants, engineers, teachers, and nurses, there is no required certification before one can be recognized by others as a policy analyst. This, of course, has to do with the fact that the policy analysis profession is not linked to any particular discipline. Someone whose business card proclaims him or her to be a policy analyst may have training in economics, criminology, public health, women’s studies, international security studies or any number of disciplinary backgrounds, some of which are by their very nature multidisciplinary. The path to the profession is much less clearly This content downloaded from 137.122.8.73 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:31:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 28 Policy analysis in Canada demarcated than is true of almost any other profession. Nevertheless, and despite the absence of a licensing or certification process or of standard and expected educational credentials, policy analysis has many of the defining characteristics that we have come to associate with a profession. These characteristics were described by Talcott Parsons, often thought of as the father of the modern study of the professions and their relationship to society and modernization, in his seminal 1939 article, “The Professions and Social Structure”. They include affective neutrality (the ability to be emotionally disengaged from a case or task, not bringing one’s personal feelings to bear); universalism (treating cases or clients the same, regardless of their particular attributes or backgrounds); collectivity orientation (this may be understood as the opposite of self-interestedness or, to put it differently, being motivated to serve the wider good); functional specificity (the professional focuses on those aspects of the case or client that are specifically related to his or her realm of technical expertise); and achievement orientation (the professional judges actions and colleagues according to notions of merit that are linked to achievement rather than ascriptive features of a person). Although professions existed in traditional societies, Parsons saw the modern professions as, in Thomas Brante’s words, “the major bearers and transmitters of rational values, and also of new technological knowledge which impels the economy forward. Hence they assume key positions in the modernization of society” (Brante, 1988, p. 120). Parsons’ early work on modern professions and the wider social and economic significance of professionalization has been followed by an enormous amount of research on the professions. Much of what has been written about professionalization is less concerned with how this process may be related to societal evolution and more concerned with identifying what this process involves and whether it has a typical set of characteristics or sequence of stages. For example, Harold Wilensky (1964, pp. 143–146) argues that the following events are typical of professionalization: 1. The task is done on a full-time basis, not by amateurs or people for whom it is not their primary employment. 2. A system for training professionals exists. 3. There has been an emergence of a professional association or associations that make claims to represent those in the profession and to regulate its standards. 4. Lobbying those in political authority is undertaken in order to have the exclusive competence of the profession recognized by law and to resist competition from other groups that seek to perform the same or similar functions to those in the profession. 5. There has been the development of a formal code of ethics that emphasizes the service ideal, which Parsons and many others have argued to be one of the defining characteristics of the professional person. This content downloaded from 137.122.8.73 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:31:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 29 The policy analysis profession in Canada Judged against the ideal types proposed by Parsons, I argue that policy analysts satisfy most of them. As a community of professionals, however, they do not meet most of the criteria that Wilensky maintains to be hallmarks of professionalization. Policy analysts represent a loose but identifiable community of professionals whose professionalization, as this is often understood, is incomplete. In this chapter I argue that the professionalization of policy analysis is usefully viewed as a cultural phenomenon that encompasses not only the expert’s relationship to the state and to various groups in society, but also the impact of policy experts on the popular consciousness and the general discourse within which more specialized policy discourses are situated. Viewed from this wider angle, the influence of policy analysts and their specialized knowledge have never been greater, not even during the post-World War II heyday of the mandarinate on the Rideau (Granatstein, 1982). In tracing the professionalization of policy analysis, I am concerned chiefly with how analysts and their craft have become embedded in our culture and governance, in the widest sense. Perspectives on the policy analysis profession The policy analysis profession may be viewed from three perspectives. We may label these the technical, political, and cultural perspectives. The first draws its inspiration from Max Weber’s work on modern bureaucracy and the ascendance of rationally based authority. The second perspective achieved prominence as a result of the Dreyfus Affair in France at the turn of the twentieth century, the starting point for the modern debate on the political role of intellectuals and, in particular, their relationship to the powerful. The third perspective can be traced to various sources, among whom Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Neil Postman are among the best known. It focuses attention on the symbolic meaning of the expert and expertise. This may be the least developed perspective but I believe that it also may be the most important. From the Weberian perspective, professionalization is a process of acquiring authority based on recognized expert credentials that may include formal training, degrees, certification, and particular types of experience. One’s status as a member of a profession depends on the possession of these credentials, and the profession’s collective authority rests on the willingness of others to acknowledge the special skills, knowledge and function of its membership. Economics is an obvious and important example of a field that underwent professionalization during the twentieth century. But social workers, criminologists, urban planners, ethicists, pollsters and a host of other groups have experienced a similar development. Professionalization in the Weberian sense is inextricably tied to the dynamic of modernization, a dynamic that is characterized by increasing levels of specialization and the displacement of traditional forms of authority by rational ones. Rational authority rests upon the cardinal importance of rules, not people. Under a rational system of domination, acts are legitimate or not depending on their correspondence to impersonal rules that exist apart from those who administer This content downloaded from 137.122.8.73 on Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:31:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 30 Policy analysis in Canada them. It is a social order under which bureaucrats and experts—elites whose judgements are, in Weber’s famous words, ‘without prejudice or passion’—occupy a dominant place. The modern state is, in the Weberian sense, a rational state. It has generated a need for experts whose special knowledge is indispensable to the activities of the state. The policy analysis profession is, from this perspective, an offshoot of the rationalization and bureaucratization of social relations, and the needs of the administrative state. It is not, however, exclusively the handmaiden of the state. Policy analysts are found