75th Anniversary Article Jonathan Bendor, having earned all of his degrees in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, took a job at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in 1979. He is now Walter and Elise Haas Professor of Political Economics and Organizations there and professor of political science, by courtesy. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1999–2000 and 2004–05. E-mail: bendor_jonathan@gsb.stanford.edu 194 Public Administration Review • March | April 2015 Public Administration Review, Vol. 75, Iss. 2, pp. 194–205. © 2015 by The American Society for Public Administration. DOI: 10.1111/puar.12333. Jonathan Bendor Stanford University Woodhouse and Collingwood’s claim is accurate, but Bendor’s is badly off the mark in an important respect: although disjointed incrementalism no longer exists as a clearly identified approach to policy making, its components, especially the “Big Tree” (local search, iterative adaptation, and the distributed intelligence of multiple minds) are flourishing, especially in applied fields such as computer science and operations research. Tis is relevant for an assessment of “Muddling Trough” because that paper is a work of applied theory. Indeed, virtually all of Lindblom’s work from 1958 to 1963—“Policy Analysis” (1958), “Muddling Trough” (1959), “Decision-Making in Taxation and Expenditure” (1961), and Strategy of Decision (Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963)—was applied theory, as were significant parts of Te Intelligence of Democracy (1965) and Te Policy-Making Process (1968). We have misunderstood what he was about. 2 More importantly, we have misunderstood what applied theory is and what its role in public administration might be. Our collective confusion partly explains why this vital part of Lindblom’s work, though much cited, did not produce a vibrant research program. Incrementalism: Dead yet Flourishing Editor’s Note: Tis 75th anniversary essay revisits the most cited, reprinted and downloaded article in the history of PAR. Charles Lindblom’s “Te Science of ‘Muddling Trough’” looked critically at synoptic decision making and introduced a new strategy, disjointed incrementalism, into the social science lexicon. In an insightful analysis, Professor Jonathan Bendor examines Lindblom’s classic article and the aftermath of the applied theories it advanced. JLP Abstract: Charles Lindblom’s 1959 essay “Te Science of ‘Muddling Trough’” is best known for the strategy of deci- sion making—disjointed incrementalism—that it recommended. Tat famous paper and Lindblom’s related work also provided two theories: a critique of the conventional method (the synoptic approach) and an argument for using incrementalism instead. Both are applied theories: they are designed to help solve complex policy problems. Lindblom’s negative applied theory has stood the test of time well: the empirical foundations of its main micro-component (cogni- tive constraints of individuals) and its central macro-component (the impact of preference conflict on policy mak- ing) have grown stronger since 1959. Te picture regarding the positive applied theory is more mixed. As a coherent decision-making strategy, disjointed incrementalism has almost disappeared. Yet its key elements, the major heuristics identified in “Muddling Trough,” are thriving in many applied fields. Intriguingly, they are often accompanied by subroutines—especially optimization as a choice rule—typically associated with the synoptic approach. C harles Lindblom’s “Te Science of ‘Muddling Trough’” (1959) is one of the most famous papers published in the Public Administration Review. Long a cornerstone of organization theory, it has been reprinted in more than 40 anthologies, and as of March 14, 2014, Google Scholar reported 8,431 citations, which makes it one of the most cited articles in the fields of public administration, organization theory, and bureaucracy. Tough estimating impact is an uncertain business, it seems clear that “Muddling Trough” has had a substantial influence on several generations of scholars. Today, however, it is a spent intellectual force. Even a casual reading of the literature in public administra- tion and organization theory indicates that the idea of disjointed incrementalism as a coherent strategy of decision making is not discussed much. More than 20 years ago, two sympathetic scholars asserted that incrementalism “has not spawned a lively research tradition leading to cumulative refinement and amplification of the core concepts (Woodhouse and Collingridge 1993, 131); a few years later, another scholar stated that “incrementalism’s fate has been [to] just fade away” (Bendor 1995, 819). 1