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)
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25
Part I
The profession of policy
analysis in Canada
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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
accalaureates 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, XXXXXXXXXXIn 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
e 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
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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
inging 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. Lo
ying 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.
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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
elationship 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
een greater, not even during the post-World War II heyday of the mandarinate
on the Rideau (Granatstein, XXXXXXXXXXIn 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
esult 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, Pie
e 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
ut 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, u
an 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
ational system of domination, acts are legitimate or not depending on their
co
espondence to impersonal rules that exist apart from those who administer
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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