Grant Jordan
Biographic Data
| ID | 4128624 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Grant Jordan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Grant |
| FAMILY NAME | Jordan |
| SIGNATURE | JORDAN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Aberdeen |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 689 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Theories of the policy process: What is British and what is universal? A polite reply to Marsh and McCaffrie
What is the ‘dominant model’ of British policymaking? Comparing majoritarian and policy community ideas
Editors’ statement
Interpreting Environments: Interest Group Response to Population Ecology Pressures
Important articles in this Journal by Nownes in 2004 and Nownes and Lipinksi in 2005 demonstrate that ‘population ecology’ approaches are now central to interest group studies. Partly at least this move to study at population level is a consequence of the numbers of such organizations. Party scholars typically deal with far fewer cases and sui generis discussion is more defensible. Ecology seems to offer a ‘handle’ on the thousands of cases that …
Democracy and Interest Groups: Enhancing Participation?
Democracy and Interest Groups assesses the contribution that interest groups make to the democratic involvement of citizens and the generation of social capital. The authors draw on new surveys of gro
Policy Without Learning: Double Devolution and Abuse of the Deliberative Idea
This article asserts that the current ‘Double Devolution’ idea in the UK is part of a wider fashion in political architecture that generally sees the emergence of larger units. Simultaneously though there is a political need for gestures to smaller scale units and more deliberative procedures. The article argues that the Double Devolution concept simply ignores a rising volume of evidence that finds problems in operationalizing small-scale and de…
The Political Costs of Policy Coherence: Constructing a Rural Policy for Scotland
It is not hard to find the complaint that a group of policies are incoherent, operate in silos or are unintegrated. The aspiration to coherence is widespread across all political systems: it is today's idea in good currency. Scholarship has identified conditions that support coherence: a strong constituency with a shared policy image. This article confirms that these are vital sources of more or less coherence, but explores the question of whethe…
Bringing Policy Communities Back In? A Comment on Grant
Defining Interests: Disambiguation and the Need for New Distinctions
This article notes the systemic lack of conceptual clarity in the social sciences and attempts to illustrate the adverse consequences by closer examination of the particular example of the interest group field. It indicates the significant ambiguities implicit in the term. Not all policy-influencing organisations are interest groups as normally understood, but because there is a lack of an appropriate label the term interest group is used by defa…
Olson Triumphant? Recruitment Strategies and the Growth of a Small Business Organisation
This article looks at the emergence and maintenance of interest groups. We systematically identify a range of membership incentives that underpin mobilisation and apply them to a case study, the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), focusing on the recruitment literature rather than the special niche literature on trade associations. The FSB was created in 1974 and membership was ‘flat’ at about 40,000 until recruiting method changes were introdu…
Cultivating small business influence in the UK: The federation of small businesses' journey from outsider to insider
This case study charts the classic transformation of a small business organisation from being a vehicle of protest that attracted a reasonable but transient membership into a much larger group with a more stable membership and a group with an effective insider policy style. The paper asserts that the change in style and the change in recruiting success are not causally linked, and, indeed, it claims that an insider style may harm recruiting. In t…
Political Parties and Interest Groups: Shaping Democratic Governance
This benchmark study of the political party–interest group relationship—crucial in shaping the characteristics of democratic political systems—provides an in-depth analysis of the connection between special interests and political parties across thirteen democracies: Argentina, Britain, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States.
The Process of Government and the Governmental Process
This review finds little utility in Bentley's famous The Process of Government. It is asserted that his book is cited as a primary source of interest group writing, but in fact, the review argues, that this prominence is given mainly by those who want to criticise the interest group orientation. Critics commonly misinterpret the group approach as meaning that policy is the outcome of an interest group struggle: such critics seem to find in Bentle…
Science and Scepticism: Expertise and Political Decisions
The relevance of Bentley for group theory: Founding father or mistaken identity
A. F. Bentley’s The Process of Government (1908) is widely accepted as an important source of contemporary interest group study. This paper argues to the contrary that Bentley’s arguments in this area are obscure and have contributed little to the programme of modern interest group research. His importance is as a contributor to the debate on the nature of social science and social science method and not as the starting-point for interest group a…
Indirect Causes And Effects In Policy Change: The Brent Spar Case
This article discusses the occupation of an oil‐related structure called the Brent Spar in the British sector of the North Sea by Greenpeace protesters in 1995. Shell intended to ‘dump’ the buoy in the deep North Atlantic. The aftermath of the occupation and associated publicity was a change of policy about the disposal of the Spar by Shell, Europe’s largest multinational company. The article considers alternative explanations for policy change –…
Accounting for Sub Governments: Explaining the Persistence of Policy Communities
The article begins by comparing the use of terms such as policy community and sub government by different authors and in different (JS. and UK) political science traditions. Although accepting the major body of work that points to the erosion of sub governments, the authors argue that too much emphasis on the complexity and volatility of policy making masks underlying tendencies to stability and bargaining The need for the resolution of conflict …
How Bumble-Bees Fly: Accounting for Public Interest Participation
This paper confirms the existence of public interest groups as a theoretical puzzle for an Olson type (economically-driven) rational choice explanation. It systematically reviews different theoretical approaches that challenge this appearance of paradox. The paper also introduces some British survey data. It concludes that rational choice analysis must subsume non-material incentives, but shows that discussions predicated on conceptions of ration…
Policy Networks Expanded: A Comment on Cavanagh, Marsh and Smith
Consultation, commissions and local government reform in Scotland and Wales: Is the issue the process or the product
Recurring Issues in Scottish Local Government Reform
This article examines the political pressures affecting local government reorgan isation in Scotland. It highlights conflicts over reform between local and central government, within political parties and within the local government environment itself. It concludes that such tensions are inevitable in any reform process. The Government entered the reform process in 1991 believing that there was a consensus on single-tier. In fact, whereas there w…
Ships in the Night: Scottish Political Parties and Local Government Reform
The departure of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 opened up the opportunity for a re-examination of the local government structure. Influenced by Michael Heseltine, one of the first decisions taken by the Major administration was to review the potential for structural change. In England, a rolling commission was established under the chairmanship of Sir John Banham, while in Scotland and Wales, ministerial reviews were conducted following lengthy consul…
Reinventing Government’: But Will It Work
Characterizing Agricultural Policy‐making
This article examines the contemporary agricultural policy‐making environment in Britain and suggests that the growing complexity of interest articulation and policy making has eroded NFU dominance as a peak association. We would suggest that it is this clientelistic attitude to agriculture rather than a specific relationship with one interest group (however influential) that shapes the agricultural agenda. This article rejects a version of event…
Interest Groups and Public Policy: The Insider/Outsider Model Revisited
This paper examines the place of groups in the consultative process in British policymaking. It stresses the importance of consultation even under the Thatcher government and distinguishes between consultation, bargaining and negotiation. The paper identifies the important divide between the relatively few groups with privileged status and the greater number of groups who find themselves consigned to less influential positions. The discussion rev…
Interest Groups and Public Policy: The Insider/Outsider Model Revisited
This paper examines the place of groups in the consultative process in British policymaking. It stresses the importance of consultation even under the Thatcher government and distinguishes between consultation, bargaining and negotiation. The paper identifies the important divide between the relatively few groups with privileged status and the greater number of groups who find themselves consigned to less influential positions. The discussion rev…
Sub-Governments, Policy Communities and Networks: Refilling the Old Bottles
This article discusses the relationship between the new British literature on policy communities and the older US sub-government approach. It notes the importance of the difference between stable and ad hoc networks, and points to the need to develop further a range of types of policy-making structures
A preliminary ordering of policy network labels
This introduction seeks to sketch out the relationship between a variety of terms that are used in contemporary discussion of the interaction between Government/State and interest groups. It starts with a short reflection on the main theories of interest intermediation — pluralism and corporatism — and argues for reserving the term policy network as a generic label embracing different types of network relationship. This piece thus attempts to rec…
Defining Interests: Disambiguation and the Need for New Distinctions
This article notes the systemic lack of conceptual clarity in the social sciences and attempts to illustrate the adverse consequences by closer examination of the particular example of the interest group field. It indicates the significant ambiguities implicit in the term. Not all policy-influencing organisations are interest groups as normally understood, but because there is a lack of an appropriate label the term interest group is used by defa…
Corporate Lobbying in the European Community
Policy Community Realism versus ‘New’ Institutionalist Ambiguity
There has been widespread interest in the term ‘institution’ within political science in the past five years. Two principal uses of this are identified. The first is associated with the policy community literature and in this sense the institution is an extra-constitutional policy-making arrangement between ministries and clientelistic groups. The second use of the term is associated with state-centred authors who wish to argue for the relative a…
Interpreting Environments: Interest Group Response to Population Ecology Pressures
Important articles in this Journal by Nownes in 2004 and Nownes and Lipinksi in 2005 demonstrate that ‘population ecology’ approaches are now central to interest group studies. Partly at least this move to study at population level is a consequence of the numbers of such organizations. Party scholars typically deal with far fewer cases and sui generis discussion is more defensible. Ecology seems to offer a ‘handle’ on the thousands of cases that …
The Political Costs of Policy Coherence: Constructing a Rural Policy for Scotland
It is not hard to find the complaint that a group of policies are incoherent, operate in silos or are unintegrated. The aspiration to coherence is widespread across all political systems: it is today's idea in good currency. Scholarship has identified conditions that support coherence: a strong constituency with a shared policy image. This article confirms that these are vital sources of more or less coherence, but explores the question of whethe…
The Pluralism of Pluralism: An Anti-Theory
Characterizing Agricultural Policy‐making
This article examines the contemporary agricultural policy‐making environment in Britain and suggests that the growing complexity of interest articulation and policy making has eroded NFU dominance as a peak association. We would suggest that it is this clientelistic attitude to agriculture rather than a specific relationship with one interest group (however influential) that shapes the agricultural agenda. This article rejects a version of event…
Accounting for Sub Governments: Explaining the Persistence of Policy Communities
The article begins by comparing the use of terms such as policy community and sub government by different authors and in different (JS. and UK) political science traditions. Although accepting the major body of work that points to the erosion of sub governments, the authors argue that too much emphasis on the complexity and volatility of policy making masks underlying tendencies to stability and bargaining The need for the resolution of conflict …
How Bumble-Bees Fly: Accounting for Public Interest Participation
This paper confirms the existence of public interest groups as a theoretical puzzle for an Olson type (economically-driven) rational choice explanation. It systematically reviews different theoretical approaches that challenge this appearance of paradox. The paper also introduces some British survey data. It concludes that rational choice analysis must subsume non-material incentives, but shows that discussions predicated on conceptions of ration…
What is the ‘dominant model’ of British policymaking? Comparing majoritarian and policy community ideas
Pluralistic Corporatisms and Corporate Pluralism
This discussion acknowledges that interest group ‐ governmental relations deserve further study, but argues that the corporatist literature of the last decade has failed to give useful guidance to the research. One major complaint concerns the hostility in many of the sources to pluralist analysis. As critiques, these attacks have been too shallow to be defended as constructive debate and in dismissing pluralist writings important insights into g…
Reinventing Government’: But Will It Work
Olson Triumphant? Recruitment Strategies and the Growth of a Small Business Organisation
This article looks at the emergence and maintenance of interest groups. We systematically identify a range of membership incentives that underpin mobilisation and apply them to a case study, the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), focusing on the recruitment literature rather than the special niche literature on trade associations. The FSB was created in 1974 and membership was ‘flat’ at about 40,000 until recruiting method changes were introdu…
Bringing Policy Communities Back In? A Comment on Grant
Policy Without Learning: Double Devolution and Abuse of the Deliberative Idea
This article asserts that the current ‘Double Devolution’ idea in the UK is part of a wider fashion in political architecture that generally sees the emergence of larger units. Simultaneously though there is a political need for gestures to smaller scale units and more deliberative procedures. The article argues that the Double Devolution concept simply ignores a rising volume of evidence that finds problems in operationalizing small-scale and de…
Cultivating small business influence in the UK: The federation of small businesses' journey from outsider to insider
This case study charts the classic transformation of a small business organisation from being a vehicle of protest that attracted a reasonable but transient membership into a much larger group with a more stable membership and a group with an effective insider policy style. The paper asserts that the change in style and the change in recruiting success are not causally linked, and, indeed, it claims that an insider style may harm recruiting. In t…
Indirect Causes And Effects In Policy Change: The Brent Spar Case
This article discusses the occupation of an oil‐related structure called the Brent Spar in the British sector of the North Sea by Greenpeace protesters in 1995. Shell intended to ‘dump’ the buoy in the deep North Atlantic. The aftermath of the occupation and associated publicity was a change of policy about the disposal of the Spar by Shell, Europe’s largest multinational company. The article considers alternative explanations for policy change –…
Policy Networks Expanded: A Comment on Cavanagh, Marsh and Smith
Consultation, commissions and local government reform in Scotland and Wales: Is the issue the process or the product
Ships in the Night: Scottish Political Parties and Local Government Reform
The departure of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 opened up the opportunity for a re-examination of the local government structure. Influenced by Michael Heseltine, one of the first decisions taken by the Major administration was to review the potential for structural change. In England, a rolling commission was established under the chairmanship of Sir John Banham, while in Scotland and Wales, ministerial reviews were conducted following lengthy consul…
The relevance of Bentley for group theory: Founding father or mistaken identity
A. F. Bentley’s The Process of Government (1908) is widely accepted as an important source of contemporary interest group study. This paper argues to the contrary that Bentley’s arguments in this area are obscure and have contributed little to the programme of modern interest group research. His importance is as a contributor to the debate on the nature of social science and social science method and not as the starting-point for interest group a…
Insider Lobbying: The British Version
Grey Papers
Central Co‐ordination, Crossman and the Inner Cabinet
The Moray Firth Working Party: Performance’ Without ‘Conformance
The case was selected as being (reportedly) one of successful implementation: the interest was in the preconditions of success. To meet a forecast shortage of housing for oil‐related construction workers, the Scottish Development Department convened a working party on which it, eight local authorities, a representative of the local industrial lobby and various other relevant central government departments were involved. A joint programme was orga…
Pluralistic Corporatisms and Corporate Pluralism
This discussion acknowledges that interest group ‐ governmental relations deserve further study, but argues that the corporatist literature of the last decade has failed to give useful guidance to the research. One major complaint concerns the hostility in many of the sources to pluralist analysis. As critiques, these attacks have been too shallow to be defended as constructive debate and in dismissing pluralist writings important insights into g…
Corporate Pluralims and Corporatist Concertation
Parliament Under Pressure
The Private Worlds of Public Policy
Journal Article THE PRIVATE WORLDS OF PUBLIC POLICY Get access Grant Jordan Grant Jordan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 38, Issue 1, WINTER 1985, Pages 122–126, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a051971 Published: 01 January 1985
Scottish Scene (1984)
Journal Article SCOTTISH SCENE (1984) Get access Grant Jordan Grant Jordan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 38, Issue 2, SPRING 1985, Pages 259–260, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a051990 Published: 01 March 1985
Insider Lobbying: The British Version
Policy Community Realism versus ‘New’ Institutionalist Ambiguity
There has been widespread interest in the term ‘institution’ within political science in the past five years. Two principal uses of this are identified. The first is associated with the policy community literature and in this sense the institution is an extra-constitutional policy-making arrangement between ministries and clientelistic groups. The second use of the term is associated with state-centred authors who wish to argue for the relative a…
The Pluralism of Pluralism: An Anti-Theory
Sub-Governments, Policy Communities and Networks: Refilling the Old Bottles
This article discusses the relationship between the new British literature on policy communities and the older US sub-government approach. It notes the importance of the difference between stable and ad hoc networks, and points to the need to develop further a range of types of policy-making structures
A preliminary ordering of policy network labels
This introduction seeks to sketch out the relationship between a variety of terms that are used in contemporary discussion of the interaction between Government/State and interest groups. It starts with a short reflection on the main theories of interest intermediation — pluralism and corporatism — and argues for reserving the term policy network as a generic label embracing different types of network relationship. This piece thus attempts to rec…
Corporate Lobbying in the European Community
Ships in the Night: Scottish Political Parties and Local Government Reform
The departure of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 opened up the opportunity for a re-examination of the local government structure. Influenced by Michael Heseltine, one of the first decisions taken by the Major administration was to review the potential for structural change. In England, a rolling commission was established under the chairmanship of Sir John Banham, while in Scotland and Wales, ministerial reviews were conducted following lengthy consul…
Reinventing Government’: But Will It Work
Characterizing Agricultural Policy‐making
This article examines the contemporary agricultural policy‐making environment in Britain and suggests that the growing complexity of interest articulation and policy making has eroded NFU dominance as a peak association. We would suggest that it is this clientelistic attitude to agriculture rather than a specific relationship with one interest group (however influential) that shapes the agricultural agenda. This article rejects a version of event…
Interest Groups and Public Policy: The Insider/Outsider Model Revisited
This paper examines the place of groups in the consultative process in British policymaking. It stresses the importance of consultation even under the Thatcher government and distinguishes between consultation, bargaining and negotiation. The paper identifies the important divide between the relatively few groups with privileged status and the greater number of groups who find themselves consigned to less influential positions. The discussion rev…
From Next Steps to Market Testing: Administrative Reform as Improvisation
This paper considers the British Next Steps agency and market testing programmes. It argues that despite aggressive marketing by those involved the approaches have been improvised with no defensible and coherent philosophy. The policies are presented as complementary but they conflict in practice. The need for change is not documented
Policy Networks Expanded: A Comment on Cavanagh, Marsh and Smith
Consultation, commissions and local government reform in Scotland and Wales: Is the issue the process or the product
Recurring Issues in Scottish Local Government Reform
This article examines the political pressures affecting local government reorgan isation in Scotland. It highlights conflicts over reform between local and central government, within political parties and within the local government environment itself. It concludes that such tensions are inevitable in any reform process. The Government entered the reform process in 1991 believing that there was a consensus on single-tier. In fact, whereas there w…
How Bumble-Bees Fly: Accounting for Public Interest Participation
This paper confirms the existence of public interest groups as a theoretical puzzle for an Olson type (economically-driven) rational choice explanation. It systematically reviews different theoretical approaches that challenge this appearance of paradox. The paper also introduces some British survey data. It concludes that rational choice analysis must subsume non-material incentives, but shows that discussions predicated on conceptions of ration…
Accounting for Sub Governments: Explaining the Persistence of Policy Communities
The article begins by comparing the use of terms such as policy community and sub government by different authors and in different (JS. and UK) political science traditions. Although accepting the major body of work that points to the erosion of sub governments, the authors argue that too much emphasis on the complexity and volatility of policy making masks underlying tendencies to stability and bargaining The need for the resolution of conflict …
Indirect Causes And Effects In Policy Change: The Brent Spar Case
This article discusses the occupation of an oil‐related structure called the Brent Spar in the British sector of the North Sea by Greenpeace protesters in 1995. Shell intended to ‘dump’ the buoy in the deep North Atlantic. The aftermath of the occupation and associated publicity was a change of policy about the disposal of the Spar by Shell, Europe’s largest multinational company. The article considers alternative explanations for policy change –…
Political science (39 works) · Law (32 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Politics (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Economics (21 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (16 works) · Public Administration (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Positive economics (12 works)