some aspects of detroit's decisional profile

Some Aspects of Detroit's Decisional ProfileAuthor(s): Morris DavisSource: Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Sep., 1967), pp. 209-224Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Johnson Graduate School of Management,Cornell UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2391549 .

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Morris Davis

Some Aspects of

Detroit's Decisional Profile

This paper shows that public administration cases can provide data to serve as a basis for behavioral theories. It analyzes the distributions of specified meetings across time quartiles in the first seven chapters of R. J. Mowitz and D. S. Wright's Profile of a Metropolis. Findings can be divided into intercase stabilities that exemplify general characteristics of the Detroit decisional process, such as heightened meeting rates in the fourth quartile and a predominance of exclusively governmental meetings in all four periods; and variations that stem from the differing substantive issues described, such as the extent of early activity by nongovernment groups or the frequency of mass meetings.

Morris Davis is associate professor of political science at the Uni- versity of Illinois.

THIS article presents a systematic analysis of the meetings specified in the first seven chapters of Mowitz and Wright's Pro- file of a Metropolis.- The bulk of that study, some 617 pages out of 678, comprises ten cases; but the last three are omitted here since they refer to purely suburban problems. The seven chapters analyzed concern major decisions in Detroit politics: two chapters, "Gratiot Redevelopment Project" and "The Urban Re- newal of Corktown," deal with large rebuilding programs near the center of the city; the rest examine cooperation by the city and county in planning and constructing "Detroit's City-County Building," competition between the same two units over the right

JRobert J. Mowitz and Deil S. Wright, Profile of a Metropolis (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1962).



210 ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY

to supply "Water for Southwestern Wayne County," the fragmen- tation in authority that led to a "Case of the Missing Port" when the St. Lawrence Seaway opened, the fourteen-year struggle over locations for "Detroit's Metropolitan Airport," and the modifica- tions in "The Extension of the Lodge Expressway" that followed an organized public protest. These events all occurred between 1945 and 1960.

Case studies, such as those produced under the Inter-University Case Program, have been employed over the years more for their specific information than for the generalizations to be derived from that information.2 Their richness of detail and verisimili- tude, to be sure, might serve as cues for theory building.3 Their data might also be used to support or to contradict various general propositions: indeed, several recent books have concluding chapters or sections that draw lessons and themes from the ex- tensive case material that precedes them.4 Eliciting implications from a series of cases, though, is not the same as systematically probing for regularities within those cases. An analogy can clarify the distinction. It is one thing to select marginal totals from public opinion polls to illustrate a thesis that has been other- wise derived; it is something quite different to undertake an internal analysis of polls in order to isolate interesting constellations of phenomena within the data themselves.5 In this paper the latter procedure is followed.6

2 This theme is sounded by Harold Stein, Dwight Waldo, James W. Fesler, and Edwin A. Bock, authors of the four articles in Bock (ed.), Essays on the Case Method (Brussels: International Institute of Administrative Sciences, 1962).

3See especially the remarks by Fesler in Bock, op. cit., pp. 77-81.

4Noteworthy examples include Alan A. Altshuler, The City Planning Process (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University, 1965) and Edward C. Banfield, Political In- fluence (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961).

5 These remarks do not imply that the first approach is fruitless or that the two approaches are always mutually exclusive. Perhaps the most scholarly and pro- vocative book in which marginal totals from polls are prominently employed is Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), while Morris Davis and Sidney Verba, Party Affiliation and Interna- tional Opinions in Britain and France, 1947-1956, Public Opinion Quarterly, 24

(1960), 590-604, exemplifies one kind of possible hybrid. Intensive analyses of internal data configurations, however, are likely to yield more in terms of both im-

mediate findings and the development of a cumulative discipline. See, for example,



DETROIT'S DECISIONAL PROFILE 211

METHOD

The approach employed was to divide each of the seven chapters into four phases (quartiles), devising codes for the identification of variously specified meetings and computing the frequencies of those meetings in each quartile. Explanations of observed differences among and within the cases were sought in the vary- ing characteristics of the cases described. The division into phases and the procedures of encoding both deserve some comment before the findings are presented.

Students of community decision making who divide the process into temporal periods customarily adopt substantive criteria.7 Often their categories are superficially simple and attractive; for example, (1) initiation of action, fixing priorities or allocating preferred values, legitimization, and implementation; or (2) initiation, preproposal, proposal, community action, decision, and aftermath; or (3) initiation, goal definition and planning, implementation, and goal achievement and consequences; or even, (4) initiation of action, legitimization, and execution.8 Other phase theories, like Coleman's on community conflict,9 are richer and more complex. Spare or elaborate, such models are all beset by serious problems. Not only is identification of the stage reached at any given moment often very difficult, but there are also theoretical uncertainties whenever a stage is telescoped or eliminated or repeated or taken out of order, or when a cycle of greater or lesser length is repeated.

Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University, 1963) and Robert R. Alford, Party and Society (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963).

6 The research described here was supported by U.S. Public Health Service Grant CH 00201 from the Division of Community Health Services. Dennis R. Judd, as research assistant, helped with much of the detailed coding.

7 Many studies of decision making, of course, do not employ any explicit phase distinctions at all.

gThese rubrics occur, respectively, in M. Kent Jennings, Community Influentials (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 107-108; Irwin T. Sanders, The Stages of a Community Controversy, Journal of Social Issues, 17 (1961), 55-65; James W. Green and Selz C. Mayo, A Framework for Research in the Actions of Community Groups, Social Forces, 31 (1953), 320-327; and Charles R. Hoffer, Social Action in

Community Development, Rural Sociology, 23 (1958), 43-51. 9James S. Coleman, Community Conflict (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957).




Two strategies have been employed in recent years by students of decision making to avoid these difficulties. In one the ana- lyst adopts a transactional approach, so that parts of the process may fold back upon and interpenetrate others. A nonlinear decisional model is thus developed, which preserves qualitatively different stages while permitting their temporal simultaneity or reversability.10 The second device is to remove the process from any temporal setting by adopting some such orientation as value- added logic." Although the usual phase analyses of community decision making err in stipulating a particular order for events, these more complex frameworks appear to reduce the significance of time sequences below what is conceptually desirable.

The approach adopted here requires only that events such as meetings be datable, not that they happen in any given order or at any special rate. The procedure followed involves counting the total number of explicit meetings described in each case, eliminating 10 percent of those meetings at each temporal end, and then dividing the time period that remains into four phases of equal length (quartiles). For example, in Chapter 6, "Detroit's Metropolitan Airport," some 66 explicit meetings are mentioned. With the first seven and last seven eliminated, 52 explicit meetings are left, the first on September 18, 1945, and the fifty-second on March 8, 1956. Similarly, the 23 explicit meetings in Chap- ter 4, "Water for Southwestern Wayne County," are reduced by two at the beginning and at the end, with the 19 to be analyzed, stretching from September 1, 1955, to November 1, 1957. (Here- after, the term "case" will refer only to those parts of each nar- rative that remain after the 10 percent subtractions.) Although this method of handling the data necessarily means a loss of some information, it avoids difficulties caused by authors going far

10 Noteworthy recent examples include William J. Gore, Administrative Decision- Making (New York: Wiley, 1964); Karl Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); and Raymond A. Bauer, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Lewis A. Dexter, American Business and Public Policy (New York: Ather- ton Press, 1963).

11 See especially Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), pp. 13-20 and passim. Contrast the notion of a "funnel of causality" developed in Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), pp. 24-32.




back in history to find antecedents to their themes or touching on just a few meetings during a long period before the main part of their account. Eliminating 10 percent is, of course, arbitrary -indeed, its application to the end of the narratives stems pri- marily from a desire for symmetry and a wish to fashion a generally applicable way of treating case studies12-but as a result, the data are more compact and more suitable for comparative analysis. The quartiles spanning the middle 80 percent of explicit meetings in each chapter range from 17 weeks for "The Extension of the Lodge Expressway" to 136 weeks for "Detroit's Metropolitan Airport."

While this sort of phase delimitation has not been expressly used in community decision-making schemes, it has been a key operational device among investigators of experimental problem- solving groups.13 It also lies just below the surface of a recent theoretical paper on "Political Influence and the Decision Proc- ess."'14 Indeed, Wheaton's chart showing the "flow of communica- tion in a developmental decision process" appears to assume three time periods of equal length.15

The treatment of evidence that follows is based upon two mini- mal definitions. A group is any set of persons larger than one. A meeting is any such set whose members are in physical proxim- ity. (Groups and meetings tend to exhibit many other kinds of

12 Since case writers often bring their narratives rapidly to date in a sort of mirror image to the relating of background events, the cases themselves frequently exhibit the symmetry we have sought.

13 See particularly Robert F. Bales and Fred L. Strodtbeck, Phases in Group Prob- lem-Solving, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 46 (1951), 485-495. The method specified in their text (p. 487) is that the "total period is divided so that each phase includes one-third of the acts of the total set. (This is approximately equivalent to a time division into thirds, though not quite, since we have observed that there is some tendency for the interaction to speed up toward the latter part of topical cycles.)" In later practice, though, time provided the sole criterion for a division into phases. This was accomplished, in fact, by applying a yardstick and a pair of shears to the paper tape on which interactions from a session had been coded.

14William L. C. Wheaton, "Integration at the Urban Level: Political Influence and the Decision Process," in Philip E. Jacob and James V. Toscano (eds.), The Integration of Political Communities (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964), pp. 120-142.

15 Ibid., p. 130. The present article can be looked upon as an attempt to supply the sorts of data necessary if one is to document and to test Wheaton's model.




behavioral characteristics,' but they need not enter the definition.) Evidence about meetings varies from instance to instance. The categories that follow refer to the degree of imputation that a reader is required to bring to a text.

1. Explicit meetings. One reads that a "meeting" or something equivalent, like a "visit" or "luncheon," took place, or one is supplied with information that makes such a meeting certain.17 Mere allusions to group opinion, such as "agree" or "concur," which do not reveal whether the group in fact met, are not scored as meetings; nor are statements by a single actor to the press.

2. Meetings inferred from formal indicators. Although no word like "meeting" occurs in the text, and such an event is not absolutely certain, an output is described that makes the inference of a meeting highly probable. Indicators in this category are limited to formal documents such as contracts, jury awards, official reports, and petitions.18 These documents constitute end products of group processes.

3. Meetings inferred from nonformal indicators. The rationale here is the same as in the preceding category, but the indicators include more routine group processes. Among the activities coded are announcing, replying by letter, requesting, denouncing, con- firming, and setting forth reasons. Opinions that are merely internal to groups are omitted; positions that are clearly con- veyed to some external actor(s) or are made public are retained.19 Actions that could as easily have been collected by the author as evidenced at a meeting (e.g., one is told that X and Y stated their opposition, but not that they were present together) or in which the medium of contact is not designated (e.g., X reminded Y or gained Y's ear) are not counted. On the other hand, behavior by even one person permits the imputation of a meeting, provided he acts in the name of a group, or that his group affiliation

16 See, for example, Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), or almost any other book by Goffman.

17 For example, a statement that a vote was taken by a commission or that an appropriation was passed by the Common Council.

18 An indicator implies only a single meeting, unless it is part of a meeting series. 19 Again, one indicator implies one meeting.




is specified20 in the text and he does not act in clear opposition to it. For example, an announcement by a spokesman for, or an official of, a firm implies a meeting of that organization.21

Explicit and inferred meetings are referred to collectively as "specified meetings." Two other categories of meetings were also coded. Although neither figures prominently in the presentation that follows, they are briefly described, since they help make clear the content of the first three categories by contrast.

4. Meeting series. These are rapidly sketched blocks of activity whose constituent items are not extensively or sharply dif- ferentiated. The category includes continuing investigations, elec- toral campaigns, sequences of conferences, lengthy surveys, and the background to the passage of state and federal laws.

5. Explicit quasi-meetings. Communications via specified media like letters or telephone are recorded here, so long as they are initiated by a single individual who is not acting in the name of a group and whose group affiliation is not stipulated in the text. When initiated by or for groups, such communications are categorized as meetings inferred from nonformal indicators.

FINDINGS

Table 1 gives the distribution by quartiles of evidence about all meetings specified in the seven cases. Of the 371 meetings coded, slightly more than half of them were explicit, while the rest were inferred, at a rate of about one formal to two nonformal indicators. Although there are some noticeable differences among the three categories in the second and fourth quartiles, the distribution for all inferred meetings closely approximates that for explicit meetings and both resemble that for the total specified meetings. Such conformity over time, especially between ex-

20This term is narrowly interpreted. Actions by the mayor alone are not indicators of group meetings, simply because he is mayor of Detroit or an official of the government. An activity by the chairman of the Detroit City Plan Commission, however, would be such an indicator.

21 This problem does not arise in meetings inferred from formal indicators, since documents are usually issued in the name of some organization.




Table 1. Distribution of evidence about specified meetings by quartile.

1st 2nd 3rd 4th quartile quartile quartile quartile Total

Kindsof evidence N %* N % N % N % N

Explicit meetings 33 17.1 43 22.3 41 21.2 76 39.4 193 Meetings inferred from indicators 35 19.7 31 17.4 40 22.5 72 40.4 178

Formal indicators 12 20.0 19 31.7 12 20.0 17 28.3 60

Nonformal indicators 23 19.5 12 10.2 28 23.7 55 46.6 118 Specified meetings (total) 68 18.3 74 20.0 81 21.8 148 39.9 371

* Percentages are based on the total for each row.

plicit and specified meetings, encouraged the use of the larger pool of information in subsequent tables.22

The data for specified meetings in Table 1 masks, of course, variability among cases. Table 2, consequently, focuses on the number of meetings in each case. Here, it is clear that the fourth quartile consistently includes a higher percentage of meetings than the other quartiles, nearly 40 percent instead of an evenly distributed 25 percent. Furthermore, in only two cases (3 and 7) does any other quartile contain a larger number of meetings. Group activity obviously builds toward a climax during the time span of a case.

The very slow increase in meeting frequencies over the first three quartiles found in Table 1 can now be seen to be the result of averaging data from the individual cases. Some cases do show a slow increase (2 and 5); others, though, proceed on an opposite course (1 and, in general, 6), while still others show particularly high activity in the second or third quartile (3, 4, and 7).

Clusterings of meetings seem related to the substance of the cases. Spurts in the second quartile come when the issue is one of intergovernmental maneuvering, whether in concert (City- County Building) or in conflict (Water for Wayne County). Ex-

22 of the 50 meeting series that were coded, 8 percent appeared in the first quartile, 22 percent in the second, 34 percent in the third, and 36 percent in the fourth. Because this distribution is rather different from that for the explicit, inferred, or specified meetings, and because in addition the category raises severe problems in both weighting and identifying, meeting series are not included in this

analysis.




Table 2. Distribution of specified meetings by case and by quartile.


Case number* and name N %t N % N % N % N

1. Gratiot Redevelopment 15 28.3 12 22.6 10 18.9 16 30.2 53 2. Corktown Renewal 7 11.3 8 12.9 11 17.7 36 58.1 62 3. City-County Building 4 11.8 14 41.2 4 11.8 12 35.3 34 4. Water for Wayne County 4 9.8 12 29.3 5 12.2 20 48.8 41 5. Missing Port 9 20.0 10 22.2 10 22.2 16 35.6 45 6. Metropolitan Airport 28 27.2 17 16.5 20 19.4 38 36.9 103 7. Lodge Expressway 1 3.0 1 3.0 21 63.6 10 30.3 33

Total 68 18.3 74 20.0 81 21.8 148 39.9 371

* This represents chapter number also. t Percentages are based on the total for each row.

tremely high concentrations of meetings in the third or fourth quartiles reflect actions of interest groups. Such meetings in the third quartile (Lodge Expressway) usually have a more marked influence on outcomes than those in the fourth quartile (Cork- town Renewal). Cases involving relatively new departures instead of continuations or adaptions of previous programs (Metro- politan Airport, Gratiot Redevelopment, and, to a lesser extent, Missing Port) show a fairly high number of meetings in the first quartile.

Table 3 rank orders the seven cases by their quartile lengths. It then lists the number of pages (excluding maps) in each chapter, the total number of specified meetings in the four quartiles, and certain ratios among these three variables. Quartiles range from 17 to 136 weeks, with the two longest cases together covering more time than the other five combined.

In general, the briefer the time span of a case, the fewer the meetings specified for it.23 In addition, as the fourth column indicates, meetings tend to occur less and less frequently as the quartiles lengthen, the meetings for the Lodge Expressway case, for example, being almost four times as concentrated as for the

23 The sole exception is case 3, which has almost as few meetings as case 7 although covering a period nearly three times longer. This case is also the most succinctly narrated of the seven.




Table 3. Descriptive characteristics of the seven cases orderd by length of quartile.

A. Length B. Pages C. Total of quartile of narra- specified Ratio of Ratio of Ratio of

Case number and name (weeks) tive* meetingst 4A to C C to B B to 4A

7. Lodge Expressway 17 60 33 2.06 0.55 0.88 4. Water for Wayne County 28 65 41 2.73 0.63 0.58 5. Missing Port 44.5 59 45 3.96 0.76 0.33 1. Gratiot Redevelopment 60 68 53 4.53 0.78 0.28 3. City-County Building 65 27 34 7.65 1.26 0.10 2. Corktown Renewal 124.5 58 62 8.03 1.07 0.12 6. Metropolitan Airport 136 106 103 5.28 0.97 0.19

Total 475 443 371 5.12 0.91 0.23

* Total number for each case, not just for 80 percent of case used in enumerating meetings.

t This includes meetings only in the four quartiles.

Corktown Renewal case.24 The selectivity of these accounts is perhaps also worth noting. The mean number of weeks between meetings for all cases is more than five with the range between about two and eight.25

Unfortunately, the tendency for the rates of specified meetings to decrease as quartiles increase in length parallels a trend toward less space being devoted to meetings or their indicators, as indicated in the fifth column. Although there is only about one meeting for every two pages in chapter 7, on the Lodge Express- way, the meeting/page ratio increases as the quartiles grow longer. Except for the Metropolitan Airport,26 as cases covered more time, less space was devoted to each meeting: indeed, for both the Cork- town Renewal and the City-County Building case more than one meeting per page is specified.27 Put another way (last column)

24 Only case 6 is out of order; and that, as Table 5 indicates, is largely to be accounted for by meetings outside Detroit and its environs.

25 In so far as the cases overlap in time, such figures understate the specified rates of group activity in the Detroit decisional process. But even with that corrected for, the impact of selectivity remains prominent.

26 The extraordinary page length of case 6 accounts for its being slightly out of order in the last two columns.

27 If the number of pages were limited to 80 percent of meetings coded, these ratios would be even higher. The more precise delimitation is not undertaken here since the cases are not always narrated in strict chronological order.




the longer the time span for a case, the more briefly it is described. At the most there is nearly a full page a week (case 7) and at the least about a tenth (cases 3 and 2), the mean for all seven cases being about one-fifth of a page for each week.

Although meetings can be classified according to many attri- butes, such as size or purpose or degree of regularity, rarely can de- ductively simple and elegant sets of categories be found that adequately fit the many data in the cases. On the other hand, schemes that do justice to the complex variety of meetings not only may seem idiosyncratic but may also have many cells un- populated or underpopulated. Table 4, which records the extent of government participation in the meetings specified for each quartile, attempts to avoid these twin difficulties. It distinguishes five kinds of meetings: (1) those including only government personnel; (2) those composed of nongovernment personnel acting at the specific request of the government28; (3) those combining individuals from the two categories just mentioned; (4) those consisting of nongovernment persons who are not acting at the request of the government; and (5) those combining government personnel with this latter category of nongovernment persons. The distinction between meetings that are requested by the government and those that are not is stressed, because the two classes of meetings have very different consequences for political pluralism.29 Indeed, while categories 1 through 3 refer to the policy output process, categories 4 and 5 record interest inputs.30

As Table 4 shows, almost 70 percent of the specified meetings in the Detroit cases are purely governmental. This concentra- tion is not unexpected, partly because government officials are involved in municipal policy making, partly because the narratives do stem from a public administration tradition. In fact, the first three categories of meetings, all of which are governmentally sponsored, together account for nearly three-fourths of all the

28For example, an engineering firm that has been hired by the Plan Com- mission to prepare a technical report.

29 See especially Seymour M. Lipset, Martin A. Trow, and James S. Coleman, Union Democracy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 87-89.

30 "Government" has not been further specified by any of the usual criteria, like level or branch or recruitment procedure, since our primary interest is in nongovernment groups and their communications.




Table 4. Extent of government participation in specified meetings by quartile.


Kind of meeting N %* N % N % N % N %

Government 49 72.1 64 86.5 48 59.3 95 64.2 256 69.0 Nongovernment, but requested

by government 2 2.9 3 4.0 6 7.4 3 2.0 14 3.8 Government with nongovern-

ment requested by it 0 0.0 0 0.0 3 3.7 5 3.4 8 2.1 Total 51 75.0 67 90.5 57 70.4 103 69.6 268 74.9

Independent nongovernment 17 25.0 4 5.4 14 17.3 27 18.2 62 16.7 Independent nongovernment

with government 0 0.0 3 4.0 10 12.3 18 12.2 31 8.3 Total 17 25.0 7 9.4 24 29.6 45 30.4 93 25.0

* Percentages are based on the grand total for each column.

coded meetings. The remaining fourth, though, is far from uni- formly distributed among either the quartiles or the cases. These meetings, whose impetus is extra-governmental, drop to their lowest point in the second quartile and then rise to a plateau during the last two periods. Furthermore, although meetings combining government and independent nongovernment groups make up one-eighth of all meetings in the last two quartiles, there are almost no such meetings in the first two quartiles. Finally, the large number of independent nongovernment meetings (17) in the first quartile should not be interpreted as indicating a typical pattern in the Detroit cases, for they are confined almost entirely to the Missing Port (5) and the Metropolitan Airport (10).31

Examination of the evidence case by case helps show the re- lationship between nongovernment and government groups. For example, six of the eight meetings of government personnel with nongovernment groups active at their request occurred in the Gratiot Redevelopment, where the Citizens Redevelopment Com- mittee, outside the normal governmental structure, did much of the organizing for this pioneering program, and where addi-

31. Of the 17 meetings, seven involved the Greater Detroit Board of Commerce or

one of its committees, while the University of Michigan figured in two and one or several airlines in five others.



DETROIT'S DECISIONAL PROFILE 2 21

tional studies were entrusted to a university and a firm of consultants. Of the 18 meetings of the government with independent nongovernment groups in the last quartile, 12 are for the Corktown Renewal. All involved some sort of protest ad- dressed by Corktown residents or businessmen to an agency like the Plan Commission or the Council. A purely intergovernmental case like the City-County Building, on the other hand, had only one meeting by an independent interest group in its entire last two quartiles. Although Water for Wayne County had only five meetings of the government with independent nongovernment groups, all of them in the last quartile, the Missing Port showed 16 such meetings, five in the first quartile, two in the second, four in the third, and five in the fourth. A group like the Wayne County Water Users' Committee obviously started late on this relatively noncommercial problem, although it was closely con- nected with the Water, Sewage, and Drainage Committee of the Board of Commerce.32 A more obviously economic question like port facilities received far more prompt attention from the businessmen on the Board of Commerce.33 The Metropolitan Air- port decision, which attracted early attention from the Board of Commerce, various airlines, and the University of Michigan, found the same groups still active in the last two quartiles. Of the 16 meetings during the third and fourth quartiles that involved independent nongovernment groups, seven included the airlines, two the university, and four the Board of Commerce or its Aviation Committee.34 Finally, in the Lodge Expressway case, 10 meetings of protesting groups are indicated in the third quartile, four with and six without government personnel present.

Taken together, the summary figure in Table 4 and the more detailed analysis illuminate several characteristics about group participation in Detroit decision making. First, most meetings include only government personnel. This is true throughout

32 Mowitz and Wright, op. cit., p. 212. The powerful connections of the Water Users' Committee resulted in its being not without impact.

33Reported activities of shipping and harbor interests, like the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Association, the railroads, and Detroit Harbor Terminals, Inc., were somewhat tardier.

34 The other three meetings reflected citizenry dissatisfaction over the location chosen for the airport.




Table 5. Some special kinds of meetings by quartiles.

Kind of meeting 1st quartile 2nd quartile 3rd quartile 4th quartile Total

Judicial meetings 0 6 1 7 14 Law suits instituted 0 2 0 4 6 Verdicts rendered 0 4 1 3 8

Mass meetings 0 0 9 10 19 Meetings held outside

Detroit and vicinity 8 8 20 38 74 Inside Michigan 3 4 10 10 27 Outside Michigan 5 4 10 28 47

the cases, although it is particularly evident in the second quartile. Second, existing business organizations tend to play an earlier and more continuous role than ad hoc protest groups; established power clusters, like the Board of Commerce, or immediately af- fected parties-in-interest, like the airlines, appear early and often on the issues that concern them. Third, cases that focus on government organization and facilities or on intergovernmental relations, rather than on programs and projects with more obvious impacts on publics, show little popular participation. Fourth, new kinds of programs are more likely than others to involve nongovernment groups working at the request of the government. Fifth, protest groups usually enter a case after the first two quartiles, and their success is more marked if they intervene before the last quartile or if they are a front for some well-established interest group.

Table 5 presents counts of judicial meetings, mass meetings, and meetings held outside the immediate environs of Detroit. Judicial meetings, as evidenced by law suits or verdicts, come either fairly early, when they are government-initiated tests; or they come relatively late, when they are last ditch attempts by nongovernment groups to thwart some action. Of the 14 judicial meetings, 13 occurred in either the second or the fourth quartile.35

The term "mass meeting" refers here to a gathering of more than twenty participants in other than a regularly institutionalized setting. Ordinary sessions of large organizations like the Wayne County Board of Supervisors would not be counted; spontaneous or special gatherings like rallies or public hearings would be. As

35-In addition, four other mass meetings took place after the fourth quartile and two before the first.




the analysis of Table 4 implied, mass meetings arose late. Table 5 shows that there were no mass meetings in the first two quartiles. Nor were such meetings a common feature late in most cases; for of the 19 in the last two quartiles, all but two were related to the Corktown Renewal and the Lodge Expressway.36

Not all of the meetings in the cases take place in Detroit or its immediate vicinity. As Table 5 indicates, 27 were held elsewhere in Michigan (usually in Lansing) and 47 others outside the state (often in Washington). Only a few extra-metropolitan meetings are specified in the first half of the cases; but in the last half they amount to more than a fourth of the total. Despite the importance of federal funds in highway construction, only one meeting outside Michigan occurred in the Lodge Expressway case. Events in the Missing Port took place entirely in Detroit, except for four meetings to negotiate structural steel priorities; and the City-County Building also took place almost entirely in Detroit. The third quartile of Water for Wayne County did involve four meetings elsewhere in Michigan and one outside, but 35 of 41 meetings were held in the Detroit area. Even on programs like redevelopment and renewal, which are generally thought of as federal-municipal undertakings, few meetings were held outside Detroit. In the Gratiot Redevelopment, there were 43 meetings in Detroit as against two others elsewhere in the state and eight outside Michigan. This dearth of extra-metropolitan meetings reflects in part the Detroit plan having initially preceded most federal programs in this field; but even in the Corktown Renewal case, which spans a later period, 55 meetings were held in De- troit and just six outside Michigan. Only in the Metropolitan Airport do meetings outside the immediate area bulk large. Its four quartiles indicate 17 meetings elsewhere in the state and 27 in the rest of the country; more than half the out-of-state meetings, in fact, occurred in this case.

DISCUSSION All data in this article are open to challenge on methodological

grounds. One might have wished an emphasis on other kinds of

36 There were also two mass meetings before the first quartile and three more after the fourth. All but one of these occurred in the same two cases.



2 24 ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY

phenomena than meetings. One might have preferred other criteria for specifying meetings and quartiles. One might find other classifications of meetings more useful or more theoretically apposite. Despite considerable care and review, coding errors may have crept into the analysis. (It is hoped that stricter or looser criteria would simply have yielded smaller or larger pools of meetings rather than a radically different configuration over time,37 and that random errors would tend to cancel out.)

Despite these operational problems, the findings presented should have considerable interest. Detroit is a major city, and the more we learn about it and other metropolises, the greater the information available for political science theories. Specific as- sertions in this account might best be considered as generalized hypotheses. This paper makes many such statements: that meetings occur most frequently in the final temporal phase of the decisional process; that mass meetings and other group protests usually come late in a case; that meetings in the second quartile tend to be almost entirely governmental; that cases comprising relatively new departures show many meetings early in their development (often by nongovernment groups), while the meeting peak for cases focused on intergovernment adjustments does not occur until the second quartile; that judicial meetings serve as tests in the second quartile or as obstructing tactics in the fourth quartile; that meetings between government officials and independent nongovernment groups become frequent only during the last half of a case and so on. Some of these statements have familiar analogues in political science or in a related social science. Some less familiar statements may also describe actual or usual relationships. Others may prove in subsequent research to be merely hasty generalizations of idiosyncratic events. How- ever lasting or short-lived these hypotheses, it is clear that public administration case studies can be not only a springboard for theoretical speculation but also serve as a basis for a substantive behavioral theory.

37 This is the argument behind our discussion of Table 1.



some aspects of detroit's decisional profile

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