Abstract
With positivist and technocratic notions still prevalent, Paul Healy's (1986) insightful effort to advance “interpretive policy inquiry” both underscores the limitations of conventional analysis and helps us to grasp the policy process in human terms. Yet the article falls short of a systematic presentation of the interpretive position and, in doing so, reveals the limitations of that approach: the need for an explicitly critical posture becomes clear. This point is made with particular attention to a pre-positivist figure, Machiavelli.
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An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00137052.
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Torgerson, D. Interpretive policy inquiry: A response to its limitations. Policy Sci 19, 397–405 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00139523
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00139523