Predecisional Processing Research Articles

The Politics of Accountability in National Forest Planning

On December 6, 2002, the Forest Service published a proposed planning regulation that provides a framework for community-based collaborative planning for sustainability, alters the spatial and temporal scales of public involvement, and replaces postdecisional appeals of forest plans with a predecisional objection process. This article examines the potential effects of community-based collaborative planning on national environmental stakeholders and explores what it means to be accountable to a national constituency. The author argues that the focus on the community of place in collaborative planning, compounded by the loss of appeals, undermines the democratic accountability of the forest planning processes.

Locking the Back Door: The Implications ofEliminating Postdecisional Appeals inNational Forest Planning

The Forest Service's new planning regulation “locks the back door.” It replaces post-decisional appeals of forest plans with a “predecisional objection process” within a framework of collaborative planning. This article examines the agency's rationale for eliminating postdecisional appeals of forest plans, and explores the potential implications of this policy initiative. Viewing appeals as a mechanism of democratic accountability, the analysis examines environmentalists’ use of the appeals process, and the effects of appeals on Forest Service land management and policy. The article concludes with observations about the role of conflict and the legitimacy of appeals as one avenue of democratic participation.

Ecosystem management: expanding the resource management `tool kit'

Ecosystem management can be thought of as the minimum set of tools a land manager should have available in attempting to define sustainable alternatives for the interactions of people and the environment. It is a term that specifically refers to a process or set of activities for addressing resource management, not a prescribed outcome. As a pre-decisional process, ecosystem management amends and expands the resource management tool kit that field-level professionals rely on to understand and manage lands and resources in an ecological context. The focus of this paper is to highlight the activities in the ecosystem management `tool kit' that are common for many agencies and organizations. Natural resources exist within certain limits and capacities. Humans are faced with difficult choices in determining how they will interact with the environment to provide for essential materials and services and maintain a healthy environment. The approach does not necessarily make hard choices any easier. The ecosystem management tool kit does support making difficult choices in the most informed and professional manner possible.

Cue selection in hypothesis generation: Reading habits, consistency checking, and diagnostic scanning

Two experiments investigated retrieval cue selection in hypothesis generation. In both experiments, subjects completed six hypothesis generation problems. Then a surprise recall test was given to measure which data a subject attended while generating a hypothesis. Subject's patterns of data recall were categorized as to whether (a) reading habits, (b) reading habits and consistency checking, or (c) diagnostic scanning was used to select cues during hypothesis generation. In Experiment 1, subjects were instructed to generate hypotheses that were consistent with all problem data. Experiment 2 required subjects to report the first hypothesis suggested by problem data. Subjects in both experiments generally used reading habits and consistency checking to select cues to retrieve hypotheses from memory. These results provide converging evidence concerning the existence of consistency checking, a predecisional process first described by S. D. Fisher, C. F. Gettys, C. Manning, T. Mehle, and S. Baca(1983, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 31, 233–254). Of the three cue selection strategies, diagnostic scanning, although seldom used, resulted in the highest probability of generating correct hypotheses. Although this finding is impressive, little evidence was found concerning the general use of diagnostic scanning in hypothesis generation.

Effects of anticipation of forthcoming information on predecisional processes.

Effects of anticipation of forthcoming information on predecisional processes.

Conceptual level as a composition variable in small-group decision making.

Abstract : Decision-making in small groups, varying in composition along a dimension of conceptual level, was investigated from the standpoint of the emergent functional role structure, conflict generation, utilization of conflict in decision synthesis, and information acqusition. The study was directed toward an understanding of the relationship between the conceptual level dimension (the independent variable) and the dependent variables of group information processing structure and specific predecisional processes. On the basis of the conceptual systems theory, the following hypotheses were advanced: (a) structuring decreases or, conversely, role flexibility increases, as the percentage of members of a high conceptual level in the group increases; (b) groups, in which the members are all of a high conceptual level, manifest more interpersonal conflict than groups in which the members differ in conceptual: (c) the extent to which generated conflict is utilized in decision synthesis increases with an increasing PMHCL in the group: (d) the extent of search for novel information increases as the PMHCL in the group increases, whereas total information search is not dependent upon group composition. Each of the hypotheses advanced was confirmed by the obtained results. (Author)