THE NATIONAL DAY CARE STUDY AND THE FEDERAL INTERAGENCY DAY CARE REQUIREMENTS: A STUDY IN THE LIMITS OF RATIONALIZATION IN THE DELIVERY OF A COMPLEX SOCIAL SERVICE (NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION, SOCIAL POLICY)

This essay is a study of two recent and related efforts to rationalize the delivery of federally subsidized day care in the United States. One effort, characteristically, was a large scale social science project, the National Day Care Study (NDCS), which played a significant part in an attempt to rationalize a set of federal day care regulations, the Federal Day Care Requirements (FIDCR). The FIDCR, in turn, are viewed as a regulatory attempt to rationalize the delivery of day care. However, because of goal-defining difficulties, this rationalization endeavour became an attempt through an appeal to the prestige of science to resolve the controversy between two competing ideologies, those associated respectively with the non-profit and proprietary sectors of the day care industry, a controversy that has recently centered around the regulations themselves.;In studying the relationship between the NDCS and the FIDCR, moreover, it was found that whereas the latter politicized the former, the former also scientized the latter. Both of these processes, however, generally led to greater obscurity rather than clarity in the day care debate.;The non-profit and proprietary sectors are compared and it is found that they differ dramatically in a variety of characteristics associated with both quality and cost. These differences are viewed as the inevitable result of rationalization in the context of two divergent sets of goals reflecting different ideologies.