Organizational culture and its implication for public policy implementation: A case study of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982

Studies of public policy implementation usually consider three factors influencing the implementation process: people and the context in which they act, institutional and environmental constraints and contingencies, and the interdependence between policy makers and policy implementers. This research considers a fourth influence, namely the basic assumptions about work--its meaning, its purpose, and how to perform it--held by the agency charged with implementing a policy. The hypothesis underlying this research is that the imposition of a set of regulations on an organization also imposes a set of values and beliefs on that organization. If these imposed values and beliefs are not congruent with the indigenous values and beliefs of the organization, then that organization may experience difficulties abiding by the imposed regulations.The research focus is the disjunction that occurred when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission imposed nuclear quality assurance requirements on scientific investigations conducted by Department of Energy research and development laboratories in connection with the nuclear waste repository program. The analytic framework used in the research is created by linking salient points of theoretical models by Talcott Parsons, James D. Thompson, and Barbara S. Romzek and Melvin J. Dubnick. The framework is grounded in the organizational cultural school of thought as articulated by Edgar H. Schein.The origin and development of ASME-NQA-1, "Quality Assurance Requirements for Nuclear Facilities," are traced and four assumptions that undergird it are examined. Four cultural assumptions that underlay the Department of Energy's research and development laboratories are similarly examined. The assumptions are: professional versus legal management systems, the nature of hierarchies, known versus unknown processes, and centralized control versus local autonomy. The two sets of assumptions are juxtaposed to explain the difficulties encountered when the ASME-NQA-1 was imposed on the scientific investigations.