THE ADVERSARIAL DEFINING OF POLICY CONTENT: POLICY FORMATION IN AND AS ITS IMPLEMENTATION (ETHNOMETHODOLOGY)

This thesis takes as its topic the adversarial interaction between the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a federal regulatory agency, and the automobile manufacturers in establishing the content of the regulatory control of traffic safety with respect to defective vehicle components. The regulatory instrument, the National Highway Traffic Safety Act of 1966, is examined for its provision of prescripts and guidelines for control of safety defects. The "adversarial" aspect of the phenomenon refers to the ensuing working out of actual regulatory policy detail via a series of federal court cases which served as the occasion to both attempt to determine the extent of control and to formulate what that control would in fact consist of.;It is shown that the "policy" toward defects is practically (i.e., really, actionably) synonymous with the current, prevailing definition of "safety defect," a definition which has evolved from the series of disputes and court decisions over the defectiveness of specific vehicle components. It is proposed that, regardless of the policy provisions existing in prescriptive form (as directives or even law), policy content consists of this standing definition and that, as such, the actual policy is unknowable in detail prior to this defining activity.;An ethnomethodological approach is taken. No formal theory (either from sociologic or political science theory) is used to explain or conceptualize the phenomenon. The notion of a system is used as a collecting device for areas of concern to be addressed, but is not meant to thereby impose a model interpretation on the phenomenon. The study is taken as a preliminary examination of policy development in a loosely defined confrontational area. Theoretic devices which appear to lend themselves to the analysis are developed, especially the notions of "local logics" as a way of characterizing immediate practical actions, and "structure logic" as a way of characterizing the accountable product of this activity. The notion of a "decisional point" is used to refer to the existence of an irremediable decision/action event deciding an issue. The federal court, its decision making and its findings comprise such a decisional point. A representational schema utilizing artifical intelligence techniques as a tracking device and practitioner's tool for decision making is suggested.