ORGANIZATION AND JOURNAL DEVELOPMENTS.

There was spirited discussion in San Francisco, California, at the annual September Policy Studies Organization meetings of the council, editorial board, and the general membership. One perennial topic dealt with the context and role of policy studies as a field. The consensus seemed to be that it is both a sub-discipline field within political science with a distinctive substance and methodology, and also an interdisciplinary field. Its distinctive substance is partly reflected by the categories into which the editorial board of the "Policy Studies Journal" is organized. Its methodology emphasizes causal analysis in explaining policy variations over time, across places, and across subject matters, as well as a methodology of means-ends analysis for evaluating alternative public policies.