Planners and Citizen Boards: Some Applications of Social Theory to the Problem of Plan Implementation

Abstract This article reports on a study of planning as expert advice to nonpartisan citizen boards,—and the means by which this advice is implemented or blocked m a semirural county. The major thesis is that in an area of relatively scarce economic resources, administrative resources in the form of individuals with the time, training and experience to use expert advice are also scarce. The result is a state of inequality between experts and boards that limits the extent to which experts can be used. Among other consequences, local boards dealing with experts seem to sense this inequality. Their major defense is rejection of the expert and reaffirmation of traditional rural institutions. This phenomenon seems most lively to occur with a high proportion of locally oriented board members of generalist status, and less lively when board members have specialist status and cosmopolitan orientations. It also seems related to the technical difficulty of the issue, the relative investments of time in the issue by boards and experts, the relevance of the issue to community action and its exposure to public scrutiny.