Michael Lissack system. But when that representation becomes an object that moves out into the larger environment, it is acted upon and controlled by its users in ways the initial architects could not fully anticipate. Bureaucrats in local welfare, housing, or health organizations can easily transform the meanings of public regulations through judgments that reflect their own interests or conceptions of good policy. When the policy object takes on new meanings in use unanticipated by its architects, contention may rise to the surface. Seeing what users, managers, or regulators have made of the object they have designed, the initial architects may discover flaws in their design, which they seek actively to correct. But other actors, now operating as secondary archi- tects, may take exception to such efforts at correction, Then a full-fledged controversy may erupt as would-he architects struggle to gain control-of the object’s form, meaning, and use. The architect is never in complete control of a policy environment. The success of their enterprise depends on other parties choosing to behave in certain ways. Just to this extent, the architects live in a world of distributed powers, which requires them to enter into a communicative relationship with their antagonists. Just as old buildings may be put to new uses when new circumstances arise, so when the policy context shifts actors may discover new meanings in policy objects and invent new ways to use them. Shifts in the policy context may trigger controversy but may also help to create conditions favorable to its pragmatic resolution for example, by promoting a change in the identity or power relationships of actors in the arena, or by fostering new alliances, changing the availability of resources, or creating a sense of crisis that over- rides preexisting disputes. Institutions often try to control the processes by which meanings are constructed for events in the policy-making process, making strategic use of symbols not merely to confuse the weak but to establish an interpretive order that conforms to their systems of belief. The more powerful the actors are, the more they may be able to impose their beliefs and preferences on others, without taking into account their own contribution to creating the environment in which they find themselves. Once they see, for example, that the antagonism of other actors is possibly, at least in part, of the architects’
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