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Inquiry and Change
Lindblom's 1990 book applying his incrementalist framework reflexively to social science itself — arguing that the disciplines studying society operate under the same cognitive and institutional constraints as the policy-making they analyze.
Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society is Lindblom's most philosophically ambitious book. Published in 1990, it applies the incrementalist framework to social science itself, arguing that the disciplines studying society operate under the same constraints of bounded cognition, contested values, and distributed knowledge that they identify in the policy-making they analyze. The book's thesis is reflexive: social scientists cannot achieve the comprehensive understanding of society that they deny is available to policymakers, and must therefore adopt the same incrementalist humility they prescribe for the subjects of their study.
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The book's argument is deliberately uncomfortable for its intended audience. Social scientists had long accepted Lindblom's critique of comprehensive planning while assuming that their own analytical work could achieve a comprehensiveness that policy-making could not. Inquiry and Change rejected the assumption. The structural constraints that defeat comprehensive policy analysis — cognitive limits, value conflicts, distributed knowledge — defeat comprehensive social