A perspective of planning literature

The wide spread disbelief and frustrations amongst managers and executives about planning theories do not seem to be caused only by the confusions over concepts and terminology, but also by the absence of a perspective of planning literature from the view point of comprehensive planning behaviour of an individual and an organization. In this paper, to explore the relationships between the concepts discussed in the planning literature, we first briefly review an hypothesis of planning behaviour which we have introduced before (Section 2), and then develop, under the framework of the hypothesis, the dimensions and subdimensions employed in an analysis (Section 3.1). Having listed the "sample" planning literature for the analysis (Section 3.3), the results are shown in the form of tables (Section 3.3). Finally, comments and discussions are made on the methodological problems, on the variety and relative mutual independence between planning concepts, on the normative vs descriptive balance of planning research, on the necessary and possibly fertile areas of future planning research, and on the relation of the analysis to the status of our hypothesis (Section 4).