In his examination of the history of the AFDC program and particularly the Massachusetts AFDC program William Simon explores how two different approaches (that of the early 1960's, when "the dominant vision was principally associated with liberals concerned with the interests of the poor" and that of the late 1970s when the AFDC was "co-opted by conservatives concerned with cost-cutting and disciplining the public work force") converged on the term discretion. "The dominant vision," according to Simon, "contrasts legality with discretion and prescribes the elimination or minimization of discretion. The meaning of discretion in this literature, however, turns out to be elusive. Sometimes discretion is defined simply as the absence of formalization, bureaucratization, or proletarianization. Thus, discretion can mean informality in eligibility norms (standards rather than rules), decentralized administration, or administration by professionals. Sometimes, however, discretion is defined in two more general senses.

The first sense refers to decisionmaking without regard to norms, or more simply, arbitrariness. Although the dominant vision frequently speaks of the problem as discretion in this sense, it seems unlikely that many of the phenomena to which it reacts are accurately characterized this way. It is extremely difficult for people to act in any setting without regard to norms, let alone in a public bureaucracy. As anthropologists have often shown in the context of primitive societies, and as Peter Blau and Michael Lipsky have shown in our context, when observers call behavior arbitrary it is usually because they either fail to perceive the norms involved or because they refuse to acknowledge them, perhaps because they conflict with the observers' own norms. The moralistically punitive and racist conduct in the horror stories of the old regime was wrong, but it was not arbitrary.

The second general sense of discretion is the practical ability to make a decision that violates the applicable norm. This is the most frequent use of the term, and much of the rhetorical power of the dominant vision derives from its tendency to associate discretion in this sense with informality, decentralization, and professionalism. Yet this general notion is often hard to apply. First, in order to identify discretion in this sense, one needs to know what the applicable norms are. But it is often, and perhaps typically, the case that there is basic disagreement over what the applicable norms are. A further difficulty is that, on a formal level, discretion of this sort can never be reduced. There is a law of conservation of discretion: one limits the discretion of one set of actors only by increasing that of others. Thus, while the dominant vision spoke generally of reducing discretion, its proposals tended to reduce only the discretion of lower level officials and to increase correspondingly the discretion of others. Conservative proposals tended to increase the discretion of upper level officials; liberal proposals tended to increase the discretion of the federal judiciary." [William H. Simon, "Legality, Bureaucracy, and Class in the Welfare System" (Yale Law Journal Symposium on the Legacy of The New Deal: Problems and Possibilities in the Administrative State), 92 Yale L.J. 1198, 1223-1224 (1983)].