Ways of Knowing and Inclusive Management Practices

The authors engage structural and agentic perspectives to examine opportunities for deliberation and the purposeful role of managers in creating those opportunities. Drawing on actor-network theory as a way of understanding the process of structuring knowledge, this essay focuses on the continuous enactment and reenactment of networks of human and nonhuman actants and the associations that connect them. This thinking is applied to policy issues, which the authors propose should be understood as ways of knowing. The fluidity of such ways of knowing provides opportunities for public managers to use the inclusive practices associated with boundary experiences, boundary objects, and boundary organizations to facilitate deliberation.     

Assumptions within Policy: A Case Study of Information Communications and Technology Policy

The deeply embedded nature of dominant assumptions creates an accepted language and way of thinking about ICT, leaving little space for alternative perspectives and ideologies. Policy directions link information technology, the information economy, innovation, competition and global markets. Innovation and information and communications technology constructs a particular application of innovation and directs funding accordingly. Given that policy is about how we categorise, about naming and naming shapes action, the question is what lenses do policy makers use to make choices in their synthesis of social, political and economic life? Using the Australian Information Communications and Technology (ICT) policy as a case study, this article will argue that policy reflects the economic, social and political ideologies of the decision makers. Despite opportunities for input into policy multiple perspectives are limited. Specifically the article looks at claims around consultation, the assumption that the information economy will benefit all Australians, the development of framework conditions for the information economy and the role of government.     

Notes

This article examines the evolution of the inter-territorial university policy in East Africa that culminated in the establishment of the regional University of East Africa (UEA) serving Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania; it further explores the causes of the collapse of the regional university in the late 1960s. The inauguration of the UEA in June 1963 exemplified the determination by Britain to maintain its influence in East Africa as the region entered the independence era. Britain sought to use the UEA as a centre for intellectual and ideological indoctrination of the regional elites that it had started to forge in 1949 following the establishment of Makerere University College in Uganda as an inter-territorial institution for East Africa. Unlike the Makerere elites who were to serve as agents of the British in the colonial era, the products of UEA would become allies of Britain in the independence era and thus serve as crucial cogs in the emerging neocolonial relations between Britain and the East African nations. This article demonstrates how the transformed political landscape after independence undermined the UEA, signalling not only the weakening of the bonds of cohesion among the East African states but also the waning fortunes of Britain in the region.     

The significance of ethnicity in the Estonian return migration policy of the early 1920s

In this article the Estonian return migration policy is analyzed from the perspective of the return migrants' ethnicity. The time period of this study covers the most intensive phase of the state-organized return of emigrants to the newly established Republic of Estonia. The survey of attitudes of the Estonian authorities towards the return of emigrants with different ethnic backgrounds leads to the conclusions that the return of ethnic Estonians was preferred to the return of non-Estonians during the first years of Estonia's independence on both economic and political grounds. The political loyalty of non-Estonians was doubted in the administrative circles of Estonia which was especially the case with regard to the emigrants that had formerly belonged to the ruling power elites. The negative attitudes towards the return of non-Estonians were further aggravated by the crisis the Estonian economy was facing at that time. As a result, a parallel with the return migration policies of other new nation-states that emerged from the ruins of the Russian empire can be drawn.