Campfire decision-making and strategic management: A politics and leadership approach to economic development

Privatization is recommended unconditionally by some scholars as the optimal means for achieving economic development. While privatization can be helpful medicine, it provides no universal cure for all the ills associated with low economic growth. A country's economic and political institutions are intertwined. Mandating privatization without being mindful of both political and economic consequences to such a policy can bring undesirable consequences during and after policy implementation. This paper proposes that to enhance the likelihood of economic growth a leader should blend economics with politics. Sensitive political leadership can stimulate a bonding among citizens, a bonding which can generate the commitment to risk by investing personal savings, to work the long hours which much precede the rewards, and often to be satisfied by a job well done rather than with material reward. Analogous to the chief executive officer of a successful corporation, the effective political leader involves stakeholders, steers decision processes, takes reasonable risks, encourages private investment, and rations public resources according to national priorities. Collective decision-making guided by the political leader, who also acts as a strategic manager during implementation, is offered as a model for development.     

Adversarial legalism and American government

Compared to other economically advanced democracies, the United States is uniquely prone to adversarial, legalistic modes of policy formulation and implementation, shaped by the prospect of judicial review. While adversarial legalism facilitates the expression of justice-claims and challenges to official dogma, its costs are often neglected or minimized. A survey of existing research, together with a case study of environmental regulation in the Port of Oakland, indicates the extent to which adversarial legalism causes (or threatens) enormous dispute-resolving costs and procedural delays, which in turn distort policy outcomes. Adversarial legalism, moreover, has increased in recent decades, as Americans have attempted to implement the ambitious, socially transformative policies of activist government through political structures, forms of legislation, and legal procedures that reflect deep suspicion of governmental authority.     

Why do adolescents use drugs? Age,sex, and user differences

This paper makes four points: (1) There is substantial substance use among adolescents in our large rural southwestern sample. (2) Adolescents explain their drug use with five kinds of reasons (i.e., Belonging, Coping, Pleasure, Creativity, and Aggression). (3) Different reasons for using drugs are related to frequency of substance use. (4) There are age, gender, and user differences in the reasons adolescents have for their drug use. After summarizing traditional ways of thinking about drug use, we describe an alternative way for examining such behavior. We use this approach to study relationships between drug use reasons and age, gender, and substance use in 2637 6th–12th-grade students. We then discuss prevention and treatment implications of this research.Received Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in personality psychology. Research interests include school dropouts, substance use, delinqueccy, personal commitments, health, and identity.Received Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in personality psychology. Research interests include at-risk youth, substance use, delinquency, narcissism, and identity.Received Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in personality psychology. Research interests include moral development and personality.     

Reviews

John N. Hazard, Managing Change in the USSR: The Political‐Legal Role of the Soviet Jurist, Cambridge: CUP, 1983, ix + 182 pp. £17.50.

Martin McCauley (ed.). The Soviet Union after Brezhnev, London: Heinemann, 1983 and New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983, xii + 160 pp. hardback £14.50, paperback £5.50.

Jonathan Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy 1930–33: The Impact of the Depression, London: Macmillan, 1983, xii + 172 pp. £25.00.

Gavriel D. Ra'anan, International Policy Formation in the USSR: Factional ‘Debates’ during the Zhdanovshchina, foreword by Robert Conquest. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1983. Distributed by Leicester UP, xi + 248 pp. £20.00.

Ivan Szelenyi, Urban Inequalities under State Socialism, Oxford: OUP, 1983, x + 158 pp. hardback £15.00, paperback £5.95.

Arvo Tuominen, The Bells of the Kremlin: An Experience in Communism, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1983, xvi + 333 pp. $27.00.

Gregory Guroff and Fred V. Carstensen (eds.), Entrepreneur ship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983, 372 pp. hardback £34.50, paperback £11.30.

Robert C. Horn, Soviet‐Indian Relations: Issues and Influence, New York, Praeger, 1982, xviii+231 pp. hardback $24.95, paperback $8.95.

Stephen R. Sacks, Self‐Management and Efficiency: Large Corporations in Yugoslavia, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983, xi + 163 pp. £15.00.

C. K. Chase‐Dunn (ed.), Socialist States in the World System. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1982, 304 pp. hardback $28.00, paperback $14.00.

David Kideckel (ed.), Political Rituals and Symbolism in Socialist Eastern Europe. Special issue of Anthropological Quarterly, April 1983, vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 52–104. Anthropological Quarterly, 620 Michigan Avenue N.E., Washington D.C. 20064. $5.00.