The Dynamics of Change: Class, Politics and Civil Society—From Marx to post-Marxism

This paper discusses how Marxist understandings of politics and civil society, particularly Marx's own work, can contribute to understanding the dynamics of political change in contemporary capitalist democracies. While briefly exploring the conceptual problems contained in the political-philosophical agenda set out in Marx's earliest works, the paper argues that his subsequent examinations of civil society and class relations are grounded in a political economy of capitalist development which retains considerable salience. The possibilities of a post-Marxist politics of civil society are assessed in this light, using the example of recent neo-liberal and neo-conservative assaults on the welfare state to indicate the ways in which membership of civil society is itself a critical focus of political contestation. A politics of civil society (for example, contemporary 'third way' strategies) lacks any substantive democratic potential, without the type of radical political economy developed by Marx.     

Decision-Making Involvement and Socioeconomic Resources in Norway: A Normative-Empirical Analysis*

The relationship between socioeconomic resources and political participation has been the subject of considerable normative-empirical debate. The present article addresses the problem on the basis of Norwegian survey data (N = 1,170) with the intent of testing both the resource-involvement relationship and the possible consequences of value over-representation among the most active citizens. The analysis of resource-involvement dependency in relation to Robert Dahl's norm-set for ‘non-cumulative resource distributions' shows only two resources to be of potential difficulty for pluralist expectations: education and gender. Other expectations as to resource-involvement inequality prove to be nonfounded for Norway. A further test of the consequences of pedagarchal and patriarchal over-representation shows the former to imply a general ‘progressive’ bias in political values, while the latter has no clear-cut ideological implications.     

Social Development and Political Participation: Class, Organizations and Sex

The relationship between social development and political participation has been described by Nie, Powell, and Prewitt in terms of two major contentions: (1) social development leads to increases in both the relative size of the middle class and the scope of the organizational infrastructure; (2) both factors lead in turn to higher rates of political participation, but the one - socioeconomic status - is mediated by civic attitudes, while the other - organizational involvement - is not. In trying to assess these contentions in relation to Norway, the present study arrives at several interesting, but disparate, conclusions: (a) existing findings with relevance for the problem (Martinussen's Distant Democracy ) are open to reinterpretation; (b) in a highly developed corporate-pluralist state such as Norway, organizational involvement must be distinguished as to its dependent-variable and independent-variable characteristics; (c) occupational status must be problematized as a sexist indicator; (d) class characteristics are not important determinants of participation in Norway, but sex is; (e) in relation to involvement in the electoral channel, civic attitudes do not mediate class position as much as they mediate sex; and (f) in relation to involvement in the corporate (interest-group) channel, neither sex nor class are significantly mediated by attitudes. Finally, it is pointed out that the relevance of these findings for the Nie-Powell-Prewitt position is uncertain, due to the problematic operationalization of both sex and organizational involvement in the original study*.     

RHODES' CONTRIBUTION TO GOVERNANCE THEORY: PRAISE,CRITICISM AND THE FUTURE GOVERNANCE DEBATE

This article discusses Rod Rhodes' contribution to governance theory. Rod Rhodes' work on governance has been much quoted. He has contributed to setting a new governance agenda and to an ongoing governance debate. This debate has also had an impact on political practice. However, as this paper argues, Rhodes' definition of governance is problematic in that it is narrowly identified with networks, and it is not consistently applied. Rhodes' concept of governance remains too narrow for it to be able to include a comparative analysis of a variation of governance forms. In addition, the governance concept needs to be equipped with tools from political economy in order be able to incorporate important aspects of interests, power and conflict. The way forward for governance theory would seem to involve the inclusion of political economy analysis of context as it affects beliefs and dilemmas.     

Tourism in Australia and Hawai'i: Historical Perspectives

Books reviewed in this article:
Jim Davidson and Peter Spearritt, Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870
Mansel G. Blackford, Fragile Paradise: The Impact of Tourism on Maui, 1959-2000     

Political Participation in the Social-Democratic State A Normative-Empirical Framework for the Analysis of Decision-Making Involvement in Norway*

The purpose of the paper is to develop an integrated normative-empirical approach for an analysis of decision-making involvement in Norway. The analysis will be based on a national sample survey carried out in early 1981 (N = 1,650). After briefly defending the choice of ‘the social-democratic state’ as a context-specifying term, the discussion turns to problematizations of two central concepts: the political and participation. The result of this exercise is an ‘operational typology of decision-making involvement’ which stipulates eight zdifferent modes of involvement in terms of survey-operational measures. It is argued that the typology covers the entire spectrum of decision-making involvement in Norway; that it is unique in doing so; and that the conceptual differences involved have important normative empirical consequences. These latter are then developed in relation to three dominant perspectives in participation research; the expressivist, the instrumentalist, and the developmentalist points of view. Each of these perspectives is illustrated by a specific research strategy, and concluding remarks are made on the necessary integration of all three for a fuller comprehension of decision-making involvement in the social-democratic state.