Raising revenues: an introduction

Raising revenues, although necessary to budgets, has received relatively scant attention from students of public budgeting. This special issue focuses attention on that topic. The contributions to this special issue show the diverse ways in which raising revenues is important.     

Corruption in the aftermath of war: an introduction

‘Corruption in the aftermath of war’ brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to enquire into the dynamics of corruption in post-conflict societies. This introduction discusses five themes, problematising and summarising key findings from the 10 articles included. First, we discuss the problems with the corruption concept, related to its moralising connotations and definitional vagueness, and propose viewing corruption as a collective action dilemma as a way of avoiding these moralising aspects. Second, we discuss post-conflict societies, and highlight the great varieties of ‘peace’ that that label can refer to. We suggest that the causes, dynamics and effects of corruption in post-conflict societies bear many similarities with those in other societies, but that the post-conflict situation often generates an intensification and entrenchment of corruption-related problems. Third, we analyse the dynamics between international interveners and domestic actors, and show the contradictions and tensions in international–domestic relations. Fourth, we argue that the inter-linkages between inequality, mistrust and corruption deserve consideration in the study of post-conflict societies, and that inequality in particular merits more attention. Finally, we discuss some methodological challenges encountered by the contributors in their studies of corruption in post-conflict societies.     

Immigration: perspectives from receiving countries

The author examines the issue of international migration from the standpoint of receiving countries. He attempts "to understand how and why migrant-receiving countries respond as they do, and to suggest some of the new issues in international migration that arise in a world in which the supply of would-be migrants and refugees is now greater than receiving countries are willing to accept."     

Administrative development issues in china's economic reform: an introduction

This introduction article provides the background information about the present symposium and the summary of the articles addressed in the symposium. On the background information, the article reviewed the process of economic reform and key measures of administrative reforms. On the symposium summary, the article explained issues and conclusions of the following articles: administrative decentralization and state-society relations, the role of government in economic development, ethical codes in China's civil service, transportation infrastructure and regional economic development, characteristics of recent financial reforms, and privatization of urban housing provision.     

Administrative ethics in post-MAO China: challenges and chances an introduction

This article provides an introduction to the recent development of administrative ethics in the People's Republic of China, which embarked on the path of reform and opening to the outside world in 1978. The article also summarizes the issues discussed in the following articles. These include Chinese views of corruption since Tiananmen, the issue of whistleblowing, organizational ethics and bureaucratic corruption in Chinese schools, changing administrative ethos and corruption in reform China, and the process of professionalization and rhe resultant rebuilding of administrative ethics in post-Mao China.     

International perspectives on public sector management and productivity: an introductory synthesis

The last ten years have seen the adoption of many significant public sector productivity initiatives globally. This special edition grew out of the first World Congress of the International Productivity Network, held in Canberra, Australia, in July 1992. Four themes are explored.     

Physical security: An introduction

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are extending the arena within which extremists and terrorists operate. Among the most active participants are Islamists and the Far Right, whose increasingly networked formats are enhanced by such technologies. These provide them with new benefits: interconnectivity; anonymity; cheapness; power enhancement; new audiences. Islamists and Jihadists are turning to the Internet to recruit, and to issue religious injunctions to the world-wide Muslim community. The stealthy growth of the U.S. militias was aided by the Internet, and white supremacists and neo-Nazis in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere increasingly see it as the last communication medium free of interference, and which they can use to best effect. Although all use it to communicate, they are poised to use it for command and control.     

Migration,Reconfigurations of Family Relations and Social (In)Security: an introduction

This introduction reviews the contributions this collection of articles makes to understanding migration, social reproduction and social protection. Migration necessarily involves reconfigurations of family relations and these entail changes in the patterning of social (in)security. Our expansive interpretation of the concepts of social reproduction and social protection situate the reorganisation of gendered family lives as integral to the migration–development nexus. Life-course thinking informs analysis of how migrants ‘do family’ and what this means for gender, identity and (in)security. The collection explores how ‘care deficits’ are managed, both discursively through the negotiation of gendered ideologies about gender identity and the family, and through the everyday practice of social reproduction. The resulting reorganisation of social security involves taking on new risks and vulnerabilities for migrants and their families. For both internal and international migrants the challenges involved in securing social reproduction are powerfully shaped by welfare and migratory regimes and raise important questions about the relationship between social protection and broader social policy and citizenship issues.     

Behind the Numbers: Welfare Reform from an Ecological Perspective

Abstract

Welfare reform is unfinished business. Contrary to proclamations of its resounding success, an examination of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 using an ecological perspective shows unequal outcomes. Some individuals and localities are faring better than others because of different ecosystems. Over reliance on reduced rolls as an indicator of success fails to capture the experiences of individuals who are differentially impacted by the redesigned welfare program. An ecological perspective avoids this flaw and offers a way to compile evidence that includes the views of multiple stakeholders. It looks behind the numbers to see how people are being affected by the nation's work first philosophy. Most importantly, an ecological perspective provides a framework for policy makers to examine the population that is being labeled as “hard to serve” and reframes the dialogue from personal pathology to a holistic approach that places equal weight on a person‐in‐environment fit in moving an individual from welfare to work. It introduces a new bottom line for effective public policy.     

Administrative reform in global perspectives: a symposium

ABSTRACT

This study examines public officials' preferences for different performance measures. Understanding these preferences is important for public officials to reach consensus on performance measurement. It finds that public officials overwhelmingly favor outcome measures, although output measures are more likely to be used in government. Public officials favor the capacities of outcome measures in addressing organizational goals and achievements. Measurement validity is not a major concern to public officials in their selections of performance measures. Finally, public officials favor the use of outcome measures in performance monitoring rather than in resource allocation.     

Development cooperation and post-colonial critique: an investigation into the South Korean model

Abstract

With the rise of the South–South Development Cooperation (SSDC), the international development community has entered into a new paradigm of development cooperation. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) has had to consider what recently added members might have to offer, particularly South Korea given its dramatic transformation from official development assistance (ODA) recipient to donor. Post-colonial theory sees ODA as a system that reinforces the traditional hierarchy of North–South relations and reaffirms the hegemony of dominant countries; the SSDC has faced similar neo-colonial allegations. By employing post-colonial theory this paper investigates some neo-­colonial criticisms of the ODA activities of major OECD-DAC and SSDC providers, before turning its focus on those of South Korea to determine whether it does indeed offer an alternative strategy to development. The African region was chosen as the focus in light of the increased amount of aid South Korea has allocated to the region. This paper concludes by offering a different role South Korea might play engaging within the OECD-DAC/SSDC context.     

Decisionism and action: changing perspectives in organization theory

The neglect of moral discourse in mainstream organization theory during the past four decades may be attributed to the dominance of the “decision,” popularized by Herbert Simon, as the field's primary unit of analysis. Underwritten by an epistemology derived from the logical positivists’ analytical distinction between value and fact, the idea of decision has come to be uncritically accepted as a morally neutral and empirically self-evident beginning point for organizational analysis. The ethnomethodological writings of Harold Garfinkel, coupled with insights from contemporary philosophy of language, radically challenge the value-fact distinction, pointing to an epistemology of everyday life in which value and fact are initially fused. The inherent fusion of value and fact provides the basis for an alternative epistemology for organization theory—termed the “action” or “process” perspective—which fundamentally alters the empirical understanding of organizational life and, consistent with the writings of Mary Parker Follett, enables the recovery of organization theory's moral center.

Commenting on the effects of technology on modern consciousness, Manfred Stanley has noted that:

Of all the upheavals of history and culture, it is difficult to imagine any of greater scope than the decline and fall not of some one vision of the good, but of the good itself. The rise of the notion that there is no such phenomenon as the good in the objective nature of things must be the most ironic anticlimax possible to centuries of bitter conflict between those who felt themselves empowered to define it.⁽¹⁾

For Stanley, the problem is not technology as such, but “technicism”: the implicit, even unconscious, belief that the humanly possible is synonymous with the technologically available. In technicist consciousness, technology is no longer a means for attaining the good, because “means” presupposes a prior moral or practical end in whose service that means is applied. Should any conception of the good be embraced at all, he argues, it ironically can merely be an artifact of what has been made available by technology.

Technicism has become the predominant attribute of modern consciousness, producing what William Barrett, speaking in a slightly different context, calls “the illusion of technique.”⁽²⁾

In the collective infatuation with technology, Barrett argues,

... we have come to regard it [technology] as the source for the discovery of human meaning. The tragic consequence of this is the inevitable alienation of man from himself and his estrangement from others. The irony of technicism to which Stanley alluded earlier may be summarized as a reversal of a familiar aphorism—invention has now become the mother of necessity—albeit one devoid of moral content.

Stanley sees the rise of technicism as concomitant with the emergence of liberal society, whose institutions have achieved coherence and legitimacy explainable in terms of three themes that have dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century. The first is the general desanctification or secularization of the political economy exemplified ... in the transformation of human skills and the earth itself into objective commodity resources for commercial production.⁽³⁾ The second theme is the ascendancy of the market principle as the chief basis of socioeconomic organization, wherein interests are privately held by individuals rather than shared by communities or other larger collectivities. Finally, there is the theme of pluralistic representation in political decision making, where the expression of individual (and group) interest is tolerated in the hope of achieving a balance among them.

Taken together these themes have produced a pervasive sense of nihilism in Western society insofar as they seem to exclude the possibility “of grounding collective standards of value priorities in anything more transcendent than the simplest shared utilities like power, wealth, and the security of one's immediate personal circumstances.”⁽⁴⁾

The consequence of the three themes of liberal society, profoundly abetted by technicist consciousness, is nothing less than the loss “of a sense of common human community in the West”⁽⁵⁾and also of the moral possibility of a common, transcendent good.     

Behavioural Development Economics: Lessons from Field Labs in the Developing World

Explanations of poverty, growth and development depend on the assumptions made about individual preferences and the willingness to engage in strategic behaviour. Economic experiments, especially those conducted in the field, have begun to paint a picture of economic agents in developing communities that is at variance with the traditional portrait. We review this growing literature with an eye towards preference-related experiments conducted in the field. We also offer lessons on what development economists might learn from experiments. We conclude by sharing our thoughts on how to conduct experiments in the field and then offer a few ideas for future research.     

Multiple perspectives on the meaning of revenue

The full range of the meaning of revenue emerges from seriously considering how people understand revenues from various perspectives. Explicit discussion of revenue meanings may contribute to improving our understanding of revenue-related phenomena. Insights can be gained from considering revenues from various perspectives. Revenue conceptualizations examined here range from the most immediate one, the notion of resources, to policy devices, mediation of relationships, measurements of political situations, and values. These discussions show that a variety of meanings are associate with revenues and that revenues are at least as fundamental to public budgeting as expenditures.