Challenges Confronting Contemporary Public Budgeting: Retrospectives/Prospectives from Allen Schick

For nearly half a century, Allen Schick's works have explored and analyzed central issues in the role of budgets in modern government. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development published Evolutions in Budgetary Practice: Allen Schick and the OECD Senior Budget Officials, a selection of his work, together with new chapters. The book traces developments in budget practices and reforms since the 1980s, relating them to changes in the role of government, and discusses challenges to contemporary budgeting and how they might be met. This collection provides an invaluable insight into Schick's thinking about public budgeting: a perspective on the past, a practical resource for the present, and a guide to the future.     

BOOK REVIEWS

book reviewed in this article
S talin's R ussia and the C risis in S ocialism . By M ax E astman .
C ontrol of A liens in the B ritish C ommonwealth of N ations . By C. F. F raser .
W hat G ermany F orgot . By J ames T. S hotwell .
N azis and G ermans . By H arold P icton . Foreword by G. P. G ooch . ( Allen & Unwin .
F rom V ersailles to D anzig . By C laud G olding . ( Allen & Unwin .
A H istory of the G ambia . By J. M. G RAY .
P ortrait of A C olony . By A lan F. H attersley .
A H istory of S outh A frica . By E ric A. W alker . Second edition .     

Do Politicians Listen to Experts? The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 and The Capacity to Budget

Last year offered a unique opportunity to compare the ideas of experts and politicians. The 1990 Budget Enforcement Act changed the federal budget process. Allen Schick's 1990 book, The Capacity to Budget, included ideas on how to improve budgeting at the federal level. A comparison is made between the new law and the new ideas in several areas of the budgetary process: deficit reduction; resource rationing; adjustment to changing expenditures; increasing budget honesty; decreasing conflict; rou-tinizing the process; integrating the parts of the budget; and balancing claims and resources.     

Books in review

the author of numberous works in U.S. Jewish history and culture. Her most recent book is The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950.     

Objectivity versus outrage

He wrote a background paper for the Committee on Health Care for Homeless Persons, “The Dynamics of Homelessness.” He has studied both the needs of homeless persons and the development of shelters and services for the homeless; he codirected a training tape for service providers; and he is coauthoring a book for shelter staff. He is author of Organization in a Changing Environment.     

Israel and its enemies

He has written widely on international relations and international law. His work Security Or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategyremains the authoritative treatment of the subject. His newest book is Force, Order and Justice: International Law in an Age of Atrocity.     

Books in review

has taught at the universities of London and York. He is author of The Making of Sociology, The Shaking of the Foundations: Family and Society,and The Abolitionists—The Family and Marriage under Attack.Fletcher’s own book on Burt, Science, Ideology, and the Media,will be issued by Transaction in 1991.     

Post-mass culture

He has written widely on media and defense issues. He is author of KAL 007: The Cover-Up—Why the True Story Has Never Been Told,and a forthcoming book on the worldwide Military Command and Control System.     

Chance,choice, civility and Coleman

He is the author of several works that bear upon themes in Coleman’s book, including Professing Sociology(1968); Foundations of Political Sociology(1972); Winners and Losers(1984); and Persuasions and Prejudices(1989).     

Democratic Quality in Stable Democracies

The major predecessor to Ringen’s and my own efforts to measure democratic quality in terms of the purpose of democracy is Robert Dahl’s seminal book Polyarchy (1971). Measuring the quality of democracy requires two prior judgments: (1) making sure that, in terms of institutional characteristics, a country is sufficiently democratic, and that, as a minimum, it has universal suffrage, and (2) that its democracy has been uninterrupted for a minimum number of years. To an important extent, higher democratic quality can be attributed to institutional characteristics of consensus democracy, especially proportional representation.     

Australian counterfactuals

The Secret History of the Convict Colony: Alexandro Malaspina's report on the British Settlement of New South Wales, by Robert J. King. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990. xii + 179 pp. £25. ISBN 0–04–610020–2.

Taming the Great South Land: a history of the conquest of nature in Australia, by William J. Lines. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991. xx + 337 pp. £30. ISBN 1–86373–017–6.

Governing Savages, by Andrew Markus. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990. x + 214 pp., illus. £9.95 paperback. ISBN 0–04–442150–8. Sydney, by Jan Morris. Viking, London, 1992. 246 pp. £16.99. ISBN 0–670–82745–2.

Australia's Immigrants 1788–1988 (2nd edition), by Geoffrey Sherington. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990. x + 199 pp., illus. £9.95 paperback. ISBN 0–04–442204–0.     

David Riesman and <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Lonely Crowd</Emphasis>

The reception of David Riesman’s classic sociological work The Lonely Crowd exemplifies both the possibilities and perils of the work of public intellectuals. The book was almost universally misread as a paean to inner-direction, and a lament upon the decline of the independent American spirit. But it was something rather more different, and more complex, than either of these things.     

The Sino-Japanese-Russian triangle

This paper attempts to understand the relations between three important actors in Northeast Asia — China, Russia, and Japan — since the end of the Cold War. Whereas the political changes attending the collapse of the communist bloc have opened new foreign policy opportunities to all three actors, only China and Russia have been quick to move on them. Japan’s relative inflexibility, attributable to its alliance with the US on the one hand and its territorial dispute with Russia on the other, has had the effect of impeding the application of triangular diplomacy. Editor ofAsian Survey, has written or editedSino-Soviet Normalization and Its International Implications (1992),China’s Quest for National Identity (with Samuel Kim, 1993), and many other analyses of Chinese domestic and foreign policy. His most recent book (with Haruhiro Fukui and Peter N.S. Lee) isInformal Politics in East Asia (Cambridge, 2000).     

The Struggle for Recognition: Diplomatic Competition Between China and Taiwan in Oceania

The PRC and Taiwan are competing to gain diplomatic recognition from Pacific Islands states, a number of which recognise Taiwan and serve as a barrier to its international isolation. Since much of Oceania is in Australia’s sphere of influence, this struggle has often involved Canberra. This paper focuses on the intensifying conflict–with conclusions about the local political economic situations of the countries in Oceania that are most likely to switch recognition, the dilemmas that the issue poses for Australia and its alliance with the US, and the game theory of these auctions of diplomatic recognition. The rental of recognition is analysed as a “sovereignty business” in which some Pacific Islands states engage—similar to the offshore financial centres which are prevalent in the region. Anthony van Fossen is Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences in the School of Arts, Media and Culture and member of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University. He has written extensively about the Pacific Islands, particularly in relation to its offshore financial centres and ‘sovereignty businesses’. His most recent book is South Pacific Futures: Oceania Toward 2050 (Brisbane: Foundation for Development Cooperation, 2005), the first comprehensive survey of expert views of the future of the region.     

Writing the Body

Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the mapping of bodies and spaces, edited by Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991.     

Last Thoughts on <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Last Intellectuals</Emphasis>

Over twenty years ago my book The Last Intellectuals put into circulation the phrase “public intellectual.” The term unexpectedly enjoyed great success. It encapsulated a new division between a professional or academic intellectual focused on his or her specialty and an intellectual orientated to a larger public. The former tend to disappear into the university, while they latter write for the educated public. In the twenty years since its publication, my book has been sharply challenged. Moreover the emergence of African-American and women intellectuals, and well as new developments such as Internet, have possibly undermined my thesis. Yet these phenomena amount to revisions, not refutations, of my thesis. Moreover the role of intellectuals in France and Germany suggest that the same process of academization is taking place in other advanced industrial nations. What is called for is not nostalgia or its opposite, a celebration of everything that happens, but a consideration of the real shifts that affect the lives and work of intellectuals.

Challenging Privatization: A Conceptual and Theoretical Argument

This is the second of a three-part polemic against the destruction of state owned enterprises in China (the first, “Against Privatization: A Historical and Empirical Argument”, is published in JCPS 13:1, 2008). It critically examines the ideology of privatization and argues for alternative guidelines of reform. The central contention is that a healthy market economy does not require domination of private property; rather it relies on apposite political-legal-ideological power and regulatory-monitoring regimes of accumulation and distribution socially legitimated within a given public culture. Rejecting the fallacies of ownership determinism and precision requirement on property rights for morality and efficiency, this essay clarifies distinction between the notion of exclusive properties and the vision of their socialized utility and management. Justifications for reforming state and private sectors alike in accordance with a unifying commons of social defense and feasibilities of innovative reform measures and policy proposals in that direction, will be elaborated in a third essay titled “Overcoming Privatization: A Strategic and Institutional Argument”.

The Time That Was Broken, the Home That Was Razed: Deconstructing Slavenka Drakulic's Storytelling About Yugoslav War Crimes

¹In this article, I analyze the conceptualization of transitionaljustice underwriting Slavenka Drakuli's book, They Would NeverHurt a Fly, on the trials at the International Criminal Tribunalfor the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. I adopt a criticaland deconstructive strategy of interpretation that reveals Drakuli'sidea of ‘justice for the Balkans’ as not only internallyincoherent and fractured but also politically problematic. Iintroduce two concepts as central to Drakuli's storytellingabout transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia: (i) theidea of a ‘broken time’ and (ii) the idea of a ‘razedhome.’ I conclude that Drakuli's narratives of justiceare aimed at repairing broken time and rebuilding the razedhome in a way that reveals the author's redemptive, rather thanpolitical, thinking about transitional justice.     

Bush, China, Taiwan: A triangular analysis

This paper reexamines American policy toward China, Taiwan, and their ambivalent bilateral relationship, focusing on the period since Washington’s shift from strong (but not unconditional) support of Nationalist China to the role of balancer in the early 1970s, particularly on the most recent period under George W. Bush. We analyze the relationship from a strategic triangular perspective. The China-Taiwan-US relationship is triangular in the sense that each actor’s relations with the other two depend on its relations with the third. It is strategic in its focus on security. The United States has been the consistent “pivot” of this triangle, having better relations with both “wings” than they have with each other. Washington has retained this structurally advantageous position partly because of its disproportionate strategic weight, and partly because of the inherent difficulties Taipei and Beijing have had forging a cooperative bilateral relationship. This structure has been quite stable since the Cold War, as Washington has periodically shifted its balance from one wing to the other without altering the triangle’s basic configuration. Yet so long as the configuration is maintained, the basic problem on which the triangle is based — the contested independence of Taiwan — cannot be resolved. This creates a sense of national identity frustration that will continue to generate attempts at resolution, either by Taiwan’s declaration of independence or China’s forced reunification (or both). editor ofAsian Survey, has written or editedSino-Soviet Normalization and Its International Implications (1992),China’s Quest for National Identity (with Samuel Kim, 1993), and many other analyses of Chinese domestic and foreign policy. His most recent book (with Haruhiro Fukui and Peter N.S. Lee) isInformal Politics in East Asia (Cambridge, 2000).     

David Riesman: A Personal Appreciation

David Riesman, the Harvard sociologist, rose to eminence in the 1950s as one of America’s most influential “public intellectuals,” gaining renown as principal author of the must-read sociological classic of the time, The Lonely Crowd. In that work, Riesman accounted for something of a sea-change in American life, marked by his famous distinction between inner-directed and other-directed character-types, and in such a convincing fashion that the book became a watershed in post-war America’s understanding of itself. Beyond that, Riesman continued to carry out urbane studies of a wide-ranging array of subjects, all the while actively engaged in the major political–ideological–ethical controversies and torments of his time. As something of a principled yet reasoned “Establishmentarian” contrarian, Riesman extended the work of such incisive social thinkers as Tocqueville, Max Weber, Veblen, and George Orwell. In this personal appreciation, Michael Delaney charts his acquaintanceship with Riesman, going back to the early 1960s (Riesman acted as a kind of mentor to Delaney at a distance; the two never met in person and their association was carried on solely through letters spanning some three decades). The essay surveys Riesman’s intellectual legacy as a self-conceived ethnographer of American life, and dwells on his “exceptionalism” as a generous, caring, high-minded man of principle, discerning judgment, and exemplary character.