India's security partnership with Singapore

Abstract

In recent years, India and Singapore have developed a strong bilateral security and economic partnership that has assumed a central position in India's strategic engagement in Southeast Asia. Having sought strategic engagement with India for many decades, Singapore has now successfully positioned itself as India's leading political partner and economic gateway to the region. At the same time, India and Singapore have actively pursued close defence ties, including frequent joint training and the assumption of an active maritime security role by India in Southeast Asia. The recent decision by India to allow the Singapore air force and army to operate long term training facilities on Indian territory represents a significant development in Indian strategic practice and may presage a more permanent Indian security presence in East Asia. This article will examine these developments and consider to what extent the emergent security relationship between India and Singapore should be seen as a desire to balance China's growing economic and political dominance of the region and to what extent it reflects a ‘natural’ strategic sphere for India stretching from Aden to Singapore and beyond into East Asia.     

The development of social indicators from content analysis of social documents

If we agree that social indicators indicate or measure only within the context of a theory of social change, and if we further assume that theories of social change which deal only with social conditions, behavioral interchanges or transactions, and the material environment, are likely to be unsuccessful because they ignore the mental side of life, it follows that we will want our theories of social change, and the social indicators associated with them, to incorporate the cultural and group psychological aspects of social behavior.When we look to possible data bases in search of raw material for social indicators of culture and group psychology there are, broadly speaking, two possibilities. Data may be gathered from interviews or from cultural artifacts.But interview response data, because of (a) their reactive character; (b) the difficulty of compiling time-series of responses; (c) the impossibility of making use of historical sources and (d) difficulties of validation against indicators external to the survey research context are, perhaps, less than ideal as a possible basis for social indicator systems. This leaves us with the possibility, and with the problem, of developing group psychological and cultural indicators from an analysis of cultural artifacts: literary documents, films, political speeches and other sources of this sort.     

The feasibility of social policies

The notion that, given sufficient ingenuity and resources, any social problem can be solved, in a manner consistent with the announced policy objectives and with the accepted institutional framework, has been a major source of failures and frustrations. This paper suggests that policy analysis should concentrate on the investigation of the conditions of feasibility of public programs. Feasibility is defined in terms of all the relevant constraints: social, political, administrative, and institutional, as well as technical and economic. The emphasis on the pure logic of choice and optimal decision rules, so characteristic of normative theorizing in decision theory, management science, and welfare economics, has tended to obscure the fact that in the field of social policies, the range of feasible choices is severely limited by a variety of constraints. Most bad decisions are not just suboptimal; on closer examination, it usually turns out that they were not even feasible at the time they were made. Only by understanding the reasons why, under certain circumstances, a given goal cannot be achieved, can we hope to gain better knowledge about the working of social institutions. Just as the essence of the scientific method is the critical analysis and refutation of proposed theories, rather than the accumulation of evidence in favor of pet solutions, so the most important task of policy analysis consists in submitting plans and objectives to the most stringent tests of feasibility. Also in analytic case studies, the search for constraints that were ignored by the decisionmakers has considerable heuristic value, as I try to demonstrate with a critical discussion of some aspects of the British National Health Service.Paper presented at the Workshop on Models and Cases in Administration Decision Making, Joint Sessions of Workshops of the European Consortium for Political Research, Strasbourg, France, March 28–April 2, 1974.     

The limits of social research

His research interests concern international housing and urban planning. His published work includes a number of edited books, most recently: Housing Markets and Policies under Fiscal Austerity; Women, Housing, and Community; The International Handbook of Housing Policies and Practices;and, forthcoming, The Deregulation of Housing.     

The social policy of the firm

The welfare state concept hides an important aspect of modern industrial societies. In capitalist countries welfare is provided through a mixture of public and private initiatives. The author suggests that the concept welfare economy more fully captures the economic interpenetration of public and private sectors. The growth of fringe benefits illustrates the extent to which private enterprise performs the welfare function.Government increasingly intervenes through processes of mandating, stimulating, regulating, and supporting, using private enterprise as the vehicle for delivery of welfare services. Government's traditionally conceived role as welfare service provider is also changed through recognition that it is both an employer and purchaser, significantly impacting society's original income distribution.An earlier version of this essay was presented as a lecture at the University of Melbourne and published in Ronald F. Henderson, The Welfare Stakes: Strategies for Australian Social Policy, Melbourne: Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research, 1981.     

The social sub-optimality of competitive elections

One of the common normative assumptions about elections is that competitive elections are inherently good, and non-competitive elections are problematic. This paper challenges that assumption. At the level of individual elections, competitive elections produce either sub-optimal results or trivially optimal results, but competitive elections are never uniquely optimal. In aggregation, competitive elections for a set of offices are inherently sub-optimal. From a procedural perspective, the circumstances in which competitive elections are appropriate are rare, and from a diagnostic perspective, we cannot conclude that there are problems in the electoral system based on a lack of competition. In the context of social choice theory, competitive elections are not inherently good.     

The utility of bonding social capital

Abstract

In most studies of social capital, bridging social capital is emphasized as ‘good’ for democracy and economic performance. It is rarer to find studies showing that bonding social capital can bring positive effects. Mostly, bonding social capital is either overlooked or depicted as the ‘villain’ that leads to ethnic conflict, intolerant behaviour and poor economic and democratic development. In this article, it is argued that this picture needs to be revised. If we assume that bonding trust is a negative force for development and democracy, we ignore a substantial portion of the political history of the West. Also, new empirical evidence from India suggests that bonding social capital is related to good governance. High levels of bonding trust cannot only facilitate political cooperation. They may also work as a shield against public sector employees who attempt to exploit citizens in a corrupt or clientelistic manner. The conclusion drawn in the article is that the view of social capital as a prime mover with inherent normatively attractive qualities should give way to a perspective where social capital is more properly regarded as an intermediate variable where the way it is combined with, or interacts with, other factors determines outcomes.     

关于社会中介组织的政治分析

社会中介组织是市场经济发展的产物,又是推动市场经济发展的润滑剂.近年来,社会中介组织在中国的发展十分迅速,它的社会功能不仅在于对市场经济发展的促进,从政治社会学的角度来看,它对于政府机构改革、政治民主化以及治理腐败等均有积极意义.     

The social construction of electronic space

Computer‐mediated communication is a phenomenon of post‐industrial society. As a consequence of the interactivity and persistent textual nature of this form of communication, new spaces of sociality are constructed which can be analysed and interpreted with the epistemologies and methodologies utilised in understanding more conventional places. This approach reveals that electronic spaces are constructions firmly tied to the cultural and social experiences of ‘real‐world’ existences. Electronic identities, then, are built from this wide base of experience and ‘real‐world’ identity rather than, as is sometimes claimed, begun afresh. These connections to understood material culture and the prevalence of the typed word in electronic spaces permits a digital archaeology, inspired by material culture studies, which is both revealing of the users of these spaces as well as the wider social constructions of post‐industrial society.