Reviews

Books reviewed: Prisoners of Professionalism: On the Construction and Responsibility of Political Studies. A Review Article Mark Bevir Reply to Mark Bevir: ‘Prisoners of Professionalism’ Jack Hayward Paradigm Politics Hugh T. Miller Additional Comments on Modernist Empiricism Mark Bevir The History of Government from the Earliest Times (Vols 1 to 3) S.E. Finer Administering the Summit: Administration of the Core Executive in Developed Countries B. Guy Peters, R.A.W. Rhodes and Vincent Wright (eds) Regulation Inside Government: Waste Watchers, Quality Policy and Sleaze Busters Christopher Hood, Oliver James, George Jones, Colin Stott and Tony Travers Unfinished Business: Reforming the House of Lords Ivor Richard and Damien Welfare The Politics and Policy of Local Taxation in Britain Allan McConnell Social Science in Government: The Role of Policy Researchers Richard P. Nathan Critical Issues in Cross‐National Public Administration: Privatization, Democratization, Decentralization Stuart S. Nagel (ed.)     

Governance is where you find it

The concept of governance is used frequently and in a variety of different ways. This article discusses Mark Bevir’s use of an interpretative approach to governance and its implications for understanding better how we govern. This approach has particular relevance to democratic forms of governance, and to the use of deliberative and direct forms of democracy.     

Understanding democratic governance: practical trends and theoretical puzzles

In line with the major philosophical (epistemological) transition in the social sciences from developmental historicism to modernist social science, there have been significant intellectual shifts in academic fields related to politics, state, and administration. More specifically, based on the modernist social science foundation, there has emerged the so-called ‘new governance’ encapsulating diverse neoliberal labels, theories, and models—including reinvention, new public management, networked governance, rational choice, and new institutionalism—which have serious adverse implications for democracy. These are some of the central arguments and claims made by Mark Bevir in his Democratic Governance. This article critically examines these claims and offers alternative viewpoints, especially regarding the controversial nexus between epistemology, theory, governance, and democracy.     

Modernism's Legacy: Dialogue,Objectivity, and Justice in Mark Bevir's Democratic Governance

This article looks at Mark Bevir's ideas on the changing nature of the modern state, as expressed in his book, ‘Democratic Governance’. In the book, the author argues that recent developments in the theory and practice of politics have their intellectual roots in wider trends in the academic study of society and politics. In particular, he argues, the rise in what he and others have called ‘the new governance’ – that is, the shift in Britain and elsewhere away from centralised policy making and implementation by state institutions toward policy networks in which the state is merely one actor among many – has emerged as a direct consequence of the rise of ahistorical, universalist social science methodologies.     

“Time is money,efficiency is life”: The transformation of labor relations in China

The past twenty-five years of economic reform have seen the transformation of labor relations in China, with the widespread adoption of capitalist labor practices by firms of all ownership types. This transformation has occurred in the absence of both large-scale privatization and political change, but was part of a gradual yet dynamic liberalization and “opening up” to foreign trade and investment that occurred across both regions and across types of firms. The first half of this paper details this process of dynamic liberalization that has spawned competition and change in labor practices, including marked increases in managerial autonomy and labor flexibility. This explanation goes beyond the regional emphasis to also examine changes across types of ownership; the gradual liberalization of labor policies and convergence with capitalist practices can only be understood as part of a more general trend ofownership expansion, through the introduction of new types of firms, andownership recombination, which is the fusing of the public and non-state sectors through novel forms of organization. The much-needed panacea to this shift to capitalism—a state regulatory and legal regime that is capable of mitigating its excesses and effective organizations to represent labor—is not yet well established. The second half of this paper explores two institutions, the labor contract system and the official trade union organization, to show how labor relations have shifted dramatically toward flexibility, insecurity, and managerial control. The author would like to thank those who offered comments and criticisms, including Mark Frazier, Jaeyoun Won, Bill Hurst, Jacob Eyferth, Elizabeth Remick, Mark Selden, Ruth Collier, and two anonymous reviewers.     

Inclusive partners? Internationalising South Korea’s chaebol through corporate social responsibility-linked development cooperation

Abstract

In recent years, non-traditional or ‘emerging’ donors such as South Korea have organised their development cooperation models in a manner that seeks to complement the capacities of the private sector by extending the overseas activities of domestic businesses. To better understand this process, this article examines the role of South Korea’s large, family-led conglomerates (chaebol) in its growing international development sector. In particular, we focus on how the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been used to link the role of its large, and frequently scandal-ridden, private companies to international development, and, by extension, how it has helped to internationalise state–business networks long associated with the Korean developmental state. We examine two strategies through which this has been carried out. The first is by extending the logic of creating shared value (CSV, a derivative of CSR) to aid and infrastructure projects in which chaebol and other state-linked businesses have participated. The second is by directly embedding CSR-based aid initiatives in the value chains of the specific chaebol themselves.     

Reviews

Books reviewed:
Prisoners of Professionalism: On the Construction and Responsibility of Political Studies. A Review Article Mark Bevir
Reply to Mark Bevir: 'Prisoners of Professionalism' Jack Hayward
Paradigm Politics Hugh T. Miller
Additional Comments on Modernist Empiricism Mark Bevir
The History of Government from the Earliest Times (Vols 1 to 3) S.E. Finer
Administering the Summit: Administration of the Core Executive in Developed Countries B. Guy Peters, R.A.W. Rhodes and Vincent Wright (eds)
Regulation Inside Government: Waste Watchers, Quality Policy and Sleaze Busters Christopher Hood, Oliver James, George Jones, Colin Stott and Tony Travers
Unfinished Business: Reforming the House of Lords Ivor Richard and Damien Welfare
The Politics and Policy of Local Taxation in Britain Allan McConnell
Social Science in Government: The Role of Policy Researchers Richard P. Nathan
Critical Issues in Cross-National Public Administration: Privatization, Democratization, Decentralization Stuart S. Nagel (ed.)     

Managing the hollow state

Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing through the 1980s and into the early 1990s governments in the industrialized democracies have brought about tremendous changes in their own State structures and in the relationship between the State and society. In the United States we refer to the “Reagan revolution,” but the changes have been no less profound in other countries, including those such as France and Sweden with very large and well-respected bureaucracies. While these changes in the nature of government are well-known and well-documented, their implications for the implementation and management of the public sector have not been explored adequately, especially in comparative context.⁽¹⁾ To the extent that the implications have been discussed it has been primarily in the context of the “new managerialism” but the changes really extend much more deeply into the process of governing and the manner in which the State relates to society.

This paper will be a step in the direction of more fully ramifying the nature of the changes using the phrase “the hollow state” to capture the changes that have occurred. The paper will attempt to look at what has been happening in government, as well as the implications for the future of the State, and for “statecraft” in contemporary democracies. That statecraft, by which the policy initiatives of government are linked to the lives of citizens, must continue to be a central element in the design of governments, but often has been ignored in the rush to reach fashionable political goals. If government is to continue to be a positive force in the future, then that craft must be fostered and mobilized rather than ignored with contempt.     

Why ‘Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill’? Rethinking the ‘coherent’ state

How we understand the state is important when addressing issues of human rights. During the debate on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda, the country was, at times, presented as nearly uniformly homophobic, exemplified by references to ‘Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill’. The state, which does discriminate against gender and sexual minorities, is comprised of different institutions and people, holding, at times, conflicting positions. This paper documents these differing positions that parts of the state adopted, along with how those positions changed over time in response to political changes and lobbying from civil society. Uncovering gaps in the coherence of the state by identifying these opposing views is useful both for how we understand and study the state, and for activism against political homophobias. Strategies against legislation similar to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill can target those within most likely to oppose such laws.     

The Military Coups in Fiji: Reactive and Transformative Tendencies

Abstract

Since 1987 there have been six coups altogether in Fiji. The article examines the reactive and transformative nature of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces, hereafter referred to as Fiji military, and coups and their impact on the small multi-cultural country of 850,000 people. The coups in Fiji have to be seen in the light of the two separate but related developments, namely the historical dynamic interplay between politics and ethnicity and secondly, how the military itself has evolved as a state institution and how it perceived its role in the modern state system. Although the military is modelled along the lines of a praetorian institution, its perceived role has often shifted from being guardian of indigenous Fijian interests to protector of the multi-ethnic state. The interventionist tendency of the military was largely in response to the way in which the interplay between politics and ethnicity had played a part in creating discord and tension. All the six coups in Fiji were linked and need to be understood in relation to each other. The 2006 coup was the most politically transformative as some of the most powerful institutions were weakened and reconfigured and a new order created under the guise of a ‘clean-up campaign’.     

Traditions of governance: interpreting the changing role of the public sector

The role of the state is changing under the impact of, for example, globalization. The changes have been variously understood as the new public management (NPM), the hollowing–out of the state and the new governance. This special issue of Public Administration explores the changing role of the state in advanced industrial democracies. It focuses on the puzzle of why states respond differently to common trends.
This introductory article has three aims. First, we provide a brief review of the existing literature on public sector reform to show that our approach is distinctive. We argue that the existing literature does not explore the ways in which governmental traditions shape reform. Second, we outline an interpretive approach to the analysis of public sector reform built on the notions of beliefs, traditions, dilemmas and narratives. We provide brief illustrations of these ideas drawn from the individual country articles. Finally, we outline the ground covered by all the chapters but we do not summarize and compare their experiences of reform. That task is reserved for the concluding article.     

Propaganda and the Question of Criminal Intent; the Semantics of the Zachistka

This article seeks to explore the origins and evolution of zachistka (‘cleansing’) and the particular role it played in the second Chechen war of 1999–2005. It argues that zachistka has become part of state, military and media representations of violence, building a psychological environment in favour of war. The article seeks to understand how the propaganda of the Russian Ministry of Defence might have contributed to the perpetuation of war crimes or incitement to atrocity crimes in the region.     

The Invisibility and Centrality of Class After Communism

Just as the availability of new ideas can drive the development of new institutions, the unavailability of ideas also has powerful political effects. The article demonstrates the paradoxical absence of class discourse in postcommunist Polish political debates—paradoxical because the same actors who eschewed class discourse believed that postcommunist class formation and inequalities were the central problems shaping the country and driving the political agenda. The paper documents the early thinking about class and politics on the part of key political activists. It traces their fear of class discourse to their limited knowledge of postwar European capitalisms and the role played by strong labor movements in stabilizing those systems. Ironically, Poles understood capitalism in too Marxist a way, as a perennially raging struggle between classes. Knowing that workers would lose out in the new system, they feared that speaking about class would empower workers as a class and thus weaken the market economy they were determined to build. Not generally aware how class compromise in the post-World War II era worked to stabilize capitalism, Polish (and most other eastern European) oppositionists did their best to thwart the emergence of class identities on the part of those left behind, even at the cost, for liberals, of reconciling themselves to political defeat. The result of the refusal to countenance class discourse was not a block on the emergence of class anger, but a displacement of that anger from class “others” to identity-based others, and thus a weakening of the liberal politics that most postcommunist liberals had wished to reinforce. A final section explores recent Polish thinking about class in the context of reactions to the Polish edition of my Defeat of Solidarity book showing continued mainstream reluctance to talk about class but new interest in this category among youth.     

Theory building: the debate between modernist and interpretive social science in the pursuit of democratic governance

Bevir’s Democratic Governance advances a new theory of governance. The theory rejects reliance on bureaucracy, market and community on the one hand, and strives to embrace a participatory and deliberative rationality to achieve democratic governance on the other. The fundamental question remains: in what ways can his theory ease the tension and bridge the gap between democracy and bureaucracy? If readers are interested in the development of a more coherent theory on public administration or prefer a more balanced perspective in the study of democratic governance, this book serves as a good start, though it may not be able to give you the ultimate answer.     

HOW THE REINVENTING GOVERNMENT MOVEMENT IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION WAS EXPORTED FROM THE U.S. TO OTHER COUNTRIES

From an academic point of view, Reinventing Government (RG) is a weak book. But the judgment of the academic community leaves with an interesting problem:How can we account for the relative influence that RG ideas have acquired over public management practices and for the enthusiasm with which those ideas have often been received by bureaucratic reformers in many countries? To answer this question, the article develops an analysis that proceeds in two stages. In the first section, I show how RG ideas gained ascendancy in political circles because they altered the terms of discourse about government management and made new kinds of coalitions possible. The second part looks at the structure of the global management consulting industry to show how the consultants who advised the Clinton administration were able to rely on already existing international network of American-based consulting organizations through which they could preach their Reinvention gospel around the globe. The American domination of the world management consulting market; coupled with the growing use by states of external consulting services as a source of advice on management issues, allowed consultants to carry RG ideas into the heart of the policy process.     

The Ideologies of Informality: informal urbanisation in the architectural and planning discourses

This paper discusses how urban informality in the developing world has been understood in the West, and how it has been incorporated in the discourse of urban architects and planners in the developed world. It proposes a genealogy of this understanding through the identification of discourses with major ideological currents. It explains the evolution of the relationship between the understanding of urban informality and anarchism; the empowerment of the urban poor and finally the role of this understanding as a neoliberal discourse against state intervention. It finds that, although the incorporation of urban informality in urban architectural discourses is presented as a relative novelty, it is in reality at least 60 years old, dating from John Turner’s writings about the barriadas of Lima. From a progressive and empowering understanding of how the grassroots are able to take their lives into their own hands, it has become a tool for neoliberal discourses defending the dismissal of the state as a valid articulator of urban development.     

The state and economic development

In this article it is argued that one must distinguish between the arbitrary, short-run power of the state and the long-run, infrastructural power of the state. Game theory concepts are used to illustrate these ideas and successful development is linked to the infrastructural power of the state. The evolution of the latter is related to culture/ideology and this is given operational meeting within the context of simple game theory. The historical experience of Japan is utilized to illustrate these ideas. Dr. Richard Grabowski is a professor of economics at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. His research interests include the role of the developmental state in economic development. His work has appeared inWorld Development, Journal of Developing Areas, Economic Development and Cultural Change.     

Perhaps this time it's different: ideas and interests in shaping international responses to financial crises

The experience of the recent two decades of financial crises shows that donor countries and international financial institutions (IFIs) can respond to a crisis in a peripheral open economy by either of two crisis management strategies: either they can impose harsh conditionality to fix the domestic economy and prevent future moral hazard problems, or they can provide last-resort credit to restore market confidence. In some cases, the crisis management strategy changes as the crisis evolves. What are the factors that determine the choice of key donor countries and IFIs? This article traces the processes by which the USA and the International Monetary Fund designed the crisis management strategy in respect to the Asian crisis, and how Germany and the European Central Bank designed the response to the eurozone crisis, in order to understand how ideas regarding the causes and solutions of a financial crisis interact with the interests of key donor countries. The article argues that in both cases ideas and interests are mutually constituted, but in each case the mechanism that linked ideas and interests was different: whereas in the Asian case US interests led to policy innovation and experimentation and to a change in the crisis management strategy, in the European case ideas played a greater role in shaping German interests. The article explains this difference on the basis of the lessons learned by IFIs from the Asian crisis, which were then implemented in the eurozone case.