ELITE ETHNOGRAPHIES: POTENTIAL,PITFALLS AND PROSPECTS FOR GETTING ‘UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL’

This article celebrates Rod Rhodes' use of ethnography to study political elites ‘up close and personal’. Initially Rhodes' work is contextualized within the development of political ethnography more generally, before his ethnographies of ‘Everyday life in a Ministry’ are reviewed, illustrating the potential of ethnography to research policy‐making elites. This review highlights epistemological and ontological questions which link to criticism of Rhodes' work as taking an anti‐foundational stance. In looking at future prospects for ethnography in governance settings, this article argues that researchers building on Rhodes' scholarship can choose whether to use ethnography as a ‘method’ or an ‘interpretive methodology’. In concluding, the case is made for a ‘constructivist modern empiricism’ which utilizes the ethnographic method alongside other research methods as being most useful for public policy and administration scholarship aiming to be practically useful for understanding either the processes of public policy‐making or its impact.     

IT'S PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION,ROD, BUT MAYBE NOT AS WE KNOW IT: BRITISH PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE 2000s

This paper assesses what happened to academic public administration (PA) in Britain in the 2000s in the light of Rod Rhodes' gloomy prognostications about the future of the subject in the late 1990s. It argues that British PA had such a good decade in the 2000s, in funding, output, academic‐practitioner interaction and institutional developments, that it could almost be said to have ‘never had it so good’, even if ‘British PA’ was probably less internationally distinctive in the 2000s than a century before. But even if the subject flourished against the odds in the 2000s, Rhodes' sombre assessment of its future cannot be dismissed. British public administration faces several potential threats in the 2010s and beyond: in funding, research, and teaching capacity. But extinction still seems an unlikely fate for British PA even when a sombre view is taken of the funding outlook and the changing balance of supply and demand.     

POLITICS BY HEURISTICS: POLICY NETWORKS WITH A FOCUS ON ACTOR RESOURCES,AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE CASE OF RENEWABLE ENERGY POLICY UNDER NEW LABOUR

Policy network analysis is criticized for being a ‘heuristic’ device, yet ‘heuristic’ methods may be essential to achieve detailed understandings of specific policy outcomes. Rational choice modelling alone cannot perform a similar function. This paper develops a ‘heuristic’ policy network approach that focuses on the analysis of actor resources. Changing contexts can alter the resource distributions of actors within a policy community. This can lead to new policy outcomes. Policy networks can therefore be rescued from criticisms made by, for example, Dowding, by re‐visiting Rhodes's earlier emphasis on analysis of actor resources. This approach is illustrated in the case of UK renewable energy policy under the UK government of New Labour. Changing contexts have strengthened the resources of the main renewable energy interest groups to achieve higher targets and more technology‐specific means of financial incentives. The Renewable Energy Association has achieved legislation favouring feed‐in tariffs as is the practice elsewhere in Europe for small renewable generators.     

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.     

Understanding Belarus: Belarussian identity

In the first of this three-part series of articles the linguistic situation in Belarus was analysed. The research questions that inform this second article are: 1) What kind of ethnic identity evolved in Belarus that makes most Belarusians insensitive to ‘their own’ national symbols and attached to those embodying their kinship with neighbouring countries? 2) What is the status of the Belarusian national movement when viewed through the prism of the most reputable theories of ethnic nationalism? My attempt to respond to these questions stems from my field observations and familiarity with scholarly studies and other material. Anthony David Smith's classic volume on ethnic origins of nations and Miroslav Hroch's perceptive book on national movements in Europe's ‘small nations’ are of special importance. A quintessential piece on Belarusian identity is Yanka Kupala's play ‘Tuteishiya’; written in 1922 and published in 1924, it was banned by the Soviet authorities primarily because Russian expansionism in regard to Belarus was painted by Kupala as a mirror image of Polish expansionism. The play is every bit as topical today as in the 1920s.     

‘Fragile States’: introducing a political concept

The special issue ‘Fragile States: A Political Concept’ investigates the emergence, dissemination and reception of the notion of ‘state fragility’. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the ‘fragile states’ concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development and security. The contributors to the issue investigate the instrumental use of the ‘state fragility’ label in the legitimisation of Western policy interventions in countries facing violence and profound poverty. They also emphasise the agency of actors ‘on the receiving end’, describing how the elites and governments in so-called ‘fragile states’ have incorporated and reinterpreted the concept to fit their own political agendas. A first set of articles examines the role played by the World Bank, the oecd, the European Union and the g7+ coalition of ‘fragile states’ in the transnational diffusion of the concept, which is understood as a critical element in the new discourse on international aid and security. A second set of papers employs three case studies (Sudan, Indonesia and Uganda) to explore the processes of appropriation, reinterpretation and the strategic use of the ‘fragile state’ concept.     

Stalinist Public or Communitarian Project? Housing Organisations and Self-Managed Canteens in Moscow's Frunze Raion

In 1929, when rationing was introduced widely across the Soviet Union, urban residents and housing organisations started to organise their own canteens at the residence level by collecting their ration books. These were called ‘self-managed canteens’ (samodeyatel'nye stolovye). Although this canteen project did not expand as expected during the food crisis of the early 1930s, the project was more successful in Moscow's Frunze raion. This was especially true of canteen No. 171, reportedly established at the initiative of housewives, which continued to operate until 1940 with a steady growth in gross sales, and which started to allocate part of its profits to local community activities. This unique case exemplifies a communitarian project by residents which might lead to a reconsideration of the ‘public’ under the Stalinist regime.     

War,Violence and the Making of the Stalinist State: A Tillyian Analysis

Abstract

Defining the state as ‘organised violence’, based on the emergence of the modern European national state system, Charles Tilly identified four essential war-driven, state-building activities: ‘war-making’; ‘state-making’; ‘protection’ of elite ‘clients’; and ‘extraction’ of resources. Drawing on Tilly's primary categories of analysis, this essay considers the ways in which war, or the threat of war, real or imagined, shaped the Soviet state, particularly in its Stalinist manifestation. This essay argues that Tilly's warfare-state paradigm, judiciously deployed, brings into high relief facets of Soviet state-making that few other paradigms do.     

The other “papers on the science of administration”: a search for common themes

The Papers on the Science of Administration are almost exclusively Gown for the opening and closing articles by Luther Gulick. This article explores the intervening nine articles to test some of Gulick's assertions about them. First, despite Gulick's somewhat unclear claim to the contrary, the “other” papers did not present many unfamiliar arguments to impress informed readers. Second, despite Gulick's explicit claim, the articles offered little consensus except on the most general and unusable “principles” of administration. Third, there were hints throughout the papers that the “principles” approach to management was collapsing because of the vague but indispensable issue of leadership. Hence, the “other” papers are neglected because they never offered the emerging consensus that Gulick promised.     

‘LADIES A YOUR TIME NOW!’ Erotic politics,lovers' rock and resistance in the UK

‘Lovers’ rock' is a largely overlooked genre of ‘Black British’ reggae music that emerged in London during the 1970s through Caribbean nightclubs and ‘pirate radio’ stations. Lovers’ rock was an integral part of the reggae music scene of that period. However, lovers rock became gendered as genre that appealed particularly to the romantic aspirations of black teenaged girls growing up in ‘Thatcher's Britain’. Within the political context of the dancehall scene, both lovers rock and roots reggae are seen as binary opposites of each other – lovers being ‘soft’ feminised reggae concerned with romantic love, and roots as masculinised ‘serious’ reggae concerned with black oppositional politics. Using black feminist theories on love and the erotic, this paper challenges the gendering of lovers' rock by suggesting that the genre was part of a much broader and complex political expression of love and rebellion amongst Caribbean communities in Britain. Indeed, while the gendering process is highly problematic, this paper also argues that Caribbean communities had also used the erotic and political intersection of both genres to reconfigure racist and sexist representations of their identities. As such Caribbean males and females had created their own ethic of ‘loving blackness’ as a way of restoring and validating their experiences within Britain's often hostile urban centres.     

Seeing/being double: how African immigrants in Canada balance their ethno-racial and national identities

With increased transnational ties to their homelands, immigrants' ontology now verges on being double – and, consequently, on seeing double – most of the time. This double consciousness, and the attendant dearth of fixity in identity among immigrants, has led some to wonder where the allegiance of minority immigrants, in particular, lies. Can these immigrants be loyal to both their ethno-racial identity and their host national identity? Is the identification with one's ethno-racial background and national identity a zero-sum game in which one side of the loyalty equation gains only at the expense of the other? This study examines these issues, using African immigrants (specifically, Ghanaians and Somalis) in Canada as a case study. In particular, we use multinomial logistic regression to predict the factors that prompt these immigrants to identify as: ‘just Canadians’, ‘just Ghanaians/Somalis’, or as ‘Ghanaian-/Somali-Canadians’. The study is significant not only because of the lack of research on African immigrants' identity formation in Canada, but also because immigrants' identity has significant bearing on their settlement and integration in host societies.     

Don't compromise your desire for development! A Lacanian/Deleuzian rethinking of the anti-politics machine

It is my aim in this article to engage with development and its promises at a time when many people are distancing themselves from the appalling reality of the development industry and the disastrous effects of its interventions. Rather than rejecting the notion of development, I contend that ‘engaging with development’ remains important in relating to Third World people's dreams and desires. In other words, people's desires for development must be taken seriously and its promises should not be forsaken. I elaborate on the political and ethical implications of the rejection of this notion of development and argue that, through the abandonment of the notion, the very ‘object’ of development is lost. In other words, the disavowal of development signifies the betrayal of its promise. To elaborate this position, I propose a Lacanian/Deleuzian perspective on development as a ‘desiring machine’—which produces endless desires—so as to explore the radical, constitutive disjunction between the ‘virtual’ world of the development machine and the ‘actual’ workings of development interventions.     

How can emerging powers speak? On theorists,native informants and quasi-officials in International Relations discourse

Emerging powers like China, India and Brazil are receiving growing attention as objects in International Relations (IR) discourse. Scholars from these emerging powers are rarely present as subjects in mainstream IR discourse, however. This paper interrogates the conditions for scholars in emerging powers to speak back to the mainstream discipline. It argues, first, that ‘theory speak’ is rare from scholars based in periphery countries perceived to be ‘emerging powers’. Despite increasing efforts to create a ‘home-grown’ theoretical discourse in China, India and Brazil, few articles in mainstream journals present novel theoretical frameworks or arguments framed as non-Western/Southern theory or even as a ‘Chinese school’ or ‘Brazilian concepts’. Second, scholars from emerging powers tend to speak as ‘native informants’ about their own country, not about general aspects of ‘the international’. Third, some scholars even speak as ‘quasi-officials’, that is, they speak for their country.     

‘Compliance or contradiction’? Teaching ‘History’ in the ‘New’ Ukraine. A view from Ukraine's Eastern Borderlands

Whilst much academic rigour has been devoted to analysing the ‘contents’ of historical textbooks in Ukraine, this article examines the teacher's role in the ‘transfer’ of the state's message to schoolchildren. This article demonstrates that in Ukraine's eastern borderlands teachers are highly active in negotiating the new historical narrative. Teachers are found to subtly change the accent or focus away from the ‘nationalist’ stance towards Russia, as found in the school history textbooks, to a more tolerant stance which aims to promote rather than negate Ukraine's historical interactions with Russia. Thus, this simultaneously reinforces a particular ‘regional’ understanding of historical events.     

A Bibliography About a Changed Federal Government Workplace

Abstract

This bibliography contains more than 130 hand picked sources that address change in the Federal government workplace, including articles and books by academics and practitioners and reports by Federal agencies including the General Accounting Office and the Office of Personnel management, as well as Congress. The introduction to the bibliography draws on the expertise of three well known authorities in the field, as well as the authors' of the bibliography.     

Vital Democracy: A Theory of Democracy in Action

Scottish citizens benefit from 19 per cent more public spending per head than English citizens. The ‘Barnett formula’ is slowly reducing the gap, but very little is known about the countries' relative needs and hence about how far the present gap is defensible: the aim of this paper is to throw some light on the countries' relative needs. We begin with the complex formulae that the Westminster government uses to assess the spending needs of English local authorities, and we use these English formulae to assess the needs of Scottish local authorities for three major blocks of local services. These formulae suggest that Scotland needs 6.4 per cent more per head than England for environmental, protective and cultural services, 8.1 per cent more for highway maintenance, and between 24.3 per cent and 35.3 per cent more for fire services. We also combine these results with those of two other papers concerned with local education and social services to show that these English formulae put Scotland's per capita needs for local government services as a whole at about 6 per cent above England's. However, we then compare the relative needs of Scottish local authorities as assessed by the English formulae with their relative needs as assessed by the Scottish needs formulae that are currently used by Holyrood, and we find major differences. This suggests either that at least one country uses seriously flawed formulae to assess needs, or that the two countries have different conceptions of need.     

Australia's Handling of Tensions between Islam and the West under the Howard Government

This article examines the impact of international conflicts involving the Muslim world upon Australia's multicultural society by studying the Howard government's responses to tensions between Islam and the West since September 11. Specifically, it surveys the Howard government's participation in the ‘War on Terror’, other aspects of Australia's foreign and security policies, including the relationship with the United States, the emergence of immigration and refugee flows as national security issues, and the subsequent impact of all this on multiculturalism and in particular on Australia's Muslim community. At a broader level, the article challenges the argument that foreign policy is inconsequential for social policy, intercommunal, inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations. The internalization of the ‘War on Terror’ has reinforced a negative portrayal of Islam and Muslims in Australia by blurring the dividing line between ‘Islam’ on the one hand and ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism’ on the other. The evidence suggests that government statements and policies, more generally had provoked apprehension amongst a wide cross-section of the Australian Muslim community. A major finding of this article is that unless care is taken, it is not inconceivable that the hitherto harmonious relationship between Muslims and other sections of Australia's community could be unnecessarily endangered.     

The resilient state: new regulatory modes in international approaches to state building?

‘Resilience’ has quickly risen to prominence in international security and development circles. In recent years it has found its way into political discourse on state building and state fragility, triggering a vast but often conceptually indistinct examination of the subject. Given its meaning in policy publications and guidelines, ‘resilience’ tends to eschew a static conceptualisation of statehood, turning instead to a more dynamic, complex and process-oriented rendering of state–society relations. This illustrates a conceptual shift from ‘failed states’ to ‘fragile states and situations’. It also transforms the concept of ‘failed state’ as a mere threat perception – with ‘stability’ as its logical other – into ‘fragility’ as a particular form of social and political risk. This paper analyses the concepts in 43 policy papers, focusing on the nexus of ‘resilience’ and ‘fragility’ in international state building, and assesses potential consequences. What does ‘resilience’ – as the opposite vision to ‘fragility’ – in fact mean? What is the practice derived from this chimerical state of states?     

Symposium Introduction: Competency and Higher Civil Servants

‘Competency’ is a word that seems to have crept into the language of public administration and policy relatively recently, although largely under the radar of academic scholarship in Europe. This article introduces a symposium of papers that address key questions about competency management: how and why has it become popular and what are the implications of the spread of ‘competency’ approaches? As the introductory paper, it outlines the intellectual background to competency approaches and outlines three interpretations of their development. One interpretation sees them as a passing fad; a ‘difference’ interpretation sees them as a common label for widely varying patterns and practices; and a ‘sameness’ interpretation treats competency management as a symptom of broader politico‐administrative developments.