THE IRREPRESSIBLE ROD RHODES: CONTESTING TRADITIONS AND BLURRING GENRES

Rod Rhodes spent 25 years as the Editor of Public Administration before he retired from that role at the end of 2010. These essays in his honour are intended to celebrate the achievement of those 25 years and reflect on his contribution to the worlds of public administration and political science. Rod has now consolidated the standing of the journal as one of the most significant locations for work on public administration. At the same time, over his career, he has prodded and probed, challenged and innovated, in a wide range of areas. The essays in this special edition have been designed around his intellectual interests over the 40 years of his career, from local government, and networks, to ethnography and narratives. Each author was asked, as appropriate, to identify Rhodes' impact and to assess the present state of the literature. Three articles consider the state of the discipline in the UK, the USA and in the world of comparative politics. Rod is then given the opportunity to reflect on his career and where his interests might lead. As ever he wants the last word! This introduction provides the context for his career and charts in broad terms his intellectual trajectory and contribution.     

W. Edwards deming and frederick winslow taylor: A comparison of two leaders who shaped the world's view of management

This paper compares the personal backgrounds and management philosophies of Frederick Winslow Taylor and W. Edwards Deming. Among the commonalities existing between the two leaders are their use of science and measurement, belief in expert knowledge, the importance of training, top management commitment, concern with customer and society, competition with contemporary figures, and American military and international applications of their theories. Among their major differences are their views on quantity versus quality, performance improvement, participation, motivation, the individual versus the group, unions, and use of disciple. Differences are discussed in terms of their relative places in the history of management thought.     

Unsettling Master Categories: Notes on Studying the Global in C. W. Mills’ Footsteps

C. W. Mills’ sociology arises out of the problematizing of established “truths.” The aim becomes a sociology that unsettles—not a sociology of unsettlement but a sociology that is itself unsettling. In this short essay I focus on themes that capture one way (mine) of executing C. W. Mills’ challenge to us, academic sociologists. The substantive focus is on what is needed to develop critical globalization studies. The accepted narratives and explanations of globalization have produced the global as a master category that obscures as much as it reveals. We need to generate new questions for research to recover what has been excluded by dominant narratives. And we need to develop conceptual architectures that allow us to detect what we might think of as countergeographies of globalization. Here I focus particularly on types of spaces where we can find resistance to global power and as yet unrecognized forms of participation by actors typically represented as powerless, or victims, or as uninvolved with global conditions. The overall project is a critical remapping of the analytic and political terrain of the global.