The ghosts of the past, the dreamlands of the future … or why fantasies are bound to fail in socialism and the market: The case of public health policy development in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia

The transition ‘from planned to market economy’ in the former Soviet Union and in several countries in post-communist Europe is one of the most sweeping social transformations of the second half of the 20th century. It is widely accepted that this transformation was driven by a shared belief in the market's superior ability to deliver economic growth, to create wealth and contribute to the well-being of the populations after the demise of the defunct socialist ideology. However, the element of utopian fantasy undergirding the grand projects of socialism and the market is usually ignored, often with detrimental results. The study draws on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to propose an alternative reading of the process of transition, as an exchange of one powerful fantasy for another. My key contention is that as long as the common utopian dream of social harmony underlying both projects will not be recognised for what it is, which is in itself an unattainable desire of the human psyche, the illusory dreamlands will continue to exist and so will their violent political consequences. The study uses the example of public health policy development in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia to illustrate how unacknowledged fantasy leads to violent utilitarianism as it was manifested in socialism, and is now repeated differently but no less tyrannically in the market. In conclusion, I argue for integrating fantasy as a constitutive element of political projects and explore the possibility of the autonomous (self-determined) mode of governance that Cornelius Castoriadis (1987/2005) theorised on and juxtaposed to the heteronomous ways of organising ruled by master signifiers present in various ideologies.     

Doing Things with Words: The Case of 'Management' and 'Administration'

Over the last two decades, management, rather than administration, has become the dominant category through which both academics and practitioners talk, write and argue the organization of public services. More recently, the discourses of leadership have also been increasingly deployed in this context. Based on interviews with UK National Health Service trust chief executives, the article examines these particular discursive changes, exploring what the distinctions do rather than what the categories might represent. It reminds us of some of the things we do (in reality and to reality) when we deploy such words, especially in the debate about control. It also suggests possibilities for disturbing the dominance of the terms that are generally axiomatic in constructing arguments about the public sector; a dominance that has come to favour the interests of some as it denies the interests of others.     

Globalization, Neoliberalism and the Exercise of Human Agency

Globalization as a development model is generally now regarded as the sine qua non for development policy with little room for alternative theorising on capitalist development. Neoliberalism, as the supporting ideology of globalization, inflates the social significance of the market and mystifies human relations. It therefore, gives a distorted view of reality, how people are living and their agential capacity to improve their lives. Critical to human agency is it the way it is exercised—does it reduce inequality or does it exacerbate inequality? How is this human agency exercised by different groups of people? The paper provides a discussion on the relationship between neoliberal ideology, globalization and the exercise of human agency. It examines the social reality of globalization and neoliberalism and how this affects the agential capacity of human beings to direct their development, as individuals, communities and as nations.     

Should Business and Non-Business Accounting be Different? A Comparative Perspective Applied to the French Central Government Accounting Standards

The French General Law of Finances of 2001 introduced a set of accounting standards including an explicit conceptual framework reconciling accrual basis accounting with the specific aspects of accounting for central government activities. This article analyzes this French set of accounting standards from a dualistic perspective that compares both business and non-business accounting. Three different views of accounting for business enterprises are addressed: the wealth-basis (static), the cash-basis, and the accrual-basis (dynamic). A dynamic view of the accrual basis is adapted to the specificities of non-business entities, including governments. The accounting representation is used here to explore further the nature and role of public sector activities within the economic system and their economic and monetary significance.     

Evangelical violence: Western Christianity and the use of force against the Third World

Abstract

Recognising the impact of religion on state action, this article identifies two variables that interact to affect the type and level of violence employed by Western states against Third World targets. First, variation in the degree to which the prominent Christian denominations and organisations within these states view evangelisation as either an individual-level or national-level process – Christian individualism vs Christian nationalism – has determined church support for using violence as a tactic. Second, the level of influence that churches and missionary organisations have over their home states affects the ability of Christian actors to directly impact state actions. Western violence against Third World peoples is expected to be lowest when churches and Christian organisations view evangelisation in primarily individualistic terms and have significant influence over the state. The article examines the relationships between concepts of evangelisation, Christian influence over state policies, and levels of violence against the Third World by examining British, French and German colonialism during the late colonial period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

Ethnic statistics and social classifications in France: how the ‘black community’ was born

Abstract

The status of France's ethnic minorities has become a major issue in recent years owing to the riots in October and November of 2005, as well as the National Assembly debates on the Taubira law,1 1. Christiane Taubira is a French female politician and activist born 2 February 1952, in Cayenne, French Guyana. She is a militant of the PRG (Parti Radical de Gauche) et ‘deputée’ (a member of the French National Parliament). She is best known for the law that she devised and proposed and bears her name, the Taubira Law. Voted in 21 May 2001, it recognizes the slave trades and slavery as a crime against humanity. ethnic statistics, affirmative action, and the memory and commemoration of slavery and the slave trade,2 2. The decision to commemorate slavery was taken on 30 January 2006, by the French President Jacques Chirac. The date for the commemoration is 10 May, each year. and communautarisme 3 3. Communautaire/communautarisme/communautariste refers to something along the lines of ‘multiculturalism’, although its connotations are almost entirely negative. Communautarisme, to the French, is what happens when you let immigrants form their own communities, speak their own languages, and practice their own religions. Consequently, France becomes less ‘French’ and more open to foreign values and cultural practices (http://inthefray.org/content/view/482/39). .The present paper shows how, against the aforementioned backdrop, the black community is creating itself as a visible group ‘endowed with value systems and representation systems’ (Champagne, P., 1984. La manifestation: La production de l'evenement politique. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 52–53(1), 18–41), and how the positions taken by the various actors (associations, journalists and politicians) have contributed to this process of legitimation. Thus, it appears that although France's Blacks are still a largely fragmented group, they are constructing an identity for themselves in the republic via a process that is a reaction to the apparent rigidity of France's republican system and to the real (albeit denied) stigmatization and discrimination that some Blacks say they are subjected to on a daily basis.

This work is a revised version of a paper accepted for presentation at the ‘Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners’ conference organized in Mansfield College, Oxford, UK, between Tuesday 22 September and Thursday 24 September, 2009.     

The word and the world: a critique of representationalism in management research

Representationalism is the belief that our knowledge represents the world as it is. The purpose of this paper is to explore the representational epistemology that has historically underlain most management research, and submit it to critical scrutiny. It is argued that we can never show whether our knowledge corresponds to the facts; truth is a property of sentences, not of the world. To talk about an object of study is to talk about a set of beliefs having a place in a language game. Social objects of study, especially, are practices and, as such, are constituted by self-understandings expressed as sets of background distinctions actors share. Our models of social reality, therefore, are internally related to practices so that the particular assumptions underlying a model of knowledge shape the background distinctions embodied in a practice. Concerning management studies, it is argued that far from merely representing organizational reality as it allegedly is, a representational epistemology is closely linked with a particular kind of action, viz. instrumental action, and a particular kind of organization, viz. bureaucratic organization. On the antirepresentational view of knowledge put forward here, it is suggested that our theories are tools for acting in the world rather than mirrors for reflecting it. As tools, questions concerning the purpose served by an inquiry are preferable to questions concerning methodology. The implications of an antirepresentational model of knowledge for management (both as an object of study and as a practice) are explored.     

Returns to Foreign Language Skills in a Developing Country: The Case of Turkey

This paper analyses the economic value of foreign languages in Turkey using data on some 6000 adult male wage-earners in 2007. We find positive earnings returns to proficiency in English and Russian, which increase with the level of competence. French and German skills are also positively rewarded, although their return seems mostly linked to the likelihood to hold specific occupations. In contrast, knowing Arabic does not generate an earnings premium. Focusing on English, we check for heterogeneous returns along the conditional earnings distribution. The results are qualitatively invariant when we account for misclassification errors in self-reported English skills.     

Notes on contributors

The phrase ‘North – South divide’—as well as variations such as ‘North – South gap’ or ‘North – South cleavage’—has become well established in public discourse and scholarly writing. The phrase, however, is highly problematic, as it is simplistic and as there is a substantial danger of misapprehending it for ‘reality’ as such. The indiscriminate usage of the phrase ‘North – South divide’ overlooks the ways in which words create and shape our understanding of the world, on which we, in turn, base our judgements and decisions. The aim of the present paper is to point out specific ways through which this linguistic distinction—as much as any other—shapes our conception of (social) reality. The paper is in two parts. In the first we will initially draw out some pitfalls that inhere in the notion of a ‘North – South divide’qua notion, and then point to other pitfalls that relate to the usage of the expression. In the second part two case studies are presented to illustrate our arguments: one of them deals with China, the other with intellectual property rights.     

'Public Service', 'Public Management' and the 'Modernization' of French Public Administration

Since the mid-1980s, successive French governments have attempted to 'modernize' the structures and methods of public administration. Although this vocabulary of 'modernization' is distinctly French, many of the actual reforms appear, at first sight, to be based on imported 'new public management' doctrines. In this article, we analyse the recent French reforms and the ideas underpinning them and we attempt to locate these reforms in their comparative context, employing data from a wide range of official reports and secondary sources and from a series of semi-structured interviews with senior officials. We build on the analyses of Hood (1991 and 1995) and Wright (1994) that if many governments are dealing with similar problems by adopting similar approaches to reforms based on private sector man-agement methods, the actual nature of the reforms in any individual state depends on the national context, or 'initial endowment'. In France, the importance of administrative law, the successful experience of nationalized, monopoly, public-service providers in the post-war period, the political weight and established rights of civil servants, and the idea of the 'general interest', represented at the local level by the prefect, explain many of the distinctive features of the hybrid modernization reforms. In short, an analysis of the policy of modernization and its origin leads to conclusions which are highly consistent with new institutional explanations of policy making (Hall 1987)     

The Algerian Works of Hélène Cixous: at the Triple Intersection of European,North African and Religious Nationalisms

The theme ‘Jewish conditions and theories of nationalism’, relating particularly to the twentieth century, can be connected to Hélène Cixous the thinker, through her childhood experiences in Algeria during the Second World War. Thereafter, she would spend 10 years in a country on the verge of what some have termed a ‘civil war’ between ‘European’ inhabitants, settled multiple generations previously, and an increasingly angry, marginalised, and dispossessed (Muslim) indigenous population. Importantly, Cixous has also called on her experiences in Algeria after Algerian independence, which is extremely rare given that the vast majority of non-Muslim departures took place up until 1962. In this way, her early life history and her intellectual trajectory, positioned as a writer of gendered and then ethnic difference (from Paris), and the relationships she garnered with Algerian women in the 1990s during the dark years of violence in Algeria, as well as her subsequent process of return to Algeria against a backdrop of a narrowly defined French national identity, are at a triple intersection with the evolutions of Algerian, French and Jewish nationalisms. This paper engages with the ambiguities and tensions of Hélène Cixous’ experience of and writing about Algeria combining close analysis of her literary production with our meetings in her Parisian home.     

Tariffs and economic development: A comment

The optimality criteria of linear programming transportation and spatial equilibrium models never ‘explain ‘ real world flow patterns. This paper provides reasons for the difference between an optimal solution and real world patterns. Data for the linear programming exercises are derived from the four stages of a rice marketing system in Sri Lanka at a time when the state had monopoly control over distribution. The examination of factors more important than transport costs in explaining residual flows sheds some light on policy and institutional problems associated with monopoly procurement.

Substantively, a comparison of the optimal solution with reality shows a fairly high degree of transportation efficiency throughout the system, except at the last stage, where rice changes hands between two parastatal orginisations (the Paddy Marketing Board and the Food Commission) to be distributed to final destinations. Inefficient store locations rather than commodity allocations generate the greatest waste of transport. Reasons for the difference between programming solutions and reality include uncertainty, congestion, policies and institutional structure conducive to a deterioration in quality of the commodity handled, problematic regional preferences for rice type, inadequate communications, unpredictable timing of rice imports and corruption.     

Post-war Kosovo landscapes in Pristina: discrepancies between language policy and urban reality

This paper focuses on the complex nature of post-war multilingual landscapes in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, as shaped by the country’s political shift after independence in 2008. We aim to contribute to this sociolinguistically underexplored territory through an examination of the relative predominance and visibility of the capital’s most dominant languages: Albanian, Serbian, and English. Our central aim is to empirically problematize the shared co-officialdom of the Albanian and Serb languages, as put forward in the “Ahtisaari Plan” in 2007 and subsequently adopted in the State Constitution in 2008 and Language Laws in 2006 and 2008. We posit that the multilingual language policies which paint an inclusive, multi-ethnic picture of Pristina do not coincide with its monolingual Albanian reality. In addition to these empirical findings, our second aim is to contribute to the theorization of authorship in the public sphere. With reference to the Pristina context, we problematize the analytical categorization conventionally made between top-down and bottom-up agency and distinguish a third category of semi-official authorship. This third category enables us to examine the dynamic nature of the discrepancy between Kosovo’s language policy and Pristina’s urban linguistic reality in more detail.     

La généalogie imaginaire de la littérature algérienne francophone

This article contends that French language is both the perfect tool for the expression of one’s own identity and the instrument of knowledge that has shut down all possible other ones in Algeria. The works of Rachid Boudjedra (1969) and Yacine Kateb (1966) illustrate the highly ideological dimension of Algerian literature. By debunking the very idea of French literature, their novels fight back the concept of cultural imperialism. Yet, I think that the conflict between ideology and literature did not appear recently, after the colonial wars of independence, but was already underlined at the birth of French language as a national idiom in the writings of an author such as François Rabelais.     

Global Sociology: Towards an Alternative Southern Paradigm

The project to (re)construct a global sociology is one where there is no agreed paradigm or even a shared understanding of the main issues that would be needed to secure a new robust and credible paradigm. What I seek to do here is to simply clarify the terms of the debate so as to establish whether we might pursue the quest for an alternative paradigm with some conviction. I first consider the ‘strong case’ for a global sociology based on the assumptions of globalisation theory which, overall, seems to suffer from economism in my view. Next I present a postcolonial perspective which posits a fundamental division between the global South and the North, an enterprise I find to be marked by a certain culturalism. I then present elements for an alternative approach towards a new paradigm based on an understanding of complexity, uneven development and the politics of scale. A brief Latin American excursus at the end seeks to provide some texture to the overall argument that a new global sociology could develop through a critical Southern lens and a focus on cultural political economy.     

Population: malady or symptom?

The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) opened the dawn of a new era in discourse over population. A newfound consensus was reached between North and South which was not there during the two previous world population conferences in Bucharest and Mexico. While consensus was reached at the 1994 ICPD on the need for action, however, debate over population is far from settled. Causes of population growth, the links between population growth and economic development, and environmental degradation remain controversial topics. The authors analyze the basis of the ICPD consensus at the local, national, and global levels. They also compare the development discourse to the political discourse over population. Both discourses emphasize different aspects of a far more complex reality. The question is which discourse to choose as a basis for drawing policy recommendations. The emerging view on the way to Cairo was that consensus would be achieved on the basis of development discourse. Success on the action plan rests upon the belief that more contraceptives, more health services, and more schools will be enough to reduce fertility rates. The political discourse, however, is better than the development discourse as a basis for policy making because it stresses the need for integration rather than running the risk of exclusion. The political discourse is also more demanding.     

The New Governance of French Education?

This article contributes to ongoing debates in comparative public administration through exploring the governance paradigm in the unfavourable empirical terrain of French education. After identifying potentially relevant features of governance, we investigate changing patterns of policy-making in French education at macro, meso and micro levels. Extrapolating research findings from extensive interviews and participant observation at ministerial meetings, we conclude the existence of a French-style governance that operates within distinctive ideational and institutional environments and interest structures. The article emphasizes the importance of historical and institutional traditions in framing the available pathways of governance.