The Attitudes of Senior Public Servants in Australia and New Zealand: Administrative Reform and Technocratic Consequence?

This article is in the tradition of comparative international research conducted over recent years into changing political-bureaucratic role relations. Its focus is the attitudinal orientation held toward various dimensions of their work by senior public servants in Canberra and Wellington. In particular, it is concerned to gauge officials' tolerance for pluralistic politics, their programmatic commitment, democratic sensibilities, and identification with conventions of ministerial responsibility. The study draws on and develops into four the two categories of public servants identified by Robert D. Putnam during the early 1970s in Western Europe. The information generated may be used as a baseline for future surveys of a similar type, which could identify changing patterns of distribution among the four basic categories: Political Bureaucrats, Classical Bureaucrats, Traditional Bureaucrats, and Technocrats. The present survey shows some significant differences between senior public servants in the two cities. In particular, those in Canberra are less programmatically committed than their Wellington counterparts, and considerably more “elitist” in their attitudes to popular involvement in policymaking. In both capitals officials are proactively rather than reactively orientated, a finding that may run counter to reformers' beliefs in the predominance of “Sir Humphrey Applebys.” The article goes on to relate the survey findings to major public sector changes that have taken place in both cities since the data for this article was collected. It speculates that, especially in New Zealand (but perhaps less so in Australia), these changes will see the emergence of more strongly technocratic attitudes among top public officials. Such attitudes may not sit easily with expectations that senior public servants be both politically accountable and managerially orientated. Finally, the four categories used in this study are related to the “images” of political-bureaucratic role relations developed in other comparative research.     

Managing Future Liability At Petroleum Impacted Sites Through Proactive Strategic Environmental Baselining

An important consideration of any commercial and industrial property acquisition or divestiture—whether it is a single gasoline station or a suite of oil refineries—is the extant environmental conditions of the property(s) at the time of the transaction. Property sellers and prospective buyers each consider and negotiate how any existing or future liability associated with extant environmental conditions will be handled. In spite of this forethought and the agreed contract terms, future litigation over unanticipated environmental contamination remains a real possibility. Often precipitating future litigation are disagreements surrounding whether “newly realized” contamination is old (pre-sale) or new (post-sale). As a result, environmental forensic investigations are often faced with the issue of “age-dating” this newly discovered contamination in order to determine whether it was released pre- or post-sale. Age-dating contamination can be an inherently difficult task to perform and technically defend. Technical arguments between experts can be short-circuited if there was an irrefutable understanding of the nature of extant contamination that had existed at the time of the sale. Conventional environmental due diligence investigations (Phase I and II site assessments) fall short of providing this understanding. In this paper, we discuss Strategic environmental baselining (SEB), a cost-effective and pro-active form of environmental due diligence that incorporates a key component of environmental forensics, that is, advanced chemical fingerprinting using modified EPA Methods that are tailored for hydrocarbon fingerprinting. Sufficient sampling and advanced chemical fingerprinting performed at the time of a transaction (or, at least, properly archived samples analyzed in the future as needed) provides the evidence that eliminates the need to “age-date” contamination at some future date. Advanced chemical fingerprinting data also provides detailed characteristics of the extant contamination and thereby, helps distinguish “old” from “new” contamination, regardless of alteration of the chemicals of concern by weathering. Armed with this information both buyers and/or sellers can protect themselves in the event of any future claim(s).     

Dissecting White-Collar Crime: Offense Type and Punitiveness

It is commonly asserted that the public is indifferent toward white-collar crime and hence is reluctant to “get tough” with more “respectable” criminals. However, such a contention fails to consider that there are many varieties of upperworld criminality and that the punitiveness of the public may differ markedly according to the type of offense involved. Based on a 1981 survey conducted in Galesburg, Illinois, we have attempted to investigate whether the criminal sanctions prescribed by citizens will vary when the broad category of white-collar crime is “dissected” into its component types. The data suggest that (1) there is considerable variation in punitiveness by type of offense; (2) while street crimes are generally given the harshest sentences, violent forms of white-collar illegality are accorded severe sanctions that exceed those meted out for some F.B.I, crimes; and (3) there is little support for the notion that the public responds leniently to upperworld crime.     

COMPARING RESISTANCE TO OPEN DATA PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT: PUBLIC EDUCATION IN BRAZIL AND THE UK

Much is known about governmental resistance to disclosure laws, less so about multi‐stakeholder resistance to open data. This study compares open data initiatives within the primary and secondary school systems of Brazil and the UK, focusing on stakeholder resistance and corresponding policy solutions. The analytical framework is based on the ‘Three‐Ps’ of open data resistance to performance metrics, corresponding to professional, political, and privacy‐related concerns. Evidence shows that resistance is highly nuanced, as stakeholders alternately serve as both principals and agents. School administrators, for example, are simultaneously principals to service providers and teachers, and at once agents to parents and politicians. Relying on a different systems comparison, in‐depth interviews, and newspaper content analyses, we find that similar stakeholders across countries demonstrate strikingly divergent levels of resistance. In overcoming stakeholder resistance – across socioeconomic divides – context conscientious ‘data‐informed’ evaluations may promote greater acceptance than narrowly ‘data‐driven’ performance measurements.     

IN DEFENCE OF LUTHER GULICK'S'NOTES ON THE THEORY OF ORGANIZATION

This article reviews a debate in public administration which occurred some 40 years ago between two giants of public administration, Luther Gulick and Herbert Simon. Simon is generally considered to have 'won' the debate in the 1940s and 195Os, and there is good reason to think that this 'victory' turned the field of public administration in a direction very different from where it had been headed previously. The paper makes two arguments. The first argument is that a close examination of the key articles – Gulicks 'Notes on the Theory of Organization' (1937) and Simon's The Proverbs of Administration' (1946) – shows that Gulicks essay was not nearly as vulnerable to Simon's criticisms as has commonly been assumed. In general, Gulicks arguments are richer and far more subtle than Simon recognized. The second argument has a more current focus: had Gulicks approach been pursued in the ways Gulick suggested, there is reason to think we would know considerably more about the design of organizational structures than we currently do.     

Twenty‐First Century Socialism? The Elusive Search for a Post‐Neoliberal Development Model in Bolivia and Ecuador

The recent political, economic and social histories of Bolivia and Ecuador point to a broader, post‐neoliberal trend emerging in Latin America. Presidents Evo Morales and Rafael Correa have closely followed the basic model of twenty‐first‐century socialism as an alternative to free market capitalism. In theory, both leaders have successfully re‐founded their countries with new constitutions that encompass the interests of all sectors of society. In practice, however, we argue that a volatile economic climate, poorly implemented reforms, increased opposition, and low political tolerance all indicate limitations to the viability of twenty‐first‐century socialism as a post‐neoliberal development model.     

Counterterrorism On the Wrong Track

Insufficient knowledge about terrorists’ real objectives poses the central problem to U.S. antiterror efforts Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s     

MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF TECHNOLOGY‐DRIVEN CHANGE WITHIN AN INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: THE GREEK CASE

Propelled by the driving forces of globalization and technology explosion, public institutions face the challenge of rapid and discontinuous change. Such change has come to undermine the relevance of traditional approaches on how an institution should be managed. We analyse a technology‐driven change effort, the implementation of an Integrated Information System (IIS), that unfolds within the boundaries of the institutional context of the Hellenic Parliament. The purpose of our research, which reports on a qualitative field study, is to explore and understand how the particularities of technology‐driven change on the one hand, and institutional change on the other, can be integrated, paying particular attention to how the different actors involved in the process interact and affect the unfolding of such a change effort. Our findings show that strong friction did indeed occur between old and new institutional factors, but that the key factor enabling the change effort to advance and finally gain legitimation was the encouragement and support in the institutional change process of opportunity‐based and emerging changes, as proposed by the technological change literature.