Corporatism and Planning in London in the 1980s

This study confirms the existence of corporatist forms of interest intermediation at the micro level of four local planning authorities in London. In all four boroughs distinctions could be drawn between local business associations and metic, non-local firms. The former displayed most of the institutional characteristics outlined by Schmitter in his original definition of corporatism. In contrast the non-local or metic firms did not exhibit all these institutional characteristics at the level of local government. The conditions under which they bargained with local planning authorities (LPAs) were often influenced by statutory and other requirements handed down from central government. These requirements were themselves often the result of corporatist interest intermediation at the level of the central state. Both local business associations (LBAs) and metic production organizations (MPOs) were required by (LPAs) to implement planning policies. This process has increased in importance during the Thatcher era. Economic decline has made the local planning authorities even more dependent on private organizations for implementation than before. Local LBAs and MPOs were granted privileged access to the planning system. Only the LBAs were granted representational monopolies for their very local areas in this process. MPOs developed representational oligopolies but because they were so few in number they could be in conflict with one another over the rights to develop a particular site. In return for these representational privileges both the LBAs and MPOs were expected to moderate their demands for major departures from the approved local plans. The methods used to intermediate interests to the local planning systems were primarily informal. Although a small number of formal meetings were held each year between external organizations and the LPAs they represented a minority of the contacts between them and representatives of both LBAs and MPOs. Informal bargaining took place in two ways. First, there were issue specific negotiations over particular developments. The second type of contact was long-term, non-issue specific and primarily concerned with network building. Both types of bargaining were relatively secret and involved only the top echelons of the organizations concerned.     

AUDITING THE EFFICIENCY OF NATIONALIZED INDUSTRIES: ENTER THE MONOPOLIES A MERGERS COMMISSION

For over thirty years, there have been no arrangements for the systematic audit of the efficiency and effectiveness of British nationalized industries. In November 1981, the Government announced their intention to introduce such audits on a regular, programmed basis and assigned the responsibility to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Using two of the Commission's reports, this essay contests the opinion that efficiency audits, as distinct from effectiveness audits, require pre-determined performance criteria. But whilst recognizing both the advance in Whitehall thinking represented by the new arrangements and the quality of the audits so far completed by the Commission, the essay questions the decision to assign this function to the Commission, rather than the Comptroller and Auditor General, and expresses doubts about the extent to which the new arrangements will contribute to proper parliamentary control and accountability in the case of public enterprises.     

Anomie and Violence among Native Americans

Cultural anomie and the marginality that results from it are important considerations when viewing Native American disorganization, both past and present. Indeed, a major consequence of Indian disorganization is intra-group aggression, a phenomenon manifested by high alcoholism and suicide rates (self-aggression) as well as assault and homicide.

And while the problem of cultural anomie has long plagued Native Americans, few attempts have been made to analyze it within the appropriate culturally-relevant, social conflict (majority/minority) perspective. This article makes such an attempt by providing a psycho-historical analysis of the significant policy controls which have served to regulate American Indians since the advent of white contact. It explores the affect of primary conflict generated by the policies of slavery, Indian wars, Removal, Allotment, Reorganization, Termination, Relocation, and Self-Determination. The analysis goes beyond these policy controls by linking them to the ensuing secondary (intra-group) conflicts existing within Indian communities on both the reservations and in the urban Indian ghettoes.     

Public Life as Tragedy

Some of the most perceptive observers of public life have emphasised its tragic dimensions, not so much out of sympathy for politicians, but because the lens of tragedy offers a unique insight into the realities of the world of politics. Here I attempt to synthesise this tragic perspective by employing the comments of those best positioned to identify the salient features of public life, its primary dramatis personae. Politics occasionally provides us with the kind of spectacular catastrophe that journalists like to construe as tragedy. But our purpose is to evoke a different, more personal, less visible kind of tragedy: the small but malignant tragedies of self‐betrayal, of inflation of the ego and deflation of conscience, of helpless witness to injustice and misfortune, of status unaccompanied by power or efficacy, of the shrinking of aspiration to the scale of the practicable, of disillusion and, on occasion, of despair.