Budget-maximizing governmental agencies: An empirical test

Niskanen's theory of government budgeting, involving powerful agencies interested in maximizing their budgets through bargaining with a weak, poorly informed governmental ‘Sponsor’, has received wide recognition. This paper presents the first direct empirical tests of Niskanen's ideas. One implication of Niskanen's model of budgeting is that the demand for public services will appear to be elastic. Niskanen's model also implies restrictions on the elasticity of the derived demand for labor in the public sector. Neither set of predictions is supported by existing empirical research on government activity.     

Expert systems for medical diagnosis: A study in technology transfer

Expert systems continue to evolve for specific applications in medical diagnosis. This is necessary because the influx of new information is so massive that the expert systems must be specialized. The research methodology for this study was based on the usage patterns of expert systems in clinical pathology with data obtained at 94 US medical schools from 202 medical-school-based clinical pathologists. The study showed the link between the use of expert systems in medical schools and within the professional medical community. Initial education in medical schools and ongoing communications through residency programs, post-doctoral fellowships and clinical usage at university hospitals with the goal of technology transfer between medical schools and physicians, seem to represent the future for this valuable diagnostic technique.     

Decay and Reconstruction In the Study of American Intergovernmental Relations

Current criticism of the performance of American governmentsis often organized around an emergent theory of intergovernmentaldecay, which contains propositions about government size, accountability,control, capacity and achievement among its central assertions.Recent evidence of American governmental performance is usedto appraise the decay theory, leading to the conclusion thatthe evidence offers little support for its major assertions.An alternative approach is then sketched out, based on the structuralconcept of "organizational interest" and the inherent dynamismof a system in which every governmental unit is always partof the relevant political environment of at least one otherunit. These considerations lead to a somewhat different assessmentof the "problems" facing American governments as well as analternative way of conceptualizing their activities.     

Industry structure and organizational deviance: Multinational corporations and questionable foreign payments

Questionable foreign payments (QFPs) by multinational corporations (MNCs) are examined in the context of world industry structures. Corporate claims and existing theory view QFPs as a function of extortive corporate-governmental relations. There are three industry conditions cited which make extortion possible: competitive pressure, foreign dependence and governmental leverage. Top U.S.-based MNCs (N=197) which have and have not made QFPs are compared on indicators of world industry structure to test for these conditions. Findings show that corporations making QFPs are more heavily involved in foreign economies, but are less susceptible to competitive pressure and no more subject to governmental leverage than nonpaying corporations. Specifically, paying corporations are likely to be leading corporations in fairly concentrated, U.S. dominated, and high-technology markets. Paying corporations, then, are in better positions to control their environments than nonpaying corporations. We conclude that changes in world industry structures beginning in the 1960s have increased the likelihood of QFPs, especially for U.S. MNCs in high-tech industries.A previous version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Memphis, Tennessee, April, 1981, under the title, A Comparative Study of Multinational Corporations Making Questionable Foreign Payments. We would like to thank David Ermann, David Rudy and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments in revising this article.     

‘Give us peace’: Gladys Avery Tillett and the search for women's political activism in the United States, 1945–1950

As previously demonstrated by scholars, the social justice feminism movement in the United States accomplished its two central goals by the time of that nation's official involvement in World War II. This article examines the subsequent development of former social justice feminists' search for political activism after World War II through the activities of one of the social movement's later, significant leaders, Gladys Avery Tillett, particularly in her participation in the controversial and bitter campaign of North Carolina United States Senator Frank Porter Graham to retain his seat in the 1950 Democratic party primary.