Innovation in local government: past,present, future

This article discusses the heightened importance of innovation in local government. It examines driving forces of innovation, as well as strategies for implementing innovation. Frameworks are discussed for studying innovation, and an overview of symposium articles is provided. The article concludes with policy implications and directions for future research.     

Extractive Relations: Natural Resource Use,Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Protection in Peru

Through ethnography of Ashaninka communities' involvement in timber extraction in Peruvian Amazonia and an engagement with recent discussions around Buen Vivir the article interrogates the common association between indigenous notions of ‘living well’ and environmental protection. A key insight is that Ashaninka individuals emphasise everyday well-being and equality over the preservation of their surroundings. Older critiques of extractivism are used to show the recent advent of environmentalist discourses and highlight issues connected with emphasising ontological difference. The article concludes that Buen Vivir would be better framed as a desire, and right, to self-determination rather than being associated with specific behaviours.     

Taxation data as indicators of state-society relations: Possibilities and pitfalls in cross-national research

Cross-national research on taxation is a growth industry in political science. This article discusses key conceptual and measurement issues raised by such studies. First, it highlights the ways in which taxation has been studied as a rich and varied concept, including as a component of the state-building process, as a collective action problem, and/or as a problem of distributive justice. Second, the article identifies the central tradeoffs associated with the construction of taxation indicators used to measure such ideas. It discusses considerations such as which forms of revenue should be included and which should not, whether and how to standardize taxation measures, and how no fine-tune measures through a clear specification of units, universes, and measurement calibration. These choices have important implications for the “scoring” of countries, and for making valid inferences about the relationship between states and societies. Evan S. Lieberman is a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at Yale University and will begin and appointment as assistant professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University in September 2002. His interests include comparative politics, research methods, and economic and social policy. I would like to thank Christopher Achen, David Collier, Marc Morjé Howard, Lucan Way, members of the Robert Wood Johnson Policy Scholars Seminar at Yale University, three anonymous reviewers, and the editors atStudies in Comparative International Development for their valuable comments and suggestions.     

Book reviews

Jan Marczewski, Crisis in Socialist Planning. Eastern Europe and the USSR. Translated from the French by Noel Lindsay. (Praeger Special Studies in International Economics and Development.) New York: Praeger Publishers and London: Pall Mall Press, 1974. xvii+245 pp. £8.00.

Alec Nove, Stalinism and After. London: Allen & Unwin, 1975. 205pp. £4.74, or £2.35 (paperback).

John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad. Volume 1 of Stalin's War with Germany. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975. x+594 pp. £12.00.

Henry W. Morton and Rudolf L. Tökés (eds.), Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s. New York: The Free Press and London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1974. xxvi+401 pp. £6.50.

Dodd L. Harvey and Linda C. Ciccoritti, U.S.‐Soviet Cooperation in Space. Coral Gables, Fla: Center for Advanced International Studies, University of Miami, 1974. xxxiii+382 pp. Paperback.

T. Dixon Long and Christopher Wright (eds.), Science Policies of Industrial Nations: Case Studies of the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, Japan and Sweden. Praeger Special Studies in International Politics and Government. New York: Praeger, 1975. xiii+232 pp.

Roy E. H. Mellor, Eastern Europe: A Geography of the Comecon Countries. London: Macmillan Press, 1975. x+358 pp. £7.50 or £3.95 (Paperback).

Bogdan Mieczkowski, Personal and Social Consumption in Eastern Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany. Praeger Special Studies in International Economics and Development. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975. xxiv+342 pp. $21.50.

Gerhard Wettig, Community and Conflict in the Socialist Camp: The Soviet Union, East Germany and the German Problem 1965–1972. Translated by Edwina Moreton and Hannes Adomeit. London: C. Hurst, 1975. xiv+161 pp. £6.30.

Kurt Sontheimer and Wilhelm Bleek, The Government and Politics of East Germany. Translated by Ursula Price. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1975. 205 pp.

Allen H. Barton, Bogdan Denitch and Charles Kadushin (eds.), Opinion‐Making Elites in Yugoslavia. Praeger Special Studies in International Politics and Government. New York: Praeger and London: Pall Mall Press, 1973. xxii+344 pp. £7.75.

Sharon Zukin, Beyond Marx and Tito. Theory and Practice in Yugoslav Socialism. London: Cambridge UP, 1975. x+302 pp. £7.50.

Ervin Pamlényi (ed.), A History of Hungary. Wellingborough: Collet's, 1975. (Published in Hungary, edited under the auspices of the Historical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.) 676 pp. £4.95.

Peter J. Potichnyj (ed.), Ukraine in the Seventies. (Papers and Proceedings of the McMaster Conference on Contemporary Ukraine, October 1974.) Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1975. 355 pp. $12.95 or $6.95 (paperback).

Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923–25). Edited and with an introduction by Naomi Allen. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975. 428 pp. $15.00. $3.95 or £1.65 (paperback).

Frank Haller, Sozialistische Akkumulations‐ und Wachstumstheorie. Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie des Sozialismus in der DDR. Berlin: Osteuropa‐Institut an der Freien Universität Berlin, 1974. In Kommission bei Verlag Duncker & Humblot, Berlin. 192 pp. DM 62.     

Manning the Fields: Remaking Women's Work in the Tobacco South in the Twentieth Century

Today, men make up the vast majority of the workforce in the tobacco fields of the American South. This was not always the case. For more than two centuries, enslaved women worked alongside men in the tobacco fields. In the late nineteenth century, the unpaid labor of female kin made possible the household's replacement of the plantation as the center of production, and it remained critical for farm families well into the twentieth century. Following World War II, agricultural engineers developed new technologies to eliminate tasks traditionally done by women. In the 1980s, the process of defeminization accelerated as growers began to hire male guestworkers from Mexico as more women moved into the non-farm labor market to supplement their families' farm incomes. The transition from family to wage labor in the tobacco South was far from a ‘natural’ process, but one nurtured by state agricultural, labor, and immigration policy.