The collaboration of ‘ghostwriting’ and literature – the case of Kawabata Yasunari

Abstract: Kawabata Yasunari is Japan's first Nobel Prize recipient for literature and thus an emblem of the modern Japanese writer, but as this essay demonstrates, this writer's career, like that of so many throughout Japan's premodern and modern history, is spanned by the curious practice of ghostwriting. Taking up the specific case of Kawabata, the article exposes a wider conflict between the modern West's notion of the original artist, underwritten by its idea of individualized creativity, and modern Japan's persistent adherence to ghostwriting's more collaborative premodern concept of creativity. Subjecting fine-grained literary historical analysis to its far-reaching theoretical consequences for the modernness of modern literature, Japanese and otherwise, this essay shows how the spectre of Kawabata's ghostwriting haunts our contemporary, and therefore possibly anachronistic, understanding of ‘modern’ literary practice.     

Agent credibility and receptivity influences on children's political learning

This study investigates the child's perception of primary agents (parent, teacher, and friend) as political references. It differs in emphasis from earlier socialization studies by adopting the perspective of the child and asking how and why the child regards these agents as authorities. Using two studies (an original and a replication performed a year later with a separate sample), we demonstrate that fifth- and sixth-grade children exhibit two evaluative dimensions, credibility and receptivity. They discriminate among the agents using these two dimensions, and this discrimination is specific to the type of issue. These dimensions affect successful attitude transmission from agent to child: increasing agent credibility and receptivity factors increase opinion congruence.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1983 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois.     

Rational decremental budgeting: Elements of an expenditure policy for the 1980s

The dominant pattern of decision-making on public expenditures has been characterized as incremental budgeting. Wide-spread dissatisfaction with this approach has led to the emergence and testing of various techniques purporting to deal with expenditure decisions in a more rational, analytic and comprehensive fashion. Yet our experience with this brand of synoptic rationalism is at best mixed; few innovations in the field of budgeting have lived up to the expectations surrounding their introduction. A synthesis of the two models outlined in this paper is called rational decrementalism: an expenditure policy for an era of retarded growth or economic stagnation.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Conference of the Scandinavian Association for Public Administration in Vedbaek, Denmark, May 13, 1980.     

Latin America’s think tanks: The roots of nonprofit privatization

Conventional development models refer to two sectors, public and for-profit private. Massive growth of nonprofit private activity undermines that picture. Latin American tyink tanks exemplify a nonprofit privatization that has an enormous impact on development and remolds inter-sectoral relationships overall. Four major dynamics account for the spectacular growth of the region’s nonprofit think tanks. Three push factors are state repression, state weakness, and public university problems, and, as epitomized by financial supply, a pull factor is also crucial to attract nonprofit growth. To conceptualize its findings, this article considers public failure theory. Unhelpful regarding the pull factor, the theory otherwise works reasonably well, especially where there is visible movement from the public to the nonprofit sector. Beyond that, the evidence suggests ways to broaden the theory. Even a broadened formulation cannot fully capture the remarkable diversity and vitality of the growth in Latin America’s think tanks. But we are able to identify and analyze the key growth factors that blend together to produce particular institutional and national configurations. Daniel C. Levy is a professor at SUNY-Albany. After earning his Ph.D. in political science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, he was research associate for five years at Yale University. He has published five books and roughly seventy articles on politics and higher education, especially on Latin America, and on Mexican politics. Levy has done field research in most Latin American countries and has presented lectures and been published on five continents.