Vladimir Iowa Lenin,Part 1: A Bolshevik Studies American Agriculture

A busy year for Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1917 also marked the publication of his study of American agriculture. The report reads as more than a historical curiosity, offering insights, however era-bounded, on a variety of topics of substantive and epistemological interest today. Lenin writes of the history of American agriculture, its dynamic regionalism, and its sector-specific class conflicts. Along the way, despite his obvious structural tendencies, we meet an anti-foundational author who, while upbraiding bourgeois economists for their expedient technicism, often in scathing terms, also warns that sweeping conclusions about the sizes of farm and capitalization are problematic in the face of historically dependent and contradictory trends. Here, in the first of the paper’s two parts, we begin to place Lenin’s project in the broader stream of critical agrarian studies, including the classic contrast with agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov, but also the diseconomies of modern agriculture, the biological limits on industrializing food production, and Stalin’s “dekulakization” campaign. Our aims here are more than academic. The exploration is framed by the roles the structure of agriculture and its impacts on its participants play in political change, from elections to revolution.     

People and Performance: Challenges for the Future Public Service— the Report from the Wye River Conference

What are the key challenges for the public sector at present, and what will the future public service look like if it is to meet these challenges? These questions were put to public‐sector leaders at a conference at the Wye River Plantation in June 1999. The leaders agreed on aspects of a broad vision for the future and the urgent need for a detailed debate on the transition questions that arose.     

Policy analysis in the presence of distorting taxes

This article first describes the new literature in environmental economics on the so‐called “double‐dividend” and then explores its implications for a broad range of economic issues. This literature reveals that in a second‐best, general‐equilibrium setting, environmental measures raise costs and prices and thereby reduce the real wage. This rise in the cost of living reduces slightly the quantity of labor supplied in an already highly distorted labor market, giving rise to losses in social welfare that can be large relative to the basic gains from a cleaner environment. These losses can be offset to some extent by using revenues (if any) from the environmental programs to reduce existing taxes on labor. This same line of analysis applies to many programs and institutions in the economy that raise the cost of living: tariffs and quotas on imports, agricultural price‐support programs, monopoly pricing, programs of occupational licensure that limit entry, and many others. Thus, traditional, partial‐equilibrium benefit‐cost analysis appears, in many instances, to have unwittingly omitted from the calculations a potentially quite significant class of social costs. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy and Management.     

Sensitive Method for the Confident Identification of Genetically Variant Peptides in Human Hair Keratin

Recent reports have demonstrated that genetically variant peptides derived from human hair shaft proteins can be used to differentiate individuals of different biogeographic origins. We report a method involving direct extraction of hair shaft proteins more sensitive than previously published methods regarding GVP detection. It involves one step for protein extraction and was found to provide reproducible results. A detailed proteomic analysis of this data is presented that led to the following four results: (i) A peptide spectral library was created and made available for download. It contains all identified peptides from this work, including GVPs that, when appropriately expanded with diverse hair-derived peptides, can provide a routine, reliable, and sensitive means of analyzing hair digests; (ii) an analysis of artifact peptides arising from side reactions is also made using a new method for finding unexpected modifications; (iii) detailed analysis of the gel-based method employed clearly shows the high degree of cross-linking or protein association involved in hair digestion, with major GVPs eluting over a wide range of high molecular weights while others apparently arise from distinct non-cross-linked proteins; and (v) finally, we show that some of the specific GVP identifications depend on the sample preparation method.     

Job burnout among narcotics investigators: An exploratory study

In exploring the relationship between narcotics investigators and job burnout in the United States, a sample of 115 East San Francisco Bay police officers from five law enforcement departments was drawn. Three subgroups (current narcotics investigators, former narcotics investigators, and patrol officers) were used in the survey. The findings indicate that current narcotics investigators had significantly higher burnout scores than the comparison groups on most dimensions of burnout. Both former narcotics officers and patrol officers had similar burnout scores. Conclusions reached were that: (1) narcotics officers experienced a greater degree of job burnout while in the assignment; (2) this burnout was directly attributed to the working environments of the narcotics officers; and (3) burnout decreased once an officer left the assignment. Administrative and managerial implications for dealing with job burnout are discussed along with suggested techniques for dealing with, and minimizing, job burnout among narcotics officers. Future research issues are identified.     

Globalization is What We Make of It: Contemporary Globalization Theory and the Future Construction of Global Interconnection

There are four perennial questions that preoccupy globalization theory. For those who write about globalization, there is a constant attempt to discover what globalization is, when it may have started, what benefits and burdens it offers for global cohabitation and whether globalization is ultimately a good thing or a bad thing. The purpose of this article is to review several new works in contemporary globalization theory and to assess what new answers they offer to these questions. Through this examination it will be argued that although these recent works provide significant improvements to former discussions on globalization, they still tend to lack an obvious insight. Namely, they fail to highlight fully the fact that whatever globalization is, it is as important to think normatively about directing its future as it is to understand its past. In other words, globalization is entirely what we make of it, both in how we cognitively come to understand it, but also in how we decide to shape its future.     

Common Sense, Competence, and Talent in the Public Service in the USA: Finding The Right Mix In A Complex World

In the career civil service the US federal government has long been guided by a merit system. This article traces how the principle of merit in appointment and promotion has developed since the nineteenth century and examines contemporary applications of competency frameworks in the US – their development, character, strengths and weaknesses. If core competency discussions and frameworks are to have a broader impact at both the government wide and the agency level, the frameworks will have to be disentangled. Existing notions of competencies for the political appointees, the leadership echelons of the career service, the rest of the career service, the entire government, central agencies, individual agencies, and badly needed future leaders not only suggest superhuman abilities, but also contain seriously conflicting expectations.