Book reviews

Cyril Smith, Marx at the Millennium, (Pluto Press, London 1996). 182pp. ISBN 0–7453–100–1 (pb).

Hans‐Henrik Holm and Georg Sørensen (eds), Whose World Order? Uneven Globalization and the End of the Cold War, (Westview Press, Boulder 1995). x.+246pp. ISBN 0–8133–2187–5 (pb).

David A.Smith and József Böröcz (eds), A New World Order? Global Transformations in the Late Twentieth Century, (Praeger, Westport 1995). xii+253pp. ISBN 0–275–95122–7.

Frank E. Manuel, A Requiem for Karl Marx, (Harvard University Press, 1995). 270pp. ISBN 0–674–76326–2.

Hanna Behrend (ed.), German Unification: the Destruction of an Economy, (Pluto Press, London 1995). 232pp. ISBN 0–7453–1003–6.

David Miller, On Nationality, (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995). 210pp. ISBN 0–19–828047–5.

Thom Keuhls, Beyond Sovereign Territory: The Space of Ecopolitics, (Borderlines Vol. 4, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1996). 168 pp. ISBN 0–8166–2467–4 (hb), 0–8166–2468–2 (pb).     

‘How we think they think’: thought styles in the management of international aid

Aid administration is characterised by high moral objectives and often frustratingly low achievements. This article explores the idea that the problem lies not in inadequate policy or instruments as such but in the thinking processes that emerge within policy circles, at delivery levels within aid administration and at the interface between donor and recipient, to which the trade likes to apply the notion of ‘partnership’. Cultural Theory identifies three distinct and often contradictory ways of thinking that reflect individualist, group and hierarchical value premises. It is adopted here to explore how these types of thinking apply within aid administration, finding that the policy process is a surprisingly ‘groupie’ kind of activity, emphasising the sharing of values and understandings within donor circles. Delivery agents (donor field offices) by contrast are under hierarchical pressure to turn the outcomes into packaged deliverables, whether the ‘good’ is packageable or not. Supported by NPM orthodoxies, these agents seek control through linear programming and performance monitoring. A third contradiction is revealed when the donor attempts to bring such packages into a partnership relationship with recipient governments. Partnership is about sharing and dealing. But what the recipient is offered is a package with Henry Ford type characteristics: ‘any colour you like (social aspiration), as long as it is black (PRSP formula)’. The article is biased; from the perspective of a consultant caught in the middle; but if there is truth in the findings it might just open the door to new styles of aid relationship and novel delivery vehicles. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, 20 Years Later: A New Science Still Unrealized in an Era of Public Cynicism and Theoretical Ambivalence

Alberto Guerreiro Ramos's public life and scholarly works challenge us to rethink and reconceptualize the field of public administration, particularly in this era of public cynicism and theoretical uncertainty. This article examines the historical context of his earlier writings and how they influenced his later scholarly work. As a prominent Brazilian scholar working in the United States, Guerreiro Ramos's "in-betweenness," as he called it, provided him a unique and little-appreciated perspective from which to reevaluate the social sciences. The result was his last book, The New Science of Organizations: A Reconceptualization of the Wealth of Nations, one of the most polemical works published in the field and an examination of the fundamental assumptions of public administration and the social sciences.     

Tau-b or Not Tau-b: Measuring the Similarity of Foreign Policy Positions

The pattern of alliances among states is commonly assumed to reflect theextent to which states have common or conflicting security interests. For the past twenty years, Kendall's τ b has been used to measure the similarity of nations' "portfolios" of alliance commitments. Widely employed indicators of systemic polarity, state utility, and state risk propensity all rely on τ b . We demonstrate that τ b is inappropriate for measuring the similarity of states' alliance policies. We develop an alternative measure of policy portfolio similarity, S , which avoids many of the problems associated with τ b , and we use data on alliances among European states to compare S to τ b . Finally, we identify several problems with inferring state interests from alliances alone, and we provide a method to overcome those problems using S in combination with data on alliances, trade, UN votes, diplomatic missions, and other types of state interaction. We demonstrate this by comparing the calculated similarity of foreign policy positions based solely on alliance data to that based on alliance data supplemented with UN voting data.     

Strategic Misspecification in Regression Models

Common regression models are often structurally inconsistent with strategic interaction. We demonstrate that this "strategic misspecification" is really an issue of structural (or functional form) misspecification. The misspecification can be equivalently written as a form of omitted variable bias, where the omitted variables are nonlinear terms arising from the players' expected utility calculations and often from data aggregation. We characterize the extent of the specification error in terms of model parameters and the data and show that typical regressions models can at times give exactly the opposite inferences versus the true strategic data-generating process. Researchers are recommended to pay closer attention to their theoretical models, the implications of those models concerning their statistical models, and vice versa.     

Field experiments on the competitiveness of males carrying genetic control systems for Aedes aegypti

The competitiveness carrying males of three genetic control systems forAedes aegypti (L.), viz. chemosterilized males, double translocation heterozygote males (T1T3) and distorter double translocation heterozygote males (DT1T3), released into a natural population in the Delhi metropolitanxarea was evaluated using a method based on the principle of release and recapture of marked females. Chemosterilized males and DT1T3 males showed approximately normal competitiveness in the field which is similar to the results obtained from laboratory and field cage experiments. The T1T3 males were found to have reduced competitiveness both in the field and laboratory cage tests, in contrast to previously reported results with unmarked T1T3 males in field cages. The cause of this reduction in competitiveness was not clear.

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Zusammenfassung Es wurde die Konkurrenzkraft vonAedes aegypti — M?nnchen ermittelt nach Anwendung von drei genetischen Verfahren, n?mlich Chemosterilisation der M?nnchen, heterozygote doppelte Translokation (T1T3) und gest?rte doppelte heterozygote Translokation (DT1T3) der M?nnchen, die in eine natürliche Population des hauptst?dtischen Gebiets von Delhi freigelassen wurden; dabei wurde eine auf dem Prinzip des Freilassens und Wiederfangs von markierten Weibchen beruhende Methode verwendet. Chemosterilisierte und DT1T3 — M?nnchen zeigten ann?hernd normale Konkurrenzkraft, was den Ergebnissen von Labor- und Freilandk?figversuchen entspricht. Die T1T3-M?nnchen zeigten verminderte Konkurrenzkraft im Feld und in Labork?figtests, im Gegensatz zu früher berichteten Befunden mit nicht-markierten T1T3-M?nnchen in Feldk?figen. Die Ursache dieser Reduktion der Konkurrenzkraft war nicht klar.

     

The Challenges of Contracting and Accountability Across the Federal System: From Ambulances to Space Shuttles

This article focuses on two questions related lo governmentcontracting and accountability. How are key components of contractingsimilar or different for city, state, and federal governmentsin the United States? To what extent do the three levels ofgovernment share the widely recognized challenges of contractdesign and contract management? To address these questions,we compared and contrasted six contracting cases, two each forlocal, state, and the federal governments. We found that forall governments in the U.S. federal system, the public managementfunctions of contracting are remarkably similar, and that contractmanagement and the achievement of accountability are "weak links"in the contracting process. Our findings do not support thehypothesis that contract management is more effective in localgovernment relative to state and federal governments.