ECONOMIC DISCOURSE AND THE MARKET: THE CASE OF COMMUNITY CARE

The UK government has introduced fundamental reforms into the provision of social care. The'community care'programme, which was fully implemented in 1993, requires local authorities to assess the needs of potential users, to design an individual package of care that reflects those needs, and to purchase the package from a range of statutory, voluntary and private providers. Thus the new arrangement introduced a'quasi-market'in community care, along the lines of those already operating in other areas of the UK public sector, such as health and education. Hitherto, much analysis of the functioning of such markets has been conducted within a neo-classical economic framework. This article examines the relevance to the complex new community care market of three alternative theoretical perspectives: the transaction costs literature, the Austrian school and the new economic sociology. It is concluded that, although neoclassical economic discourse has been influential in shaping policy, no single perspective can capture all the issues relevant to analysing the market in community care. Therefore, in evaluating the reforms, an eclectic theoretical approach will be required which draws upon a variety of economic discourses.     

BUREAUCRACY TRIUMPHANT OR DENIED? THE EXPANSION OF THE BRITISH CIVIL SERVICE, 1919–1939

The power of central government in Britain increased significantly in the inter-war period, but did Britain become bureaucratic? This article examines the expansion of the civil service as a whole through a detailed case study of one particular department (the Ministry of Labour) in the light of traditional critiques of bureaucracy. It concludes that previous over-concentration on the role of the Treasury has distorted analysis. The inter-war civil service became bureaucratic in terms not of rationality, inefficiency or power but only of size and increasing complexity. In this it reflected a general trend in British society, which also affected industry and the trade union movement.     

Bringing the Sociology of Media Back In

In political communication research, news media tend to be studied more as a dependent than independent variable. That is, few studies link structural characteristics of media systems to the production of journalistic discourse about politics. One reason for this relative silence is the inadequacy of prevalent theories. Influential scholars in sociology and political communication such as Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, and William Gamson provide only sketchy, institutionally underspecified accounts of media systems. Likewise, models in the sociology of news have tended to either aggregate societal level influences (chiefly political and economic) that are analytically and often empirically quite distinct or overemphasize micro-level influences (news routines, bureaucratic pressures). In between such micro- and macro-influences, the mezzo-level "journalistic field" represents an important shaping factor heretofore largely ignored. As path-dependent institutional logics, fields help ground cultural analysis; as interorganizational spatial environments varying in their level of concentration, they explain heretofore undertheorized aspects of news production. Drawing on the sociology of news and field theory (Bourdieu and American new institutionalism), this essay offers a series of hypotheses about how variable characteristics of media systems shape news discourse. Since variation at the system level is most clearly seen via cross-national comparative studies, international research is best positioned to build more generalizable theory about the production of journalistically mediated political discourse.