Reviews

Terry L. Thompson & Richard Sheldon, eds, Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988, xiii+290 pp., £21.00.

Michael Rywkin, Soviet Society Today. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1989, xii+243 pp., $35.00 h/b, $12.50 p/b.

David Lane, Soviet Society Under Perestroika, London: Unwin Hyman, 1990, xv+401 pp., £40.00 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: The Communist Party in the Capital, 1925–32. London: Macmillan, 1990, xv+328 pp., £47.50.

Roger Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, Two Steps Forward: Soviet Society and Politics under the New Economic Policy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, xi+453 pp., £48.00.

Francois Heisbourg, ed., The Strategic Implications of Change in the Soviet Union. London: Macmillan, 1990, vi+227pp., £40.00.

Neil Fodor, The Warsaw Treaty Organisation: a Political and Organizational Analysis. London: Macmillan, 1990, 235 pp., £40.00.

Gerald Segal, The Soviet Union and the Pacific. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990, xiii+236 pp., £30.00 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Philip S. Gillette & Willard C. Frank, Jr, eds, The Sources of Soviet Naval Conduct. Lexington, IN: Lexington Books, 1990, xvii+297 pp., $39.95.

Sylvia Woodby & Alfred B. Evans, Jr, eds, Restructuring Soviet Ideology: Gorbachev's New Thinking. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990, 226 pp., £22.50.

Nikolai N. Petro, ed., Christianity and Russian Culture in Soviet Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990, xi+244pp., £17.95 p/b.

David A. Dyker, Yugoslavia: Socialism, Development and Debt. London: Routledge, 1990, xi+201 pp., £30.00.

Agnes Heller & Ferenc Fehér, From Yalta to Glasnost. The Dismantling of Stalin's Empire. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, viii+288 pp., £35.00.

Elemer Hankiss, East European Alternatives. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, xiv+319 pp., £35.00.

George Blazyca & Ryszard Rapacki, eds, Poland into the 1990s: Economy and Society in Transition. London: Pinter, 1991, x+148 pp., £27.50.

Michael D. Kennedy, Professionals, Power and Solidarity in Poland: A Critical Sociology of Soviet‐Type Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, xiv+421 pp., £45.00, $59.50.

Graham Smith, ed., The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union. London: Longman, 1990, x+389 pp., £22.50 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

James Muckle, Portrait of Soviet School under Glasnost. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1990, ix+205 pp., £35.00.

Piers Beirne, ed., Revolution in Law: Contributions to the Development of Soviet Legal Theory, 1917–1938. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990, xiii+202 pp., $49.95.

Richard M. Connaughton, The Republic of the Ushakovka: Admiral Kolchak and the Allied Intervention in Siberia, 1918–20. London: Routledge, 1990, ix+193 pp., £30.00.

Vitaut Kipel & Zora Kipel, eds, Byelorussian Statehood—Reader and Bibliography. New York: Byelorussian Institute of Arts and Sciences, 1988, 398 pp.     

Government health policy and hospital labor costs: the effects of wage and price controls on hospital wage rates and employment

This study examines the rapid growth of hospital wage rates and employment levels over the past decade, with particular attention to the period 1971-73, when wage and price controls were in effect throughout the economy. The analysis shows that the hospital regulations under the Economic Stabilization Program reduced real hospital wages below what they would have been in the absence of controls; a similar but smaller effect of the controls on hospital employment levels is also shown. This suggests that if the current HEW proposal for hospital cost containment is enacted, its impact would be a significant decrease in the rate of growth of hospital wages and employment.     

Performance Indicators in Academia: An X‐Efficiency Approach?

This article utilises three different perspectives to evaluate the uses of performance indicators in Australian higher education: federalism, neoclassical economics and X-efficiency theory. The introduction of performance indicators by the Commonwealth government is associated with providing the most efficient path for the allocation and distribution of scarce resources in higher education (neoclassical economics), increasing its control over the universities (federalism theory), and applying pressure to them and in turn their academic members to increase their effort levels (X-efficiency theory). X-efficiency theory is proposed as a possible model to support and inform efforts to better understand and improve the operation of performance indicators.     

Agriculture in world history

What does food sovereignty look like?

Raj Patel

Hannah Arendt observed that the first right, above all others, is the right to have rights. In many ways, Via Campesina's call for food sovereignty is precisely about invoking a right to have rights over food. But it's unclear quite how to cash out these ideas. This Grassroots Voices section examines some of the difficulties involved in parlaying the right to have rights about food systems into practical solutions.     

Under development and modes of production: A reply to Nicos Mouzelis

What follows is a reply to a number of points raised by Nicos Mouzelis in his review of my book, From Modernisation to Modes of Production: A Critique of the Sociologies of Development and Underdevelopment (Macmillan 1979, £4.95 paper) in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Volume 7, No. 3, April 1980. I focus on Mouzelis’ arguments that my framework for analysing Third World societies is ideological and reductionist. I try to show how the analysis put forward in my book can be used to analyse what for me is the central problem of ‘development ‘ ‐ namely the relations between the restricted and uneven capitalist development characteristic of Third World societies, their class structures, forms of state and development strategy. I also examine the relevance of Mouzelis's alternative ‐ of inter‐relating structuralist and action perspectives ‐ and suggest that the framework put forward in my work can deal more adequately with the issues raised by Mouzelis in his review. I agree with Mouzelis that the most fruitful debates in the Sociology of Development currently centre on the relevance of the Marxist approach, and view my comments here as part of this wide‐ranging, continuing debate, of which my work forms a part.     

Trade or raid: Acadian settlers and native Americans before 1755

Public Choice - Could North America have been settled more peacefully, with fewer property rights violations against Native Americans? To answer this question, we utilize the case of French...