Actions by Political Officials Have Weakened the Federal Government Workplace: Downsizing Has Cut Lower Level Workers the Most and Replacing Federal Employees with Private Corporations Costs Much More,Creating the Need for Immediate Reform

Abstract

The authors of this paper are four practitioners each of whom has many years of experience working in the Federal government and also has pursued doctoral studies in public or business administration. Three ideas developed in this paper are that: (1) the Federal civil service has been changed from being a model workplace to a much less desirable one; (2) although downsizing has been touted as an efficiency and economy measure, lower level employees experienced the most cuts and (3) the current practice of replacing Federal employees with private corporations costs much more. Over the past two decades private sector workplaces in the United States, and now the Federal government workplace, have experienced so much change that previous theories, concepts, models, and expectations no longer hold. Just as private industry workplaces have been changed by downsizing, reorganizations, mergers, elimination of middle management, and outsourcing, so, too, has the Federal government workplace been fundamentally altered. Reducing the number of government workers, replacing Federal employees with private firms, increasing the number of officials with political agendas, and using harsh personnel management practices have transfigured the Federal workplace. Examples of factors that have contributed to a changed workplace include: the Civil Service Reform Act which replaced the Civil Service Commission with the Office of Personnel Management; importing private sector approaches into the government, e.g., the Grace Commission; replacing the Civil Service Retirement System with the Federal Employees Retirement System; pressure to downsize and privatize; and many elements of the National Performance Review and Government Performance and Results Act. Now that the metamorphosis away from the traditional Civil Service borne of the Pendleton Act is nearly complete (although the new paradigm is not entirely clear), questions about the effects of a changed government workplace are being raised. Some people believe the metamorphosis is from a caterpillar to a butterfly, while others think the opposite. Whether the changed Federal government is a thing of beauty or a distasteful organism will be determined over time by observations and assessments of the effects of the change. These effects will be both internal to the government workplace, itself, and external to it, involving the products, services, outputs, and outcomes it produces. This paper begins by describing some of the politically mandated changes that have altered the very foundation of the Federal government workplace over the past 20 years and made it a much less desirable place to work. Next, some of the effects of two politically mandated changes are examined: (1) downsizing or reducing the number of Americans who can work for their government and (2) contracting out or replacing government workers with private corporations. Political officials have told the media and the American public that these changes were needed to improve the government's efficiency, effectiveness, and economy. It has been suggested that these initiatives will reduce costs. However, an examination of downsizing and contracting out shows the opposite effect. While overall the Federal government has fewer employees now than in 1961, the statistics indicate that lower level employees have been cut the most:

• The number of secretaries decreased by 39% between 1992 and 1998.

• The blue collar workforce is down 40% since 1982, e.g., Supply Clerical and Technician (?35%), Accounting Technician (?24%), and Electronics Mechanic (?41%).

• Between 1993 and 1998 the number of GS‐1 to GS‐10 employees fell from 767,000 to 594,000.

• In 1983 the number of GS‐1 to GS‐10 workers exceeded GS‐11 to GS‐15 by nearly 300,000, while in 1997 GS‐11 to GS‐15 outnumbered the lower level workers by 44,000.

Although authoritative cost comparison studies are difficult to conduct because top officials have made little provision to collect information on the cost of contracting with private firms or the number of contract employees, available information indicates that it is much more expensive than using government employees. The contracting out we are talking about is not the usual kind—building ships or planes, or acquiring computer systems or special expertise not available in the government. Rather, it is contracting with private firms to do jobs that are currently being performed by Federal employees. Not satisfied with the level at which firms are being substituted for Federal employees, actions by political officials have created an environment which now favors private corporations and where they can be given work at top management's discretion, often regardless of cost. In fact, today most contracting out is done without the use of Circular A‐76 Cost Comparison Studies. There is empirical and logical evidence that shows that replacing government employees with private corporations is more expensive. For example, a study by the Department of the Army documents what people close to contracting have always known—that it is far more expensive to contract with a private firm for work than to have Federal employees do it. Logically, the government incurs additional items of cost when replacing Federal employees with private corporations. First, there is the profit that goes to the firm. Second, there is the firm's overhead which pays for corporate offices, staffs, and CEOs. Third, there are the costs of the contracting and award process and of contract administration and management. Although the worker on a government contract may be paid a little less than a government worker, the cost of the worker is only a third to a half of what the government pays the firm. Thus, replacing government workers with private firms usually costs far more and it is not unusual for it to cost two to three times as much. This paper partly is based on the authors' long experience in the Federal government. It is not based on the organizations in which they are currently employed.     

Jihadism as a Subcultural Response to Social Strain: Extending Marc Sageman's “Bunch of Guys” Thesis

My aim in this article is to extend Marc Sageman's seminal research on Al Qaeda by re-articulating it through the prism of Albert Cohen's theory of delinquent subcultures, an approach which came to prominence in Criminology in the 1960s, but has since then been largely eclipsed by other approaches in that field. Drawing on Sageman's findings and observations, I suggest that Al Qaeda-affiliated or -inspired groups in the West can be best understood as a collective response or “solution” to the strains encountered by the members of these groups, and that these strains are imposed on them by the circumstances in which they find themselves. My broader aim is to show that although Criminology, with a few exceptions, ignores the subject of terrorism, terrorism studies can appreciably benefit from an engagement with Criminology as a source of theoretical inspiration.     

The (im)possibility of development studies

Abstract

Development studies is commonly understood to be committed both to a principle of difference (the Third World is different, hence the need for a separate field of studies) and a principle of similarity (it is the job of development policy to make ‘them’ more like ‘us’). This double commitment has led to important challenges to the intellectual standing of the discipline and/or its object of study, development. This paper begins by reviewing five theorems which pronounce the impossibility of development studies. It then offers a more sympathetic account of the field. While recognizing the urgent need for development studies to be critical and at times oppositional, the paper suggests that an allied commitment to public policy-making can be taken as a sign of maturity. Development, and development studies, should be understood as sets of social practices, or technologies of rule, the organization and effects of which need to be (and in key respects are) contested and subjected to political and scholarly review.     

Constructing a decolonized world city for consumption: discourses on Hong Kong Disneyland and their implications

The paper argues that, under the globalized economy, state power is far from diminishing. I study how the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government officials in 1999 developed “competition-development” discourse and “disappearing-world-city” discourse to persuade the public to approve the unequal and non-transparent Hong Kong–Disney deal for setting up the Hong Kong Disneyland (HKDL). I also examine how newspaper reports have circulated and have reinforced these two pairs of political discourses in wider popular discourse. I further reveal, in the post-colonial context of HongKong, how the HKDL project functions to accomplish decolonization tasks and to reshape Hong Kong as a consumption-based tourist spot instead of a citizen-based participatory community.     

Bodies,Materials, Practice: Habiting Space and the Representational Limits of Latour's Semiotics of Assemblies

This article identifies an emerging interest in actor-network theory (ANT) within spatial studies and its significance to social semiotics. It questions the usefulness of borrowing ANT for spatial analyses, arguing that ANT is a representational theory of knowledge rooted in a Chomskyan theory of competence and that this produces an impoverished conception of practice within spatial production. To illustrate this contention, a letter describing the Elliott household in 1860s Adelaide is examined as a programme for visiting the Elliott home. A comparison is then made between Latour's programme and Lefebvre's dialectic of spatial production. It is noted that the constituent elements of the programme, association and substitution, are analogous to Lefebvre's concepts of representations of space and representational spaces, respectively. However, since the programme does not offer any corresponding third element to match spatial practice, an ANT-informed interpretation of spatiality is criticised for bifurcating competence from performance and universalising a particular competence.     

Fair trade slippages and Vietnam gaps: the ideological fantasies of fair trade coffee

Fair trade coffee sales have boomed since the late 1980s, making it one of the most recognised forms of ‘ethical consumerism’ in the world. Around the same time exports of lower quality coffee beans from Vietnam also boomed, launching Vietnam from an insignificant coffee exporter to the world’s second largest with historically unprecedented speed. These disparate projects have had significant impacts on thousands of farmers – with Vietnam’s new class of coffee producers representing three and a half times the number of coffee families certified by fair trade. Northern actors, however, have given far more public and positive attention to fair trade. This article will argue that this difference does not stem from a strictly objective appraisal of the relative merits and shortcomings of each project, but from the compatibility of fair trade with ‘free trade’ and its emotionally charged ideological fantasies. This includes unconscious beliefs and desires around individualism, voluntarism, democracy and the affirmation of the exaggerated power of Northern consumers – as opposed to the Southern agency and complicated collective action implied by Vietnamese coffee statecraft.     

Psychologically disturbed and on the side of the terrorists: the delegitimisation of critical intellectuals in Terrorism and Political Violence

The journal Terrorism and Political Violence recently published a special issue looking at why particular communities of intellectuals purportedly support terrorism, which, due to its politically partisan nature, is potentially damaging for terrorism studies. Showing that several articles within the special issue use the twin processes of accusing intellectuals of supporting terrorism and of being psychologically disturbed as a form of delegitimisation, three fundamental flaws in the special issue will be examined. In explaining these flaws, this paper draws attention to the way that this special issue forms an “epistemic community” at both the micro and the macro level, where certain assumptions on power and legitimacy are unquestioned. As a result, the special issue gains and performs an ideological function in censuring criticism of Israeli foreign policy.     

Exercising control and gathering information: the functions of interpellations in Hungary (1990–2014)

The article investigates the factors shaping the number and content of interpellations, a form of parliamentary questions by members of parliament (MPs) in post-regime change Hungary. Four theoretical propositions regarding the functions of interpellations are examined in this context: political control; policy-oriented information seeking; parliamentary group leadership; and constituency service. A new database of 4096 observations for the period between 1990 and 2014 is compiled in order to analyse these hypotheses. Computer-assisted content analysis techniques and count data regressions are used to describe the text of interpellations in terms of their geographical and policy content. Results show that opposition MPs interpellate more, whereas representatives of single-member districts and regional lists interpellate less than their peers. Representatives from single-member districts and regional lists make more reference to local issues in general, but not to their own district or county. Finally, policy specialisation increases the likelihood of submitting pertinent parliamentary questions.     

The freedom of navigation in international law and the utility of international society discourse

In the international law of the sea, the emergence of new actors and systems influencing relations between states has lead to evolving rules and calls for the redefinition of the traditional issues such the allocation of jurisdiction and rights to states in its maritime zones. In the maritime domain, this is seen thrice in the evolution of the various maritime zones in the United Nations Conferences for the Law of the Sea （UNCLOS I, II and III）. In the maritime domain, there are certain actions that are not dependent on any state＇s consent. One of such is the rule of freedom of navigation. This paper, argues for the possibilities of concomitance between international law and studies in international society based on the growing recognition of the importance of examining the sociological and historical element in rule development. This paper focuses on a rule in the international law of the sea with the aim of determining the extent to which norms have caused changes in rule development, if any. This method, known as the English School method of international relations, acknowledges the benefits of international law positivism in highlighting generality with the benefits of a normative discourse in highlighting alternatives and the utility of compliance. So, although the maritime domain is rooted in a state system, one where the parts interact as a whole, a branching-out analysis towards the normative discourse in the development of this rule will facilitate more understanding, as the case-specificity of most issues in the maritime domain cannot be overemphasised.     

Un-Packing Packaged Cultures: Chinese-ness in International Business

This paper focuses on how the Chinese are represented in the international business literature. Chinese cultures are packaged to make knowledge about the Middle Kingdom more accessible to a general audience. The ways in which these packaged cultures are framed and constructed will be questioned here. Drawing inspiration from Foucault, this article identifies four traits of a packaged culture – it mediates, it asserts the uniqueness of the culture, it selectively packages the culture and it claims that cultural differences matter in business. These traits will form the basis for comparing and examining three methods of packaging a culture, namely the general-macroscopic, ethnographic present and critical emergence approaches. This paper concludes that researchers should reflect on the power they yield when they represent another culture, and that the general public may privilege theories that are accessible rather than sound.