Reshaping the State: Administrative Reform and New Public Management in France

This essay examines the administrative reform process in France since the late 1980s. The key reforms undertaken during this period have sought to delegate greater managerial autonomy to the ministerial field-service level. We undertook semistructured interviews with officials in the field services of three French ministries (Education, Agriculture, and Infrastructure) in the Champagne-Ardennes region, as well as with members of the wider policy communities. The capacity of the field services to adopt a proactive approach to management reform depended on five key variables: internal organizational dynamics; the attitude of the central services to mesolevel autonomy; the degree of institutional receptivity to change; the type of service delivery, and the extent of penetration in local networks. The Infrastructure Ministry was more receptive to management change than either Education or (especially) Agriculture, a receptivity that reflects the institutional diversity of the French administrative system, and that supports new institutionalist arguments. The essay rejects straightforward convergence to the New Policy Management norm. Changes in public management norms require either endogenous discursive shifts or else need to be interpreted in terms of domestic registers that are acceptable or understandable to those charged with implementing reform.     

The Female Body,Work, and Reproduction in Deland,Cather, and Dreiser

After the turn of the century and in large part motivated by the Suffragist movement, women in America were working both to support families at home and for surplus spending money, as Nan Enstad documents. Census reports from the time reveal women working at everything from menial labor to banking and canalboat captaining (Albertine 240-49). Correspondingly, the popular literature of the early twentieth century tells the stories of working- class women in which work, instead of men, becomes the seductive force from which young women must be rescued (Hapke 6). In spite of the popularity of these dime-novels, contemporaneous works like Margaret Deland's The Iron Woman (1911) and Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) also exist that show working women as executing important leadership work, instead of factory work or domestic labor, that was not typically assigned to women at the time. Furthermore, in going beyond the common turn-of-the-century tale of the oppressed factory girl, these works instead show an important and unique relationship between women and work that has yet to be considered by scholars of American literature.     

Equality and Sharing: Views of Household Across the Iron Curtain

Before they reunified, the two Germanies provided a natural experiment in whether law could rectify what many have seen as injustice between men and women in the household. East German legislation mandated that equal hours of housework be contributed by husband and wife, while West Germany allowed the couple to reach any arrangement they chose. This paper explores the predicted and actual consequence of the two regimes for labor force participation, divorce, and equality within marriages.