Development Of Bureaucracy Research Articles

Select Document: the Case of Robert Ayleway esqr, late Comptroller of the Artillery in Ireland, 1692

Abstract This article examines a petition drawn up by Robert Ayleway, an official within the Irish fiscal-military state in 1692, in connection with charges of corruption and incompetence during the Williamite Wars (1689–91). Ayleway’s petition, and his wider career, demonstrate that he was part of a process of English and Irish state formation that had begun well before 1688, driven by informal patronage networks as much as by formal bureaucratic developments, creating an entrenched interest group of officials that nevertheless came into conflict after 1689 with new officers, many of them foreign, who came to Ireland in William III’s train. Both sides suspected the loyalty of the other, but the petition reveals that Ayleway saw himself, with some justice, as a competent and loyal official who had used his private means to serve the public in a way that had also advanced his own private interests, suggesting something of the ethos of officials within the new Irish (and English) fiscal-military state.

Becoming Visible: Religion and Gender in Sociology

The European men canonized as the founders of sociology sought to explain the societal shifts they associated with modernization including urbanization, the development of bureaucracy, and the emergence of the nation state. In this essay, I suggest how developing theoretical and methodological tools have gone hand in hand with social changes and new questions about the place of religion in contemporary society to make religion more visible in the discipline of sociology. Seeing gender has also been problematic in sociology, although in somewhat different ways. I show how asking questions about gender illuminates the unevenness of the secularization process. I outline recent developments in feminist thinking. I show how considering gender and religion together enhances our understanding of both.

Amnesty for the city. The Hoogpoort design for the Carrefour de l'Europe in Brussels (1983)

In 1983, four young architects from Belgium and the Netherlands (Stéphane Beel, Xaveer De Geyter, Arjan Karssenberg, Willem Jan Neutelings) participated together in a design competition for the Carrefour de l'Europe, situated at the heart of Brussels. In this article, their proposal is interpreted, critically examined and considered in a wider historical and theoretical context. In Team Hoogpoort's project, the Brussels crossroads was left open and unhindered by architecture, while a few high-rise buildings reinforced the metropolitan potential of the city. The design is an early example of the acceptance of the conditions of the late-modern city, or at least of a reinforcement of certain aspects: such as mobility, congestion, commerce and leisure. The post-war commercial and bureaucratic development of the city centre was countered not by means of a conservative design proposal, but by a provocative and conceptual celebration of metropolitan activities.This approach to the development of the historical city differed strongly from previous designs for the site. It was, however, concurrent with international convictions (for example, those of Koolhaas, Venturi and Ortner). As such, the project was immediately historicised, by some critics and historians, to mark the birth of a new architectural culture in Belgium. Recent projects for the Carrefour start from an alternative approach, based on different conceptions of the role of architecture in an urban environment, and on the necessity of a political approach towards the city.

Gender and Development Cooperation: Scaling up Work with Men and Boys

Work with men and boys for gender equality and women and girls' empowerment has reached a stage of critical mass within development cooperation. Efforts are now needed to scale up interventions and to embed them in policy and practice. The article is written from the perspective of development bureaucracy and examines the background and the current contexts for work with men and boys and suggests main entry points for future developments.

Tool-power: Water infrastructure as wellsprings of state power

This article examines the role of water infrastructure in the production of state power, and advances an understanding of nonhumans as power brokers. While state power is increasingly understood as the effect of material practices and processes, I draw on the idea that objects are ‘force-full’ to argue that infrastructure helped cement federal state power in Tijuana over the twentieth century, and simultaneously limited the spaces of stateness in surprising ways. To support my argument, I examine three sets of water infrastructure in Tijuana, Mexico. First, I examine the key constitutional edicts, laws, and treaties that enabled bureaucratic development and staked territorial claims on water during Mexico’s liberal era (1876–1911) and post-revolutionary period. Second, I trace the development of Tijuana’s flood control and potable water conveyance networks, designed and built between the 1960s and the 1980s, which enabled rapid urban growth but ultimately cultivated dependency on a distant, state engineered water source. Finally, I show how the ordinary infrastructures of water supply—such as barrels, cisterns, and buckets, common tools in Tijuana homes—both coexist with and limit state power, resulting in variegated geographies of institutional authority, punctuated by alternative spaces of rule. Together, these infrastructures form the ‘hydrosocial cycle’ of Tijuana, which I use to illustrate the uneven spatiality of state power. In conclusion, I draw on insights from object-oriented philosophy and science and technology studies to move past the anthropocentric notion of infrastructure as ‘power tools’—handy implements used by humans to exercise dominion—toward tool-power: the idea that objects-in-themselves are wellsprings of power.

Learning while governing: expertise and accountability in the executive branch

Although their leaders and staff are not elected, bureaucratic agencies have the power to make policy decisions that carry the full force of the law. In this groundbreaking book, Sean Gailmard and John W. Patty explore an issue central to political science and public administration: How do Congress and the president ensure that bureaucratic agencies implement their preferred policies? The assumption has long been that bureaucrats bring to their positions expertise, which must then be marshaled to serve the interests of a particular policy. In Learning While Governing, Gailmard and Patty overturn this conventional wisdom, showing instead that much of what bureaucrats need to know to perform effectively is learned on the job. Bureaucratic expertise, they argue, is a function of administrative institutions and interactions with political authorities that collectively create an incentive for bureaucrats to develop expertise. The challenge for elected officials is therefore to provide agencies with the autonomy to do so while making sure they do not stray significantly from the administration's course. To support this claim, the authors analyze several types of information-management processes. Learning While Governing speaks to an issue with direct bearing on power relations between Congress, the president, and the executive agencies, and it will be a welcome addition to the literature on bureaucratic development.

Transparent‐making Documents and the Crisis of Implementation: A Rural Employment Law and Development Bureaucracy in India

This article examines an attempt by the Indian state to render its developmental operations “transparent.” It does so by tracking the implementation of India's ambitious social security legislation, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA). NREGA is premised on the introduction of a vigorous transparency into a notoriously flawed state delivery system. On the basis of long‐term immersion in the everyday world of government offices in northern India, I argue that transparent governance is, quite literally, made by documents. An ethnographic focus on “transparent‐making documents” leads me to argue that they had the ironic and entirely unintended effect of making this particular developmental law extremely difficult to implement. I demonstrate my thesis on the crisis of implementation by attending initially to the overwhelming volume and forms of labor expected from lower‐level development bureaucrats to produce the transparent‐making documents. Subsequently, I turn to the kinds of work these papery artifacts were doing to argue that they were posing a hindrance to the regular working of the Indian state.

Servir al Estado, servir al poder: la burocracia en el proceso de construcción estatal en América Latina

Resumen Este trabajo es un estudio sobre las relaciones entre el proceso de construcción estatal y el desarrollo de la burocracia en América Latina desde fines del periodo colonial hasta los primeros cincuenta años posteriores a la independencia. Analizamos aquí los datos resultantes de nuestro proyecto de investigación sostenido por el ERC sobre los casos de Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina y Uruguay. Nos hallamos ante una realidad compleja en cuanto al funcionamiento de la burocracia estatal y de aquellos agentes que, sin percibir sueldos estatales, tienen sin embargo funciones relacionadas con la administración estatal en áreas como la justicia o la percepción de impuestos. El trabajo analiza sobre todo, los datos referidos al estado central, con la excepción de la provincia de Santa Fe en la Argentina que ha sido incluida.

Fixers as Shadow “Public Servants”: A Case Study of Israel

Fixers can thrive in any level of political, bureaucratic, or institutional development. Paradoxically the academic research of the phenomenon of fixers is in its infancy. There exists no accepted definition of fixers; the boundaries between fixers and lobbyists remain murky, in terms of comparative administration only limited knowledge about the forces that breed different types of fixers in different political settings is available; and no deductive theory was articulated that might determine when and how fixing might become dysfunctional and corruptive. In an attempt to better understand the phenomenon of fixers more theoretically; this study analyzes fixers in view of three theories of bureaucratic corruption, and in view of the emerging theory of alternative politics. Using Israel as a case in point, the study shows that within certain national and local branches of government fixers not only create a shadow copy of official institutions, but also foster institutional corruption.

Growth and Development of Civil Service and Bureaucracy in Bangladesh: An Overview

The aim of this article is to analyse the growth and development of bureaucracy as an institution of government in Bangladesh from historical and politico-administrative perspectives. Although it is now an independent state, various Hindu kings, Muslim emperors, British lords and zamindars of the Indian subcontinent ruled the area of Bangladesh for several hundred years. In 1947, when India and Pakistan emerged as independent states, Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan. To understand the growth and development of bureaucracy in Bangladesh, the article is divided into two broad sections: the colonial legacy of both British India and Pakistan (1601–1971) and the Bangladesh period (1971–2008). The structure and working patterns of bureaucracy in Bangladesh are a legacy of British colonial rule, which impeded reform efforts after Independence and caused politicisation of the administration and governance. Civil-military elitisms reduced accountability of the administration, resulting in a dominating bureaucratic structure with corruption.

Changing Ideals in a Donor Organisation: ‘Participation’ in Sida

SummaryDevelopment buzzwords shelter diverse and often divergent strands of meaning and practice, lending an air of credibility and currency to the policies of the agencies that espouse them. Tracing the trajectory of one of these buzzwords, ‘participation’, in Swedish development cooperation, this paper seeks to unpack some of those diverse meanings and lend form to some of those divergent practices. It weaves together institutional ethnography with oral history and textual analysis, fortified by insights from a unique action research initiative on participation. This innovative process brought together desk officers from across the institution in a participatory learning group that met for the best part of a year to explore the challenge of institutionalising participation in Sida.The paper tells the tale of efforts to promote and negotiate participation in a changing external and institutional environment. It begins in a time when the term had not yet gained currency but in which the practice of Swedish development cooperation resonated with many of the ideals that were associated with popular participation. It goes on to chart the rise of ‘popular participation’ (folkligt deltagende) and other variants, community participation, beneficiary participation, stakeholder participation and civil society participation, as Swedish development cooperation came to be influenced by the discourses and practices of bilateral and multilateral development institutions. Pursuing the trajectory of participation into an era in which other buzzwords – harmonisation, ownership and account‐ability – have taken precedence, it reflects on the paradoxes of efforts to institutionalise ideals within development bureaucracies as they grapple with the opportunities, challenges and contradictions of the Paris Agenda and the reconfiguration of the business of aid.

Bureaucratic Reforms and Development: How Innovative Was the 'Poupatempo' Experience in Brazil?

Bureaucratic Reforms and Development: How Innovative Was the 'Poupatempo' Experience in Brazil?

The global construction of development models: the US, Japan and the East Asian miracle

During the heyday of the ‘Washington Consensus’ in the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese government became an increasingly vocal critic of its market-liberalizing prescriptions. Drawing on documents produced by the Japanese development bureaucracy, this paper analyses the origins of the Washington-Tokyo controversy, and suggests that it provides new insights into the nature of models of economic development. Such models are based on post hoc social constructs-interpretations of past events forged in part by development experts, but also by states, which can play a major role in selecting, interpreting and packaging development facts. Washington's ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model and Tokyo's ‘East Asian’ model were based on distinct interpretations of development facts, but were not as far apart as they seemed on the surface. We conclude that although development models may draw on local materials, they are also very much global products, constructed in the context of transnational networks and organizational fields.

Muddy waters: more stormy SEAS for ezetimibe

Ezetimibe seems fated to remain a controversial drug. Initially, when this drug was discovered and then belatedly launched, no one knew how it worked. It was an acyl cholesterol acyl transferase inhibitor that happened to lower cholesterol levels in animal models - unlike the others which did not and have later failed conspicuously in human trials (1). This upsets the purists of object-orientated rational drug design who dominate the product development bureaucracy of the pharmaceutical industry. Clinicians were initially dubious about it - it did not offer the power of a statin, but many were becoming worried about the increasingly high rate of side effects seen with higher doses of statins.

Map-making, landscapes and memory: a geography of colonial and early modern Ireland, c.1530-1750

This is the first engagement by a geographer in one book of this most formative and revolutionary period (c. 1550 - c. 1750) in Ireland's history. Using the twin concepts of 'colonialism' and 'early modernity', the book comprises a geographical analysis of the conquest and settlement of Ireland by the New English (and Scottish) and the consequences of this often violent and deep-seated intrusion upon the cultures and landscapes of pre-existing Irish societies. The book effectively isolates the emerging methodologies of the early modern British state in this process of colonial subjugation: the systematic use of surveillance techniques; the implementation of regional and island-wide mapping and inventories of strategic landscapes and resources; the development of bureaucracies and the administrative techniques of law and the market economy so as to obliterate regional expression of 'other' Gaelic or Gaelicised cultures and practices. Consequently, a wide range of documentary evidence, from the Elizabethan fiants, 16th and 17th century mss. maps, the '1641 Depositions', the Cromwellian Civil and Down Surveys, Petty's '1659 Census' to the 'State of Popery' materials of 1730s are available for mapping. The book contains over 100 original colour and black and white maps, which point up the nuanced and regionally varied character of the engagement between local peoples and incomers. The use of so many maps thus highlights many hidden Irelands, often obscured in a strictly historical/narrative format. Uniquely, the book uses Irish language (as well as English) sources to illuminate Irish ways of understanding and using territories and resources, understandings and practices which were often undermined and eroded under New English rule. Overall, the book represents a novel rendition of Ireland's experiences in this crucial early modern period from the particular perspective of a historical geographer.

Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development

ABSTRACTGender and development has grown enormously as a field over the last thirty years. In this introduction, we interrogate the ambivalence that underpins feminist engagement with development and examine what current dilemmas may suggest about the relationship between feminist knowledge and development practice. In recent years, there has been growing frustration with the simplistic slogans that have come to characterize much gender and development talk, and with the gap between professed intention and actual practice in policies and programmes. Questions are now being asked about what has become of ‘gender’ in development. This collection brings together critical reflections on some ideas about gender that have become especially resonant in development narratives, particularly those that entail popularization and the deployment of iconic images of women. This introduction explores more closely the issues raised by such myth‐making, arguing that these myths stem from exigencies within the politics and practices of development bureaucracies, within the difficult politics of feminist engagement with development policy and practice and within feminist politics itself.

The Asian economic crisis and bureaucratic development: a veto player analysis

The Asian economic crisis and bureaucratic development: a veto player analysis

Women, Society and Water Technologies: Lessons for Bureaucracy

Water technologies are increasingly regarded as pivotal to the process of societal development. One arena of importance is the delivery of water to society through comprehensive water supply programs that aim at ensuring ‘safe’ water for all. The principal target group in these programs is women, whose development is believed to be promoted through improved water facilities offering them greater convenience, better health and enhanced socio-economic opportunities. These programs can be seen as having three essential aspects, namely technology, people and institutions. Of these, the responsibilities of designing technologies for supplying water, creating institutional frameworks for their execution and implementing the program at the people’s end for their benefit all lie with development bureaucracies. But the extent to which these bureaucracies can be sensitive to the socio-cultural contexts of the communities and the women for whom the program interventions are designed and implemented remains problematic. This article explores the gender dimensions of the socio-cultural context of water and how this may play a role in the adoption and management of improved water technologies. A perspective on the lessons for planning bureaucracies is offered to make the concerned technologies more efficient, effective and sustainable.

Organizational Changes in Canada's Sport System: Toward an Athlete-Centred Approach1

Prompted by an examination of the sport system, a reorientation of priorities and actions around high performance sport has occurred in Canada. One of the important changes has been a shift away from the administrative aspects of sport delivery to a focus on the development of high performance athletes. This shift has meant that more resources are now invested directly in high performance athletes rather than in the administration of sport organizations. The purpose of this paper was to explore the reorientation in priorities, from the bureaucracy of sport to the athletes and their development. Using Pettigrew's contextualist approach, we examined the content, context, and process of changes that led to the introduction of athlete-centred initiatives in Canada's sport system. Evidence of the change included increased representation of athletes on decision-making committees of sport federations, increased athlete funding, the creation of training centres, and a forum for athletes to resolve disputes with coaches and sport federations. The change to a more athlete-centred system was the result of pressures originating from the external and internal environments. Key individuals also played an important role in the athlete-centred change. The application of Pettigrew's approach allowed us to discuss the nature of the changes that took place and to better understand the complexity of the change process in light of pressures originating from the context. This paper allowed us to reflect on the reorientation in Canadian sport from a focus on the structural and bureaucratic development of the system to an athlete-centred approach. We also discussed system-wide changes occurring in Canadian sport and uncovered the factors that led to greater athlete-centred programs and services.

Capitalisme d’État ou société bureaucratique de développement

Increasingly, one can observe the power of the state extending into the modem sector of Third World economies. Different types of cooperative relationships are established with multinational corporations, even to the point of excluding them altogether. A considerable part of the literature suggests that in this instance there is the formation of dependent capitalist societies, what could be referred to as state capitalism. Such a definition is contradictory and conceals the true operation of these societies. In fact, was are witnessing the emergence of a new type of production that the author refers to as bureaucratic development societies dominated by bureaucratically organized state classes. These state-classes collectively appropriate the social surplus and determine its allocation on a political basis allocating it either to consumption by the dominant class or to investment, but in this latter case, without consideration as to the immediate return on possible investments. The means by which such a class arrives at decisions are of particular interest because the author shows that they constitute both a hope and a threat for the broad-based development of the economies and the societies of the Third World.