Contradiction In Terms Research Articles

Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal, Some Are More Equal than ‘Others’

Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal, Some Are More Equal than ‘Others’

James Fries

HEALTHY AGING WAS ONCE thought to be a contradiction in terms. Enter James Fries, a professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Early in his career, he foresaw a society in which the active and vital years of life would increase in length, the onset of morbidity would be postponed, and the total amount of lifetime disability would decrease. At the heart of his vision is an emphasis on improvements in preventive medicine and the untapped potential of health promotion and prevention. Known as “compression of morbidity,” Fries’ hypothesis holds that if the age at the onset of the first chronic infirmity can be postponed more rapidly than the age of death, then the lifetime illness burden may be compressed into a shorter period of time nearer to the age of death. Evidence supporting this hypothesis thus must take two forms: first, that it is possible to substantially delay the onset of infirmity; second, that the accompanying increases in longevity will be comparatively modest.1 Think about two points on a typical human lifespan, with the first point representing the time at which a person becomes chronically ill or disabled and the second point representing the time at which that person dies. Today, the time between those two points is about 20 years or so years. During the early portion of those years, chronic disease or disability is minor, but increases nearer to the end of life. The idea behind compression of morbidity is to squeeze or compress the time horizon between the onset of chronic illness or disability and the time in which a person dies. As Fries, the author of more than 300 articles, numerous book chapters, and 11 books, including Take Care of Yourself and Living Well, explained,2,3 By minimizing the number of years people suffer from chronic illness, we enable older people to live more successful, productive lives that benefit themselves and society. When we consider healthcare reform and new approaches to structuring health care systems, we must recognize that by avoiding long-term periods of morbidity, we reduce healthcare costs and improve the lives of patients at the same time. Since Fries’ seminal article on his hypothesis was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, compression of morbidity has been intensely discussed and argued for nearly three decades. Today, with data strongly confirming the hypothesis, compression of morbidity has become widely recognized as the dominant paradigm for healthy aging, at both individual and policy levels, and is thought to have laid the foundation for successful health promotion and programs. James Fries at Mount Everest Base Camp.

Holiday eating guidelines

T HE HOLIDAY season should be a special time of the year, filled with happiness and joy. However, enjoying the holidays while following a renal diet may seem a contradiction in terms for renal patients. Our patients often spend more time with friends and family and may be eating different foods than the rest of the year. Helping our patients enjoy the holidays while following a renal diet presents a unique challenge for dietitians. The following holiday materials were developed by the Gambro Dietitians of Greater Cincinnati (submitted by Deanna White, RD, LD, Cincinnati, OH) and by Kathy Reynolds, RD, LDN, from Dialysis Clinic Incorporated (DCI) in Nashville, TN. The educational materials include holiday eating tips, menus, a choose and avoid list, and holiday food safety tips. These educational tools can be used to help patients and loved ones make the holiday season safe and delicious. Some information was obtained using the Illinois Council on Renal Nutrition’s (ICRN) diet booklet provided by the National Kidney Foundation of Illinois (NKF-I). Al so available from the NKF-I is the Everyday Eating Cookbook fey Dialysis Patients and Their Families. Several holiday recipes and menus are included in this cookbook, which may be of great help to patients and family members. For more information on the cookbook or booklet, please call the NKF-I at l-312-663-3103.

Journalism and Professional Education: A Contradiction in Terms?

This article revisits a set of long-standing debates to suggest how the role of universities in providing a ‘professional education’ in journalism might be (re)considered. Existing arguments over journalism education identify a need to move beyond the limiting frame of a presumed ‘industry–academic dichotomy’ to develop a more critical approach to professional education. While supporting this direction, this article draws on work suggesting that a more careful consideration of both the concept of professionalism and its implications for stakeholders is required. It argues that, by approaching professionalism as a discursive and socially valorised basis of identity rather than simply a series of ‘traits’, a more analytical perspective on how universities are both subject to and implicated in processes of ‘professionalisation’ is gained. These processes situate universities as both major stakeholders in, and an increasingly important influence on, emergent formations of journalistic professionalism.

Landscape characteristics influence morphological and genetic differentiation in a widespread raptor (Buteo jamaicensis)

Landscape-scale population genetic structure in vagile vertebrates was commonly considered to be a contradiction in terms whereas recent studies have demonstrated behaviour and habitat associated structure in several such species. We investigate whether landscape features influence morphological and genetic differentiation in a widespread, mobile raptor. To accurately describe genetic differentiation associated with regional landscape factors, we first investigated subspecies relationships at a continental scale. We used 17 microsatellite loci and five morphological measurements to investigate differentiation between eastern and western subspecies of red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) and to identify patterns between differentiation and habitat within western North America. Bayesian and frequency-based analyses of microsatellite data revealed clear distinctions between B. j. borealis (eastern) and B. j. calurus (western) samples. Furthermore, hawks sampled in Texas were stouter than those collected from the Rocky Mountains and farther west. Among western samples, birds from the Great Basin, Rocky Mountains, and Washington were significantly different in morphology than those from Oregon and California. We identified a pattern of isolation by distance among western breeding sites around the Sierra Nevada. Given the long-range dispersal capabilities of raptors, this pattern suggests that population-specific habitat preferences, corresponding with habitat breaks between eastern and western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, and/or regionally variable population densities limit migration between the Mediterranean habitat of central California and the xeric habitats of southern California and interior west. We suggest habitat preferences and regionally disparate population densities may play a role in shaping genetic structure in vagile avian taxa.

Pierre Batcheff, the surrealist star

Pierre Batcheff was one of the foremost jeunes premiers of 1920s cinema. Unlike his fellow stars, he despised the commercial films he made, and engaged with the surrealists and their sympathizers, leading to his role as the Man in Un chien andalou in 1929. In this article, we argue that Batcheff's performance style, which more often than not involved distancing himself from the action and from his female screen partners, and his star persona as the exotic other, contributed to make him what might seem like a contradiction in terms: a surrealist star. We show how the ideological preoccupations of the surrealists at the end of the 1920s, whether in relation to literature (Breton), painting (Dalí), or cinema (Artaud), intersected with those of Batcheff, making him an exemplary uncanny object, as defined by Hal Foster's work on surrealism.

A Smile in His Mind's Eye: A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell (review)

Reviewed by: A Smile in His Mind’s Eye: A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell Julius Rowan Raper Ray Morrison. A Smile in His Mind’s Eye: A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. xii + 529 pp. Like Walt Whitman, Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) contained multitudes, an expansiveness reflected by the body of his work. For starters, his fiction contains the Egyptian world of The Alexandria Quartet with which many readers are familiar, the French world of the Avignon Quintet that fewer have visited, plus the largely forgotten [End Page 912] worlds of his early poetry, his minor works, and three pre-World War II novels that range in setting from Bangladesh and Greece to London. It is chiefly to the third group, the often forgotten work, that Ray Morrison limits his immense study. In its roughly 275,000 words, his book similarly contains worlds—or at least the materials for four monographs. Even though the size of Morrison's investigation may dictate that it will most often be used as a reference work read one large chapter at a time as students of Durrell investigate individual novels or groups of poems, the various parts do develop a unified vision of the poet-novelist as he evolved from a neophyte symbolist into a post-World War II master novelist who embraced the vision of Taoist thinkers Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. In fact, Morrison's title plays on Durrell's own brief Taoist-informed autobiography, A Smile in the Mind's Eye (1982). Morrison's argument runs as follows: that all Durrell's work was one single "book" (21) and that "during the first part of his literary career" (38–39), his apprenticeship, his "major influence" was French symbolism (63). Like Paul Verlaine, Durrell, in the early poems, privately printed as Quaint Fragment: Poems Written between the Age of Sixteen and Nineteen (1931), seems to reject any naturalistic grounding as "all that garlic from the lowly kitchen" (52). The poems pursue the loftiness of music, symbols and dreams (52–53) and are less metrical than musical. But theirs is an elusive music to "convey the hidden spirit of the world" (66–67). Morrison's suggestions will help any reader who has struggled to find in these verses a clear setting, character, action or even theme to pin them down and render them accessible. Morrison's symbolist approach appears less helpful when he turns to Durrell's apprentice fiction, Pied Piper of Lovers. Here he quotes, then ignores, symbolist critic Anna Balakian's warning, in Critical Appraisal, "that 'the symbolist novel is a contradiction in terms' . . . for the symbolists rejected all narrative forms." Morrison, nonetheless, goes in quest of what Balakian termed "certain vestigial aspects of symbolist technique in the novel" (79), a search that produces a 40,000 word decoding of Durrell's largely autobiographical novel into ideas found in the works of Remy de Gourmont and Arthur Schopenhauer. One problem with this approach is that, since all words are symbols, a novel unlike a poem contains far too many possible signs for interpretation. Another difficulty is that because the key symbols of a novel are its characters, settings, action, structure, and recurring images, an analysis has to focus primarily on these naturalist dimensions. One could argue that Morrison spends too few words on the latter elements and too many on possible allusions to the ideas of Gourmont and Schopenhauer, especially since he must later admit [End Page 913] that Durrell both "remains strangely quiet about the influence of Gourmont on his own work" and maintains his "silence on the impact of Schopenhauer" (439). Consequently, Morrison's book remains less an influence study than a collection of parallel readings of Durrell, Gourmont, Schopenhauer and the Taoists in the form of an influence study. In defense of Morrison, we must remember that Durrell later disowned his first two novels and that he was famously playful in his treatment of ideas and that having played, he moved on. Gourmont and Schopenhauer may have become tools and toys he left behind. Despite the limitations of Morrison's method, it produces numerous helpful...

Quick remedies for improving diabetes care: A contradiction in terms

Quick remedies for improving diabetes care: A contradiction in terms

Habermas and the `Post-Secular Society'

The article appraises Habermas's recent writings on theology and social theory and their relevance to a new sociology of religion in the `post-secular society'. Beginning with Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Habermas revisits his earlier thesis of the `linguistification of the sacred', arguing for a `rescuing translation' of the traditional contents of religious language through pursuit of a via media between an overconfident project of modernizing secularization, on the one hand, and a fundamentalism of religious orthodoxies, on the other. Several questions, however, must be raised about this current project. How far can Habermas engage adequately with religious ideas of the absolute while still retaining certain broadly functionalist theoretical premises? Is the notion of an ongoing secularization process in the `post-secular society' a contradiction in terms? What appropriate `limits and boundaries' are to be accepted between the domains of knowledge and faith, and how strictly can they be drawn? How coherent is the notion of `methodological atheism', and how consistently can Habermas pursue the project of a `religious genealogy of reason'?

Functional homology and homology of function: biological concepts and philosophical consequences

“Functional homology” appears regularly in different areas of biological research and yet it is apparently a contradiction in terms—homology concerns identity of structure regardless of form and function. I argue that despite this conceptual tension there is a legitimate conception of ‘homology of function’, which can be recovered by utilizing a distinction from pre-Darwinian physiology (use versus activity) to identify an appropriate meaning of ‘function’. This account is directly applicable to molecular developmental biology and shares a connection to the theme of hierarchy in homology. I situate ‘homology of function’ within existing definitions and criteria for structural assessments of homology, and introduce a criterion of ‘organization’ for judging function homologues, which focuses on hierarchically interconnected interdependencies (similar to relative position and connection for skeletal elements in structural homology). This analysis of biological concepts has at least three broad philosophical consequences: (1) it provides the grounds for the study of behavior and psychological categories as homologues; (2) it demonstrates that philosophers who take selected effect function as primary effectively ignore large portions of comparative, structural, and experimental research, thereby misconstruing biological reasoning and knowledge; and, (3) it underwrites causal generalizations, which illuminates inferences made from model organisms in experimental biology.

What kind of Sceptic was Pascal?

Antony McKenna has argued that Pascal has been misunderstood as a "Christian Pyrrhonist" when he is in fact an Academic sceptic. He holds Pascal's scepticism to be a negative dogmatism and Christian Pyrrhonism to be a contradiction in terms and thus useless as a category of intellectual history. This essay argues that McKenna's reading of Pascal is unsustainable and that his assault on the notion of Christian Pyrrhonism is based on a mistaken conception of what constitutes "true" Pyrrhonism. In fact, it argues that McKenna's Pyrrhonism is actually a form of Academicism and that Pascal himself understood the difference between these ancient schools more accurately.

The Tatars of the Russian Federation and National–Cultural Autonomy: A Contradiction in Terms?

This article explores the recent fate of the Russian experiment in national–cultural, non-territorial autonomy (NCA) through the prism of the experience of the Tatars. The Tatars are the most numerous minority in Russia and have achieved, peacefully, a very high degree of autonomy, in contrast to the Chechens. I seek to answer two questions. First, why did the NCA form at first appear so attractive to the Tatar elite? Second, why has it almost lost all significance to them and to others in Russia? It should be noted that this experiment is still presented by Russia as the centrepiece of its ‘nationalities policy’. Following some reflections on the importance of theory, I set out the latest Russian government depiction of the NCA experiment, as well as its critique by leading scholar Aleksandr Ossipov and the Russian Constitutional Court. I follow with an account of the history and influence of the Tatars in Russia. Fourth, I turn to the relationship of the Tatars with the theory and practice of NCA since 1917. Fifth, I analyse the Tatar response to the federal law ‘On National–Cultural Autonomy’ of 1996 and its amendment in 2004. Finally, I reflect on Ossipov's epitaph for the Russian NCA experiment.

Informed Consent in Emergency Research: A Contradiction in Terms

Improving the treatment of life threatening emergency illness or disease requires that new or novel therapies be assessed in clinical trials. As most subjects for these trials will be incapacitated there is some controversy about they might best protected whilst still allowing research to continue. Recent European and UK clinical trials legislation, which has effectively stopped research into emergency conditions, is discussed. Possible changes to these regulations are proposed.

Economic democracy: meaningful, desirable, feasible?

Daedalus Summer 2007 To some, economic democracy is self-evidently a good thing if it means spreading economic opportunities more widely, giving workers a greater say in the workplace, and allowing communities to participate in the investment decisions that shape their future. Indeed, a classic argument has it that political democracy–universal suffrage, civic freedoms, and all that is needed to make them practical and effective–will work better if accompanied by ‘social’ or ‘economic’ democracy. Absent the latter, real civic participation will be low and big money will corrupt the political process, especially in complex societies where commercial networks can shape political agendas and the cost of campaigning is high. While few deny the need to reform the way elections are run and 1⁄2nanced– a source of recurrent scandal in nearly every rich country–another line of thought would challenge the conclusion that it makes sense to aim for economic democracy. The very phrase is thought to be a contradiction in terms, or a category mistake. Economic processes are too complex to be governed by votes and electioneering. Governments can and must lay down some basic ground rules, but, as Friedrich Hayek showed, they lack the locally speci1⁄2c information required to run complex enterprises effectively, still less to plan the entire economy. On the one hand, consumer needs are too intricate and changeable; on the other, the myriad of speci1⁄2c investment opportunities at the local level can never be known at the planning center. While Hayek’s critique of central planning was in many ways compelling, it failed to acknowledge the extent to which markets rely on the wider social context in which they are embedded. It also did not demolish the argument that public initiative and collective resources are necessary to meet large-scale and manifest threats.1 Robin Blackburn

The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of St. Maximus the Confessor (review)

Reviewed by: The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of St. Maximus the Confessor David Bradshaw Demetrios Bathrellos The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of St. Maximus the Confessor Oxford Early Christian Studies New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 Pp. 228 + xii. $98. Although the ancient christological debates culminate in the work of St. Maximus the Confessor, until now there has been no monograph devoted specifically to Maximus's Christology. This work neatly fills that gap and in doing so provides a helpful introduction to some of the knottier issues of patristic theology. The book begins with a review of the debates leading up to and following the Council of Chalcedon. Bathrellos treats this familiar material well, correcting [End Page 286] where necessary what he sees as inaccuracies in the prevailing scholarship. He defends the two Leontioi (Leontius of Byzantium and Leontius of Jerusalem) against charges that they were less than orthodox, observing that Leontius of Byzantium explicitly affirms a human will in Christ and that both authors attribute to Christ a human as well as a divine energy. The second chapter examines Monothelitism. Bathrellos takes issue with those scholars (such as Tixeront and Jugie) who have argued that the Monothelites did not actually mean to deny a human will in Christ but merely saw Christ's human will as wholly passive with respect to his divine will. The issue is tricky because the Monothelites did not distinguish, as did Maximus, between the faculty of will, its exercise, and its object, so their precise meaning is often hard to determine. Nonetheless, Bathrellos thinks it is clear that Patriarch Sergius meant to deny a human faculty of will in Christ and that the same is true of Pope Honorius inasmuch as he endorsed Sergius's views without qualification. (As Bathrellos observes, the fathers of the Sixth Ecumenical Council "took for granted that [Honorius] was a heretic and anathametized him, as they also took for granted that to be a pope and a heretic at the same time does not constitute a contradiction in terms" [79].) As for the sources of Monothelitism, Bathrellos sees them as lying partly in the Monophysitism but partly also in a revival of the Apollinarian notion that a truly human will in Christ would necessarily be in conflict with his divine will. The remaining chapters treat Maximus's own Christology. Maximus builds on the work of the Leontioi in affirming both that the single personal subject present in the Incarnation is the Logos and that at the level of nature ("what," rather than "who") this single personal subject is composite. The attempt to work out this position in detail gives rise to a number of interesting questions. Bathrellos argues that Maximus denies human inclination (gno\me\) and choice (prohairesis) in Christ not in order to exclude the actual exercise of Christ's human will but because he sees these terms as implying ignorance, deliberation, and the capacity for evil. Scripture often speaks of Christ's will as being thwarted, and this is, for Maximus, a clear sign that his human will is at work. The question then is how, given that two faculties of will are active, they necessarily converge in a single decision. Should we think of them as working more or less in parallel (Tixeront) or, instead, of the human will as subordinate to the divine will (Jugie)? Bathrellos argues that neither of these views is adequate and that precisely because the human will is that of the Logos, it is moved directly by the Logos (and not by the divine will per se) without any violation of human self-determination. The author also discusses at length monoenergist formulas such as the "new theandric energy" spoken of by Dionysius the Areopagite. Notoriously, Maximus originally was willing to give such formulas an orthodox reading but then rejected them. Bathrellos argues that the shift was a result of the need to conciliate the hard-line Dyothelites of Italy and Sicily and did not represent a real change in Maximus's thinking. Although this is probably correct, I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the underlying theological issues...

Cosmetic Surgery in a Different Voice: The Case of Madame Noël

Cosmetic surgery emerged at the end of the 19th century in the U.S. and Europe. Like most branches of surgery, it is a ‘masculine’ medical specialty, both numerically and in terms of professional ‘ethos’. Given the role cosmetic surgery – and, more generally, the feminine beauty system – play in the disciplining and inferiorization of women's bodies, a feminist cosmetic surgeon would seem to be a contradiction in terms. It is hard to imagine how cosmetic surgery might be practiced in a way which is not, by definition, disempowering or demeaning to women. In this paper, I explore the unlikely combination of feminist cosmetic surgeon, using one of the pioneers of cosmetic surgery, Dr. Suzanne Noël, as an example. She was the first and most famous woman to practice cosmetic surgery, working in France at the beginning of this century. She was also an active feminist. Based on an analysis of the handbook she wrote in 1926, La Chirurgie Esthétique, Son Rôle Social in which she describes her views about her profession, her techniques and procedures, and the results of her operations, I tackle the question of whether Noël's approach might be regarded as a ‘feminine’ or even feminist way of doing cosmetic surgery – in short, an instance of surgery in ‘a different voice’.“The primary requisite for a good surgeon is to be a man – a man of courage.”Edmund Andrews. (1861). The Surgeon. Chicago Medical Examiner“Surgery involves bodies – those of surgeons as well as of patients … What does it mean when the body of the surgeon – the intrusive gazer, the violator, the recipient of sensory assaults – is that of a woman?”Joan Cassell. (1998). The Surgeon in the Woman's Body

Novel Medicine: Arrowsmith

Sinclair Lewis' novel Arrowsmith was first published in the United States back in the 1920s. The author was already well known for Babbit and had intended for his next book to involve something ‘heroic’. At first he had planned on writing a work about a labour giant. In preparation, Lewis had even gone to visit the US union leader, Eugene Debs, one of the founders of the International Labor Union and a five-time (!) candidate for the American presidency on behalf of the Socialist Party of America. However, a mutual friend, Dr Morris Fishbein, who among other things was for many years the editor of JAMA, introduced Lewis to a young bacteriologist, Paul de Kruif. The scientist, who had just been fired from his job at the prestigious Rockefeller Institute, collaborated with him in ways that today would have given him claim to have been listed as a co-author. However, those were different days. Perhaps it is not too surprising that Lewis was attracted to medicine as the theme of this book. Fishbein and de Kruif were hardly Lewis' first brush with the profession, as his elderly father was still practicing as a physician at the time of writing. As well, one of his grandfathers and an uncle were also doctors. The novel's plot involves the life and career of Martin Arrowsmith, a typical Midwesterner hayseed who shortly after entering medical school meets up with and is heavily influenced by one of his professors, Max Gottlieb. This senior physician is a German Jew, and Lewis probably modelled him after Jacques Loeb, an eminent researcher most famous for his discovery of artificial parthenogenesis. On the impressionable young Arrowsmith, the older researcher exerts a powerful influence in his role as teacher, mentor and role model, offering his protege a glimpse into ‘scientific’ medicine. Through Arrowsmith's career and struggles, Lewis presents the thesis that there is an essential conflict between clinical medicine and scientific research; moreover, that the struggle in fact cannot be resolved. One is either a ‘scientist’ or a ‘doctor’. As quoted in a fascinating analysis of the novel,1 ‘In his memoirs, de Kruif quotes Jacques Loeb as having said that something like “medical science” did not exist, as it was a contradiction in terms.’ In a way, we are still grappling, sometimes not all that successfully, with the same conflict today. While the issue remains as fresh as ever, the book is dated. To this reader, the novel is what we would today clearly consider overwritten. Both clinical medicine and laboratory research are caricatured more than they are characterized. That being said, it is still a good read. But to fully enjoy the book and to understand the currents of medical history which explain its background and which the book itself elucidates, I strongly suggest reading the review referenced below as a companion to the novel.1 Apparently in its day and for a long time afterwards, Arrowsmith influenced many young people to choose medicine and perhaps some even to opt for a life of ‘pure’ bench research. I doubt, however, it would do the same today. Young people are more jaded than was I when I first read this novel more than four decades ago. As well, for many reasons, medical research has lost some of its innocence since then. In the two decades after Lewis published Arrowsmith, the Nazi and Japanese medical atrocities followed, as well as other abuses less egregious but still not worth copying, took some of the shine off of this career goal. For their part, the blandishments of Big Pharma and the resultant corruption which so many of our colleagues have fallen into have had their ill effects as well. That being said, for a clear look at some of the strong forces which influenced American medicine in the era just following Osler's, and which continue to roil it to this day, turn to Sinclair Lewis' fine novel.

Development Agents And Nomadic Agency : Four Perspectives in the Development “Market”

Discourse between development agents and nomads implies that development for nomadic communities is a contradiction in terms. Two systems, the nomadic and the development system, interact and exist in conflict. Discourses of sedentarization and associative life threaten pastoral adaptive strategies. Within these discourses, a market‐oriented subtext underscores investors' power, brokers' competition, and clients' opportunism. Semistructured and informal interviews focused on relations between Woδaaöe communities, local pastoral organizations, government technical services, and international agencies. This paper examines communication between these parties through approaches of agency, political ecology, and disequilibrium theory. How will the social change instigated by development affect cultural mechanisms that facilitate resource access and allocation? Will development become too costly for pastoral households, local ecology, and even the national economy?.

Participatory approaches for sustainable agriculture: A contradiction in terms?

This paper examines the adoption and application of a participatory approach to the transfer of scientific research to farmers with the objective of supporting government policies for sustainable agriculture. Detailed interviews with scientists and farmers in two case studies in New Zealand are used to identify the potential and constraints of such an approach. One case study involves Māori growers wishing to develop organic vegetable production; the other involves commercial wheat farmers who want to improve their profitability and face major problems of groundwater nutrification. The paper concludes that while both case studies are characterized as successful by those involved, there is an inherent creative tension between the adoption of a participatory approach and its use to advance public policy goals.

The Challenges of Modernizing Tax Administration

Customer friendliness in tax systems typically characterized by control and enforcement appears to be a contradiction in terms. But many tax agencies, like other types of public organizations, have become more customer-oriented in the last few decades. This article, comparing the administration of tax systems in Norway and the USA, describes and analyzes the driving forces behind the consumer orientation movement in tax administration in the two nations and the dilemmas and effects of trying to balance control and service. Using a broad transformative perspective, we analyze structural and cultural changes in tax administration that are related to the increase in customer orientation and also consider the symbolic aspects of catering more to taxpayers. Norway and the USA have experienced similar structural reforms, but the two countries deviate rather sharply in other respects, particularly in the much larger impact of consumer-oriented reforms in the USA.