Functionalist Models Research Articles

Defining the boundaries of legitimate state practice: norms, transnational actors and the OECD's project on harmful tax competition 1

International cooperation could help governments regulate mobile transnational corporations (TNCs), but cooperation is itself embedded in transnational political processes in which TNCs and other private actors exercise influence. This study of the OECD's project on“Harmful Tax Competition”argues that international cooperation has done little to enhance governments' capacities to tax TNCs, and that normative deliberations in which private actors played central roles were crucial to this outcome. State-centric, functionalist models of international cooperation therefore need to be supplemented with insights from social constructivism and with greater attention to non-state actors. In the process of defining a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate forms of tax competition, liberal economic norms encouraged a narrow focus on tax preferences rather than corporate tax rates, and materially weak tax havens were able to use normative arguments to persuade the OECD to moderate its demands, in part because they found a sympathetic audience among TNCs and the transnational tax service industry. These transnational actors also persuaded the OECD to acknowledge the legitimacy of international tax planning and legal tax avoidance. The scope of the HTC project further narrowed after 2001 because of Bush administration's anti-tax ideology, and now focuses only on improving the exchange of information among tax authorities. This resolution of the issue is unstable because of normative inconsistencies and continuing threats to corporate tax revenues.

Critical Perspectives on Educational Evaluation

Abstract: This article examines what a critically informed orientation to evaluation in formal and non-formal education settings entails. A substantial critique of the technical rationality pervading conventional approaches to evaluation in education is illuminated by comparing functionalist models (exemplified in competencybased education and behaviourist variations on that theme) with participatory approaches, and through a corollary account of the way system imperatives intrude on lifeworld values. However, the author argues that a commitment to critical evaluation in education calls for systematic engagement with conventional, mainstream initiatives as well as with alternative approaches. Some guiding principles, consistent with the emancipatory aims of a critical orientation, are identified in making the case for the feasibility and necessity of critical evaluation in education. Questions are raised about the efficacy of the continuing debate on quantitative versus qualitative methods and the effects on critical evaluation of postmodern discourse.

Critical Reflections on Mentoring in Work Settings

Mentoring is presently at the forefront of strategies to improve workplace learning. However as is often the case, functionalist models of mentoring dominate, and as a result, research on mentoring is rather narrowly conceived. This article was designed to redress this imbalance by critically reflecting on mentoring from contrasting theoretical perspectives. Functionalist conceptions of mentoring construct it as a rational and hierarchical process, often involving an older mentoranda younger learner In contrast, critical or Radical Humanist conceptions highlight contests for meaning but, more important, want to expose unequal and often exploitative power relations. Many mentoring relationships undoubtedly involve high levels of nurturance, but as this article demonstrates, taken-for-granted practices need to be brought to the surface for mentoring to be regarded as a useful learning tool in today's work settings.

Government purchasing: an evolving profession?

As government organizations step hopefully into a new century, among the challenges they face will be the demands of the “New Purchasing” and persistent pressure to redefine the role of the purchasing practitioner in government. Reengineering of purchasing activities was a constant feature of the 1990s in many government jurisdictions. Those who manage the function usually influence a large share of organizational expenditure and must also cope with the demands of e-commerce, devolution of responsibility, partnering and strategic alliances, and the implications of globalization within the context of an accountable public sector. Applying some theoretical, functionalist models of a profession, this paper seeks to establish professional credentials for purchasing practitioners.

Race, crime and region: the socio-spatial dynamics of Aboriginal offending 1

Patterns of indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice systems of settler societies such as Australia and Canada exhibit a strong spatial component, with rural and remote regions showing higher levels both of serious crime and of punitive response. In Australia, these patterns have been the subject of recent cultural geographies of Aboriginal offending which rely on limited functionalist models of the effects of modernisation. An alternative model is proposed, which interprets these variations in the light of socio-spatial theories of postmodernisation. A probit analysis of rates of Aboriginal offending across Australian jurisdictions reveals a close relationship between levels of seriousness of crime and levels of cultural stability and socioeconomic stress.

Functionalist and Conflict Views of AICPA Code of Conduct: Public Interest vs. Self Interest

The sociological models of functionalism and conflict are introduced and utilized to analyze professionalism in the accounting profession as it is manifest in the American Institute of Certified Public Accountant's Code of Conduct. Rule 203 of the Code and provisions of the Code related to the public interest are examined using semiotic analysis to determine if they are most consistent with the functionalist or conflict models. While the analysis does not address intent of the Code, it is determined that the Code contains semantic defects which result in different interpretations of the Code to different readers. The defects found are most consistent with the conflict model of professionalism. This has implications for the public and for individuals within the profession, making the Code less useful to both groups. The defects are seen as a potential battleground for the self-interest vs the public interest orientation of the accounting profession.

British sovereignty and the development of EC environmental policy

Functionalist models of integration and the emergence of a global environmental movement do not explain the development of European Community environmental policy because they fail to focus on the role of individual member states in shaping the actual content of EC environmental policies. For its part, the British government agreed to environmental directives because it believed that they would not undermine its sovereignty ‐ the ability to pursue an environmental policy style built on dispersal and absorption of pollution ‐ and thereby avoid adjustment costs imposed by the Community. These same concerns also underpinned Britain's acceptance of the environmental provisions contained in the Single European Act and in the Maastricht Treaty. Instances where EC environmental directives have ratcheted up pre‐existing British standards and forced substantial investment reveal the limitations of intergovernmental bargaining models rather than the government's willingness to expand EC power or sacrifice its prefe...

The German Experience of Professionalization: Modern Learned Professions and Their Organizations from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era by Charles E. McClelland

146 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The German Experience ofProfessionalization: Modern Learned Professions and Their Organizations from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era. By Charles E. McClelland. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. x + 253; notes, index. $54.50. Charles E. McClelland’s The German Experience of Professionalization is a detailed study of the development of the major German profes­ sions, primarily law, medicine, teaching, engineering, and chemistry, from their origins in the early 19th century through the Nazi period. It is part of the growing literature on German professionals and complements and expands on such works as the anthology edited by Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad H. Jarausch, German Professions, 1800— 1950, and Jarausch’s The Unfree Professions: German Lawyers, Teachers, and Engineers, 1900—1950 (both Oxford, 1990). The book is based primarily on printed records such as journals of professional organi­ zations and government debates, and on secondary works, since much of the archival material either was destroyed during World War II or is not helpful in answering the questions posed by the author. McClelland argues that the chief models for dealing with profession­ alization, those derived from the Anglo-American experience, are not adequate to deal with the German situation. Neither functionalist models that see professions as autonomous entities gradually emancipat­ ing themselves from the state nor power-orientated models that see professions attempting to dominate markets through manipulation of the state sufficiendy explain the German experience. The author lists nine characteristics of an admittedly limited ideal type against which he constandy checks German professional development: advanced, special­ ized education; codes of conduct; altruism/public service; competency tests, examinations, and licensing; social prestige; economic rewards; career ladders; monopolization of market services; and autonomy. The author’s thesis is that German professions began to form slowly in the 19th century, due to political disunification and to government distrust of independent groups. During the 1860s and 1870s the so-called free professions, such as medicine and law, began to eman­ cipate themselves from government control (engineers had formed the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure [VDI] as early as 1856) and achieved a good deal of success in this process in succeeding years. By the turn of the century, however, professional groups found themselves in­ creasingly calling on the state to secure more rigorous educational and licensing requirements to protect themselves from overcrowding or, in the case of the doctors, to attempt to influence the growing health insurance structure. By the 20th century, some professions were involved in union-style agitation. These attempts were not always successful but do show that German professions carried on a dialectical relationship with the state not seen in the same degree in North America. Professionalization and bureaucratization existed side by side in Germany. McClelland also rejects a Sonderweg TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 147 approach to the German professions. While German professions may have capitulated to the Nazi coordination policies without great resistance, there is little evidence that professionals were enthusiasti­ cally going over in great numbers to the Nazis before 1933. The book’s primary interest to historians of technology may lie in the author’s comparison and contrast of engineers and chemists with other professionals. What he says about engineers—the VDI’s inabil­ ity to build as successful a professional organization as other groups, its neutrality stance, and its disinclination to become involved in union-like activities, opening the way for the more radical Bund der Technischindustriellen Beamter—has been said already in more de­ tail by such authors as Kies Gispen in his New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 1815—1914 (Cambridge, 1989) and by German scholars such as Wolfgang Koenig. Nonetheless, this work is an important, if somewhat tediously written, contribution to the study of professionalization in the German context. It shows that we need more studies of how professionals like engineers relate to state power and to the important social issues of our time, given the significant role professionals play in modern society. Donald Thomas Dr. Thomas is professor of history at the Virginia Military Institute and author of Diesel: Technology and Society in Industrial Germany (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1987). The Skulking Way of War: Technology and...

Continuity and endurance of patrilineage in towns

shows centralization of authority in the states and a retention of traditional micro-structure. In contrast to the modernizing state's organs, cohesive groups of agnates remain, by and large, the cornerstone for structuring community life and for regulating primary relationships. The pastoralists' 'tribe' of the sedentaries' 'lineage' (I regard the two as similar) is an entity which is hardly noticeable to the foreign eye because tribesmen are rarely seen aggregated or operating together. We more often hear of tribes than see them on the move; Arabic nomenclatures differentiate people in line with their ascription, as for example, individuals belonging to the Azazma and the Tarabin tribes are socially addressed as 'Azzami' or 'Turbani'. Early functionalist models which were founded on native ideologies concerning the tribal distinction of peoples were later criticized as being unscientific.2 According to the latter approach, folk beliefs about tribes should be considered a 'superstructure', implying the existence of a 'better knowledge' of social reality that has to be camouflaged for some practical purposes. Having followed sedentarizing Bedouin communities along the desertto-town continuum, a process which accentuates tribal distinctions,3 I here return to the native 'folk theory' of patrilineality and other related practices of agnation. To begin with, however, I shall discuss first the ideas of the ecological school, which find it so difficult to acquiesce in indigenous models of lineage ideology. The durability of patrilineages which is different from what happened in the course of urbanization in the West strikes the Western mind as either

Functionalist Models for Korean Unification

Functionalist Models for Korean Unification

Sociobiological (Genetic) versus Economic (Functionalist) Models of Social Evolution

With the support of a grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, research is currently underway on a major effort to rethink the basic theoretical issue that inspired the emergence of sociobiology. That issue, in a nutshell, concerns the explanation for the origins and evolution of social life (human societies being only one example among many others).