This article discusses: the doctrinal content of the group of ideas known as ‘new public management’(NPM); the intellectual provenance of those ideas; explanations for their apparent persuasiveness in the 1980 s; and criticisms which have been made of the new doctrines. Particular attention is paid to the claim that NPM offers an all-purpose key to better provision of public services. This article argues that NFM has been most commonly criticized in terms of a claimed contradiction between ‘equity’ and ‘efficiency’ values, but that any critique which is to survive NPM's claim to ‘infinite reprogrammability’ must be couched in terms of possible conflicts between administrative values. The conclusion is that the ESRC'S Management in Government’ research initiative has been more valuable in helping to identify rather than to definitively answer, the key conceptual questions raised by NPM.

A public management for all seasons

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

1 All about Oil 2 How America's Power Grew 3 Capital Bondage 4 Accumulation by Dispossession 5 Consent to Coercion AFTERWORD Further Reading Bibliography Notes Index

The New Imperialism

Twenty years ago, in the pages of the, Journal of Common Market Studies, Hedley Bull launched a searing critique of the European Community's "civilian power" in international affairs. Since that time the increasing role of the European Union (EU) in areas of security and defence policy has led to a seductiveness in adopting the notion of "military power Europe". In contrast, I will attempt to argue that by thinking beyond traditional conceptions of the EU's international role and examining the case study of its international pursuit of the abolition of the death penalty, we may best conceive of the EU as a "normative power Europe".

Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.

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The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders

In April 1970, Susan Strange published an article in the Chatham House review which challenged the mutual exclusivity of international economics and international politics.(f.1) The consequence was a rebirth of the concept of political economy in international studies. She has continued consistently her liberation struggle from academic self-enclosure, disciplinary defensiveness, and turf wars. She insisted that the new international political economy be a broad church open to historians, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and the whole range of humanistic studies, as well as economists and political scientists. In this, she echoed Fernand Braudel's appeal in 1958 for the integration of the human sciences in his famous essay on the longue duree. Her work never stood still. She moves forward in responding to her critics and, above all, by her acute perceptions of change in reality. She is not alone in perceiving that the field of international relations study (IR) is beset by an identity crisis.(f.2) The problem now is not just the need for a more ecumenical use of methods and approaches but also for a new ontology -- an updated view of the basic entities and relationships that constitute reality. This is what The Retreat of the State is all about. Susan Strange is a realist in the literal sense that she asks: Where does the power lie? What is the nature of the power? Who benefits? Who suffers? Conventional IR has said a priori that power lies with states. Susan Strange challenges the exclusivity of that assumption. Her enquiry into power and its workings contributes to a 'new realism' quite different from the 'neorealism' of established IR. It has, she writes, led her to a 'final parting of the ways from the discipline of international relations' (p xv). As a realist, Strange cuts through such currently fashionable euphemisms as 'regimes,'(f.3) 'interdependence,' 'globalization,' and 'global governance,' to demonstrate that these terms can act as ideological screens to obscure relations of dominance and subordination. Although she has been associated with the proposition that power is shifting from political authorities to markets,(f.4) in this book the classical notion of 'market' is also implicitly questioned. A market is no longer that abstractly defined infinity of buyers and sellers whose interactions are guided to a beneficent outcome by a providential unseen hand. There are many different markets, and they all need to be analysed as power systems. She illustrates with a few cases: telecoms, insurance, the big accountancy firms, and cartels. In all of these cases, the power systems work to strengthen big corporate translational business. On cartels, she asks why the subject of private protectionism seems to be taboo among liberal economists and concludes that 'while the rhetoric of free enterprise and open competition is necessary to a full integration of a world economy operating on a market principle, the rhetoric is often, in reality, empty of meaning' (p 60). The ontology of Strange's new realism includes a decline in the authority of states, an increase in the authority of big translational firms, a parcelling of authority downwards from states to smaller territorial entities, along with a general erosion of power based on territory and a rise in non-territorial power in economy, technology, and communications. Others have noted these tendencies; they give substance to Hedley Bull's vision of a new medievalism of overlapping authorities and loyalties.(f.5) While accepting this vision as foreshadowing present reality, Strange takes the next step and asks who governs in such circumstances. This must be the first question in reflecting upon the condition of the world and its future; and, of course, there is no clear answer to it. A conspiracy theory will not do. There is no effective conclave of big corporations with United States government power, though these forces do seem to be the predominate actors. A key word in this book is 'symbiosis. …

The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy

An Introduction to International Political Economy Susan Strange, formerly University of Warwick.Professor Strange was well known for her unorthodox and stimulating views on the international political economy. Here she provides the student and scholar with a new model synthesising politics and economics by means of a four-faceted structural analysis of the effects of any kind of political authority (including states) on markets, and, conversely, of market forces on states. This refreshingly new framework of analysis is an ideal introductory text.

States and markets

Adopting new and much more comprehensive concepts of both power and politics, The Retreat of the State develops a theoretical framework to show who really governs the world economy. It goes on to explore some of the non-state authorities, from mafias to the Big Six accounting firms and international bureaucrats, whose power over who gets what in the world encroaches on that of national governments. The book is a signpost, pointing to some promising new directions for the future development of research and teaching in international political economy. Its originality and scope make The Retreat of the State of great importance for scholars and students of international relations, business and management.

The Retreat of the state

In this theoretically original work, two distinguished authors explore the mutual interdependence of states and firms throughout the world. They show how global structural changes - in finance, technology, knowledge and politics - often impel governments to seek the help and cooperation of managers of multinational enterprises. Yet, as Professors Stopford and Strange demonstrate, this is constrained by each country's economic resources, its social structures and its political history. Based on grass-roots research into the experience of over 50 multinationals and more than 100 investment projects in three developing countries- Brazil, Malaysia and Kenya - the authors develop a matrix of agendas. They present the impact on projects of the multiple factors affecting the bargaining relationships between the government and the foreign firm at different times and in a variety of economic sectors. In conclusion they offer some guidelines for actions to both governments and firms and some points to future interdisciplinary research.

Susan Strange

Papers

The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy

The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy

States and markets

The Retreat of the state

Rival States, Rival Firms: Competition for World Market Shares