Introduction to The Sociology of “Developing Societies” Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin MacMillan, London, 1982, 474 pp.
| Author | James Midgley |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230050211 |
| Date | 01 April 1985 |
| Published date | 01 April 1985 |
Book
Reviews
179
control of public expenditure, co-ordination
of
decision-making, the ethics of the
administrator, Open Government, relations between Ministers and civil servants, and Select
Committees.
Much of what is said is interesting because of who is saying it, rather than because of its
intrinsic significance. For example when Wass says that no minister has won political
distinction in the
U.K.
by his performance in Cabinet or by his contribution to collective
decision-taking,
it
bears
a
good deal of thinking about. In the light of the increasing number
of
leaks by officials, it is interesting
to
read Wass’s view that ‘notwithstanding the loyalty
of
a
civil servant to the government, his conscience should clearly require him to oppose actions
which are either unlawful, unconstitutional. or which involve some great affront to Human
values’. Would deliberate concealment of information from Parliament by
a
Minister come
under the heading
of
‘unconstitutional’? The critical reader will judge several of the topics to
be significant merely because they have been included, even before he has read what Wass has
to say about them. He calls, for example, for the reinstatement of PAR, although many
observers had written it
off
long before it was formally abolished. (Yet curiously, he has
forgotten that the initials stand for Programme-not Policy-Analysis and Review). His cry
of ‘Come back, CPRS, all (or almost
all)
is forgiven’ is noteworthy for similar reasons.
The author tells
us
that he was initially tempted to rewrite the lectures in the course of
turning them into
a
book, but decided in the end
to
publish them
as
they stood. This is
a
pity.
The effort of revision would surely have clarified some parts of his argument. For example,
on p.
5
he embarks on a discussion of efficiency. ‘For me’, he writes, ‘efficiency means that
actions and decisions are taken in
a
rational and systematic way; that internal conflicts and
inconsistencies are brought to the surface and resolved; and that objectives are defined and
optimal means employed to secure them’. Three pages further on he says, ‘of course, if
a
given standard of service can be supplied by new techniques at lower cost, efficiency
is
improved’. This is quite
a
different approach to the concept and one which is more in line
with that taken by writers on administration generally. (It is true that ‘optimal means’ may be
taken to imply ‘minimum costs’; but is it reasonable to expect readers to interpret the former
expression in that sense?) On p.
18
on yet another tack, he seems to confuse the concept of
efficiency with that of effectiveness-a very different kettle of fish.
On the whole, however, this short, lucidly written book can be recommended with
confidence to anyone seriously interested in public administration.
HENRY
PARRIS
Acton
Society
Trust
INTRODUCTION TO THE SOCIOLOGY
OF
‘DEVELOPING SOCIETIES’
Edited
by
Hamza
Alavi
and
Teodor
Shanin
MacMillan, London,
1982,474
pp.
Before the Second World War when many ‘developing societies’ were under European
colonial domination, research into their social characteristics was conducted on a limited
basis by anthropologists, archaeologists and historians. But during the post-war years, when
most secured political independence, economists, sociologists, political scientists and others
began to take
a
wider interest in the phenomena of underdevelopment. By contributing to and
articulating the largely implicit interdisciplinary paradigm which ordered early research in the
field, sociologists made a distinctive contribution to this enquiry. They conceptualized and
systematized prevailing ideas to provide
a
set of analytical and normative concepts which
became known as modernization theory. However, other sociologists disagreed vociferously
with the tenets of the modernization approach drawing attention to its theoretical and
practical inadequacies and exposing its blatently ethnocentric features. In time, their
criticisms helped to formulate an alternative paradigm which drew
on
Marxian ideas for
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