Volume 8 Number 2 May 1976
Edited by: Ronald Dore
New York artist Ben Shahn, "is Actones, Episodes, Nodes, Nodal Chains, Scenes, Serials, Nomoclones, Permaclones, Paragroups, Nomoclonic Types, Permaclonic Types, Permaclonic Systems and Permaclonic Supersystems. Culture is also Phonemes, Morphemes, Words, Semantically Equivalent Utterances, Behaviour Plans and many other things".
The lecturer, under his academic robes, is a solemn, long-necked, myopic stork. Only a birdbrain, is the message, could be capable of such stupendous gobblydegook. It is sad that a concept should be so abused as the word "culture" is, both by those who so enthusiastically make a living out of it, and by those stern British sociologists and anthropologists who are about as ready to admit that culture has a legitimate part to play iii social explanation as a Luther that indulgences might be a means to salvation.
Though they have mellowed somewhat recently, there was a time when if you called a British social anthropologist, a "cultural anthropologist", he would react with contemptuous amazement, unable to believe that anyone could fail to recognise the difference between a scientific student of social structure such as himself and, say, a Margaret Mead or some other purveyor of entertaining speculations to the Book of the Month Club. Nor have their sociologist cousins been immune from the feeling that culture, attitudes, value systems are somewhat improper concerns.
A recent Ph.D. thesis on the British engineering profession devoted its first, and only eloquent, chapter to pouring scorn on the notion that the low status accorded to engineers in British society might in any way be explained by the cultural ethos of Oxbridge in particular or of the British upper middle class in general.
Volume 8 Number 3 July 1976
Edited by: Robin Luckham
Why imperialism? This issue of the IDS Bulletin is largely about the impact of the central capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America upon the Third World.
Sometimes this is talked of in terms of the 'dependence' of the latter upon the former. 'Dependence', however, connotes a certain passivity or want of will. Whereas imperialism conveys more clearly that this dependence has been imposed; and further that present dependence is historically linked to past domination.
And new tactics? A deliberate ambiguity: both new tactics and forms of domination, and new tactics, new room for manoeuvre against it.
Volume 8 Number 4 October 1976
Edited by: James A. Craig
This guest edition of the IDS Bulletin has been contributed by members of the Department of Administrative Studies, University of Manchester (DAS), which holds courses, of varying length, for public officials from developing countries.
Many of those who attend these courses are what used to be termed 'generalist' administrators, and a number of articles in the first part of this issue refer to problems of course construction, content and teaching methods, to be applied to a group whose only common feature would appear to be the state as paymaster. The 'business' or 'industry' of running such courses is the subject of worldwide debate: what does training actually mean; in what sense is it different from education; does training improve administrative capacity, etc. These questions are familiar to many readers of the Bulletin, and there is little doubt that the answers are as various as the people involved.
Volume 9 Number 2 May 1978
Edited by: Robin Luckham and Richard Jolly
For the past four years the major industrial OECD countries have been in the throes of a crisis brought to a head by the oil price rises of 1973-74, but arising from longer-run difficulties which had already begun to appear by the late 1960s. The crisis is by no means over. The situation of the economically stronger countries such as the USA, Japan and West Germany seems to be on the upturn but the recovery of others including Britain is still very much in doubt. With increasing oil output, Britain's balance of payments is rapidly improving but this is far from a sufficient condition for dealing with unemployment, stagnation in key sectors, regional imbalance, low productivity and decline or collapse in the social services. And in any case the issues for Britain are not simply economic, but involve also social and political problems which recession has sharpened: the difficulties of coming to terms with Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism; racial conflict; political violence; persistent poverty; the erosion of the welfare state; and corruption and decay in our police and local government bureaucracies.
It is with some trepidation that we undertake in this issue of the Bulletin to analyse some of these dangers and to call attention to some of the opportunities which lie beyond them.
