James R. Simmons

The Irony of Privatization

What does privatization really mean? It depends on who is speaking and the specific language game in use. This article borrows an interpretive device, originally developed by Roland Barthes and further articulated by Jean Baudrillard, which lays waste to the assertion that a word has a single denotative meaning. Such an interpretation (that words represent, or correspond to, reality) is but the first step of a progressively unreal simulacrum that moves to skepticism, through masking (where a word connotes the radical absence of the object it points toward) to hyperreality. Hyperreality is the domain of self-referential imagery, where words and symbols refer only to themselves but provide titillation and visceral gratification in the process. The authors conclude that the very term privatization lacks foundational stability.

Structural Conflict in Contemporary Cities

A surprising number of modern American cities are experiencing efforts to drastically alter or even abandon their forms of local government. We discuss the major perspectives on municipal structural choice and then use both survey and census data in an attempt to explain this contemporary urban conflict over governance structure. Our findings demonstrate that no single institutional, political, social, or contextual theory satisfactorily explains this evolving struggle over governing arrangements in U.S. cities. Rather, a complex array of factors such as race, ethnicity, education, economic change, governmental composition, and specific municipal design features seem to be driving these movements for institutional change.

The University and Student Political Engagement.

Prior research has identified a substantial positive relationship between college attendance and civic engagement. This article examines student experiences with university academics and ancillary programs to determine which of these, if any, motivate increased student engagement. Various student characteristics were evaluated to determine their impact on student engagement. Data was obtained from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Current Population Survey (CPS). Results indicated that engagement is related positively to some student college experiences, unrelated to some experiences, and even negatively related to other experiences. Few individual characteristics relate to engagement, ACT scores and gender both impact engagement, and, surprisingly, engagement was higher among men than women.

If It Weren't For Those ?!@! Nader Voters We Wouldn't Be In This Mess: The Social Determinants of the Nader Vote and the Constraints on Political Choice

Much has been written about the effect of Ralph Naders recent experience in Presidential politics—in particular about the consequential election of 2000. The general view is that Naders direct effect on that contest was to cost Gore the election and the indirect effect was to undermine popular and professional support for third-party challenges from the left. In this paper, we revisit this debate by contrasting Nader voters with both Nader-supporting Gore voters and non-voters using data from the 2000 National Election Studies. In line with some predictions, we find that the Nader voters had a tendency to come from privileged positions in terms of income and occupation and to embrace consistently progressive policy positions. More surprising is the fact that Latino voters were disproportionately attracted to Nader and that Nader voters were mobilized to vote in numbers far higher than has been previously reported. This mobilization effect is also evident in Nader-supporting Gore voters under the age of 34. A final analysis suggests that little separates those Nader voters who were divided in their support for Gore.

Altruistic Corruption: The Downsian Bureaucrats Revisited

AbstractClassical Weberian public administration theorists envisioned large-scale government organizations dutifully managed by neutral and nonpartisan professionals as the best route to achieve societal goals. By contrast, contemporary public choice theory views these same institutions and officials as a source of self-serving corruption and inefficiency. These rational actor accounts, in turn, have drawn criticism for their simplistic assumptions about individual motivation and their faulty predictions. In response, choice theorists have increasingly been attracted to a tactic first popularized by Anthony Downs of attributing both altruistic and self-interested motives to governmental actors whenever their economic models fail to accurately predict or even adequately describe public sector behavior. I will argue here that even this more sophisticated and complex Downsian approach falls prey to the basic failings inherent in conventional public choice theory. Consequently, we will need to look elsewhere ...

Global urban politics: Informalization of the state, by Julie-Anne Boudreau: New York, John Wiley & Sons, 2017

arrangement of trading platform. In this chapter, McNeill revitalizes the concept of the central business district (now usually dismissed) as the crucial spatial platform for understanding corporate activities worldwide. Chapter 6 captures global cities’ formation together with the practices of knowledge generation by gurus, experts, and management consultancies. In this respect, global cities become experimental sites of innovation and where “knowledge is recognized, turned over and absorbed” (p. 147). The book’s strengths include the connection of theory with qualitative empirical observations and the balance of different case studies. In fact, McNeill is able to document with his own observations the validity of different urban theories. This helps us understand that there are certain locations of the globe where power and knowledge have concentrated. In addition, the analysis is well balanced between case studies in the Global North and cases in the Global South. The book portrays how material objects, technologies, and social processes shape the power relationships between cities in the North and cities in the South. This helps us to understand the different role of cities within countries. He observes that “[c]ities are compositional: they compose national territories at the same time as they enact what we recognize as global networks” (p. 150). Hence, he explains the paradoxes of the global economy and applies theories of uneven development across cities and regions. On the other hand, McNeill neglects the dimension of administrative bureaucracies and of the power embedded in nation-state institutions. The global cities literature has emerged in relation to the declining role of nation-states in a globalized capitalistic political economy; hence, a complement to the critical political economy approach of the book would be an interpretation of the evolving relations between bureaucracies and cities. In addition, regional science, agglomeration, and location theories are ignored in the book despite being pivotal in the global cities literature. Notwithstanding, the book is an important contribution to the understanding of political economies in the 21st century and critical urban studies. The book provides a clear image of what constitutes the global and the city in the 21st-century global economy. This precision and lucidity make the book accessible to a broad audience of scholars and nonacademics who are interested in better understanding the key processes of globalization and urbanization. The length of the book (182 pages); the concise, informed, and up-to-date writing style; as well as the relatively accessible price make the volume an attractive option for upper undergraduate–level seminars in critical urban studies, economic geography, city planning, and human geography. Global Cities and Urban Theory might well become a standard reading in courses dealing with the political economy of urban development.

Divided Wisconsin: Partisan Spatial Electoral Realignment

When the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates head into the general election this fall, they will be courting votes from a statewide electorate that has dramatically shifted over time,...

Book Reviews : High Noon on the Electronic Frontier. Peter Ludlow, editor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. 538 pp.,

boundaries, calls into question the territorial nature of the state. It has implications for multinational corporations and all those organizations that have international operations. It has implications for individuals who might need to protect themselves from the harm that could come from the new technology’s incursion into, or intrusion on, their daily lives. Existing institutions might not be adapted to this novel situation. Likewise, there is no case law in international law that covers many of the issues in cyberspace (e.g., censorship and international trade via the Web). The question of what laws apply to the Internet, which spans wide areas and defies boundaries, is indeed a ripe and fertile field of law. This anthology is written for sociologists, politicians, &dquo;techies,&dquo; and internationalists. It is for those who accept technology and might even be technophiles or technoenthusiasts, but