…. One of the tasks of transaction cost economics is to asssess purported bureaucratic failures in comparative institutional terms.
The basic argument is this: it is easy to show that a praticular hierarchical structure is beset with costs, but that is neither here nor there if all feasible forms of organization are best with the same or equivalent costs. Efforts to ascertain bureaucratic costs that survive comparative instiutional scrutiny are reported elsewhere (Willimson, 1975, chapter 7; 1985 chapter 6), but theser are very provisonal and preliminary. Although intertemporal transformations and complexity are recurring themes in the study of bureaucratic failure, much more concerted attention to these matters is needed.
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Thus the initial interest in ‘downsizing’ of firms has been accompanied by rhetorical flourishes such as the quest to be ‘lean and mean’ and to accomplish the process of ‘right-sizing’. Vonk’s empirical analysis (1992) of thirty-one large American corporations indicates that their reductiosn in workforce do not appear to be tailored to any calculations of the marginal costs of labor in production or to targeting particularly expensive parts of the labor process; instead, the cuts seem to be carried out in similar ways across large numbers of firms in quite different cirucmstances, suggesting a process of imitation or institutional isomorphism
(Dimaggio and Powell, 1983) in which firms adopt practices that become standard in their reference group so as not to appear backward or out-of-touch (see Meyer and Rowan, 1977).
Python API to Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
The oaipmh Python module enables high-level access to an OAI-PMH metadata repository. Arbitrary repositories can be accessed and harvested using an easy to use Python-based API. It has built-in support for the default Dublin Core metadata set (oai_dc). It can also be easily extended with support for other metadata sets using a simple declarative system based on industry-standard xpath expressions.
The oaipmh module can be integrated with any Python application. The only requirement is libxml2 and its Python bindings.
TODO: cite Bryson as example of its ubiquity and Dennett for refutation (or just google ….?).
TODO: write up original David article (1985 AER I think) and then reference the Liebowitz and Margolis article from JLE (1992?).
What is the myth? The myth quite simply is that the there was an American Dream that could be realised or was more likely to be realized than in other countries (especially the ‘old’ home countries of Northern Europe). Formally this could be rendered as:
The USA allowed for (significantly) greater social mobility than in other countries (particularly those in Western Europe from which many of the early immigrants came). This mobility might be only in any a specific area, for example referring only to the extreme case of progress from rags to riches, or it might be the more common situation of poor immigrant to self-respecting independent yeoman farmer.
Margaret Thatcher’s quote There is no such thing as society
has seen wide circulation. Often used to condemn Thatcher and the Conservative Government under her as uncaring and promoting atomistic individualism that left many behind and damaged the solidarity of British society. However it is worth considering the quote in full before a rush to judgement. It reads:
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I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.
About
Dr. Rufus Pollock is co-Founder and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge.
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