Search results

The idea of spontaneous orders dating back to Mandeville and elaborated at length by the Austrian School of Economics (Menger, Hayek) is no doubt a major contribution to the understanding of society (Hamowy, 1987). It offers great insights into how human beings solve coordination problems by unintentionally creating mechanisms for social interaction such as the market, money, language, science and law (Hamowy, 1987; Petsoulas, 2000). Such a successful concept must have its limits somewhere, as a concept which explains everything covers nothing. I wish to explore this question by relating the evolution of European integration after the Second World War to the Hayek theory of a spontaneous order. Perhaps Hayek contributed most to the elaboration of Adam Smith's vision of a self-correcting social order that needs little direction and control (Boettke, 1998). Hayek underlined time and again the importance of spontaneous processes with the entailed claim that government must adopt an attitude of humility towards conventions that are not the result of intelligent design, the justification of which in the particular instant may not be recognizable, and that may appear unintelligible and irrational (Hayek, 1960, 1982).

In almost all aspects of social life government intervention seems much more pervasive and intrusive today than ever before – at least in many of the Western countries. Governments seem year by year to consume still more resources and to regulate the details of the actions and interactions of their citizens still further.

Public administration as an aspect of governmental activity has existed as long as political systems have been functioning and trying to achieve program objectives set by the political decision-makers. Public administration as a field of systematic study is much more recent. Advisers to rulers and commentators on the workings of government have recorded their observations from time to time in sources as varied as Kautilya's Arthasastra in ancient India, the Bible, Aristotle's Politics, and Machiavelli's The Prince, but it was not until the eighteenth century that cameralism, concerned with the systematic management of governmental affairs, became a specialty of German scholars in Western Europe. In the United States, such a development did not take place until the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the publication in 1887 of Woodrow Wilson's famous essay, “The Study of Administration,” generally considered the starting point. Since that time, public administration has become a well-recognized area of specialized interest, either as a subfield of political science or as an academic discipline in its own right.

This chapter examines how structural factors related to gender, managerial level, and economic sector could impact the level of experienced person/role conflict in management based on a representative survey conducted among managers in Norway. Person/role conflict appears relevant for understanding emotions in organizations and is linked with emotional dissonance and emotional labor through theoretical and empirical considerations. Our findings reveal that the effect of gender remains significant when controlled for economic sector and managerial level. This indicates that experienced person/role conflict can be partially caused by perceived incongruity between internalized and gender role-related expectations as well as managerial role-related expectations.

All sorts of distinctions can be made concerning prestige goods: for instance, between the most durable like precious stones passed down from generation to generation and the ephemeral ones, or between those which seem to exert a universal fascination, like gold and others valued only in some places. The question of borrowings and possible syncretism is also most appealing for the comparatist and countless illustrations could be given here. In many cases, prestigious goods must be studied by taking both their symbolic and practical value into consideration. What I mean is that a ‘Veblenesque’ approach only paying attention to them as status symbols tends to underestimate their functional dimension. For example, limousines or jets must certainly be analyzed in terms of attributes of power and status enhancement. However, one cannot deny that they also have concrete functions of ‘comfortableness’ and rapidity for ubiquitous elites bound to do extensive traveling. Normally, in modern democracies, top political actors inherit or acquire all kinds of prestigious public assets, but these must be returned at the end of their mandate. Even presents officially given to them are supposed to be surrendered to a public museum. The famous affair of Emperor Bokassa's diamonds offered to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing no doubt discredited the French President and contributed to his defeat in the 1981 elections.