Down from Bureaucracy:
The Ambiguity of Privatization and Empowerment
Joel F. Handler

Winner of the 1997 Gladys M. Kammerer Award of the American Political Science Association

Cloth | 1996 | $72.00 / £49.95
288 pp. | 6 x 9

e-Book | 2001 | $72.00 | ISBN: 978-1-4008-2198-3

Shopping Cart | Reviews | Table of Contents

Throughout the world, politicians are dismantling state enterprises and heaping praise on private markets, while in the United States a new rhetoric of "citizen empowerment" links a widespread distrust of government to decentralization and privatization. Here Joel Handler asks whether this restructuring of authority really allows ordinary citizens to take more control of the things that matter in their roles as parents and children, teachers and students, tenants and owners, producers and consumers. Looking at citizens as stakeholders in the modern social welfare state created by the New Deal, he traces the surprising ideological shifts of empowerment from its beginning as a cornerstone of the war on poverty in the 1960s to its central place in conservative market-based voucher schemes for school reform in the 1990s.

Handler shows that in the past the gains from decentralization have proved to be more symbol than substance: some disadvantaged members of society will find new opportunities in the changes of the 1990s, but others will simply experience powerlessness under another name. He carefully distinguishes "empowerment by invitation" (in special education, worker safety, home health care, public housing tenancy, and neighborhood organizations) from the "empowerment by conflict" exemplified by the radical decentralization of the Chicago public schools. What emerges is a map of the major pitfalls and possible successes in the current journey away from a discredited regulatory state.

Review:

"The scope of the book is impressive. It encompasses all levels of government and a wide range of policy examples drawn from education, health care, occupational safety, housing, land use, and other areas . . . Handler's emphasis on empowerment is refreshing."--American Political Science Review

Endorsement:

"A broad-based, scholarly warning to watch the details of decentralization very carefully because it is a complex phenomenon that can either fulfill or badly disappoint expectations for empowerment and efficiency. The great strength of the book is probing analysis and painstaking documentation of the recurring or structural problems of decentralization across a range of public policy areas."--William H. Clune, University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	Introduction	3
Ch. 2	The Context of Decentralization	19
Ch. 3	The Uses of Decentralization	41
Ch. 4	Privatization	78
Ch. 5	Power and Empowerment	115
Ch. 6	Empowerment by Invitation	133
Ch. 7	Empowerment through Conflict: School Reform	169
Ch. 8	Conclusions	216
	References	243
	Index	261

Subject Areas:

• Economics
• Political Science and International Relations
• Sociology
• Education

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For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Cloth: $72.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-04461-3

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Cloth: £49.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-04461-3

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File created: 11/4/2009

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