Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION: Canberra in the balance
- PART ONE Canberra: a state apparatus changes its mind
- PART TWO State and society: reflections, refractions, reductions
- CHAPTER 5 ‘Rationalisation’ and modernity: what has happened to the state's deliberative capacity?
- CHAPTER 6 Integrity under stress: the Lucky Country enters the world economy
- Appendixes
- Notes and References
- Index
CHAPTER 5 - ‘Rationalisation’ and modernity: what has happened to the state's deliberative capacity?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION: Canberra in the balance
- PART ONE Canberra: a state apparatus changes its mind
- PART TWO State and society: reflections, refractions, reductions
- CHAPTER 5 ‘Rationalisation’ and modernity: what has happened to the state's deliberative capacity?
- CHAPTER 6 Integrity under stress: the Lucky Country enters the world economy
- Appendixes
- Notes and References
- Index
Summary
From the mere fact that system integration and social integration become largely decoupled, we cannot yet infer linear dependencies in one or the other direction. Both are conceivable… In one case they would function as the institutional framework that subordinated system maintenance to the normative restrictions of the lifeworld, in the other case as the basis that subordinated the lifeworld to the systemic constraints of material reproduction.
The larger purpose of this study was always to look at our higher public servants to understand more clearly their part in the relation between state and society. In this respect the body of information presented in the preceding chapters resembles a collection of still photographs of social phenomena that are moving and so ‘in process’. They ask for some kind of ‘reconstruction’ of a process that is manifest in the elemental fact that the age, and thus also the historical experience and professional formation, of our respondents are so closely related to their location and their ‘life chances’ in the Canberra state apparatus.
To this end, and with an intention that is more sociological than historical, we look back in the first section of this chapter to an earlier period of ‘reform’ that began with the Whitlam government and ended with the Report of the Royal Commission into the Australian Public Service (RCAGA) in 1976. We look at the operating culture of higher public administration in the Whitlam period only to grasp some points of orientation and some coordinates that can help to establish the trend line of the changes that pass through our case material of the late 1980s and which point towards the destiny of the nation in the decades ahead.
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- Economic Rationalism in CanberraA Nation-Building State Changes its Mind, pp. 159 - 207Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989