ORGANIZATIONAL VARIABLES AND POLICY IMPACT: EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY

This paper explores how administrative organization practices mediate the impact of equal employment opportunity policy. Extra organizational variables are discussed as factors influencing the significance of organizational action. Organizational action in EEO may be rooted in a theory of change which views people as the critical variables or in a theory of change which views organizational structures or processes as critical. Intervention strategies flowing from each assumption are catalogued and special issues raised in exploring the impact of alternative strategies are discussed.     

REOCCUPYING SECULARIZATION: SCHMITT AND KOSELLECK ON BLUMENBERG'S CHALLENGE

This article analyzes the compound of the categories of secularization and reoccupation in its variations from Hans Blumenberg's philosophy to Carl Schmitt's political theory and, ultimately, to Reinhart Koselleck's conceptual history. By revisiting the debate between Blumenberg and Schmitt on secularization and political theology with regard to the political‐theoretical aspects of secularization and the methodological aspects of reoccupation, I will provide conceptual tools that illuminate the partly tension‐ridden elements at play in Koselleck's theorizing of modernity, history, and concepts. For Schmitt, secularization is inherently related to the question of political conflict, and, correspondingly, he attempts to discredit Blumenberg's criticism of secularization as an indirectly aggressive, and thereby hypocritical, attempt to escape the political. To this end, I argue, Schmitt appropriates Blumenberg's concept of “reoccupation” and uses it alternately in the three distinct senses of “absorption,”“reappropriation,” and “revaluation.” Schmitt's famous thesis of political concepts as secularized theological concepts contains an unmistakable methodological element and a research program. The analysis therefore shows the relevance of the Blumenberg/Schmitt debate for the mostly tacit dialogue between Blumenberg and Koselleck. I scrutinize Koselleck's understanding of secularization from his early Schmittian and Löwithian theory of modernity to his later essays on temporalization of history and concepts. Despite Blumenberg's criticism, Koselleck holds onto the category of secularization throughout, but gradually relativizes it into a research hypothesis among others. Simultaneously, Koselleck formalizes, alongside other elements, the Schmittian account of reoccupation into his method of conceptual analysis and uses the term in the same three senses—thus making “reoccupation” conceptually compatible with “secularization,” despite the former notion's initial critical function in Blumenberg's theory. The examination highlights a Schmittian residue that accounts for Koselleck's reserved attitude toward Blumenberg's metaphorology, regardless of a significant methodological overlap.     

COTTAGE SETTLEMENTS AND GARDEN COOPERATIVES IN THE MOSCOW AREA

Spaee-time shifts are analyzed for a particular type of suburban recreational, development—the cottage, settlements and garden cooperatives around Moscow. Measurement of the appearance, stabilization and decline of this recreational function along six major rail lines radiating from Moscow shows a centrifugal shift fostefed by the development of high-speed transportation and the conversion of older recreational areas close to the city to residential and industrial uses. A characteristic feature of the expansion of the recreational zone Over time has been a leaping movement in which the centers of recreational development, after having taken shape for one or two decades, will suddenly leap outward to a more distant zone. Furthermore, suburban cities are beginning to generate their own demand for recreational space and are becoming nuclei of their own recreational zones.     

BEYOND THE RATIONALITY PROJECT: POLICY ANALYSIS AND THE POSTPOSITIVE CHALLENGE

Peter deLeon. 1988. Advice and Consent: The Development of the Policy Sciences
Deborah A. Stone. 1988. Policy Paradox and Political Reason
John S. Dryzek and Davis B. Bobrow. 1987. Policy Analysis by Design     

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY AND THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION: AN ANALYSIS OF REORGANIZATION OPTIONS

Responding to his 1976 campaign pledge, President Carter has reorganized the federal government's enforcement of equal employment opportunity(EEO) laws. He has done so by shifting some EEO responsibilities from the Civil Service Commission and the Department of Labor to create a “Super-EEOC”. This article examines why President Carter chose the EEO reorganization that he did from the standpoint of advantages and disadvantages. Also presented are alternative reform options that the President could have selected that would have involved increasing EEO coordination or reorganization entailing new legislation that would have gone far beyond the creation of a “Super-EEOC.”     

AGRICULTURAL COOPERATION AND AGRIBUSINESS IN SOVIET TRANSCAUCASIA

The author, an authority on the agriculture of Transcaucasia, traces the evolution of the new Soviet system of interfarm integration at the rayon (minor civil division) level and the development of a new agribusiness administration combining all farm-related and food-related activities. Since the initial experimentation with rayon-level integration (known by the Russian acronym RAPO) in the Georgian SSR in the early 1970s (notably in Abasha Rayon), the RAPO system of administration has been introduced throughout the Soviet Union. As of Jan. 1, 1984, there were 3,109 RAPO administrations in the USSR, comprising 95,975 separate enterprises with a total employment of 33.6 million people. The enterprises included 50,435 farms (mainly the nation's 26,000 collective farms and 23,000 state farms), 7,849 agricultural processing plants, 19,587 agricultural service enterprises and 7,361 rural construction agencies. The RAPO system of administration constitutes the lowest level of a new agribusiness hierarchy of management, represented at the republic and national levels of government by the consolidated Agroprom (Agribusiness) agencies.