Book reviews

Australian politics

Francis G. Castles (ed.), Australia Compared. People, Policies and Politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991) pp.290. $22.95 ISBN 0 04 442339 X.

A. Kouzmin and N. Scott (eds), Dynamics in Australian Public Management: Selected Essays (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990) pp.454. $34.95 ISBN 0 7329 0187 1.

Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1880–1900 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1988) pp.320. $24.95 ISBN 0 86840 370 9.

Rosemary Whip and Colin A. Hughes, Political Crossroad: The 1989 Queensland Election (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991) pp.270. $29.95 ISBN 0 7022 2362 X.

Glenn Withers (ed.), Commonality and Difference: Australia and the United States (Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian/American Educational Foundation, 1991) pp.138. $19.95 ISBN 1 86373 074 5.

Comparative and international politics

Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping A Watchful Eye: The Politics of Congressional Oversight (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1990) pp.288. $US12.95 ISBN 0 81570 059 8.

Zehra F. Arat, Democracy & Human Rights in Developing Countries (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991) pp.219 $n.p. ISBN 1 55587 170 4.

Ian Bellany, A Basis for Arms Control (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1991) pp.155. $n.p. ISBN 1 85521 051 7.

Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 1991) pp.421. $n.p. ISBN 0 86091 318 X.

Ivo Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response: NATO Strategy and Theater Nuclear Forces Since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) pp.411. $US57.00 ISBN 0 231 17520 0.

John Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.128. $27.95 ISBN 0 631 16428 6.

Bogdan Denitch, The End Of The Cold War: European Unity, Socialism, and the Shift in Global Power (London: Verso, 1990) pp.123. $24.95 ISBN 0 86091 532 8.

David Donnison, A Radical Agenda: After the New Right and the Old Left (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991) pp.215. £9.95. ISBN 1 85489 030 1.

Peter Drysdale (ed.), The Soviets and the Pacific Challenge (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991) pp.160. $17.95 ISBN 1 86373 010 9.

Leon Hurwitz and Christian Lequesne (eds), The State of the European Community (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.475. $49.95. ISBN 1 55587 249 2.

Tetsuya Kataoka, The Price of a Constitution: The Origin of Japan's Postwar Politics, (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1991) pp.237. $n.p. ISBN 0 8448 1714 7.

Daphne A Kenyon and John Kincaid (eds) Competition among States and Local Governments (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press, with the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1991) pp.285. $n.p. ISBN 0 87766 517 6.

Jan‐Erik Lane and Svante O. Ersson, Politics and Society in Western Europe, 2^nd edn, (London: Sage, 1991) pp.421. £10.95. ISBN 0 8039 8407 3.

Stephanie Lawson, The Failure of Democratic Politics in Fiji (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp.307. $90.00 ISBN 0 19 827322 3.

E.M. McLeay (ed.), The 1990 General Election: Perspectives on Political Change in New Zealand, Occasional Publication No.3 (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 1991) pp.183. $NZ29.95. ISBN 0 475 11202 4. ISSN 1170 7356.

Henry Phelps Brown, Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp.552. $n.p. ISBN 0 19828 390 3.

Philip R. Pryde, Environmental Management in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.314. $37.50 ISBN 0 521 40905 5.

Anthony Smith The Age of Behemoths. The Globalization of Mass Media Firms (New York: A Twentieth Century Fund Paper. Priority Press Publications, 1991) pp.80. $n.p. ISBN 0 87078 325 4.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World‐System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.242. $35.00 ISBN 0 52140604 8.

Daniel Warner, An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.151. $US30.00 ISBN 1 55S7 266 2.

Political theory and methodology

Norman Barry, Welfare (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990) pp.144. $24.95 ISBN 0 335 15595 2.

Peter Beilbarz, Labour's Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) pp.168. $49.95 ISBN 0 415 06616 6.

Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) pp.497. $n.p. ISBN 0 7450 0634 5.

Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991) pp.242. $29.95 ISBN 0 86091 538 7.

Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (eds), Ethics, Politics, and Human Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp.191. $39.95 ISBN 0 631 17885 6.

Barry Hindess, Choice, Rationality, and Social Theory (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988) pp.132. $70.00 ISBN 0 04 301306 6.

A. Khoshkish, Power or Authority? The Entelechy of Power (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991) pp.128. $n.p. ISBN 0 8191 8395 4.

Frank Lewins, Social Science Methodology: A Brief but Critical Introduction (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1992) pp.110. $14.95 ISBN 0 7329 1331 4.

David Miller (ed.), assisted by Janet Coleman, William Connolly and Alan Ryan, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.570. $39.95 ISBN 0 631 17944 5.

Raymond Plant, Modern Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.398. $34.95 ISBN 0 631 14224 X.

Alan Udoff, Leo Strauss's Thought: Towards a Critical Engagement (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.327. $n.p. ISBN 1 55587 232 8.     

Walking with preschool‐aged children to explore their local wellbeing affordances

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.     

Land Snail Shell Beads in the Sub-Saharan Archaeological Record: When,Where, and Why?

Shell beads are well established in the archaeological record of sub-Saharan Africa and appear as early as 75,000 BP; however, most research has focused on ostrich eggshell (OES) and various marine mollusc species. Beads made from various land snails shells (LSS), frequently described as Achatina, also appear to be widespread. Yet tracking their appearance and distribution is difficult because LSS beads are often intentionally or unintentionally lumped with OES beads, there are no directly dated examples, and bead reporting in general is highly variable in the archaeological literature. Nevertheless, Achatina and other potential cases of LSS beads are present at over 80 archaeological sites in at least eight countries, spanning the early Holocene to recent past. Here, we collate published cases and report on several more. We also present a new case from Magubike Rockshelter in southern Tanzania with the first directly dated LSS beads, which we use to illustrate methods for identifying LSS as a raw material. Despite the long history of OES bead production on the continent and the abundance of land snails available throughout the Pleistocene, LSS beads appear only in the late Holocene and are almost exclusively found in Iron Age contexts. We consider possible explanations for the late adoption of land snails as a raw material for beadmaking within the larger context of environmental, economic, and social processes in Holocene Africa. By highlighting the existence of these artifacts, we hope to facilitate more in-depth research on the timing, production, and distribution of LSS beads in African prehistory.     

Le Danger des liaisons: Censoring Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses

When Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses first appeared in late March 1782, it was an immediate succès de scandale. Laclos’s focus on his characters’ libertine psychology and his creation of a “monstrous” female villain, Merteuil, distinguished the novel from mainstream eighteenth-century French works. As an analysis of the novel’s reception demonstrates, Laclos’s suggestive portrayal of female sexuality and empowerment—and, specifically, of Merteuil—led first to the text’s association with dangerous works known as “mauvais livres” or “livres philosophiques” such as the Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1791) and the anonymous Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier de Chartreux (1741), and later contributed to its classification as a pornographic work at the time the concept was invented in the early nineteenth century—and, ultimately, to its censorship in 1823. If the novel was devoid of explicitly sexual scenes, it nonetheless elicited such images in the minds of (at least some of) its readers and thereby caught the attention of the authorities. Les Liaisons dangereuses may be one of the most prominent historical cases of a book being banned not for what was depicted in its pages, but for the fantasies it inspired—providing a compelling twist to the adage that “pornography is in the eyes of the beholder,” or the mind of the reader.     

Strategies of Policy Advocacy Organizations and Their Theoretical Affinities: Evidence from Q‐Methodology

Policy advocacy is an increasingly important function for many nonprofit organizations, yet their advocacy activities have largely escaped theoretical grounding. The literature on nonprofits has described how they engage in policy advocacy, without linking them to theories of policy change. The policy studies literature, on the other hand, has explained how various forms of influence result in policy change, but has largely ignored organizational perspectives on those processes. These two literatures remain largely disconnected. Drawing upon interviews with a purposive sample of policy advocacy directors at 31 nonprofit organizations, this study applies Q‐methodology to identify and describe six distinct policy advocacy strategies employed by the organizations, and their resonant theoretical views of policy processes. These findings suggest strategic approaches for nonprofits seeking to influence policy processes. They also enhance the academic literature on policy processes by adding the advocates’ views and expectations. Implications for further research are also identified.     

The minimum wage and seasonal employment: Evidence from the US agricultural sector

Nearly 40% of agricultural workers in the United States earn an hourly wage that is within 10% of the prevailing state-level minimum wage. We evaluate the impact of the minimum wage on farm employment using county-level data from the United States Census of Agriculture. We employ long-differences specifications and find evidence of a dynamic, negative effect of the minimum wage on seasonal agricultural employment, but no effect on year-round agricultural employment. We estimate a long-run elasticity of total agricultural employment with respect to the minimum wage of about −0.40, which is both statistically and economically significant. Employers’ total expenditures on hired agricultural workers are not affected by the minimum wage. Finally, our analysis suggests that increases in minimum wages may lead to higher capital investment as well as the consolidation of farming operations in the agricultural sector.     

From Activity Areas to Occupational Histories: New Methods to Document the Formation of Spatial Structure in Hunter-Gatherer Sites

Over the past five decades, archaeologists have proposed a wide range of methods for the study of spatial organization within hunter-gatherer sites. Many of these methods sought to identify the spatial location of activities based on patterns of behavior observed in ethnographic contexts. While this resulted in productive observations at certain sites, many of these methods were tailored to specific situations and thus could not be applied to a wide range of sites. For example, open-air sites rarely contain preserved bone or features, such as hearths, which were central components to identifying characteristics of site structure. In addition, many of these methods often did not take into consideration the temporal dynamics of the occupation, i.e., that many sites were formed through subsequent occupations of differing duration. This paper proposes the use of two related methods that assume many assemblages are the result of more than one occupation. The methods target the distribution of lithic artifacts, the most ubiquitously preserved of archaeological materials, and accounts for the potential that the final resting place of artifacts was the result of both intentional and unintentional movement by humans and a host of biological and geological processes. The main goal of this paper is to use an understanding of how these processes influenced the formation of site structure to estimate the relative number and duration of occupations for each site in the sample. These new methods will be presented and explained through the study of seven open-air Middle Paleolithic sites in France but are applicable to a wide range of hunter-gatherer sites.