Down from Bureaucracy: The Ambiguity of Privatization and Empowerment

Joel F. Handler

Published by Princeton University Press 1996

Down from Bureaucracy

The Ambiguity of Privatization and Empowerment

Joel F. Handler

Volume 24 in the series The William G. Bowen Series

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400821983

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Joel F. Handler is Richard C. Maxwell Professor of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of The Poverty of Welfare Reform and of Law and the Search for Community.

Reviews

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.

"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

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

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Chapter 1. Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
PART I: The Organization of the Welfare State: Public and Pr
Chapter 2. The Context of Decentralization Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Chapter 3. The Uses of Decentralization Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
Chapter 4. Privatization Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	78
PART II: The View from Below: Empowerment by Invitation, Empowerment through Conflict
Chapter 5. Power and Empowerment Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
Chapter 6. Empowerment by Invitation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
Chapter 7. Empowerment through Conflict: School Reform Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
Chapter 8. Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	216
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261

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