POLITIK KEKERABATAN DAN PERWUJUDAN GOOD GOVERNANCE (STUDI KASUS: TABANAN)

Studi ini merupakan analisis neo-institusionalisme terhadap permasalahan politik dinasti dalam kaitannya dengan perwujudan good governance di Kabupaten Tabanan. Sebagaimana diketahui bahwa pasca reformasi, Tabanan dipimpin oleh satu kelompok keluarga yang sama. Dengan berfokus pada sektor pelayanan kesehatan, studi ini akan melihat seberapa jauh politik dinasti memberi dampak terhadap sektor kebijakan publik dan perwujudan good governance. Secara umum, kebijakan pelayanan kesehatan yang ditempuh oleh pemerintah Kabupaten Tabanan adalah kebijakan non-populis. Pemkab Tabanan lebih memilih membangun rumah sakit berstandar internasional dibandingkan dengan menyediakan layanan kesehatan gratis bagi warga miskin. Selama ini studi mengenai politik dinasti dan pengaruhnya terhadap sektor kebijakan publik di Tabanan dilihat sebagai permasalahan politis semata tanpa melihat kepada persoalan deep state structure, yakni fungsi normatif dan budaya di dalamnya. Studi ini menemukan bahwa terdapat pertentangan antara sociological instution, historical institution dengan rational choice institution dibalik kukuhnya politik dinasti dan pergumulan dalam mewujudkan good governance di Kabupaten Tabanan. Kata kunci: Politik dinasti, good governance, neo-instutionalisme, kebijakan publik, Kabupaten Tabanan.

Thinking carefully about inclusiveness: evidence from European guilds

Policy lessons are often drawn from the emergence in Europe of ‘inclusive’ institutions, which are held to have displaced ‘extractive’ institutions and fostered economic growth. This article analyzes the concept of inclusiveness using evidence on a historical institution that has been widely viewed as inclusive – the guild. It finds that we must differentiate between three types of inclusiveness: community, corporative, and societal. Community inclusiveness refers to the share of individuals involved in an institution's operations, corporative inclusiveness the share of political representation enjoyed by the institution itself, and societal inclusiveness the extent to which the institution enables full economic and political participation by everyone in society. We must also distinguish between general inclusiveness, which takes into account general-equilibrium effects, and partial inclusiveness, which assumes away such effects. Inclusiveness and extractiveness are not opposites in theory, and guilds show why certain types of inclusive institution are likely to behave in extractive ways. Finally, guilds alert us to trade-offs between inclusive economic institutions, inclusive political institutions, and inclusive growth. History does not imply abandoning the concept of inclusiveness, but rather thinking about it carefully.

Sociology of Bad Governance in Interwar Romania, RAO Press, Bucharest, 2019, Bogdan Bucur

This review seeks to critically unravel Bogdan Bucur's Sociology of Bad Governance in Interwar Romania by using both an emic and an etic approach. From an emic perspective, that is, from inside the book, Bogdan Bucur's intellectual effort is really impressive. Despite a huge amount of data, Sociology of Bad Governance in Interwar Romania proves itself quite easy to read thanks to a solid organization. Additionally, due to the fact that the author has employed a classic academic recipe, the abovementioned book is also very coherent. However, looked at it etically, the book loses its internal coherence due to some conceptual and methodological blunders. Conceptually, despite the fact that the book brings to the fore the issue of bad governance and that it includes a theoretical chapter, the concept of good governance is left unaddressed. Methodologically, the author seems to have fallen in the trap of methodological nationalism. A consistent liberal and neo-marxist literature has already addressed the state as a historical institution which is more or less dependent on the international milieu. In his attempt to explain the administrative failures of the interwar Romanian state, the author has completely overlooked the path dependence explanation and the impact former empires had had on post-colonial states. Thus, a confusion between causes and manifestations of bad governance has emerged.

Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology: A Historical Development

This paper traces the historical development of Karl Barth’s ecclesiology by analysing three representative works: The Epistle to the Romans, the Göttingen Dogmatics, and the Church Dogmatics. It argues that Barth’s theological turning point was a shift away from an early period Christology, which emphasised an eschatological time/eternity dialectic, culminating in the resurrection, towards a Christology that emphasised the anhypostatic union of Christ’s two natures, that culminated in the incarnation. Thus Barth gave an increasingly positive valuation of the church as an historical institution.

From Cohong to Comprador

This chapter analyzes how the Republican economic reformer Wu Juenong, in his attempts to revive the collapsed industry, articulated a criticism of the tea merchants as parasitic. These were the same houses who played a crucial, dynamic role during the nineteenth-century golden years of Chinese tea. What had changed by the 1930s was not the comprador (buyer) and tea warehouse merchants' own behavior but instead the perspectives of Chinese economic thought, now rooted in a division between “productive” labor and “unproductive” finance. The chapter introduces the comprador both as a real, historical institution and as a theoretical category in modern Chinese history. As with free labor in India, the oppositional categories of productive and unproductive labor in China signaled an embrace of the industrial capitalist model by nationalists across Asia, in spite of a dearth of the traditional signs of industrialization in either region.

Ancestry.com and the Evolving Nature of Historical Information Companies

This study of the genealogy and biotech company Ancestry analyzes the ways in which the organization has evolved over the past few years. Ancestry is difficult to categorize as a corporate entity. The company trades in servicing both “traditional” types of history (genealogical records) and, more recently, biotech-based investigation through the use of DNA sequencing. Ancestry is highly influential in the way that millions of people around the world access the past. Given this, the company’s shifts in focus are of great interest. Through considering various new elements of the way that Ancestry functions, and illustrating that this complexity is foundational to its purpose, the article suggests the company is redefining what a public historian or public historical institution might be, adding a scientific dimension to historical data and also acting to present a particular model of the past through its advertising campaigns. The article suggests that public history’s models for considering such protean organizations are in need of attention, and the complexity of such a company demonstrates new challenges and opportunities for scholars in the field.

THE ANTINOMIES OF HABERMAS'RECONSTRUCTION OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

There are few attempts to reformulate the historical perspective of classical sociological theory comparable to that of Jürgen Habermas’ reconstruction of historical materialism. Habermas considered historical materialism to be principally a theory of social evolution and he sought to revise its conception of historical development. In Habermas’ opinion, the logic of the development of normative structures, social identities and cultural understandings differs from that of material production and the organizational complexity of social systems. My analysis reveals how the major innovation of Habermas’ reconstruction of historical materialism is the ensuing conceptualizations of the social relations of production as forms of social integration and the function of systematically distorted communication in their historical institution. Despite the significant implications of this supplementation of the paradigm of production with a theory of communication, Habermas’ reconstruction of historical materialism is shown to be limited by its inflexible logic of development and disengagement from the conflicts internal to processes of material production. It is proposed that the historical perspective of other strands of contemporary social theory may rectify these limitations through their concern with social creativity, institutional variations and the dialectics of social struggle.

Animals, Slaves, and Corporations: Analyzing Legal Thinghood

The Article analyzes the notion of legal “thinghood” in the context of the person–thing bifurcation. In legal scholarship, there are numerous assumptions pertaining to this definition that are often not spelled out. In addition, one's chosen definition of “thing” is often simply taken to be the correct one. The Article scrutinizes these assumptions and definitions. First, a brief history of the bifurcation is offered. Second, three possible definitions of “legal thing” are examined: Things as nonpersons, things as rights and duties, and things as property. The first two definitions are rejected as not being very interesting or serving any heuristic function. Conversely, understanding legal things as property is meaningful, useful, and helps to understand what it means to say that animals are legally things. Defining things as property has certain rather important implications, which are analyzed at the end of the Article. For instance, not everything needs to be either a person or a thing: The historical institution of outlawry involved treating individuals neither as legal persons nor as legal things. One must conclude that the person–thing bifurcation is less fundamental than is often assumed.

Thehukouand traditional virtue: An ethnographic note on Taiwanese policing

This research note suggests that traditional ideals of virtue in Taiwan enable an order-making dynamic to operate in the backstage of state record-keeping processes. These virtues coordinate cooperation by policemen, civilians and politically empowered elites, simultaneously facilitating local order-maintenance and ensuring that police records serve the interests of the established political economic structure. I focus on the ways that this arrangement is grounded in the historical institution of the population registry, or hukou. I argue that Taiwan’s hukou has effectively translated traditional virtues into policeable objects of modern administration: inscribed in the documentary practices of population registration, embedded in a naturalized division of social control labor, and institutionalized as collective habits of response to trouble.