Posts Tagged Care
Power, Politics, and Public Policy A Matter of Caring.
This book is a compilation of papers presented at the ‘94 Caring Research Conference held in Ottawa, Canada. Anne Boykin, editor, wrote, “It is hoped that this book will reinforce the commitment to caring that needs to direct our ways of being in the world.” The intended audience encompasses nurses worldwide who advocate on behalf of human care and caring.
The book is organized into three sections: theory (five articles), practice (six articles), and education. There are diagrams and figures throughout and text is made more readable by its organization, use of italics, bullet points, and tables, but the book has few pictures. Each article is well referenced (mainly from the 1980s and 90s; a few date earlier than the 1950s). Even though all articles adhere to the conference’s theme, I was kept engaged by the variety of writing styles. Articles encompass literary, anecdotal, historical, qualitative research, concept analysis, theory development, quantitative research, and philosophical styles.
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The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol and Public Policy.
America’s most recent moral crusade, the war on drugs, has been pronounced a failure by critics from the left, right, and center and now is favored almost exclusively by politicians, law enforcement agencies, and other groups with a stake in its continuation and a seeming imperviousness to information. In The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol, and Public Policy, Kenneth Meier provides evidence that the war on drugs has been a failure in the states but also demonstrates that this most recent attempt to expunge sin is akin to earlier failed attempts to regulate personal behavior. The analyses presented in the book underline the irrationality of many U.S. anti-drug policies but also demonstrate that forces in the policy environment make it difficult for us to learn from our policy mistakes. The book’s ultimate substantive contribution is a sophisticated, balanced, and well-reasoned analysis of the forces underlying the adoption, implementation, and effects of policies to regulate drugs and alcohol. Antidrug policies are exposed clearly as good politics but bad public policy. The frustrating fact, though, is that the results suggest that we seem unable to stop ourselves from embarking on Quixotic anti-sin campaigns despite our history of failure in the arena. Americans may be doomed to a future of badly designed and implemented policies intended to regulate sin.
Aside from this substantive contribution, Meier’s book represents an important addition to the study of public policy through his careful application of three approaches to policy analysis: cross-sectional quantitative analysis, quantitative historical analysis, and qualitative historical analysis. Meier applies each approach in this research, and the results are impressive. The study is contextually rich and empirically rigorous; rather than pursuing one line of inquiry and accepting its limitations, Meier acknowledges the weaknesses and strengths of each and uses them in complementary fashion. The volume of quantitative and qualitative data used for the analysis is enormous, and the overall effect of the blending of three forms of analysis is to provide a study that takes advantage of the best aspects of each approach while accounting for the weaknesses of each through the use of the others. This is not to say that one cannot find places to quibble with measures, model specification, and the like, but the breadth of evidence Meier brings to bear, and its consistency, renders such criticisms trivial.
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Challenging the public/private divide: feminism, law and public policy.
The concepts of public and private have been central to recent analysis in a number of areas. The evolution of public-private sectors has been a major theme in urban studies and certainly a major theme in feminist studies. One of the reasons for this centrality, as well as one of the frustrations in using a public-private framework of analysis, is the imprecise nature of this conceptualization – both rich in insights and full of ambiguities. Urban researchers, who have often used this conceptualization either in real or virtual spatial terms, can profit from the kind of debate and analysis of the public-private conceptualization that is contained in the book edited by Susan Boyd : Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law and Public Policy. The contributors to the book examine a whole variety of areas of public policy and law – day care, homework, tax policy, maternity benefits, child welfare, child custody – under a sort of double lens; how does the public-private interface play out in the particular area and what are the consequences for women and particularly for specific groups of women.
One of the major themes that emerges in the book is the inadequacies of the current understandings of the public-private divide to take into account the needs and specific conditions of doubly marginalized groups of women. Koshan (Aboriginal women), Ocran (homeworkers in the garment industry), Iyer (low-income, non-white), Buss (Third World women) have been negatively affected by public policy – relating to violence in the case of Koshan, maturity benefits in the case of Iyer and non-regulation of home work in the case of Ocran. It is necessary to look more broadly at the patterns of marginalization and address these fundamental issues rather than focus uniquely on issues of the public-private interface.
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