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This article is an analysis of the current immigration policy in Australia from the perspective of critical social work. The analysis is based on the outcomes of the immigration applications of three families of children with disabilities. It is argued that, as seen in the experience of the three families, Australian immigration policy is markedly underpinned by ableism and economic rationalism, rendering the assessment process to determine immigration eligibility patently discriminatory against people with disabilities and their families. Such discriminatory practice is seen as a challenge for social work practice. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as prime minister and Labor leader in June 2010. She describes her government as being firmly in the “tradition of Labor”. To locate it in the broad ideological continuum of Labor governments, and to test the suggestion that she is travelling a reform path set largely by the Hawke and Keating governments, I analyse the positions taken by Rudd and Gillard on a range of issues, beginning with economic policy. On social issues Gillard has been even more cautious than Rudd and this reflects her analysis of the electoral impact of Howard's Culture Wars. Her focus on educational opportunity suggests she is the logical successor to Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. As Labor leaders, Rudd and Gillard each embraced market-reliant policy positions. Rudd even claimed to be an “fiscal conservative”. However, with Rudd venturing a critique of neo-liberalism, it is Gillard whose stance is closer to Hawke and Keating's “economic rationalism”. Indeed Gillard's insistence upon the centrality of markets leaves Labor with a dilemma: if there are no significant problems with relying on markets then why does Australia need a social democratic party?

If, as Lytton Strachey once insisted, ignorance is the first requisite of the historian, the three decades of the anti-Keynesian revolution are now ripe for serious appraisal. These are the decades that Australians recognize as the period of economic rationalism. Conventional interpretation of the period cites its accomplishments as derivatives of understanding — an understanding of wealth-creation arrangements, of market processes, of the necessity of liberalizing “reforms”, of cumulative insights into how economies work and of the effects of (modest levels of) democracy in the modern world. All this is now recognized as sophisticated ignorance.

Social scientists offer competing theories on what explains the policymaking process. These typically include economic rationalism, political competition or power struggles, and policy imitation of the kind that diffuses across spatially proximate neighbors. In this paper, we examine the factors that have influenced a recent local policy trend in California: inclusionary zoning (IZ). IZ programs require developers to make a certain percentage of the units within their market-rate residential developments affordable to low- or moderate-income households. By 2007, 68 percent of jurisdictions in the San Francisco Bay Area had adopted some type of IZ policy. We test the relative importance of economic, political, and spatial factors in explaining the rapid diffusion of IZ, across 100 cities and towns in the Bay Area. Consistent with an economic efficiency argument, results of hazard models provide some evidence that IZ is adopted in places with less affordable housing. However, political factors, such as partisan affiliation and the strength of affordable housing nonprofits, are even more robust predictors of whether or not a local government adopts IZ. There is no evidence of spatial diffusion in the case of IZ adoption; jurisdictions are not, on average, responding to the behavior of their neighbors. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Background Great strides have been achieved over the past few decades in service provision for people with intellectual disability (ID). However, there has also been a growth in the use of economic rationalism and a related rise in managerialism in forming service provision outcomes. Method An account of the focus on process and means of provision directed within the managerialist agenda to determine how individual authority has become subsumed within patterns of dependence. Results An underlying influence of utilitarianism has led to a focus on servicing the average through service provision trajectories which in turn have weakened the pace for social change and perpetuated a vulnerable conception of people with ID. Conclusions There has been a qualification of the idealised intent of providing individualised support, choice and recognition of the moral worth of people with ID into relative features of equality. There remains an overriding static conception of the person with ID within funding frameworks and service provision which relies on economic and rationalist depictions of the individual.

This article considers the role of ideas in New Labour’s approach to the governance of urban regeneration and characterizes this approach as ‘embryonic associationalism’. This approach contrasts with the economic rationalism of previous Conservative governments and leads to a more determined effort to empower local community groups within the policy process. We analyse the effects of this shift in approach in practice through a comparative case study of changing patterns of governance in different areas of the English city of Sheffield over a ten-year period. We conclude that while other factors are important in shaping the nature of community empowerment, New Labour’s approach has promoted a political environment in which it is increasingly difficult for local state actors to ignore the voice of local communities. However, while we refer to this as ‘New Labour’s approach’, we are clear that this relates to a tradition of ideas that is far from new in Labour thought.

In Australia, as elsewhere, relations between government and community sector organisations* have undergone fundamental change over the past decade. Economic rationalism and new manageralism have reshaped funding arrangements, seeing the widespread introduction of contracts with service specifi cations, performance measures and reporting requirements. Within the literature there is considerable anxiety about the impact contracting may have on the community development activities of community sector organisations. This article draws on the experience of over 500 community sector organisations that provide human services to explore how contractual arrangements have affected some aspects of their community development activities. The research findings suggest that, from the perspectives of organisations, the adverse impacts have been less than anticipated. *This paper uses the term 'community sector' to denote not-for-profi t organisations who are managed by voluntary management committees whose broad purpose is to address welfare needs.

In this paper I look at the current trend toward positivism in the practice of psychotherapy. I use the term psychotherapy throughout, to remind family therapist readers that the problem is not ours alone. I offer a brief, critical literature review. I suggest that the trend towards positivism offers little of therapeutic value and compromises the ethical practice of psychotherapy. The origins of the trend lie in economic rationalism (demonstrated by the sorry state of the profession in the USA), philosophical error (the belief in certain knowledge) and a misplaced faith in method (simple algorithms exist that can transcend even the most complex circumstances). I dispute the validity of these influences and draw upon David Smail's suggestion that the pursuit of objectivity is an attempt to avoid the awkward necessity of making moral judgements. In the last section of the paper I briefly examine a philosophical framework that could serve as a guide to the subjective practice of psychotherapy and I offer a simple subjective metaphor drawn from a work of literary criticism. (author abstract)

Children with disabilities pose unique challenges for occupational therapists when the value of therapy programmes and the child's individual progress are being evaluated. Children whose development is atypical may make progress through a course of intervention and/or maturation, yet standardised tests frequently used by occupational therapists are often not sensitive enough to detect these changes. In this current climate of economic rationalism and accountability, providing documentary evidence of occupational therapy programme benefits is essential. This paper addresses the utility of goal attainment scaling for objectively and systematically documenting the outcomes of occupational therapy intervention. Goal attainment scaling provides a direct, reliable and accurate method of assessing treatment-induced client change. The process of goal attainment scaling is described and the literature on goal attainment scaling in paediatrics is reviewed. It is concluded that goal attainment scaling is a useful clinical process and measure of therapy programme outcomes for children with disabilities.

Evidence-based practice (EBP) first appeared on the healthcare horizon just over a decade ago. In 2003 its presence has intensified and extended beyond its initial relation to medicine embracing as it does now, nursing and the allied health disciplines. In this paper, I contend that its appearance and subsequent growth and development are the effects of potent ‘regimes of truth’, four of which bear the names: positivism, empiricism, pragmatism and economic rationalism. My aim is to show how EBP generates the controversy it does because its nature and methods are inextricably interwoven with the way it has become politicised and professionalised. This exegesis is an attempt to outline how the combined effects of the four forms of rationality mentioned above allow for both the methods and objectives of EBP to be constructed as they are, while at the same moment producing the particular effects of knowledge and power in terms of who sells and who buys the idea of EBP in the culture of contemporary healthcare.

Since the 1980s, governments throughout the western industrialized world have required greater emphasis on fiscal and public accountability within the public sector. As a result, museum value has been constructed in response to economic rationalism and government policies without sufficient input from the museum sector itself. This paper asserts that any discussion of the role of museums, the contribution they make to societies and appropriate ways of evaluating their impact requires the perspectives and contributions of all stakeholders. It examines preliminary findings from a study that asked about the impact of museums from the perspective of museum professionals and end-users. It reports significant areas of agreement between public and professional cohorts regarding the role museums play and the contribution they make both to individuals and to the social and economic development.

In international nature conservation policy, value-arguments based on science and economic rationalism increasingly overshadow the aesthetic and ethical arguments that originally inspired the conservation movement. We argue that this trend risks removing conservation from the public realm, in part because it facilitates the adoption by nongovernment conservation bodies of corporate values and/or their integration with government bureaucracies. By contrast, the explicit recognition of aesthetic and ethical values would complement arguments based on science and economic utility. We subscribe to a reformist view of globalization that accepts the inevitability of a globalizing world but argues that the process needs humanizing by incorporating quality of life values in the policy process. We argue that re-emphasis of aesthetic and ethical arguments in international conservation policy would contribute to this goal by reasserting links between conservation bodies and the public, thereby leading to more effective action on the ground.

Australian public sector institutions and public sector labour relations experienced intense change during the 1980s and 1990s. Proponents of restructuring sought to insert market-like pressures into areas formerly governed by bureaucratic mechanisms. This reversed a trend towards continual growth in state provision of non-market based social protection and social welfare, and continual growth in the public sector's share of the economy. The politics and content of Australian public sector restructuring under Labor and then the Liberals substantially resembled restructuring efforts in two Canadian provinces. In all three examples, political pacts between unions in the exposed and non-exposed sectors, and between organised labour and capital, determined the direction of change. But the level of institutional robustness of these various actors determined both the pace and effectiveness of change. Weak employer organisations and unions incapable of sustaining pacts in Canada produced wider oscillations in policy content that attained less substantive success than in Australia.

Given recent focus on unethical activity and failings in corporate governance in the private sector, this paper briefly overviews the application of ‘economic rationalism’ in public administration and its impacts on the ethics of public sector decisions. It is argued that although ‘unethical’ decisions in public administration may be influenced by the economic imperatives embodied in ‘economic rationalist’ policies, it does not follow that the application of economic principles is necessarily inconsistent or injurious to ethical outcomes. In many instances the application of economic principles in public administration adds value by making existing ethical conflicts transparent and enabling more informed decisions.

Judging by public comment, doctors and society are no longer connected. This paper argues that much of this disconnectedness is based on an overemphasis of technology, evidence and economic rationalism and a neglect of the humanistic values of caring - the art of medicine. As medical educators we have a duty to integrate the art and science of medicine, that is to open the world of daily surprise of the human condition called illness - the experience of suffering, adaptation and recupera- tion - to our new generation of young doctors. © 2002 Blackwell Publishing Asia

Both internationally and within Australia public policy is experiencing a rush back to the idea of community. After 15 years of discourse about the new public management and economic rationalism a much older discourse is slipping back into public policy. It is a normative discourse about changing relations between state democracy, market capitalism and civil society in which the idea of community is a central 'new' relation used to manage both state and market failures. Already new policy tools emerging from this discourse can be seen with innovations based on concepts such as partnerships, place management, and a raft of community consultation mechanisms. Much of the rhetoric about community as a new foundation for public policy, however, remains confused. The result is a muddle of ideas in which this potentially useful concept is in danger of becoming just another public policy reform fad. This article looks at what policy makers are saying about community, identifies problems in this current usage and offers ways of thinking about community with a view to establishing its policy utility.

What brought about the restructuring of the Australian domestic aviation industry in the 1980s in Australia? Rather than being the product a radical shift in policy, the ‘triumph of economic rationalism’ or the victory of one set of interests over another, it was a case of the decay and dissolution of an inappropriate set of institutional arrangements. Changes in the market and in political forces prompted industry actors to undermine and challenge a prevailing set of government policies and market rules. A variety of commercial, legal, administrative and political arenas were the institutional sites for these events. Policy change and a new set of rules of the game were not so much imposed from above, as registered at the conclusion of events.

This article analyses the categories comprising the relationship between productivity and rate-of-return reporting in the context of water infrastructure. It examines the categories and relations comprising rates of return, showing how each can fail to capture real productivity gains. Theoretically, high returns may be obtained despite low real productivity and vice versa. This has implications for ‘corporatisation’, since the restructuring of Australia's water systems has entrenched rate-of-return reporting as the pre-eminent measure of performance. The problem is, if water's rate-of-return is continually increased without ensuring commensurate real productivity improvements, eventually Australia's water systems must break down. The issue is acute as neither the theory of corporatisation nor the logic of ‘economic rationalism’ supplies a means for ensuring profitability does not outrun productivity. I conclude the rationalisation of Australia's water has exposed citizens to new, fundamental and otherwise unprotected social, environmental and economic risks.

In the context of calls for a 'third way' which proposes the abandonment of many of the social democratic and statist commitments of the postwar era, this paper reviews both the responsibilities accepted by peak bodies such as ACOSS and those that ought to be retained by government. It is sceptical of claims that social policy debates in Australia lead to the conclusion that welfare state development here has been satisfactory. Social democratic objectives (derived from intellectual contributions in the 1940s and 1950s as well as from the comparative political economy of the 1980s and 1990s) emphasize more decommodified provision of services than can be readily admitted in Australia. If the demand for social welfare and social policy continues to increase to the extent suggested by past and present circumstances, serious implications emerge for both public and private providers.

This article outlines and explores the differences and connections in the ideas underpinning the reform of public institutions in Australian society over the past two decades. In particular, the article asks whether public institutions have been renewed or eroded through the changes of the 1980s and 1990s and whether the changes were as inevitable as some advocates and analysts claim. Some ideas and theories appropriate to the future role of government and public institutions in Australia beyond the current consensus are explored. The article offers afresh analysis of public sector reform in Australia and contributes to the ongoing debate about alternatives.

This article is about New Zealand's recent experience in public sector reform. New Zealand became seized with economic rationalism about the same time as Australia did but at the national level we went faster and farther than Australia towards the creation of a commercial culture in the public sector. Here I discuss what might be learned from what has happened in New Zealand.

This paper uses poststructuralist ideas to describe aspects of the battle to retain personal power of one mother of four late adolescent children, when she became unemployed during the restructuring of the New Zealand economy, which began in 1984 and continues in the present. A deconstructive analysis of the text of unstructured interviews with Sonya shows how agencies of the State, including the Welfare, gradually increase their practices of surveillance over her domestic life and reduce her options for agentic action in public life. These practices are linked to an analysis of discourses of economic rationalism and liberal humanism to show that this insidious exclusion and regulation is underpinned by ‘possessive individualism’—a model of the person/citizen who has rights to speak in the public sphere insofar as he/she owns property. It is argued that this model of personhood, which pervades much community psychology, at the same time devalues both the traditional work of women and forms of non-material productivity which can be characterized as human service. The paper claims that the discursive approach can help to avoid disrespectful implications of deficit in people whose voices are silenced by dominant discourses, including those which dominate much psychological theorizing. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Consistent with the economic rationalist philosophy which now pervades the decisions and policies of all Australian governments, the persuasive aura of competitive markets has been used to justify the provision by the private sector of an increasing range of public services. Governments who have been consistently antagonised by the findings of the auditor-general are now attempting to use the arguments for competition in the public sector to diminish the stature and role of the auditor-general. In place of audit models which are based upon an auditor who is able to conduct audits on behalf of parliament, the auditor-general is to be increasingly isolated from the means to audit. This represents the onset of a radical interpretation of public sector audit which will usher in the last days of an independent public sector audit function.

The 1994 Fundamental Expenditure Review (FER) of the UK Treasury was a radical overhaul of organization that had major implications for the way the Treasury conducts its business. This article examines the origins and implications of FER, paying particular attention to the ‘strategic’ philosophy of controlling public expenditure encapsulated within it. Ostensibly an expression of modern economic rationalism overturning outmoded administrative practices, the FER approach to public spending control might alternatively be interpreted as a manifestation of a recurring ‘econocrat’s fallacy of control’ which aims to remove redundancy, random search mechanisms and external veto points from control systems.

Health sector financing reforms that have been ongoing over the last decade in most developed countries are rooted in philosophical terms in the ideology of economic rationalism. The ideology suggests that it is possible to artificially create markets for activities in contexts where markets do not develop naturally, and that the creation of these artificial markets leads to resource allocations that are both more efficient and more equitable than historical arrangements. The application of the ideology to New Zealand's health sector has generated some benefits—for example, a more rational approach to influencing the decisions of self-interested health care providers; but it has also generated some costs—for example, on ideological grounds it has brought into question the non-market rationales for maintaining a national health service system.

Private for-projit prison corporations are expanding in Australia faster than in any ,other country. These corporations are based in the USA and form part of the corrections- commercial complex. it is the contention of this paper, from observations in NSW, Australia, that the nature of these newly internationalised private prison corporations is neo-colonialist, both economically and culturally. It can be compared with the expansion of the nuclear power industry by transnational US corporations in the 1960s and 1970s and other transnationals more recently. Using this perspective, the appropriateness of transnational private for-profit prison corporations running prisons in Australia is severely questioned. Transnational corporations are commonplace, reaching into markets in the most inaccessible parts of the world. They sell everything from cola to computers to security and attempt to create markets for their products where they are non-existent. These corporations have their bases in the UK, Japan, the USA and continental Europe. There has been strong debate about the harmful effects of their domination of world markets and their marketing of consumer items particularly in 'developing' countries. The marketing of sensitive human services by transnationals in the politically favoured climate of privatisation in many countries of the world should thus be vigorously questioned and scrutinised. The current contracting of prisons to private corporations' most with their bases in the USA, is only the most recent in the saga of US transnational corporations selling products and services which may well have been detrimental to the receiving nations. It can be contextualised in the international correc- tions-commercial complex identified by Lilly and Knepper (1991, 1992) and it can be paralleled with the export of nuclear power, health care systems and toxic chemicals by large US transnational corporations for profit and the attempted 'colonisation' of those industries in countries outside the US. Each of these exercises has concealed vital information and evidence from the receiving country, and has been accompanied by extravagant claims concerning the benefits of the commodity being 'sold'. Each has necessitated the introduction of culturally foreign attitudes and personnel and used the discourse of the market, economic rationalism and efficiency as the dominant discourse, whilst dismissing that of social

This article examines and comments on the reporting of economic news in the Australian media, the influence on that reporting of media judgments about newsworthiness, the relationship between economic reporting and the financial markets, and governments' use of the media in the economic policy process. Finally, it focuses on the role of economic commentators in the quality press, their relations with the bureaucracy, their part in the rise of economic rationalism and the nature of their influence on the formulation of economic policy. It concludes that when the commentators as a group take up causes and pursue them over sustained periods, they help to create a climate of elite option which emboldens governments to undertake politically difficult policy reforms.

Everyone in the western world has a clear idea of what a hospital is. People think of a series of large multi-storeyed buildings filled with highly skilled and professional people (the ‘ologists’) offering sophisticated services amid an impressive array of high technology equipment. Over the past century the development of the hospital has involved cramming more and more services, staff and resources into the one location. Many large hospitals today have a staff of several thousand and are like a small city. But will hospital development continue in this direction? We think not. We believe the hospital has reached an evolutionary branch. The fundamental nature of hospitals is about to change because of the application of information and clinical technology, changing medical practices and economic rationalism. To understand why requires an excursion into a number of disciplines including the history of the hospital, organisation behaviour, medical practice, management and health care policy. And this is no mere epistemological exploration: it is vital for society generally and those who work in health care particularly to understand that the existing structure of the principal organisation which delivers health care is coming to an end. Our principal focus is the teaching hospital, but the analysis applies to a substantial degree to the many kinds of hospitals found throughout the industrialised world.

Biomedical research was once an unquestioned good, and generous funding for a short time allowed researchers to work on whatever interested them. Two contradictory pressures have changed this. As costs have risen and economic rationalism has become politically dominant, governments, private corporations and granting agencies have increasingly demanded compliance with their own priorities, instrumental values and performance criteria. On the other hand, social and ethical critics have characterized biomedical research as being out of touch with real health needs and community values and as being an agent of social control that entrenches the power of a technocratic hegemony. The profession has largely acquiesced in bureaucratic and corporate intervention in exchange for continued funding, and assumed that social concerns could be allayed by 'top down' paternalistic education of the public. However, this response tends to add weight to the criticism that biomedicine is an agent of social control. What is needed is a spirited defence of the value of independent scholarship and research that is not limited to science but includes the humanities. Equally important is a process of community education in which scientists not only transmit their knowledge and enthusiasm to the public, but themselves become open to the social and ethical concerns of the community.

The 1980s have seen the triumph of economic rationalism. Greater efficiency has become a sacred goal. Increased competition and the unlocking of market forces, we are told, are the key means to obtain it. Proponents of economic rationalism insist that the public sector is riddled with inefficiencies. The private sector, by contrast, is self-evidently superior. To the extent that the private sector often operates less than optimally, a major reason is the plethora of perverse governmental regulations which hamper its efficiency. Despite the problems, the public sector needs to model itself wherever possible on the private. And where public sector activities can be or are being done in the private sector, then the public sector should surrender such activities. The inevitable result will be an increase in net economic welfare: the economy will become more dynamic and scarce resources will be allocated more efficiently. Such is the rhetoric of the economic rationalists.

We have reached a phase of diminishing returns in medicine. Increasing costs produce smaller and smaller incremental benefits in health status. Medical scientists continue to work within the ideology of the Enlightenment, whereby advances in knowledge will eventually lead to control of health and welfare. The enormous costs of this ideology have led to two new ideologies: those of economic rationalism and managerialism. At the public level, the Western liberal emphasis on the value of individual life is generally held to justify the amount of public money spent on health. Those who frame health policy are influenced to some extent by this ideal, but we cannot continue to develop costly interventions without constraint. To overcome this impasse, we might accept that economic rationalism provided a proper base for health care; or we might redefine disease so that more people were excluded from treatment programmes; or we might agree to limit medical research in costly areas; we might change our ethical thinking to emphasize classical utilitarianism; or we might undertake systematic studies of community values and opinions to find out what people really want from their health and welfare services. There are serious ethical problems with each of these solutions, except for the last: the idea of modifying services to take note of community values. Testing community values is difficult, but there are ways of doing it, and there have been some exercises in which the process has been undertaken with some success. The recent Constitutional convention suggests that it may even be possible in Australia.