[lbo-talk] The Left has more than enough mystique and values, but lacks discipline and accountability

[Alan Rudy]

Wow, promises vs. results and folks losing their jobs for not achieving
desired results... how staggeringly neoliberal of you.
Promises vs results independent of who made the promises and whether or not
the results were reasonable (or even rational?)
So, you think that school principals who are made to promise - and then
"achieve" - passing test scores under no child left behind are efficient but
those who are not ought to be fired?  Your whole analysis is functionalist
in the extreme - you focus on instrumental analyses of uncritically accepted
structural goals with no sense that the goals, goal-setting processes and
measurements of "success" are almost surely contradictory along many many
valences.
Does the meaning and content of democratic participation in setting desired
goals have any place in any of the standards you've set for efficiency?
The reason people are attacking your questions is because they are posed in
such an opaque and/or neoliberal manner and this is a place flush with
people rather seriously opposed to such mannerisms.
How many people here have been "reshuffled" due to institutional
contradictions rather than personal incompetence?
By your lights every social worker in the US should have been fired or
reshuffled because state and federal welfare programs failed to win the war
on poverty, the vast majority of primary and secondary school teachers
should be fired or reshuffled because students are not surpassing the
standards of achievement of the past... and every line worker in every
factory that resisted productivity goals should have been fired or
reshuffled (along with the lower management who embraced enforcing or were
forced to enforce utterly contradictory patterns of corporate discipline...

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 6:21 PM, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 3:15 PM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 1) What do YOU mean by efficiency?
>
> Whatever you want to make of it. But strictly speaking: promises vs.
> results. Accountability and correction of public policies and social
> services to get the results promised.
>
> Health and/or education ministers being fired for not achieving the desired
> results... public administrations getting reshufled to improve results.
> That
> sort of thing.
>
> FC
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319