His remonstrations were enjoined by Robert Merton, who reproached me for the false imputation that mistakes capitalism for industrialism. He was criticising an essay I had written in 1982 about the industrial sociology of his recently deceased student Alvin Gouldner. I claimed that Gouldner’s classic text, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, missed the specifically capitalist character of indus...

The concept of good governance has increasingly come to be seen as an essential ingredient of principles guiding natural resource management. Governance is a term that does not lend itself to an easy definition. Perspectives on debates in governance have varied; however, essentially questions of governance of natural resources revolve around such issues as improving the effectiveness of the bur...

Researches in electronic government have indicated a number of organizational barriers that hinder the adoption and implementation of electronic government. This paper proposes a research framework for analysing how organizational barriers influence the adoption and implementation of e-government at local levels. The framework is constructed based on four organizational dimensions; adaptability...

From Marco Polo to Richard Nixon, narratives of the encounter between Chinese and Westerners have been defining texts of European cultures and their descendants. Successive but sporadic reports from travellers, missionaries, diplomats, traders and others have provided a model of an alternative way of arranging people, of organizing their lives, of thinking about the state of being human; one th...

This paper assesses the nature of partnerships through the research site of local governance in England and Scotland, engaging a range of debates and literature around governance and meta-governance. The research used secondary data of local authority partnership working in England and Scotland as well as primary qualitative data from participant observation and interviews with senior officials...