Australian Educational Researcher Vol. 19, No. 1 1992

Book Reviews

E c o n o m i c R a t i o n a l i s m in Canberra, A Nation Building State Changes its Mind Michael Pusey Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1991 310 pages, $25 (paper).

Every now and then a new book will act as an in te l lec tua l l ightening rod. Michael Pusey's Economic Rationalism in Canberra is such a book because it crystalises formerly diffuse notions and concerns about the intellectual cast and policy direction of national politics into a forceful and concrete form. Hugh Stretton has called it a book which de- serves to become the 'political book of the decade', and, certainly, the book has made quite a political splash: first, be- cause it comes at a time ripe for critical reflection on the last decade of economic rationalist policy making and, second, because it sheds new light on an impor- tant structure of power in the nation's capital.

The book comes in two parts. The first part analyses the results of survey data collected in the mid-1980s dealing with the social and educational back- ground, the political attitudes and policy proclivities of a sample comprised of 215 SES officers in a range of federal depart- ments grouped under three headings: the central agencies such as Treasury, Finance, PM&C; the market-ori- ented/economic departments such as Industry, Technology and Commerce;

and the social service departments such as Social Security. According to Pusey, the federal state apparatus has become domi- nated by a new cadre of privileged, highly educated technocrats, many of whom have been schooled in the intellectually limit- ing discipline of neo-classical eco- nomics, and who now dominate the all- powerful central agencies, and through them, the rest of the state apparatus. "The central agencies,' Pusey argues (p. 6), 'represent a new and minimalist laissez- faire state set in norms that come from a dominating neoclassical economic ratio- nalism that is anti-statist, anti-union, and either asocial or anti-social in its ori- entations to policy'.

The second part of the book attempts to stand back and assess, from the per- spective of sociological theory, the wider significance of the rise of the econocrats, for Australian society, for the direction of public policy and for the character and de- liberative capacity of the Australian state. The going here will daunt some and delight others as Pusey draws on the work of Habermas and Luhmann and goes about constructing a sociological interpreta- tion of the inner workings and wider so- cial significance of economic rationalism in key state agencies. A central argument here is that economic rationalism as a discourse is bureaucratically successful (it adds 'power to power') because it exists on the basis of a 'self-referential' reduc- tionist logic which can be translated across all spheres of administration to create a simplifying ' t ranscontextual

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commensurability of reference' which fur- ther empowers the central agency co-or- dinators and controllers.

This is an ambitious book which spreads a wide net. There is material on the attitudes and ideology of key state elites, and on the structure, internal dy- namics and processes of reform within the federal bureaucracy. There is also much about power and policy, as well as about the broad historical character and current trajectory of the Australian state. The book is at its strongest as a political sociology of key bureaucrats in the cen- tral agencies (Treasury, Finance, etc). It also provides a penetrating analysis of prevailing discourse and of administra- tive relationships between the central, market and social service departments. The book is also goo6 at relating the prevalence of economic rationalism and the power of the central agencies with the broad thrust of Labor's federal bureau- cratic reforms in the 1980s.

At times, however, the book's ambi- tion overreaches the mark. For example, there are large assumptions and a range of unexplored issues in the argument that private schools plus university eco- nomics training breeds full-blown eco- nomic rationalism in the bureaucratic elite. The same applies to the attempt to link findings about the attitudes of senior bureaucrats to wider arguments about state-society relationships. Also, for a book dealing with economic rationalism in Canberra, we hear surprisingly little about the role of the government or its key ministers. We are told that Labor's ministerial cadre is powerful and deter- mined and that Labor's bureaucratic re- forms have been designed to assert more control over the bureaucracy. Yet how ministers fit into, shape or respond to Canberra's economic rationalism is never fully explored. Indeed, some years ago, Senator Button described Canberra's bu- reaucratic rationalists as 'intellectually constipated', but Pusey does not explore these potentially important tensions be- tween ministers and rationalist bureau- crats. Similarly, on the other side, key

rationalist ministers of the 1980s, such as Paul Keating, don't even rate a men- tion.

The characterisation of the state's role is also questionable and, certainly, the major transition in the Australian state depicted by Pusey needs to be treated more sceptically. The book's sub-title is 'A Nation Building State Changes it Mind'. There is a good deal in Australia's history which justifies the characterisa- tion of Australia's state as a one-time na- tion builder. Yet it is also true that any examination of key areas of past eco- nomic policy also reveals a good deal of economic rationalism in the nation's his- tory. Australia was never a full blown Keynesian state, for example. Very lim- ited proposals to inject a bit of forward thinking and planning into the economy in the mid-1960s were rejected out of hand by Menzies and by the economic ra- tionalists in Treasury as an affront to the free market. Even protectionism, which radically restructured the economy, was practised in a way that preserved man- agement autonomy and respected the sanctity of the autonomous firm. In this sense, the Australian state has tended in key areas to practise macro-level structur- ing with micro-level laissez-faire, and on this score, Pusey is simply wrong when he claims that there has historically been an active partnership between capital and the state 'at the operating level of indus- try' (p. 107). Protectionism was a good idea very badly practised and in this sense, Australia has been burnt by some of its older forms of state intervention. Significantly, it is the historical legacy of this form of older intervention (whose passing Pusey seems to lament) which is partly behind the push for market forces in the current era. Even moderate eco- nomic rationalists honest enough to ad- mit that some other countries have appar- ently benefitted under interventionist policies, will reject the idea here largely because the Australian state's track record in economic intervention is not a good one. Pusey's book, then, needs a more critical appraisal of the Australian state.

Book Reviews 71

Certainly, there is a tendency to romanti- cise an earlier golden interventionist era in a completely uncritical way.

Quite rightly, in my view, Pusey has an ideological axe to grind with the na- tion's economic rationalists. Certainly, there is a lot of angst in the book which adds colour and an edge to the writing, but which also at times sees Pusey stretch the evidence to suit his wider critical aims. This is unfortunate because it will raise questions in the minds of many readers about how fair and even Pusey has been with his data. The image the book pro- jects is one of the Canberra bureaucracy infested with economic rat ional is t economists. If we count business train- ing and accountancy as well as eco- nomics, the level of infestation in Pusey's sample is 54 per cent, or 44 per cent if we just count economics graduates. This means, though, that over half the SES in Pusey's sample do not hold eco- nomics degrees. Moreover, it is clear that (for some unexplained reason) there is 'some over-representation' (p. 59) of economic departments in Pusey's sample, and when the whole SES is assessed, the level of economics graduates falls to only 25 per cent. Admittedly, Pusey is right in pointing to the prevalence of econocrats in the key central agencies, but this still leaves 75 per cent of Canberra's SES in the non-economics category. This sort of data doesn't sit well with Pusey's wider claims, and another writer could just as easily claim, perhaps, that the country's economic problems stem in part from a lack of sufficient economic expertise in the bureaucracy.

In another example, Pusey claims that 'it is the wish of two-thirds of our SES of- fleers to "bust the unions"'. This some- what emotive claim is based on response data to survey question 26 (graphed in Fig. 2.5) that shows two-thirds of the sample 'agreed' with deregulation of the labour market, with the rest disagreeing. Yet when we look at question 26 itself (reproduced in Appendix A), we find not two possible survey responses but four - fully approve, approve with reservations,

disapprove with reservations, and com- pletely disapprove. Pusey's handling of the data, then, leaves no room for finer grained interpretation, and, in this case, we simply don't know how many of Pusey's S ES labour market deregulators had reservations about the idea or how se- rious those reservations might be. At one point in the book, Pusey praises a study by Theda Skocpol for its 'beautifully fine-grained analysis'. It's a pity Pusey has not done the same in his own work.

These criticisms raise at least some doubts about the scholarly integrity of the book. This is a shame because the book already has, and will hopefully con- tinue to galvanise, critical attention on a now identifiable cadre of econocrats who have, arguably, done a lot of damage to the economic and wider social and cultural fabric of the country. The book deserves to be widely read, but its content needs careful scrutiny.

Stephen Bell, Graduate Public Policy Program, University of New England, Armidale.

Values Education in Austral ian S c h o o l s B.V. Hill Australian Education Review No. 32, A.C.E.R., Hawthorn, Victoria, 3122 186 pages

Brian Hill has provided an interesting new way of conceiving values education in Australian schools. He brings out well the all-pervasive influence of value choices in the curriculum as a whole and the impossibility of having a neutral or value-free curriculum. He also argues that the value framework resting on the tradi- tional liberal education model while still having much to offer, is not sufficient for Australian schools in the 1990s. We need to take account of the multi-ethnic nature of contemporary Australian soci- ety and explicitly promote multicultural- ism which can then serve as an underly-

72 Book Reviews

ing model for all aspects of the curricu- lum, not just the traditional value areas of moral and religious education.

However, as Hill says, one of the risks of espousing multiculturalism is that of encouraging cultural neurosis, that is, the lack of a stable and coherent value system of one's own to which one is able to give full commitment. He therefore in- troduces the valuable notion of a 'transcultural perspective'. Unfortunately his discussion of this concept is rather brief and vague and it is one that would repay a lot more attention by Hill and other contemporary writers on Australian curriculum issues. One crucial element that would need to be addressed here would be the idea of transcending individual cul- tural differences and conflicts, while drawing from them a coherent set of fun- damental principles (not necessarily shared by all groups) which could form the basis of a new way of conceiving what is to be an Australian in the last decade of the Twentieth Century.

To achieve such a goal we would need to develop an empathy (not merely sym- pathy) for the other cultures in our midst, which would involve a genuine under- standing of how other groups think and feel about basic value issues. This in turn would require direct interaction and shar- ing in other ways of life. So, as Hill does point out, this transcultural ideal in- volves an important affective as well as cognitive dimension.

Within this general value framework Hill develops, in a quite readable way, a number of relevant themes, both philo- sophical and practical. He examines, for instance, the links between morality and religion where he distinguishes six logi- cally separate types of possible relation- ship arguing that the most appropriate way of conceiving the two is as different domains but with important areas of over- lap. He also asks the question whether the job of values education has become too hard for the state school and argues convincingly that it has not and that the state school can justifiably aim to bring about commitment in its pupils to the

procedural values built into Australian democratic life. He then examines the implications for non-state schools, and maintains that such schools are obliged to work within the liberal democratic ethos and that there is a need for some to urgently examine practices that may con- flict with this (e.g., religious indoctrina- tion in a particular faith).

Overall, Brian Hill has provided a use- ful service in drawing together the whole range of value issues across the curricu- lum and relating these specifically to the Australian context. In so doing, he has filled an important gap in the available literature.

Peter Hobson, Senior Lecturer, Department of Social, Cultural and Curriculum Studies, University of New England

Teacher Educat ion: Research and D e v e l o p m e n t s on T e a c h e r Educat ion in the N e t h e r l a n d s J. T. Voorbach and L.G.M. Prick (eds.) Amsterdam, Swets & Zeitlinger, 1990 170 pages

This collection contains almost all the Dutch contributions to the XIV the annual conference of the Association of Teacher Education in Europe in 1989. Many of the papers take the form of reports on re- search in progress. The book has three parts. In Part I, Research Related to Teaching Practice, there are six contribu- tions, one of which is printed in Dutch. They are: Equal Opportunities and Classroom Interactions in Preservice and Inservice Teacher Training Courses by Dolle-Willemsen and Rodenburg-Smit, Taking Account of the Presumptions of Student Teachers by Broekman, Bannik and V e d d e r , L'i t e r a r i s c h e Erkundungsgangen Im DaF-Unterricht by Tuk, The'Concept of Photosynthesis and Pupils Ideas on the Concept of Cycles by Boschhuizen, Pupils Ideas About Health by Brinkman, and, Pupils' Ideas on lleredity by Lakeman, Boschuizen and

Book Reviews 73

Brinkman. In Part II, Education and Actual Developments, there is only one contribution; namely, Teacher Education and the Development of a Political Attitude in Consequence of an Open Europe by van der Dussen. Part III, Teacher Related Research, contains five contributions including The Training of Primary Teachers in the Netherlands: Discrepancies Between Supply and Demand, 1920-1990 by Frankrijer; The Process of Reflection and the Relation with Teachers" Self-System by Admiraal, Korthagen and Vedder; Diagnosis of Students' Preconceptions with a Multiple- Choice Test: The Effects of its Use in a Teaching Strategy by Licht; l l uman Resources Management in the Autonomous School by Prick and van der Horst; and The Professional Preparation of Primary School Teachers in Europe by Vonk.

This collection is not one which would readily recommend itself to those with a research interest in teacher educa- tion. First, the (English) language is fre- quently quite difficult to follow. This se- riously detracts from some papers (see, for example, Dolle-Wil lemsen and Rodenburg-Smit; and Broekman, Bannik and Vedder). It appears that most of the authors are bi-lingual since no mention is made of a translator. While one can ad- mire the authors' bi-linguality, clearly, the papers would have benefitted from some editorial work to enhance the qual- ity of the publication. (The paper by Tuk will, of course, only be useful to those who read Dutch or who have access to a translator.)

Second, the quality of some of the re- search reported appears to be rather poor and distinctly old-fashioned. It is, for example, a long while since I have heard enthusiastic support of interaction scales based on modified versions of FIAC (see, for example, Dolle-Wil lemsen and Rodenburg-Smit). Moreover, the ap- proach to gender equity in the classroom in Dolle-Willemsen and Rodenburg-Smit is oddly mechanistic and devoid of any of the influence of the exciting recent work

being conducted by feminist postmod- ernist researchers (see, for example, Davies and Banks 1991). It was equally surprising to find van der Dussen's plea, in the context of an open Europe, for teachers and teacher educators to recog- nise the political nature of their work. Given the literature in the fields of soci- ology, psychology and philosophy over the past decade or so, it would be hard to imagine this understanding not permeat- ing the work of teachers and teacher edu- cators. The fact that Dutch research might not necessarily be of consistently high quality, or indeed of the cutting edge variety, is well addressed in Kieviet (1990) who explains the historically re- stricted access of teacher edtacators to re- search funding.

However, the book is not without some redeeming qualities. For example, the emphasis on the importance of school students' preconceptions in learn- ing new concepts (see, for example, the c o n t r i b u t i o n s by B o s c h h u i z e n ; Brinkman; Lakeman, Boschuizen and Brinkman; and Licht) is evidence of en- gagement by Dutch researchers in appro- priate, useful and relevant research activi- ties. Similarly, the research concerned with the prior knowledge of preservice students and attempts to encourage pre- service students to uncover implicit in- fluences on their teaching and reflec- tively consider their impact is highly ap- propriate (see, for example, papers by Broekman, Bannik and Vedder; and Admiraal, Korthagen and Vedder). It is just unfortunate that so many of the con- tributions are so hard to follow.

References

Davies, B. and Banks, C. (1991), 'The G e n d e r Trap" A F e m i n i s t Poststructuralist Analysis of Primary School Children's Talk about Gender', Journal of Curriculum Studies, 24(1), pp. 1-25.

Kieviet, F. K. (1990), 'A Decade of Research in the Netherlands', in R.P. Tisher and M.F. Wideen (eds.),

74 Book Reviews

Research in Teacher Education: International Perspectives, London, Falmer Press, pp. 47-65.

Elizabeth Hatton, Department of Social, Cultural and Curriculum Studies, University of New England

Ability, Partial Information, Guessing: Statistical Modelling Appl ied to Mul t ip l e -Cho ice Tests T.P. Hutchinson Adelaide, Rumsby Scientific Publishing, 1991. 266 pages, $33 (paper).

This book provides an extensive statisti- cal treatment of models of performance on multiple-choice tests. Unlike Item Response Theory (IRT) which is a model of response probabilities, Hutchinson claims to provide a theoretical foundation for the 'psychological processes' associ- ated with multiple-choice test perfor- mance. In his treatment, Hutchinson considers alternative interpretations and implications of guessing, omitted items, differing test formats including answer- until-correct strategies, and partial in- formation. It should be clearly noted that the author himself admits that his ap- proach, termed mismatch theory, is new and still developing. He states that the theoretical ideas he presents are:

in many ways crude - there is no at- tempt at mechanistic realism in mod- elling the subject's processes of thought in attacking a problem. But at least it [the theory] is able to pre- dict how the subject will behave when the format of the test is changed - when a second attempt is permitted at questions answered wrongly, for in- stance. At least the theory is not as bad as assuming the only alternative to perfect knowledge is no knowledge and hence random guessing (p. 4).

It should also be noted at the outset that the book is heavy reading and is not user-oriented. It is a relatively terse theo- retical treatise with much of the necessary mathematics provided for anchoring the concepts of the mismatch theory. In sev- eral places, Hutchinson's notation be- comes confusing and obscure, and steps in logic are occasionally omitted - all of which serve to make the text much more difficult to read than perhaps it could be. Although Hutchinson includes a chapter of exercises for students, I would hesitate to use this text for any but the very ad- vanced and mathematically sophisticated student of psychometrics - thus the actual audience for the book is rather small and selective.

The book opens with an outline chap- ter where Hutchinson sets the stage for his theory and reviews what he will cover in the text. It is here that Hutchinson makes and defends the claim that psy- chometrics has fallen short of providing a full account of test-taking behaviour by focussing too much on sophisticated statistics at the expense of development of cognitive theory to accompany the test models. He thus sets the reader up to receive mismatch theory as a new devel- opment designed to fill the gap left by statistically rich, but cognitively poor, approaches such as IRT.

In Chapter 2, Hutchinson provides a brief review of the important concepts and equations associated with IRT. He does this to present what he considers the 'state-of-the-art' in psychometric theory which he can then use as a backdrop against which to develop mismatch the- ory. Later in the book, Hutchinson actu- ally develops the statistical links be- tween his mismatch theory and standard IRT models. Hutchinson's review of IRT is very short and concise and he explores some of the more co'ntentious areas of IRT (such as whether easy or difficult items should be differentially weighted, monotonicity of the item characteristic curve (ICC), and whether the upper asymptote of the ICC should always be 1). One problem (which may not apply

Book Reviews 75

to all copies of the book) was that page 13 was missing in my edition of the book!

Chapter 3 presents the mismatch the- ory in its various forms and under various distributional assumptions. The basic tenant of the theory is that:

Each alternative response that is available in a multiple-choice item gives rise within the subject to a con- tinuously-distributed random variable that reflects how inappropriate the al- ternative is to the question posed. The distribution of this random vari- able for the correct option differs from that for the incorrect options (p. 44).

A correct response is thus selected as the one which mismatches least the ques- tion at hand. The going gets a bit rough in this chapter partly because of confus- ing notation and partly because the treatment is too brief. He extends his treatment in Chapter 4 by considering the response distributions, not as continu- ous, but as finite categorical states. He presents at least six variations of finite- state theory, each tied to particular exten- sions of the testing activity. For exam- ple, Hutchinson derives a theory to deal with misinformation in test items and one to deal with distractors which are known to be distractors. Again, brevity works against clarity of presentation in this chapter.

Chapters 5 through 7 consider various aspects of the multiple-choice testing problem and indicates how mismatch theory can be used to make predictions about test behaviour under the conditions which bound the problems discussed. The types of problems discussed include vary- ing the format of the multiple-choice test in a variety of ways such as requiring con- fidence estimates on responses, answer- until-correct (AUC) strategies, ' non-of - the-above' and 'all-of-the-above' options, response weighting, and the impact of number of options. He further explores the AUC style of testing in Chapter 6 by

reporting on an empirical study using the strategy. Here, then, Hutchinson begins to connect his theory with empirical test data. Chapter 7 focuses on empirical data arising out of a test format which em- ploys some proport ion of nonsense items (those which have no correct op- tion available). In all of his empirical demonstrations, Hutchinson shows fairly clear evidence that subjects do possess partial information on multiple-choice tests, and that varying the format of the test can illuminate the extent to which such partial knowledge is present.

Chapter 8 is quite useful in that Hutchinson takes time to criticise his own mismatch theory. Here he examines issues such as whether partial informa- tion is good or bad, whether wrong re- sponses are better than omits, how the assumption of equal item difficulties by mismatch theory affects the theory's pre- dictions, and the implications of subjects working to maximise their score or merely to pass the test. Hutchinson is tough on his theory which was refreshing to see; he clearly sees mismatch theory as useful to pursue but needing much more development work and empirical testing.

In Chapter 9, Hutchinson shows how mismatch theory and IRT can be 'melded' together to form a coherent theoretical approach. His primary purpose here is to avail himself of some of the mathemati- cal aspects of IRT which allow him to re- lax some of the more restrictive assump- tions in mismatch theory. Thus he de- rives versions of mismatch theory which can cope with unequal item difficulties and with unequal attractiveness among distractors.

Chapter 10 of the book reviews Hutchinson's ideas for the future devel- opment and exploration of mismatch theory. He ranges widely in his discus- sion to cover aspects such as the unidi- mensionali ty problem (which plagues not only mismatch theory but IRT as well), the relationship between guessing and difficulty, and further exploration of the AUC strategy as a way of illuminating partial knowledge. His last chapter pre-

76 Book Reviews

sents a range of assignments for students, many of which involve derivations and computer programming.

My overall impression of the book was that it represents an important devel- opment in psychometrics, but as a device for 'selling' the theory to students and po- tential users, the book fails badly. It would be best employed as a reference text for researchers, not as a learning de- vice for students. However, I must point out one critically important plus attached to this book. Hutchinson shows clear ev- idence of having read widely and deeply

in the test literature: the book is very thorough in its coverage of what is now known and what the controversies and various opinions are about many con- tentious issues. I would commend the au- thor on his thorough and balanced inte- gration of the literature in every step of the development and empirical testing of his theory.

Ray W. Cooksey, Department Psychology, University of New England

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