Bureaucrats, Technocrats, Femocrats

Some of the fundamental features of the contemporary state are contested in this collection of essays which are concerned with Australian political sociology and public policy. Among the themes explored are the development of the complex interventionist state, characterized by the proliferation of its activities to encompass virtually every feature of its subjects' everyday lives and functioning as a central site of struggle over the distribution of social, economic, political and cultural resources; and the impact of the so-called new social movements - the women's movement, the various multiracial and multicultural movements, and the environmentalist movement - which make new claims on the democratization of the distribution of resources; the impact on the state of the pressure for economic "restructuring", arising from the new terms of competition within a global economy in recession. This book is intended for students and researchers in political and theoretical sociology, and public policy.