Reviews : Anna Yeatman, Bureaucrats, Technocrats and Femocrats: Essays on the Contemporary Australian State (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1990) Reviewed by Mark Considine
Abstract
ReviewsAnna Yeatman, Bureaucrats, Technocrats and Femocrats: Essays on the Contemporary Australian State (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1990) Reviewed by Mark Considine SAGE Publications, Inc.1991DOI: 10.1177/072551369103000111 The attempt to bring current policy dilemmas and problems of state administration into the same discussion as arguments about long-standing sociological problems makes this an important book. It is one of only a few Australian efforts which maintain a sociological perspective within a series of encounters with the technical world of policy and administration - Encel and Wilenski being the other obvious contenders for this title. Yeatman's work demonstrates that a radical sociological perspective has something to contribute to the world of policy and administration and, perhaps predictably, she also shows that this approach has more than a few problems to resolve. Consider her discussion of the Hawke Government's child support policy. This provides a challenging critique which upsets commonsense views and strikes at the heart of statist solutions. Developed in 1986, this scheme aims to bring distributive justice to the field of child maintenance by using the Taxation Office to collect child support payments from the non-custodial (usually male) parent. Yeatman points out that the policy received support from many femocrats, including