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| 1 |
ID:
106032
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article investigates the cultural dynamics and tensions of efforts to reform African tax bureaucracies according to contemporary global standards of independence, transparency, and efficiency. Focusing on the controversial establishment of a semi-independent tax authority in Mauritius, the article perceives tax reform as an uneasy and unstable meeting of different organizational cultures and epistemic communities. Unlike much existing literature - which understands public sector reform within the dichotomy of the modern and the traditional, and a resulting hybridity of bureaucratic culture - the article suggests that the notion of 'tribidity' better describes the reformed Mauritian tax authority. Here, three bureaucratic cultures interact: a global semi-private sector, centred on the performance-based culture of New Public Administration (NPA); a communal culture, emphasizing loyalty, ethnic identity, and union solidarity; and a Weberian culture, where process, hierarchy, and security are fundamental. The unsettled interplay of these overlapping bureaucratic cultures determined the fate of Mauritius's tax reforms, showing how such reform cannot be approached as entirely technical and apolitical.
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| 2 |
ID:
152083
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article focuses on the performance of the calypso song ‘VAT on You’, as a response to the introduction into Dominica of the value added tax (VAT). The article applies a set of concepts to frame and so enhance our understanding of the event in terms of global history. Both calypso and VAT have extended histories and this performance represents an unusual meeting of earlier and current forces of globalisation. The conclusion assesses the helpfulness of the framing concepts ‘longue durée,’ continuities, centring, class divisions and micro-resistance, and assesses the song’s contribution to such resistance
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