178 Book Reviews

AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION BY TRAINING AND VISIT: T H E ASIAN EXPERIENCE M. M. Cernea, J. K. Coulter and J. F. A. Russell World Bank, Washington, 1983, 157 pp.

The report of a symposium held in Thailand is useful for both academics and practitioners in Rural Development. It deals with the Training-and-Visit (T and V) approach to extension that had its first widespread publicity in 1977 and has since been taken up, particularly in S.E. Asia, on a large scale with the encouragement of the World Bank.

The 14 chapters are a mixture of country essays on experiences in parts of Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines and Nepal, together with papers by Bank staff, on five major aspects of the T and V approach. These aspects-Farmer Participation and the Village Extension Worker, Technical Recommendations and Research-Extension Linkage, Training, Management and System Maintenance, and Monitoring and Evaluation-provide a good format for discussion of strengths and weaknesses of the method. For the reader coming new to the subject, the introductory chapter could have spelt out the salient characteristics of T and V more concisely.

The dominant messages of the text are the need for flexibility in the design, operation and development of extension systems, and for much more evaluation of on-going programmes. These are important because there has been increasing criticism on T and V in the literature:

(a) It is too rigid in structuring and execution. (b) Farmers’ initial enthusiam is often lost through lack of sufficient appropriate advice to

convey. (c) The method is excessively top-down in ignoring and failing t o diffuse farmers’ own

innovations, and failing to pass on to technical researchers the current conditions and requirements of farmers.

(d) Reliance on ‘contact’ farmers to pass on extension messages implies (wrongly) that the contact farmers are themselves good communicators and that farmers in their neighbourhood are sufficiently uniform in scale and resource access for messages to be of universal significanre.

(e) Scarce government funds might be usefully spent on investments other than extension.

It is a significant virtue of this book that, from time to time throughout, and particularly in the concluding chapter, these criticisms are either directly or indirectly addressed.

D. S. THORNTON Department of Agricultural Economics & Management

University of Reading

GOVERNMENT & T H E GOVERNED: BBC REITH LECTURES 1983 Sir Douglas Wass Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, 120 pp.

Sir Douglas Wass delivered this prestigious series of lectures shortly after retiring from his position as Permanent Secretary of the Treasury and Joint Head of the British Civil Service. Coming from such a background, he does not give much away. For example, he ‘can recall several important policy changes which governments have made as the result of a deliberate reassessment’. But he does not tell us what they were, nor give even one example. However, the worldly-wise reader will not expect any such revelations. What he can fairly ask for is a concise and intelligent discussion of a range of problems of central importance in public administration. And this is exactly what he gets. The issues raised include, for example,

Book Reviews 179

control of public expenditure, co-ordination of decision-making, the ethics of the administrator, Open Government, relations between Ministers and civil servants, and Select Committees.

Much of what is said is interesting because of who is saying it, rather than because of its intrinsic significance. For example when Wass says that no minister has won political distinction in the U.K. by his performance in Cabinet or by his contribution to collective decision-taking, it bears a good deal of thinking about. In the light of the increasing number of leaks by officials, it is interesting to read Wass’s view that ‘notwithstanding the loyalty of a civil servant t o the government, his conscience should clearly require him t o oppose actions which are either unlawful, unconstitutional. or which involve some great affront to Human values’. Would deliberate concealment of information from Parliament by a Minister come under the heading of ‘unconstitutional’? The critical reader will judge several of the topics t o be significant merely because they have been included, even before he has read what Wass has to say about them. He calls, for example, for the reinstatement of PAR, although many observers had written it off long before it was formally abolished. (Yet curiously, he has forgotten that the initials stand for Programme-not Policy-Analysis and Review). His cry of ‘Come back, CPRS, all (or almost all) is forgiven’ is noteworthy for similar reasons.

The author tells us that he was initially tempted to rewrite the lectures in the course of turning them into a book, but decided in the end to publish them as they stood. This is a pity. The effort of revision would surely have clarified some parts of his argument. For example, on p. 5 he embarks on a discussion of efficiency. ‘For me’, he writes, ‘efficiency means that actions and decisions are taken in a rational and systematic way; that internal conflicts and inconsistencies are brought t o the surface and resolved; and that objectives are defined and optimal means employed to secure them’. Three pages further on he says, ‘of course, if a given standard of service can be supplied by new techniques at lower cost, efficiency is improved’. This is quite a different approach to the concept and one which is more in line with that taken by writers on administration generally. (It is true that ‘optimal means’ may be taken to imply ‘minimum costs’; but is it reasonable to expect readers to interpret the former expression in that sense?) On p. 18 on yet another tack, he seems to confuse the concept of efficiency with that of effectiveness-a very different kettle of fish.

On the whole, however, this short, lucidly written book can be recommended with confidence to anyone seriously interested in public administration.

HENRY PARRIS Acton Society Trust

INTRODUCTION TO T H E SOCIOLOGY OF ‘DEVELOPING SOCIETIES’ Edited by Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin MacMillan, London, 1982,474 pp.

Before the Second World War when many ‘developing societies’ were under European colonial domination, research into their social characteristics was conducted on a limited basis by anthropologists, archaeologists and historians. But during the post-war years, when most secured political independence, economists, sociologists, political scientists and others began to take a wider interest in the phenomena of underdevelopment. By contributing to and articulating the largely implicit interdisciplinary paradigm which ordered early research in the field, sociologists made a distinctive contribution to this enquiry. They conceptualized and systematized prevailing ideas to provide a set of analytical and normative concepts which became known as modernization theory. However, other sociologists disagreed vociferously with the tenets of the modernization approach drawing attention to its theoretical and practical inadequacies and exposing its blatently ethnocentric features. In time, their criticisms helped to formulate an alternative paradigm which drew on Marxian ideas for