Colonial Bureaucracies: Politics of Administrative Reform in Nineteenth Century Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book is an abridged version of my PhD thesis submitted to the University of Sydney nearly three decades ago. All these years the thesis was lying on shelves collecting dust as my areas of interest and priorities changed. A few years ago, I felt the urge of sharing the contents of the study with a larger audience and enabling them to appreciate contemporary changes in Australian public bureaucracy in the backdrop of changes that started occurring more than one hundred and sixty years ago. It is important to scan the pages of history to perceive why administrative changes occurred in the way they did and what forces were at play in shaping those changes. I therefore decided to give the thesis the shape of a book by thoroughly editing and substantially reducing the original study and making it more focused and readable. I was particularly interested in exploring the manner in which the formative phase of public administration unfolded in a distant land whose 'colonial' history began only two and a quarter centuries ago. There, 'modern' political and administrative institutions developed in an indigenous social-cultural milieu that had not felt the need for any organized system. The native heterogeneous tribal groups scattered throughout the vast continent followed traditional lifestyles and social relations were based on complex kinship structures and rules. Thus, these institutions had to be created from scratch and were mainly based on British patterns to meet the demands of new and expanding colonies far away from the colonizing country.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".