4 results for "Management"

Nationalism and conflict management

Eric Taylor Woods,Robert S. Schertzer,Eric Kaufmann
Ethno-national conflict is one of the central issues of modern politics. Despite the emergence of approaches to managing it, from nation-building to territorial autonomy, in recent years, the application of these approaches has been uneven. Old conflicts persist and new ones continually emerge. The authors of this book contend that what is needed to drive forward the theory and practice of ethno-national conflict management is a more nuanced understanding of ethnicity and nationalism. The book addresses this issue by linking theories of ethnicity and nationalism to theories of conflict management. Its contributors share a common goal of demonstrating that a nuanced understanding of ethnicity and nationalism can beneficially inform conflict management in theory and practice. To do so, they analyse both hot and cold conflict zones, as well as cases that have been important in the development of the most widely-used conflict management models. The book is aimed at those interested in the theory and practice of ethno-national conflict management as well as the study of ethnicity and nationalism. It is well-suited for undergraduate and advanced research students, experts and policy-makers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics.
Routledge 2013 127 pages

Design for liberty: private property, public administration, and the rule of law

Epstein, Richard A.
Following a vast expansion in the twentieth century, government is beginning to creak at the joints under its enormous weight. The signs are clear: a bloated civil service, low approval ratings for Congress and the President, increasing federal-state conflict, rampant distrust of politicians and government officials, record state deficits, and major unrest among public employees. In this compact, clearly written book, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein advocates a much smaller federal government, arguing that our over-regulated state allows too much discretion on the part of regulators, which results in arbitrary, unfair decisions, rent-seeking, and other abuses. Epstein bases his classical liberalism on the twin pillars of the rule of law and of private contracts and property rights—an overarching structure that allows private property to keep its form regardless of changes in population, tastes, technology, and wealth. This structure also makes possible a restrained public administration to implement limited objectives. Government continues to play a key role as night-watchman, but with the added flexibility in revenues and expenditures to attend to national defense and infrastructure formation. Although no legal system can eliminate the need for discretion in the management of both private and public affairs, predictable laws can cabin the zone of discretion and permit arbitrary decisions to be challenged. Joining a set of strong property rights with sound but limited public administration could strengthen the rule of law, with its virtues of neutrality, generality, clarity, consistency, and forward-lookingness, and reverse the contempt and cynicism that have overcome us.
Harvard University Press 2011-11-15 233 pages

The whole world is watching: mass media in the making & unmaking of the New Left

Gitlin, Todd
"The whole world is watching!" chanted the demonstrators in the Chicago streets in 1968, as the TV cameras beamed images of police cracking heads into homes everywhere. In this classic book, originally published in 1980, acclaimed media critic Todd Gitlin first scrutinizes major news coverage in the early days of the antiwar movement. Drawing on his own experiences (he was president of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-64) and on interviews with key activists and news reporters, he shows in detail how the media first ignore new political developments, then select and emphasize aspects of the story that treat movements as oddities. He then demonstrates how the media glare made leaders into celebrities and estranged them from their movement base; how it inflated the importance of revolutionary rhetoric, destabilizing the movement, then promoted "moderate" alternatives--all the while spreading the antiwar message. Finally, Gitlin draws together a theory of news coverage as a form of anti-democratic social management--which he sees at work also in media treatment of the anti-nuclear and other later movements. Updated for 2003 with a new preface, The Whole World Is Watching is a subtle and sensitive book, true to the passions and ironic reversals of its subject, and filled with provocative insights that apply to the media's relationship with all activist movements.
University of California Press 1980 327 pages

The war game: studies of the new civilian militarists

Horowitz, Irving Louis
War gaming has become a characteristic feature of modern life. From amateur clubs to professional academicians playing the war game in the company of military circles, we have come up against the phenomenon of the "robotization" of human life. Irving Louis Horowitz argues that those who protest the idea that war is a game do so on moral grounds that leave unanswered tough questions: What is the alternative to playing the game? What will become of us if we allow the opponent to become the better "player" in an all-or-nothing game of extinction? Horowitz provides answers in a logical manner while focusing on facts and ethical alternatives to risky ethics. The work is divided into three sections: The New Civilian Militarists, Thermonuclear Peace and Its Political Equivalents, and General Theory of Conflict and Conflict Resolution. Included are such topics as arms, policies, and games; morals, missiles, and militarism; and conflict, consensus, and cooperation. Horowitz concludes that it is time to register the fact that the basic option to destructive uses of science is not traditional morality, but better science--a science of survival. With a new introduction by Howard Schneiderman along with a major essay and other materials not included in the original edition, this classic work is a worthy contribution to intellectual debate in the twenty-first century and a must read for military strategists, sociologists, and historians.
Transaction Publishers 2013 195 pages