Agendas and Decisions


Book Description

Connecting theory and practice, Agendas and Decisions explores how state-level public executives and managers decide and implement policy. The authors focus on Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander's (1979–1987) management system, which believed in and practiced the principles espoused by leadership theorists: focus on one or two important substantive problems or initiatives, work with stakeholders to protect the organization and to obtain necessary resources, hire good people, and authorize them to act. In addition to sending his cabinet members to the Kennedy School of Government to learn leadership principles, he also established the Tennessee Government Executive Institute (TGEI) to provide a similar program for mid-level executives. Authors Dorothy F. Olshfski and Robert B. Cunningham managed the TGEI during its first five years and had unprecedented access to state-level public executives and managers. Here, they explain the everyday workings of state-level bureaucracy within the context of a simple decision model and share managers' and executives' own stories. Their research questions several aspects of the current orthodoxy on decision-making processes, offers new thinking about executive leadership in implementation and evaluation, and compares executive and middle-manager thinking and behavior.




The Surprising Science of Meetings


Book Description

No organization made up of human beings is immune from the all-too-common meeting gripes: those that fail to engage, those that inadvertently encourage participants to tune out, and those that blatantly disregard participants' time. In The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven G. Rogelberg draws from extensive research, analytics and data mining, and survey interviews to share the proven techniques that help managers and employees change the way they run meetings and upgrade the quality of their working hours.




Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies


Book Description

How does an idea's time come? -- Participants on the inside of government -- Outside of government, but not just looking in -- Processes: origins, rationality, incrementalism, and garbage cans -- Problems -- The policy primeval soup -- The political stream -- The policy window, and joining the streams -- Wrapping things up -- Some further reflections -- Epilogue: Health care reform in the Clinton and Obama Administrations -- Appendix on methods.




Agendas and Instability in American Politics


Book Description

When Agendas and Instability in American Politics appeared fifteen years ago, offering a profoundly original account of how policy issues rise and fall on the national agenda, the Journal of Politics predicted that it would “become a landmark study of public policy making and American politics.” That prediction proved true and, in this long-awaited second edition, Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner refine their influential argument and expand it to illuminate the workings of democracies beyond the United States. The authors retain all the substance of their contention that short-term, single-issue analyses cast public policy too narrowly as the result of cozy and dependable arrangements among politicians, interest groups, and the media. Jones and Baumgartner provide a different interpretation by taking the long view of several issues—including nuclear energy, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safety—to demonstrate that bursts of rapid, unpredictable policy change punctuate the patterns of stability more frequently associated with government. Featuring a new introduction and two additional chapters, this updated edition ensures that their findings will remain a touchstone of policy studies for many years to come.




Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies


Book Description

Kingdon's landmark work on agenda setting and policy formation is drawn from interview conducted with people in and around the U.S. federal government, and from case studies, government documents, party platforms, press coverage, and public opinion surveys. While other works examine how policy issues are decided, Kingdon's book was the first to consider how issues got to be issues. This enduring work attempts to answer the questions: How do subjects come to officials' attention? How are the alternatives from which they choose generated? How is the governmental agenda set? Why does an idea's time come when it does? Longman is proud to announce that Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies has been reissued in this Longman Classics edition, featuring a new epilogue: Health Care Reform from Clinton to Obama. Comparing the Clinton administration in 1993 with the Obama administration in 2009 and 2010, Kingdon analyses how agenda setting, actors, and alternatives affect public policy.




Making Meetings Work


Book Description

A best-seller in its first edition, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition covers everything you need to know about organizing engaging meetings, including preparing agendas, controlling what happens behind the scenes prior to and after meetings, and managing conflicting values and personalities. Through the Meeting Masters Research Project at the University of Michigan, author John E. Tropman observed and interviewed the nation′s most successful meeting experts to find out how to make meetings both stimulating and productive. Based on his findings, Tropman formulated seven principles and fourteen commandments for implementing dynamic meetings. This second edition has been extensively revised and expanded to include Family meetings and family group decision making Problems and solutions for board of directors meetings Community and civic meetings Volunteers and meetings Leadership in community decision making Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition provides simple, easily applied best practices for supervising or instigating meetings with decision accomplishment outcomes. Author John E. Tropman reveals goal oriented procedures that keep proposals moving towards quality group decision making and assure other participants look forward to attending your meetings. Written with humor and a deep understanding of the realities of business and political life, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition is an extraordinary resource for anyone who leads, facilitates, or attends meetings.




Cultural Strategies of Agenda Denial


Book Description

This is the first book devoted to examining why some issues proposed by aggrieved individuals or groups are denied access to policy agendas. The book contains case studies that look at the policy process from the perspective of the strategies opponents often use to ensure agenda denial--strategies usually motivated by perceived threats to widely held world views and identities.




Agenda Formation


Book Description

"Experienced politicians and legislators have always known that by shaping the agenda they can influence decisions. In the past, experienced politicians' knowledge has been mostly anecdotal. The development of social choice theory provides a basis for a fuller and more systematic understanding of the effects of agendas on outcomes. In this book, the appreciation of the role and workings of agendas that has been developed using social choice theory is presented in a nontechnical way." "This collection of essays explores several features of agenda formation by developing ideas such as that most issues are one-dimensional, agenda items and issues are certain to change because losers have an interest in changing them, domestic concerns at least partially determine agendas and issues in international politics, and new issues and arguments can abruptly change the expectations about winning. The distinguished contributors argue that the knowledge needed to compete includes knowing what the possible agenda items or issues are, where they come from, and how to manipulate them advantageously."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved




Policy Agendas in British Politics


Book Description

Using a unique dataset spanning fifty years of policy-making in Britain, this book traces how topics like the economy, international affairs, and crime have shifted in importance. It takes a new approach to agenda setting called focused adaptation, and sheds new light on key points of change in British politics, such as Thatcherism and New Labour.




Deciding to Decide


Book Description

Of the nearly five thousand cases presented to the Supreme Court each year, less than 5 percent are granted review. How the Court sets its agenda, therefore, is perhaps as important as how it decides cases. H. W. Perry, Jr., takes the first hard look at the internal workings of the Supreme Court, illuminating its agenda-setting policies, procedures, and priorities as never before. He conveys a wealth of new information in clear prose and integrates insights he gathered in unprecedented interviews with five justices. For this unique study Perry also interviewed four U.S. solicitors general, several deputy solicitors general, seven judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and sixty-four former Supreme Court law clerks. The clerks and justices spoke frankly with Perry, and his skillful analysis of their responses is the mainspring of this book. His engaging report demystifies the Court, bringing it vividly to life for general readers--as well as political scientists and a wide spectrum of readers throughout the legal profession. Perry not only provides previously unpublished information on how the Court operates but also gives us a new way of thinking about the institution. Among his contributions is a decision-making model that is more convincing and persuasive than the standard model for explaining judicial behavior.