Democracy and the Public Service


Book Description

This revised edition, like the original, concerns the problems of harmonizing effective governmental administration with the requirements of a democracy. It features a new chapter on the impact of management and theories of management upon public personnel administration, including discussion of the Model Public Personnel Law of 1940, the Watergate scandals and President Carter's personnel reforms of 1978




The New Public Service


Book Description

The New Public Service: Serving, not Steering provides a framework for the many voices calling for the reaffirmation of democratic values, citizenship, and service in the public interest. It is organized around a set of seven core principles: (1) serve citizens, not customers; (2) seek the public interest; (3) value citizenship and public service above entrepreneurship; (4) think strategically, act democratically; (5) recognize that accountability isn’t simple; (6) serve, rather than steer; and (7) value people, not just productivity. The New Public Service asks us to think carefully and critically about what public service is, why it is important, and what values ought to guide what we do and how we do it. It celebrates what is distinctive, important, and meaningful about public service and considers how we might better live up to those ideals and values. The revised fourth edition includes a new chapter that examines how the role and significance of these New Public Service values have expanded in practice and research over the past 15 years. Although the debate about governance will surely continue for many years, this compact, clearly written volume both provides an important framework for a public service based on citizen discourse and the public interest and demonstrates how these values have been put into practice. It is essential reading fo students and serious practitioners in public administration and public policy.




Advancing Public Goods


Book Description

This is a timely and thought-provoking book which brings the discussion of public goods to confront the contemporary world economy where such goods have often a global nature and require super-national provision and control. Giovanni Dosi, St Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy In this wide-ranging selection of papers, distinguished economists, public policy advisers and political theorists contribute to the debate on public goods. The studies cover topics in the conceptualization, classification and stratification of public goods. Also examined are public institutional design, global economic institutions and partnership typologies. Individual papers address the financing, regulatory, organizational and legal aspects relating to services of general interest in Europe. The dynamics of global public good production, including monopolies, patents, scientific uncertainty and market failures, are discussed. Empirical research on the state, profit and non-profit sectors is presented. Providing numerous examples of specific public goods, the contributions also highlight the impact of macroeconomic policies on provision. The book presents a broad diversity of new approaches to global public goods within the framework of mixed economies, beyond the standard economic analysis of public services. Academics, researchers and policymakers in the area of global public goods and services will find this volume of great interest.




Rethinking Governance


Book Description

Several problems plague contemporary thinking about governance. From the multiple definitions that are often vague and confusing, to the assumption that governance strategies, networks and markets represent attempts by weakening states to maintain control. Rethinking Governance questions this view and seeks to clarify how we understand governance. Arguing that it is best understood as 'the strategies used by governments to help govern', the authors counter the view that governments have been decentred. They show that far from receding, states are in fact enhancing their capacity to govern by developing closer ties with non-government sectors. Identifying five 'modes' of government (governance through hierarchy, persuasion, markets and contracts, community engagement, and network associations), Stephen Bell and Andrew Hindmoor use practical examples to explore the strengths and limitations of each. In so doing, they demonstrate how modern states are using a mixture of governance modes to address specific policy problems. This book demonstrates why the argument that states are being 'hollowed out' is overblown.




European Union


Book Description

Richardson introduces the policy-making processes at work in the EU. This edition has been significantly improved to make it even more accessible for second and third year undergraduates. A website will also support this edition, featuring some of the more technical material such as statistics.




Securing 'the Homeland'


Book Description

This edited volume uses a ‘constructivist/reflexive’ approach to address critical infrastructure protection (CIP), a central political practice associated with national security. The politics of CIP, and the construction of the threat they are meant to counter, effectively establish a powerful discursive connection between that the traditional and normal conditions for day-to-day politics and the exceptional dynamics of national security. Combining political theory and empirical case studies, this volume addresses key issues related to protection and the governance of insecurity in the contemporary world. The contributors track the transformation and evolution of critical infrastructures (and closely related issues of homeland security) into a security problem, and analyze how practices associated with CIP constitute, and are an expression of, changing notions of security and insecurity. The book explores aspects of ‘securitisation’ as well as at practices, audiences, and contexts that enable and constrain the production of the specific form of governmentality that CIP exemplifies. It also explores the rationalities at play, the effects of these security practices, and the implications for our understanding of security and politics today.




Making Sense of the Multilevel Governance of Migration


Book Description

This book examines the nexus between City Networks, multilevel governance and migration policy. Examining several City Networks operating in the European Union and the United States of America’s multilevel political settings, it brings migration research into conversation with both policy studies and political science. One of the first comparative studies of City Networks and migration, the book argues that multilevel governance is the result of a contingent process of converging interests and views between leaders in network organisations and national governments, the latter continuing to play a key gatekeeping role on this topical issue even in the supranational EU system.




Energy, Power and Protest on the Urban Grid


Book Description

Providing a global overview of experiments around the transformation of cities' electricity networks and the social struggles associated with this change, this book explores the centrality of electricity infrastructures in the urban configuration of social control, segregation, integration, resource access and poverty alleviation. Through multiple accounts from a range of global cities, this edited collection establishes an agenda that recognises the uneven, and often historical, geographies of urban electricity networks, prompting attempts to re-wire the infrastructure configurations of cities and predicating protest and resistance from residents and social movements alike. Through a robust theoretical engagement with established work around the politics of urban infrastructures, the book frames the transformation of electricity systems in the context of power and resistance across urban life, drawing links between environmental and social forms of sustainability. Such an agenda can provide both insight and inspiration in seeking to build fairer and more sustainable urban futures that bring electricity infrastructures to the fore of academic and policy attention.




Public Employment Services and European Law


Book Description

Employment services are at the centre of a complex web of rules deriving from the EU, national public law and from private agreements. This book examines the law and regulation of public services through case studies of the public employment services in EU member states.




The Fetish Revisited


Book Description

Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.