Our Journal


Book Description




Hearings


Book Description




The Kodak


Book Description










Becoming a Mighty Voice


Book Description

American labor unions resemble private representative democracies, complete with formally constituted conventions and officer election procedures. Like other democratic institutions, unions have repeatedly experienced highly charged conflicts over the integration of ethnic minorities and women into leadership positions. In Becoming a Mighty Voice, Daniel B. Cornfield traces the 55-year history of the United Furniture Workers of America (UFWA), describing the emergence of new social groups into union leadership and the conditions that encouraged or inhibited those changes. This vivid case history explores leadership change during eras of union growth, stability, and decline, not simply during isolated episodes of factionalism. Cornfield demonstrates that despite the strong forces perpetuating existing union hierarchies, leadership turnover is just as likely as leadership stagnation. He also shows that factors external to the union may influence leadership change; periods of turnover in the UFWA leadership reflected employer efforts to find cheap, non-union labor, as well as union efforts to unionize workers. When unions are threatened by intensified conflict with employers and when entrenched high status groups within the union are obliged to recruit members of lower socioeconomic status, then new social groups are likely to be integrated into union leadership. Becoming a Mighty Voice develops a theory of leadership change that will be of interest to many engaged in the labor, civil rights, and women's movements as well as to sociologists or historians of work, gender, and race, and to students of political and organizational behavior.







Aviation regulatory reform


Book Description







The Local Budget as a Complex System


Book Description

This book examines budgeting by analyzing the local government budget as a complex system, thus adding a new dimension to traditional budget textbooks. It is designed to complement existing texts—not replace—by putting the budget in a complex system, general equilibrium framework. A complex systems framework adds to conventional budget analysis in at least four ways: It looks at the budget as the result of many variables that are outside the finance department’s purview; it understands that there are multiple interdependences among these variables; it suggests analysis of non-obvious relationships among actions in the budget process in order to optimize results; and it argues that the actors in the process must understand that their budgetary behaviors have indirect and far-reaching implications that go beyond the budget document. This book also uses concepts seldom discussed in the budgetary literature—that of governance, including concepts of the facilitative state, with adjustments for exogenous shocks; the forms of decision making; and the political climate of the jurisdiction. This framework notes methods of success of firms in the private sector that operate in environments of rapid technological change. While becoming a popular theoretical framework for how private sector firms change, dynamic capability analysis has received little attention in the public management field. This book utilizes DC since public sector organizations also face rapidly changing environments. Lastly, the book discusses the potential relationship between the local budget and local community welfare maximization.