A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Custodians of Place provides a new theoretical framework that accounts for how different types of cities arrive at decisions about residential growth and economic development. Lewis and Neiman surveyed officials in hundreds of California cities of all sizes and socioeconomic characteristics to account for differences in local development policies. This book shows city governments at the center of the action in shaping their destinies, frequently acting as far-sighted trustees of their communities.
They explain how city governments often can insulate themselves for the better from short-term political pressures and craft policy that builds on past growth experiences and future vision. Findings also include how conditions on the ground—local commute times, housing affordability, composition of the local labor force—play an important role in determining the approach a city takes toward growth and land use. What types of cities tend to aggressively pursue industrial or retail firms? What types of cities tend to favor housing over business development? What motivates cities to try to slow residential growth? Custodians of Place answers these and many other questions.
Rapid social economic changes, the transition from a planned economy to a market economy, or even economic liberalization can lead to political instability and the collapse of authoritarian regimes. Despite experiencing all of these unprecedented changes in the past forty years, China under the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership has so far successfully transformed and improved both its governance capacity and its ruling capacity. Governing and Ruling addresses this regime resilience puzzle by examining the political logic of its taxation system, especially the ways in which taxation helps China handle three governance problems: maneuvering social control, improving agent discipline, and eliciting cooperation. Changdong Zhang argues that a taxation system plays an important role in sustaining authoritarian rule, in China and elsewhere, by combining co-optation and repression functions. The book collects valuable firsthand and secondhand data; studies China’s taxation system, intergovernmental fiscal relationships, composition of fiscal revenue sources, and tax administration; and discusses how each dimension influences the three governance problems.
"There have been many attempts to adapt Foucault's arguments to the study of international relations, but this powerful and provocative book is the most sustained, and arguably the most successful in showing how the governmentality approach can be adapted to the analysis of global politics."
---Barry Hindess, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University
A highly welcome and original contribution to contemporary debates on the shape and future of the international system and on the possibility of reconfiguring IR theory as social theory."
---Mathias Albert, Bielefeld University, Germany
"Iver Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending have put meat on the bones of Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality, fulfilling the hopes of long-famished students and scholars of global governance. Through their focus on specific case studies, the authors have provided a much-needed contribution to the international relations literature, one that is sure to become a staple of courses and seminars throughout the world."
---Ronnie D. Lipschutz, University of California, Santa Cruz
What does globalization mean for the principle of state sovereignty and for the power and functioning of states? Whereas realists assert the continued importance of states, constructivists contend that various political entities as well as the logic of globalization itself undermine state sovereignty.
Drawing on the state formation literature and on social theory, particularly the works of Weber and Foucault, Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending question the terms of the realist-constructionist debate. Through detailed case studies, they demonstrate that states use nongovernmental organizations and international organizations indirectly to enforce social order and, ultimately, to increase their own power. At the same time, global politics is dominated by a liberal political rationality that states ignore at their peril. While states remain as strong as ever, they operate within a global polity of new hierarchies among states and between states and other actors.
Iver B. Neumann is Director of Research at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Oslo.
Ole Jacob Sending is Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, where he heads the Research Programme on Global Governance and International Organizations.
Cover art credit: © iStockphoto.com/Will Evans
Also available as an e-book.
Beginning with a discussion of the political, economic, and cultural development of Europe from a historical perspective, the focus of the book shifts to an examination of the changing forms of European democracy and the move from public ownership and planning to privatization and deregulated competition. Further essays analyze the challenge to national party systems and electoral performance from emerging social movements and organized interest groups. Political and bureaucratic structures are also examined as is the new European constitutionalism reflected in the increasingly significant role of the judiciary. Lastly, attention is turned to several major themes in European politics: the changing foundations of foreign and security policy, the function of industrial champion firms, and the retreat from the welfare state. Primarily comparative in its scope, Governing the New Europe does devote particular attention to specific major states as well as to the importance of the European Union to the political life of member and non-member countries.
Neither exaggerating the common features of the patterns that have emerged in contemporary Europe nor capitulating to the complexity of enduring differences and instabilities between states, Governing the New Europe will become one of the standard texts in its field.
Contributors. Jack Hayward, Jolyon Howorth, Herbert Kitschelt, Marie Lavigne, Tom Mackie, Michael Mezey, Edward C. Page, Richard Parry, Richard Rose, Anthony Smith, Alec Stone
Take four emblematic American scenes: the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando; an ecotour of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks; the film An Inconvenient Truth. Other than expressing a common interest in the environment, they seem quite dissimilar.
And yet, as Governing the Wild makes clear, these sites are all manifestations of green governmentality, each seeking to define and regulate our understanding, experience, and treatment of nature. Stephanie Rutherford shows how the museum presents a scientized assessment of global nature under threat; the Animal Kingdom demonstrates that a corporation can successfully organize a biopolitical project; the ecotour, operating as a school for a natural aesthetic sensibility, provides a visual grammar of pristine national nature; and the film offers a toehold on a moral way of encountering nature. But one very powerful force unites the disparate “truths” of nature produced through these sites, and that, Rutherford tells us, is their debt to nature’s commodification.
Rutherford’s analysis reveals how each site integrates nature, power, and profit to make the buying and selling of nature critical to our understanding and rescuing of it. The combination, she argues, renders other ways of encountering nature—particularly more radically environmental ways—unthinkable.
Wind energy is often framed as a factor in rural economic development, an element of the emerging “green economy” destined to upset the dominant greenhouse- gas-emitting energy industry and deliver conscious capitalism to host communities. The bulk of wind energy firms, however, are subsidiaries of the same fossil fuel companies that wrought havoc in shale-gas and coal-mining towns from rural Appalachia to the Great Plains. On its own, wind energy development does not automatically translate into community development.
In Governing the Wind Energy Commons, Keith Taylor asks whether revenue generated by wind power can be put to community well-being rather than corporate profit. He looks to the promising example of rural electric cooperatives, owned and governed by the 42 million Americans they serve, which generate $40 billion in annual revenue. Through case studies of a North Dakota wind energy cooperative and an investor-owned wind farm in Illinois, Taylor examines how regulatory and social forces are shaping this emerging energy sector. He draws on interviews with local residents to assess strategies for tipping the balance of power away from absentee-owned utilities.
During the past thirty years, the American workplace has undergone fundamental changes in the composition of its workforce, its technology, its financial structure, and its competitive position. These social and economic transformations have been paralleled by equally profound changes in the legal framework of the employment relationship. The National Labor Relations Act has proved incapable of protecting the long-established right of employees to union representation against growing resistance by employers. And to fill the gap created by the decline of unions, the legislatures and courts have been busy creating and enforcing many new individual employee rights.
Governing the Workplace addresses this new world of work. Its main concern is with the question of who will represent the interests of workers in major decisions about their lives: how and when they will be hired, fired, and retired, and how they will be treated when they are on the job. The book examines in vivid detail many real-life problems, ranging from wrongful dismissal and mandatory drug testing to pay equity and occupational safety, to employee involvement on the shop floor and in the corporate boardroom. Should workers be represented by a lawyer in the courtroom, by a government official in charge of an administrative program, by the employer’s personnel manager, by the union leader engaged in collective bargaining with the employer, or by the employees themselves participating in a committee that exercises real influence inside the firm? After undertaking a systematic appraisal of each of these options, leading labor lawyer Paul Weiler develops a blueprint for the reconstruction of the law of the workplace, especially designed to give American workers more effective representation.
"Provocative and often wise. . . . Cook, who has a complex understanding of the relationship between governing and the news, provides a fascinating account of the origins of this complicity."—James Bennet, Washington Monthly
"[Governing with the News] addresses central issues of media impact and power in fresh, illuminating ways. . . . Cook mines a wealth of historical and organizational literature to assert that the news media are a distinct political institution in our democratic system."—Robert Schmuhl, Commonweal
The formation of the press as a political institution began in the early days of the republic when newspapers were sponsored by political parties; the relationship is now so central that press offices are found wherever one turns. Cook demonstrates not only how the media are structured as an institution that exercises collective power but also how the role of the media has become institutionalized within the political process, affecting policy and instigating, rather than merely reflecting, political actions. Cook's analysis is a powerful and fascinating guide to our age when newsmaking and governing are inseparable.
"This is a wonderful analysis of a highly important topic. Tim Cook is resoundingly right that we need to look at the media as political institutions and their operatives as political actors."—David R. Mayhew, author of Divided We Govern
"This meticulously researched and well reasoned work proposes to take seriously a thesis which flies in the face of both journalistic lore and political myth. Governing with the News is an innovative contribution to our understanding of media."—W. Lance Bennett, author of News: The Politics of Illusion
"This book should be read by journalists . . . by mass communication faculty teaching courses in media structure or effects and journalism faculty as a supplemental text to courses in media history and media management."—Benjamin J. Burns, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
Once the hub of the tsarist state, later Brezhnev's "model Communist city"--home of the Kremlin, Red Square, and St. Basil's Cathedral--Moscow is for many the quintessence of everything Russian. Timothy Colton's sweeping biography of this city at the center of Soviet life reveals what such a position has meant to Moscow and ultimately to Russia itself.
Linchpin of the Soviet system and exemplar of its ideology, Moscow was nonetheless instrumental in the Soviet Union's demise. It was in this metropolis of nine million people that Boris Yeltsin, during two frustrating years as the city's party boss, began his move away from Communist orthodoxy. Colton charts the general course of events that led to this move, tracing the political and social developments that have given the city its modern character. He shows how the monolith of Soviet power broke down in the process of metropolitan governance, where the constraints of censorship and party oversight could not keep up with proliferating points of view, haphazard integration, and recurrent deviation from approved rules and goals. Everything that goes into making a city--from town planning, housing, and retail services to environmental and architectural concerns--figures in Colton's account of what makes Moscow unique. He shows us how these aspects of the city's organization, and the actions of leaders and elite groups within them, coordinated or conflicted with the overall power structure and policy imperatives of the Soviet Union. Against this background, Colton explores the growth of the anti-Communist revolution in Moscow politics, as well as fledgling attempts to establish democratic institutions and a market economy.
As it answers persistent questions about Soviet political history, this lavishly illustrated volume may also point the way to understanding Russia's future.
In the wake of globalization, national governments are becoming increasingly interdependent, and knowledge is arguably becoming the most valuable form of capital. Helmut Willke’s Smart Governance offers a new perspective on global governance from the vantage point of a global knowledge society.
Employing a case study of the global financial system and an analysis of several governance regimes, Willke contends that markets, legal systems, and morality must evolve to cope with uncertainty, build capacities, and achieve resilience. Smart Governance will change the way economists, historians, and political scientists view international cooperation.
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