Title: The political logic of economic reform in China
Author: Shirk, Susan L
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | China
Publisher's Description: In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chinese communist political institutions are more flexible and less centralized than their Soviet counterparts were.Shirk pioneers a rational choice institutional approach to analyze policy-making in a non-democratic authoritarian country and to explain the history of Chinese market reforms from 1979 to the present. Drawing on extensive interviews with high-level Chinese officials, she pieces together detailed histories of economic reform policy decisions and shows how the political logic of Chinese communist institutions shaped those decisions.Combining theoretical ambition with the flavor of on-the-ground policy-making in Beijing, this book is a major contribution to the study of reform in China and other communist countries.   [brief]
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Title: The politics of reform in Ghana, 1982-1991 
Author: Herbst, Jeffrey Ira
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Economic reform was the most pressing question for African and other Third World countries during the 1980s, and it will continue to dominate their public policy agendas during the coming decade. In this first full-length examination of the political economy of adjustment in Ghana, Jeffrey Herbst describes the causes of Ghana's dramatic economic decline and reviews the politics of reform that began in 1983.Ghana was one of the first African countries to adopt a comprehensive reform program and the one that has sustained adjustment longest. As Africa confronts the possibility of total economic collapse by the turn of the century, the Ghanaian experience will have profound ramifications across the continent in the debates regarding stabilization and structural change.Herbst devotes special attention to the interaction between the type of government and the politics of adjustment, the reaction of interest groups such as urban labor and the peasantry, and the relationship between economic and political change. His extended field research and sophisticated knowledge of the issues involved, both from the economic and political science literature, make this an extremely useful study. It will be important not only to Africanists, political scientists, economists, and sociologists, but also to government and financial leaders wrestling with economic reform in the Third World.   [brief]
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Title: Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and reform 
Author: Gleason, Elisabeth G
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Religion | Renaissance History | European History | Christianity
Publisher's Description: Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542) was a major protagonist in the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century. A worldly Venetian patrician, he later became an ascetic advocate of Church reform and, as a Catholic cardinal, was sent to the important Colloquy of Regensburg. He failed in his mission to bring about an agreement between Lutherans and Catholics; nevertheless, his life and thought, as well as his friendships with the most vocal proponents of concord, peace, and toleration, make him an impressive and significant historical figure.In the first biography of Contarini since 1885, Elisabeth Gleason greatly broadens our understanding of the man and his times. As a result, scholars and students will come to see Cardinal Gasparo Contarini as a reminder of alternative concepts of authority and liberty in both church and state.   [brief]
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Title: The politics of Muslim cultural reform: jadidism in Central Asia 
Author: Khalid, Adeeb 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam | Asian Studies | Asian History | European History
Publisher's Description: Adeeb Khalid offers the first extended examination of cultural debates in Central Asia during Russian rule. With the Russian conquest in the 1860s and 1870s the region came into contact with modernity. The Jadids, influential Muslim intellectuals, sought to safeguard the indigenous Islamic culture by adapting it to the modern state. Through education, literacy, use of the press and by maintaining close ties with Islamic intellectuals from the Ottoman empire to India, the Jadids established a place for their traditions not only within the changing culture of their own land but also within the larger modern Islamic world.Khalid uses previously untapped literary sources from Uzbek and Tajik as well as archival materials from Uzbekistan, Russia, Britain, and France to explore Russia's role as a colonial power and the politics of Islamic reform movements. He shows how Jadid efforts paralleled developments elsewhere in the world and at the same time provides a social history of the Jadid movement. By including a comparative study of Muslim societies, examining indigenous intellectual life under colonialism, and investigating how knowledge was disseminated in the early modern period, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform does much to remedy the dearth of scholarship on this important period. Interest in Central Asia is growing as a result of the breakup of the former Soviet Union, and Khalid's book will make an important contribution to current debates over political and cultural autonomy in the region.   [brief]
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Title: China's new business elite: the political consequences of economic reform 
Author: Pearson, Margaret M 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | China
Publisher's Description: The transition from a planned to a market economy that began in China in the late 1970s unleashed an extraordinary series of changes, including increases in private enterprise, foreign investment, the standard of living, and corruption. Another result of economic reform has been the creation of a new class - China's new business elite. Margaret M. Pearson considers the impact that this new class is having on China's politics. She concludes that, contrary to the assumptions of Westerners, these groups are not at the forefront of the emergence of a civil society; rather, they are part of a system shaped deliberately by the Chinese state to ensure that economic development will not lead to democratization.   [brief]
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Title: Risk and rationality: philosophical foundations for populist reforms 
Author: Shrader-Frechette, K. S 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Social Problems | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: Only ten to twelve percent of Americans would voluntarily live within a mile of a nuclear plant or hazardous waste facility. But industry spokespersons claim that such risk aversion represents ignorance and paranoia, and they lament that citizen protests have delayed valuable projects and increased their costs.Who is right? In Risk and Rationality , Kristin Shrader-Frechette argues that neither charges of irresponsible endangerment nor countercharges of scientific illiteracy frame the issues properly. She examines the debate over methodological norms for risk evaluation and finds analysts arrayed in a spectrum. Points of view extend from cultural relativists who believe that any risk can be justified (since no rational standards are ultimately possible) to naive positivists who believe that risk evaluation can be objective, neutral, and value free. Both camps, she argues, are wrong, because risk evaluation as a social process is rational and objective, even though all risk-evaluation rules are value-laden.Shrader-Frechette defends a middle position called "scientific proceduralism." She shows why extremist views are unreliable, reveals misconceptions underlying current risk-evaluation methods and strategies, and sketches the reforms needed to set hazard assessment and risk evaluation on a publicly defensible foundation.These reforms involve mathematical, economic, ethical, and legal procedures. They constitute a new paradigm for assessment when acceptance of public hazards is rational, recognizing that laypersons are often more rational in their evaluation of societal risks than either experts or governments have acknowledged. Such reforms would provide citizens with more influence in risk decisions and focus on mediating ethical conflicts, rather than seeking to impose the will of experts. Science, she argues, need not preclude democracy.   [brief]
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Title: In one's own shadow: an ethnographic account of the condition of post-reform rural China
Author: Liu, Xin 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | China
Publisher's Description: China underwent a dramatic social transformation in the last decade of the twentieth century. This powerful ethnographic study of one community focuses on the logic of everyday practice in post-reform rural China. Enriched with many vivid anecdotes describing life in the village of Zhaojiahe in northwestern China, In One's Own Shadow skillfully analyzes the changes and continuities marking the recent history of this region and highlights the broader implications for the way we understand Chinese modernity. Liu's narrative provides a wonderfully evocative exploration of many domains of everyday life such as kinship and marriage traditions, food systems, ceremonial celebrations, social relations, and village politics. He brings to life many of the personalities and customs of Zhaojiahe as he presents the villagers' strategies to modernize in an environment of scarce resources and a discredited cultural heritage. This accessibly written ethnography will be an essential contribution to the anthropology of China.   [brief]
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Title: The making of fornication: eros, ethics, and political reform in Greek philosophy and early Christianity
Author: Gaca, Kathy L
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical Philosophy | Classical Religions | Classical Politics | Christianity | Ethics | Social and Political Thought | Ancient History | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory - with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order - as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers.   [brief]
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Title: Politician's dilemma: building state capacity in Latin America
Author: Geddes, Barbara
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Economics and Business | Latin American History | Politics
Publisher's Description: In Latin America as elsewhere, politicians routinely face a painful dilemma: whether to use state resources for national purposes, especially those that foster economic development, or to channel resources to people and projects that will help insure political survival and reelection. While politicians may believe that a competent state bureaucracy is intrinsic to the national good, political realities invariably tempt leaders to reward powerful clients and constituents, undermining long-term competence. Politician's Dilemma explores the ways in which political actors deal with these contradictory pressures and asks the question: when will leaders support reforms that increase state capacity and that establish a more meritocratic and technically competent bureaucracy?Barbara Geddes brings rational choice theory to her study of Brazil between 1930 and 1964 and shows how state agencies are made more effective when they are protected from partisan pressures and operate through merit-based recruitment and promotion strategies. Looking at administrative reform movements in other Latin American democracies, she traces the incentives offered politicians to either help or hinder the process.In its balanced insight, wealth of detail, and analytical rigor, Politician's Dilemma provides a powerful key to understanding the conflicts inherent in Latin American politics, and to unlocking possibilities for real political change.   [brief]
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Title: Fanshen: a documentary of revolution in a Chinese village
Author: Hinton, William
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | China | Anthropology | Asian History
Publisher's Description: More than thirty years after its initial publication, William Hinton's Fanshen continues to be the essential source for those fascinated with China's continual process of rural reform and social change. This edition will appeal to anyone interested in understanding China's complex social processes, . . . [more]
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Title: True gardens of the gods: Californian-Australian environmental reform, 1860-1930
Author: Tyrrell, Ian R
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | California and the West | Environmental Studies
Publisher's Description: One of the most critical environmental challenges facing both Californians and Australians in the 1860s involved the aftermath of the gold rushes. Settlers on both continents faced the disruptive impacts of mining, grazing, and agriculture; in response to these challenges, environmental reformers attempted to remake the natural environment into an idealized garden landscape. As this cutting-edge history shows, an important result of this nineteenth-century effort to "renovate" nature was a far-reaching exchange of ideas between the United States - especially in California - and Australia. Ian Tyrrell demonstrates how Californians and Australians shared plants, insects, personnel, technology, and dreams, creating a system of environmental exchange that transcended national and natural boundaries. True Gardens of the Gods traces a new nineteenth-century environmental sensibility that emerged from the collision of European expansion with these frontier environments.Tyrrell traces historical ideas and personalities, provides in-depth discussions of introduced plants species (such as the eucalyptus and Monterey Pine), looks at a number of scientific programs of the time, and measures the impact of race, class, and gender on environmental policy. The book represents a new trend toward studying American history from a transnational perspective, focusing especially on a comparison of American history with the history of similar settler societies. Through the use of original research and an innovative methodology, this book offers a new look at the history of environmentalism on a regional and global scale.   [brief]
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Title: Rural China takes off: institutional foundations of economic reform 
Author: Oi, Jean Chun
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | China | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: In this incisive analysis of one of the most spectacular economic breakthroughs in the Deng era, Jean C. Oi shows how and why Chinese rural-based industry has become the fastest growing economic sector not just in China but in the world. Oi argues that decollectivization and fiscal decentralization provided party officials of the localities - counties, townships, and villages - with the incentives to act as entrepreneurs and to promote rural industrialization in many areas of the Chinese countryside. As a result, the corporatism practiced by local officials has become effective enough to challenge the centrality of the national state.Dealing not only with the political setting of rural industrial development, Oi's original and strongly argued study also makes a broader contribution to conceptualizations of corporatism in political theory. Oi writes provocatively about property rights and principal-agent relationships and shows the complex financial incentives that underpin and strengthen the growth in local state corporatism and shape its evolution. This book will be essential for those interested in Chinese politics, comparative politics, and communist and post-communist systems.   [brief]
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Title: The magistrate's tael: rationalizing fiscal reform in eighteenth-century Chʿing China 
Author: Zelin, Madeleine
Published: University of California Press,  1984
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: Madeleine Zelin shatters the image of China as a backward empire wracked by corruption and economic stagnation, thrust into the modern world when the western gunboats arrived in the 1840s, by providing an account of the indigenous evolution of the Chinese state. The Magistrate's Tael makes it possib . . . [more]
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Title: Merchants and reform in Livorno, 1814-1868 
Author: LoRomer, David G
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: History | European History
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Title: Human rights and reform: changing the face of North African politics 
Author: Waltz, Susan Eileen
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | African History | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Independence from colonial rule did not usher in the halcyon days many North Africans had hoped for, as the new governments in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria soon came to rely on repression to reinforce and maintain power. In response to widespread human rights abuses, individuals across the Maghrib began to form groups in the late 1970s to challenge the political practices and structures in the region, and over time these independent human rights organizations became prominent political actors. The activists behind them are neither saints nor revolutionaries, but political reformers intent on changing political patterns that have impeded democratization.This study, the first systematic comparative analysis of North African politics in more than a decade, explores the ability of society, including Islamist forces, to challenge the powers of states. Locating Maghribi polities within their cultural and historical contexts, Waltz traces state-society relations in the contemporary period. Even as Algeria totters at the brink of civil war and security concerns rise across the region, the human rights groups Susan Waltz examines implicitly challenge the authoritarian basis of political governance. Their efforts have not led to the democratic transition many had hoped, but human rights have become a crucial new element of North African political discourse.   [brief]
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Title: Livelihood and resistance: peasants and the politics of land in Peru 
Author: Smith, Gavin
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Latin American Studies
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Title: The three-piece suit and modern masculinity: England, 1550-1850
Author: Kuchta, David 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | European History | Men and Masculinity
Publisher's Description: In 1666, King Charles II felt it necessary to reform Englishmen's dress by introducing a fashion that developed into the three-piece suit. We learn what inspired this royal revolution in masculine attire--and the reasons for its remarkable longevity--in David Kuchta's engaging and handsomely illustrated account. Between 1550 and 1850, Kuchta says, English upper- and middle-class men understood their authority to be based in part upon the display of masculine character: how they presented themselves in public and demonstrated their masculinity helped define their political legitimacy, moral authority, and economic utility. Much has been written about the ways political culture, religion, and economic theory helped shape ideals and practices of masculinity. Kuchta allows us to see the process working in reverse, in that masculine manners and habits of consumption in a patriarchal society contributed actively to people's understanding of what held England together. Kuchta shows not only how the ideology of modern English masculinity was a self-consciously political and public creation but also how such explicitly political decisions and values became internalized, personalized, and naturalized into everyday manners and habits.   [brief]
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Title: Taming the elephant: politics, government, and law in pioneer California
Author: Burns, John F
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | United States History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: Taming the Elephant is the last of four volumes in the distinguished California History Sesquicentennial Series, an outstanding compilation of original essays by leading historians and writers. These topical, interrelated volumes reexamine the meaning of the founding of modern California during the state's pioneer period. General themes run through all four volumes: the interplay of traditional cultures and frontier innovation in the creation of a distinctive California society; the dynamic interaction of people and nature and the beginnings of massive environmental change; the impact of the California experience on the nation and the world; the influence of pioneer patterns on modern California; and the legacy of ethnic and cultural diversity as a major influence on the state's history. This fourth volume treats the role of post-Gold Rush California government, politics, and law in the building of a dynamic state, with influences that persist today. Provocative essays investigate the creation of constitutional foundations, law and jurisprudence, the formation of government agencies, and the development of public policy. Authors chart the roles played by diverse groups - criminals and peace officers, entrepreneurs and miners, farmers and public officials, defenders of discrimination and female and African American activists. The essays also explore subjects largely overlooked in the past, such as the significance of local and federal government in pioneer California and early struggles to secure civil rights for women and racial minorities.   [brief]
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Title: Standing ground: Yurok Indian spirituality, 1850-1990
Author: Buckley, Thomas C. T
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Native American Ethnicity
Publisher's Description: This colorful, richly textured account of spiritual training and practice within an American Indian social network emphasizes narrative over analysis. Thomas Buckley's foregrounding of Yurok narratives creates one major level of dialogue in an innovative ethnography that features dialogue as its central theoretical trope. Buckley places himself in conversation with contemporary Yurok friends and elders, with written texts, and with twentieth-century anthropology as well. He describes Yurok Indian spirituality as "a significant field in which individual and society meet in dialogue - cooperating, resisting, negotiating, changing each other in manifold ways. 'Culture,' here, is not a thing but a process, an emergence through time."   [brief]
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Title: Peasants and protest: agricultural workers, politics, and unions in the Aude, 1850-1914 
Author: Frader, Laura Levine 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Gender Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: In the first decade of the twentieth century, the sleepy vineyard towns of the Aude department of southern France exploded with strikes and protests. Agricultural workers joined labor unions, the Socialist party established a base among peasant vinegrowers, and the largest peasant uprising of twentieth-century France, the great vinegrowers' revolt of 1907, shook the entire south with massive demonstrations. In this study, Laura Levine Frader explains how left-wing politics and labor radicalism in the Aude emerged from the economic and social transformation of rural society between 1850 and 1914. She describes the formation of an agricultural wage-earning class, and discusses how socialism and a revolutionary syndicalist labor movement together forged working-class identity.Frader's focus on the making of the rural proletariat takes the study of class formation out of the towns and cities and into the countryside. Frader emphasizes the complexity of social structure and political life in the Aude, describing the interaction of productive relations, the gender division of labor, community solidarities, and class alliances. Her analysis raises questions about the applicability of an urban, industrial model of class formation to rural society. This study will be of interest to French social historians, agricultural historians, and those interested in the relationship between capitalism, class formation, and labor militancy.   [brief]
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