Title: The implementation perspective: a guide for managing social service delivery programs 
Author: Williams, Walter
Published: University of California Press,  1980
Subjects: Politics
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Title: High culture fever: politics, aesthetics, and ideology in Deng's China 
Author: Wang, Jing 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Asian Studies | Asian Literature | Asian History | Politics | China
Publisher's Description: Jing Wang offers the first overview of the feverish decade of the 1980s in China, from early reexaminations of Maoism through the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Wang's energetic, creative, and highly intelligent take on Chinese culture provides a broad portrait of the post-revolutionary era and a provocative inquiry into the nature of Chinese modernity.In seven linked essays, the author examines the cultural dynamics that have given rise to the epochal discourse. She traces the Chinese Marxists' short debate over "socialist alienation" and examines the various schools of thought - Li Zehou and the Marxist Reconstruction of Confucianism, the neo-Confucian Revivalists, and the Enlightenment School - that came into play in the Culture Fever. She also critiques the controversial mini-series Yellow River Elegy . In mapping out China's post-revolutionary aesthetics, Wang introduces the debate over "pseudo-modernism," refutes the pseudo-proposition of "Chinese postmodernism," and looks at the dawning of popular culture in the 1990s.This book delivers a ten-year intertwined history of Chinese intellectuals, writers, literary critics, and cultural critics that gives us a deeper understanding of the China of the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond.   [brief]
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Title: When the Soviet Union entered world politics 
Author: Jacobson, Jon 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Politics | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The dissolution of the Soviet Union has aroused much interest in the USSR's role in world politics during its 74-year history and in how the international relations of the twentieth century were shaped by the Soviet Union. Jon Jacobson examines Soviet foreign relations during the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan, focusing on the problems confronting the Bolsheviks as they sought to promote national security and economic development. He demonstrates the central importance of foreign relations to the political imagination of Soviet leaders, both in their plans for industrialization and in the struggle for supremacy among Lenin's successors.Jacobson adopts a post-Cold War interpretative stance, incorporating glasnost and perestroika-era revelations. He also considers Soviet relations with both Europe and Asia from a global perspective, integrating the two modes of early Soviet foreign relations - revolution and diplomacy - into a coherent discussion. Most significantly, he synthesizes the wealth of information that became available to scholars since the 1960s. The result is a stimulating work of international history that interfaces with the sophisticated existing body of scholarship on early Soviet history.   [brief]
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Title: A shield in space?: technology, politics, and the strategic defense initiative: how the Reagan Administration set out to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" and succumbed to the fallacy of the last move 
Author: Lakoff, Sanford A
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Politics | Political Theory | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: In March 1983, Ronald Reagan made one of the most controversial announcements of his presidency when he called on the nation's scientists and engineers to develop a defensive shield so impenetrable as to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." This book provides the first comprehensive review and evaluation of the project launched to implement that announcement - the project officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative and more popularly as "Star Wars." The authors - a political scientist and a physicist who has played a key role in developing military technologies - provide an intriguing account of how political rather than technical judgment led to the initial decision, and they explain the technical issues in terms accessible to nonspecialists. Judging SDI as "a classic example of misplaced faith in the promise of technological salvation," the authors examine the implications of the program for strategy, arms control, the unity of the Western alliance, its prospective economic impact, and the way the American political process has dealt with all these issues.   [brief]
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Title: Transforming free speech: the ambiguous legacy of civil libertarianism 
Author: Graber, Mark A
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Law | Social and Political Thought | Politics
Publisher's Description: Contemporary civil libertarians claim that their works preserve a worthy American tradition of defending free-speech rights dating back to the framing of the First Amendment. Transforming Free Speech challenges the worthiness, and indeed the very existence of one uninterrupted libertarian tradition.Mark A. Graber asserts that in the past, broader political visions inspired libertarian interpretations of the First Amendment. In reexamining the philosophical and jurisprudential foundations of the defense of expression rights from the Civil War to the present, he exposes the monolithic free-speech tradition as a myth. Instead of one conception of the system of free expression, two emerge: the conservative libertarian tradition that dominated discourse from the Civil War until World War I, and the civil libertarian tradition that dominates later twentieth-century argument.The essence of the current perception of the American free-speech tradition derives from the writings of Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (1885-1957), the progressive jurist most responsible for the modern interpretation of the First Amendment. His interpretation, however, deliberately obscured earlier libertarian arguments linking liberty of speech with liberty of property. Moreover, Chafee stunted the development of a more radical interpretation of expression rights that would give citizens the resources and independence necessary for the effective exercise of free speech. Instead, Chafee maintained that the right to political and social commentary could be protected independent of material inequalities that might restrict access to the marketplace of ideas. His influence enfeebled expression rights in a world where their exercise depends increasingly on economic power.Untangling the libertarian legacy, Graber points out the disjunction in the libertarian tradition to show that free-speech rights, having once been transformed, can be transformed again. Well-conceived and original in perspective, Transforming Free Speech will interest political theorists, students of government, and anyone interested in the origins of the free-speech tradition in the United States.   [brief]
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Title: Down on their luck: a study of homeless street people
Author: Snow, David A
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Urban Studies | Politics | Ethnic Studies | Anthropology
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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: From friend to comrade: the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927
Author: Van de Ven, Hans J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | China | Politics
Publisher's Description: Scholars have long held that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was a centralized organization from its founding in 1921. In a departure from that view, From Friend to Comrade demonstrates how the CCP began as a group of study societies, only evolving into a mass Marxist-Leninist party by 1927.Hans J. van de Ven's study is based on party documents of the 1920s that have only recently become available, as well as the writings of a wide range of Chinese communists. He analyzes the party's difficulty in building a cohesive organization firmly rooted in Chinese society. While past scholarship has emphasized the influence of Soviet communism on the CCP, van de Ven stresses the thinking and actions of Chinese communists themselves, placing their struggle in the context of China's political history and highly complex society.   [brief]
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Title: Reconcilable differences?: congress, the budget process, and the deficit 
Author: Gilmour, John B
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: Gilmour traces the development of the congressional budget process from its origin through the emergence of reconcilliation and Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. He shows how changes in process have brought about far-reaching shifts in congressional power, and explains why they have failed to control the explosion of budget deficits.Throughout the last decade budgetary issues have dominated the national political agenda as the deficit has skyrocketed to previously unimaginable levels. In this important book, John Gilmour traces the continuing quest of Congress over the last fifteen years to reform its budgeting system in the hope of producing better policy. He shows that the enactment of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the introduction of the reconciliation procedure in 1980 have produced a budgetary system in which congressional majorities can get what they want, provided only that they can agree on a comprehensive budget policy. From his thorough analysis, Gilmour concludes that, while the reforms have not produced balanced budgets, they have eliminated procedural obstructions to the adoption of a coherent budget.New budget procedures have transformed the way Congress works. Before the reforms of 1974 and 1980, Congress had an extremely fragmented, disintegrated budgetary system in which the budget emerged almost haphazardly from the independent actions of numerous committees. Gilmour shows that reconciliation procedures in the budget process makes total revenue, total expenditures, and the size of the deficit matters of deliberate choice, consolidating decisionmaking to an extent unprecedented in the history of the modern Congress.Yet, despite the striking structural and procedural changes, and despite its highly majoritarian features, the budget process has failed to reduce dissatisfaction with congressional handling of money. Deficits have been larger, not smaller, and overall spending has gone up. Gilmour deftly shows that the massive budget deficits of the Reagan years were due primarily to the failure of the House, the Senate, and the President to agree on how to reduce spending or increase taxes enough to eliminate the deficit. Responsibility for budgetary failure, he argues, must rest with Congress and its inability to reach consensus, not on the new budget process, which, given what we can expect from procedural change, has been quite successful.   [brief]
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Title: The corporate practice of medicine: competition and innovation in health care
Author: Robinson, James C 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Medicine | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: One of the country's leading health economists presents a provocative analysis of the transformation of American medicine from a system of professional dominance to an industry under corporate control. James Robinson examines the economic and political forces that have eroded the traditional medical system of solo practice and fee-for-service insurance, hindered governmental regulation, and invited the market competition and organizational innovations that now are under way. The trend toward health care corporatization is irreversible, he says, and it parallels analogous trends toward privatization in the world economy.The physician is the key figure in health care, and how physicians are organized is central to the health care system, says Robinson. He focuses on four forms of physician organization to illustrate how external pressures have led to health care innovations: multispecialty medical groups, Independent Practice Associations (IPAs), physician practice management firms, and physician-hospital organizations. These physician organizations have evolved in the past two decades by adopting from the larger corporate sector similar forms of ownership, governance, finance, compensation, and marketing.In applying economic principles to the maelstrom of health care, Robinson highlights the similarities between competition and consolidation in medicine and in other sectors of the economy. He points to hidden costs in fee-for-service medicine - overtreatment, rampant inflation, uncritical professional dominance regarding treatment decisions - factors often overlooked when newer organizational models are criticized.Not everyone will share Robinson's appreciation for market competition and corporate organization in American health care, but he challenges those who would return to the inefficient and inequitable era of medicine from which we've just emerged. Forcefully written and thoroughly documented, The Corporate Practice of Medicine presents a thoughtful - and optimistic - view of a future health care system, one in which physician entrepreneurship is a dynamic component.   [brief]
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Title: Scarcity, choice, and public policy in middle Africa 
Author: Rothchild, Donald S
Published: University of California Press,  1978
Subjects: African Studies | Politics | Public Policy
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Title: Some trouble with cows: making sense of social conflict 
Author: Roy, Beth
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | South Asia | Politics | Hinduism
Publisher's Description: Fascinating in its combination of personal stories and analytical insights, Some Trouble with Cows will help students of conflict understand how a seemingly irrational and archaic riot becomes a means for renegotiating the distribution of power and rights in a small community.Using first-person accounts of Hindus and Muslims in a remote Bangladeshi village, Beth Roy evocatively describes and analyzes a large-scale riot that profoundly altered life in the area in the 1950s. She provides a rare glimpse into the hearts and minds of the participants and their families, while touching on a range of broader issues that are vital to the sociology of communities in conflict: the changing meaning of community ; the impact of the state on local society; the nature of memory ; and the force of neighborly enmity in reshaping power relationships during periods of change.Roy's findings illustrate important theoretical issues in psychology and sociology, and her conclusions will greatly interest students of ethnic/race relations, conflict resolution, the sociology of violence, agrarian society, and South Asia.   [brief]
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Title: The rise of a party-state in Kenya: from "Harambee" to "Nyayo!" 
Author: Widner, Jennifer A
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Although Kenya is often considered an African success story, its political climate became increasingly repressive under its second president, Daniel arap Moi. Widner charts the transformation of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) from a weak, loosely organized political party under Jomo Kenyatta into an arm of the president's office, with "watchdog" youth wings and strong surveillance and control functions, under Moi. She suggests that single-party systems have an inherent tendency to become "party-states," or single-party regimes in which the head of state uses the party as a means of control. The speed and extent of these changes depend on the countervailing power of independent interest groups, such as business associations, farmers, or professionals. Widner's study offers important insights into the dynamics of party systems in Africa.   [brief]
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Title: The fourth estate and the Constitution: freedom of the press in America 
Author: Powe, L. A. Scot
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Law | Politics | American Studies | Media Studies
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Title: Nested games: rational choice in comparative politics
Author: Tsebelis, George
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: Clearly written and easily understood by the nonspecialist, Nested Games provides a systematic, empirically accurate, and theoretically coherent account of apparently irrational political actions.
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Title: Putting Islam to work: education, politics, and religious transformation in Egypt 
Author: Starrett, Gregory 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Education | Religion | Islam | Politics
Publisher's Description: The development of mass education and the mass media have transformed the Islamic tradition in contemporary Egypt and the wider Muslim world. In Putting Islam to Work , Gregory Starrett focuses on the historical interplay of power and public culture, showing how these new forms of communication and a growing state interest in religious instruction have changed the way the Islamic tradition is reproduced.During the twentieth century new styles of religious education, based not on the recitation of sacred texts but on moral indoctrination, have been harnessed for use in economic, political, and social development programs. More recently they have become part of the Egyptian government's strategy for combating Islamist political opposition. But in the course of this struggle, the western-style educational techniques that were adopted to generate political stability have instead resulted in a rapid Islamization of public space, the undermining of traditional religious authority structures, and a crisis of political legitimacy. Using historical, textual, and ethnographic evidence, Gregory Starrett demonstrates that today's Islamic resurgence is rooted in new ways of thinking about Islam that are based in the market, the media, and the school.   [brief]
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Title: Importing diversity: inside Japan's JET Program
Author: McConnell, David L 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Japan | Politics | Education
Publisher's Description: In 1987, the Japanese government inaugurated the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program in response to global pressure to "internationalize" its society. This ambitious program has grown to be a major government operation, with an annual budget of $400 million (greater than the United States NEA and NEH combined) and more than six thousand foreign nationals employed each year in public schools all over Japan.How does a relatively homogeneous and insular society react when a buzzword is suddenly turned into a reality? How did the arrival of so many foreigners affect Japan's educational bureaucracy? How did the foreigners themselves feel upon discovering that English teaching was not the primary goal of the program? In this balanced study of the JET program, David L. McConnell draws on ten years of ethnographic research to explore the cultural and political dynamics of internationalization in Japan. Through vignettes and firsthand accounts, he highlights and interprets the misunderstandings of the early years of the program, traces the culture clashes at all levels of the bureaucracy, and speculates on what lessons the JET program holds for other multicultural initiatives.This fascinating book's jargon-free style and interdisciplinary approach will make it appealing to educators, policy analysts, students of Japan, and prospective and former JET participants.   [brief]
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Title: Legal hermeneutics: history, theory, and practice 
Author: Leyh, Gregory
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Political Theory | Postcolonial Studies | Law | Language and Linguistics
Publisher's Description: Interpretation of the law is based on assumptions about the nature of texts, language, and the act of interpretation itself. These fourteen new essays trace the origin of these assumptions, examine their philosophical implications, and extend legal interpretation in new and constructive directions.
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Title: Political economy and the rise of capitalism: a reinterpretation 
Author: McNally, David
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Political Theory | Economics and Business | History
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Title: The French Revolution and the birth of modernity 
Author: Fehér, Ferenc 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Politics | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: Written from widely different perspectives, these essays characterize the Great Revolution as the dawn of the modern age, the grand narrative of modernity. The scope of issues under scrutiny is extremely broad, ranging from the analyses of the hotly debated class character of 1789 and the problem of . . . [more]
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