Title: Breaking through bureaucracy: a new vision for managing in government
Author: Barzelay, Michael
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: This book attacks the conventional wisdom that bureaucrats are bunglers and the system can't be changed. Michael Barzelay and Babak Armajani trace the source of much poor performance in government to the persistent influence of what they call the bureaucratic paradigm - a theory built on such notions as central control, economy and efficiency, and rigid adherence to rules. Rarely questioned, the bureaucratic paradigm leads competent and faithful public servants - as well as politicians - unwittingly to impair government's ability to serve citizens by weakening, misplacing, and misdirecting accountability.How can this system be changed? Drawing on research sponsored by the Ford Foundation/Harvard University program on Innovations in State and Local Government, this book tells the story of how public officials in one state, Minnesota, cast off the conceptual blinders of the bureaucratic paradigm and experimented with ideas such as customer service, empowering front-line employees to resolve problems, and selectively introducing market forces within government. The author highlights the arguments government executives made for the changes they proposed, traces the way these changes were implemented, and summarizes the impressive results. This approach provides would-be bureaucracy busters with a powerful method for dramatically improving the way government manages the public's business.Generalizing from the Minnesota experience and from similar efforts nationwide, the book proposes a new paradigm that will reframe the perennial debate on public management. With its carefully analyzed ideas, real-life examples, and closely reasoned practical advice, Breaking Through Bureaucracy is indispensable to public managers and students of public policy and administration.   [brief]
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Title: The Shanghai Green Gang: politics and organized crime, 1919-1937
Author: Martin, Brian G
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Politics | Criminology
Publisher's Description: In a remarkable example of history as detective work, Brian Martin pieces together the fascinating and complex story of the Shanghai Green Gang and its charismatic leader, Du Yuesheng. Martin sifts through a variety of fragmentary and at times contradictory evidence - from diplomatic dispatches to memoirs to police reports - to produce the most comprehensive account of this chaotic period of Chinese history. In analyzing the Green Gang's system of organized crime in Shanghai, the author broadens our understanding of a critical aspect of Chinese urban history and sheds light on the history of drug trafficking and organized crime worldwide.Martin argues that the Green Gang, the most powerful secret society in China during the first half of the twentieth century, was a resilient social organization that adapted successfully to the complex environment of a modernizing urban society. Illustrating its multilayered and complex relations with the bourgeoisie, the industrial proletariat, and the foreign and domestic political authorities, Martin demonstrates how these factors led to the Green Gang's absorption into the corporate state system after 1932.   [brief]
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Title: What's the matter with liberalism? 
Author: Beiner, Ronald 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | Political Theory | Social and Political Thought
Publisher's Description: In the wake of the revolutions of 1989, the ongoing political turmoil in the Soviet Union, and the democratization of most of Latin America, what is the task of political theorists?Ronald Beiner's invigorating critique of liberal theory and liberal practices takes on the shibboleths of modern Western discourse. He confronts the aridity of liberal societies that possess incommensurable "values" and "rights," but no principles. To Beiner, this neutralist view is both a false description of liberal society and an incoherent political ideal. Rather, he encourages the theorist to remain faithful to the important task of questioning and criticism, instead of serving as a source of ideological reassurance about our own superiority.Beiner looks to the Socratic tradition for guidance. Permitting ethos to replace values, and discourse about "the good" to replace talk about "rights," the theorist is able to reorder social priorities. Considered in this light, the liberal political philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s appears insufficiently Socratic, as does a liberal way of life that presents itself as a model of imitation.Polemical, impassioned, and brilliantly argued, What's the Matter with Liberalism? is essential reading for everyone who cares about contemporary theory and the future of liberal society.   [brief]
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Title: Fascist spectacle: the aesthetics of power in Mussolini's Italy
Author: Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | European History | Popular Culture | European Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history.Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.   [brief]
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Title: Muslim rulers and rebels: everyday politics and armed separatism in the southern Philippines 
Author: McKenna, Thomas M 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Politics | Islam | Southeast Asia | Asian History
Publisher's Description: In this first ground-level account of the Muslim separatist rebellion in the Philippines, Thomas McKenna challenges prevailing anthropological analyses of nationalism as well as their underlying assumptions about the interplay of culture and power. He examines Muslim separatism against a background of more than four hundred years of political relations among indigenous Muslim rulers, their subjects, and external powers seeking the subjugation of Philippine Muslims. He also explores the motivations of the ordinary men and women who fight in armed separatist struggles and investigates the formation of nationalist identities. A skillful meld of historical detail and ethnographic research, Muslim Rulers and Rebels makes a compelling contribution to the study of protest, rebellion, and revolution worldwide.   [brief]
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Title: Between marriage and the market: intimate politics and survival in Cairo 
Author: Hoodfar, Homa
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Homa Hoodfar's richly detailed ethnography provides a rare glimpse into the daily life of Arab Muslim families. Focusing on the impact of economic liberalization policies from 1983 to 1993, she shows the crucial role of the household in survival strategies among low-income Egyptians. Hoodfar, an Iranian Muslim by birth, presents research that undermines many of the stereotypes associated with traditional Muslim women. Their apparent conservatism, she says, is based on rational calculation of the costs and benefits of working within formal and informal labor markets to secure household power. She posits that increasing adherence to Islam and taking up the veil on the part of women has been partially motivated by women's desire to protect and promote their interests both within and beyond households.   [brief]
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Title: White plague, black labor: tuberculosis and the political economy of health and disease in South Africa
Author: Packard, Randall M 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Medicine | Medical Anthropology | African Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Why does tuberculosis, a disease which is both curable and preventable, continue to produce over 50,000 new cases a year in South Africa, primarily among blacks? In answering this question Randall Packard traces the history of one of the most devastating diseases in twentieth-century Africa, against the background of the changing political and economic forces that have shaped South African society from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. These forces have generated a growing backlog of disease among black workers and their families and at the same time have prevented the development of effective public health measures for controlling it. Packard's rich and nuanced analysis is a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on South Africa's social history as well as to the history of medicine and the political economy of health.   [brief]
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Title: From fascism to libertarian communism: Georges Valois against the Third Republic
Author: Douglas, Allen 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Georges Valois is the enigma who stands at the center of French fascism. Writer, publisher, economic and political organizer, Valois went from adolescent anarchism to fascism and finally to libertarian socialism. His career has mystified scholars, as it did his contemporaries. From Fascism to Libertarian Communism is the first study of Valois to take his entire life and work as its focus, explaining how certain basic assumptions and patterns of thought took form in strikingly different ideological options. Douglas's work, based on a thorough examination of sources from police archives to personal papers and interviews, provides a convincing explanation of this quixotic figure - a man who founded French fascism only to turn to the radical left and eventually die as a resister in Bergen-Belsen.At a time when radical socialism is in decline and neofascist movements are gaining renewed support - in France and elsewhere - this original interpretation of Georges Valois's life and thought could not be more timely.   [brief]
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Title: Same bed, different dreams: managing U.S.-China relations, 1989-2000
Author: Lampton, David M
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Politics | Asian History | China | United States History
Publisher's Description: The title of this unique insider's look at a crucial decade of Sino-American interchange derives from a Chinese expression that describes a relationship of two people whose lives are intimately intertwined but who do not fundamentally communicate with each other. David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, demonstrates that while the United States and China have enormous interests at stake in their bilateral relationship, neither has been particularly deft in dealing with the other. His fascinating account shows how the processes of globalization, along with the development of international regimes and multilateral organizations, have brought America and China increasingly close in the global bed. At the same time, their respective national institutions, interests, popular perceptions, and the very characters of their two peoples, assure that the nations continue to have substantially different dreams. Lampton explores the reasons why the Sino-American relationship is so difficult for both nations to manage and suggests ways it can be more effectively conducted in the future. His unique experience in China - nearly thirty years as a scholar, as the head of a policy-oriented exchange organization, and as director of Washington think-tank research programs - enabled him to spend extended periods with Chinese leaders and see them as they encountered America, as well as to observe U.S. leaders as they tried to come to grips with Chinese circumstances. Among many other key events, Lampton witnessed firsthand the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, successive congressional battles over most-favored-nation tariff treatment, the end of the Bush era and the rocky beginning of the Clinton administration, the death of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin's transition to power, the reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, and the Asian financial crisis that unfolded from mid-1997 to the end of the decade. Lampton's careful documentary research is supplemented by interviews and accounts of his personal interaction throughout the period with leaders and key players in Washington, Beijing, Taipei, and Hong Kong. The book thus represents a singular combination of historical research, policy analysis, and personal observation, and offers guidance for those in both America and China who must shape this critical relationship in the twenty-first century.   [brief]
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Title: Model rebels: the rise and fall of China's richest village
Author: Gilley, Bruce 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Politics | Asian History | China | Social Science
Publisher's Description: A portentous tale of rural rebellion unfolds in Bruce Gilley's moving chronicle of a village on the northern China plains during the post-1978 economic reform era. Gilley examines how Daqiu Village, led by Yu Zuomin, a charismatic Communist Party secretary and president of the local industrial conglomerate, became the richest village in China and a model for the rural reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s. A growing campaign of political resistance led to increasing tensions between the villagers and the Chinese state, and eventually, in an event that made headlines around the world, an armed confrontation between the village and higher authorities backed by paramilitary police brought Yu Zuomin and his village crashing down.   [brief]
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Title: Double-edged diplomacy: international bargaining and domestic politics
Author: Evans, Peter B 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | Public Policy | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This original look at the dynamics of international relations untangles the vigorous interaction of domestic and international politics on subjects as diverse as nuclear disarmament, human rights, and trade. An eminent group of political scientists demonstrates how international bargaining that reflects domestic political agendas can be undone when it ignores the influence of domestic constituencies.The eleven studies in Double-Edged Diplomacy provide a major step in furthering a more complete understanding of how politics between nations affects politics within nations and vice versa. The result is a striking new paradigm for comprehending world events at a time when the global and the domestic are becoming ever more linked.   [brief]
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Title: The cigarette papers 
Author: Glantz, Stanton A
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Politics | Medicine | Public Policy | Law | United States History
Publisher's Description: Around-the-clock tobacco talks, multibillion-dollar lawsuits against the major cigarette companies, and legislative wrangling over how much to tax a pack of cigarettes - these are some of the most recent episodes in the war against the tobacco companies. The Cigarette Papers shows what started it all: revelations that tobacco companies had long known the grave dangers of smoking, and did nothing about it.In May 1994 a box containing 4,000 pages of internal tobacco industry documents arrived at the office of Professor Stanton Glantz at the University of California, San Francisco. The anonymous source of these "cigarette papers" was identified only as "Mr. Butts." These documents provide a shocking inside account of the activities of one tobacco company, Brown & Williamson, over more than thirty years. Quoting extensively from the documents themselves and analyzing what they reveal, The Cigarette Papers shows what the tobacco companies have known and galvanizes us to take action.   [brief]
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Title: From my grandmother's bedside: sketches of postwar Tokyo 
Author: Field, Norma 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Autobiography | Asian History | Japan | Politics
Publisher's Description: From My Grandmother's Bedside is an experiment in genre, a moving and evocative reflection on contemporary Japan, human desire, family relations, life, and death. Norma Field, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an American G.I., and author of the acclaimed In the Realm of a Dying Emperor , returned to Japan in 1995 to tend to her slowly dying grandmother, who had been rendered speechless by multiple strokes. What she finds - both in the memories of her childhood in her grandmother's household and in the altered face of postmodern Japan - forms the substance of her narrative that transcends both memoir and essay to reveal, through crafted fragments, a refraction of the whole of Japan.Having spent her childhood in Japan and her adulthood in the United States, Field speaks from the position of one who straddles two worlds. Her testimony is highly personal, her voice is intimate, her observations are keen and clear. She juxtaposes details from daily life - conversations overheard on the subway; arguments between her mother and aunts; the struggle to feed, bathe, and care for her grandmother - with observations on the political and social changes that have transformed Japan. She shows how the belated coming to terms with the war and continuing avoidance of the same are intimately related to the look and feel of Japanese society today. She gently folds back the complicated layers of blame and responsibility for the war, touching in the process on subjects as diverse as the effects of the atomic bomb, comfort women, biracial/bicultural families, the farewells of Kamikaze pilots, and the dehumanizing effects of Japan's postwar economic boom. A recurrent theme is the observation of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. From My Grandmother's Bedside is also a contemplation of the many facets of language: the kinds of language with which her grandmother's illness has been negotiated, the wordless language her grandmother speaks, her own relationship to these languages. Through it all runs the realization that the personal and the political are perpetually entangled, that past and present converge and overlap.   [brief]
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Title: Between memory and desire: the Middle East in a troubled age
Author: Humphreys, R. Stephen
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | Islam | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Middle Easterners today are caught between memories of the past and frustrated hopes for the future. They struggle to find solutions to crises of economic stagnation, political gridlock, and cultural identity. In recent decades Islam has become central to this struggle, and almost every issue involves fierce, sometimes violent debates over the role of religion in public life. R. Stephen Humphreys's new book presents a much-needed and thoughtful analysis of Islam's place in today's Middle East. In clear, accessible language, he integrates the medieval and modern history of the region to show how the sacred and secular are tightly interwoven in its political and intellectual life. Humphreys discusses the conflicts over power and resources that engage Middle Eastern politicians and looks at the major ideologies that have shaped these conflicts. He focuses on the impact of Islam on public life and examines Muslim ways of thinking about the "secular" versus the "religious." What values does Islam put into play? What challenges does it pose to "ordinary" politics? What resources does it bring to the struggle for social justice? Humphreys recognizes the Western tendency to dismiss Middle Eastern politics as an incoherent tale of violence and fanaticism, and his book is especially valuable for its analysis of the deeper issues behind the headlines. These issues include the region's apparent inability to evolve democratic institutions, conflicts rooted in the peace settlements after World War I, and the unresolved debates over which cultural and moral values should drive Middle Eastern policy. Between Memory and Desire reminds us that Middle Easterners remember the past in specific ways: the shame of the colonial era; the disappointments since independence; and the glory of the Middle Ages, when Muslim achievements were respected throughout the world. Even if these memories are only partially true, in defining the past, they also define what the future ought to be.   [brief]
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Title: Owen Lattimore and the "loss" of China 
Author: Newman, Robert P
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | China | United States History | Politics
Publisher's Description: In March 1950 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy accused Owen Lattimore, a distinguished China scholar at The Johns Hopkins University, of being "the top Soviet espionage agent in the U.S." The Senate Foreign Relations Committee exonerated Lattimore four months later, but for the next two years Pat McCarran and his Senate Internal Security Committee investigated him, forcing the Justice Department to indict him for perjury. The case was eventually dismissed, but only after extraordinary efforts by the FBI failed to unearth a single reliable witness who could testify against Lattimore.Lattimore was a victim of the virulent witch hunts that took place in the U.S. in the 1950s after China, our friend and ally in World War II, went over to that reviled enemy, communism. Americans could not believe that China made this choice freely; its adherence to the World Communist Conspiracy must have been coerced by Soviet manipulation and domestic subversion by Americans. Some Communist mastermind in the American government had to be blamed for our "loss" of China. Lattimore, who had never been in the State Department but who had warned that China was not a stooge of Stalinist Russia and that Mao Zedong had come to power on his own, became the scapegoat.In this magisterial biography, Robert Newman follows the career of Owen Lattimore, scholar-adventurer, through his service in both the Chinese Nationalist and American governments in World War II, the tribulations of being Joe McCarthy's flagship heretic, his brilliant academic career in England, and finally his return to Central Asia as the foremost advocate of Mongolian nationalism and independence.Newman proves definitively that there was never any case against Lattimore. His book is based on a unique source, the Lattimore file from the FBI - 38,900 pages - arguably the most complete and candid file on a major prosecution ever released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is on the FBI's testimony - albeit testimony of the most reluctant sort - that Lattimore is finally exonerated.   [brief]
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Title: Hooliganism: crime, culture, and power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 
Author: Neuberger, Joan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Criminology
Publisher's Description: n this pioneering analysis of diffuse underclass anger that simmers in many societies, Joan Neuberger takes us to the streets of St. Petersburg in 1900-1914 to show us how the phenomenon labeled hooliganism came to symbolize all that was wrong with the modern city: increasing hostility between class . . . [more]
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Title: Holland under Habsburg rule, 1506-1566: the formation of a body politic 
Author: Tracy, James D
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Politics | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Under what conditions were limited forms of self-government possible in medieval and early modern Europe? While many historians have sought an answer by focusing on the development of parliamentary institutions in emerging national monarchies, or investigating the wider autonomy enjoyed by various city-states within their own borders, James Tracy looks instead at an intermediate level of political organization, the self-governing province. Readers of medieval and early modern European history will learn here how the province of Holland, during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II (1506-1566), effectively underwent an apprenticeship in self-government.   [brief]
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Title: The long peace: Ottoman Lebanon, 1861-1920 
Author: Akarlı, Engin Deniz
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: Long notorious as one of the most turbulent areas of the world, Lebanon nevertheless experienced an interlude of peace between its civil war of 1860 and the beginning of the French Mandate in 1920. Engin Akarli examines the sociopolitical changes resulting from the negotiations and shifting alliances characteristic of these crucial years.Using previously unexamined documents in Ottoman archives, Akarli challenges the prevailing view that attributes modernization in government to Western initiative while blaming stagnation on reactionary local forces. Instead, he argues, indigenous Lebanese experience in self-rule as well as reconciliation among different religious groups after 1860 laid the foundation for secular democracy. European intervention in Lebanese politics, however, hampered efforts to develop a correspondingly secular notion of Lebanese nationality.As ethnic and religious strife increases throughout much of eastern Europe and the Middle East, the Lebanese example has obvious relevance for our own time.   [brief]
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Title: The deficit and the public interest: the search for responsible budgeting in the 1980s 
Author: White, Joseph 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Political time is counted, not in years, but in issues - the depression defined the political era of the 1930s just as the cold war did the 1950s and civil rights the 1960s. Today the federal budget looms as the dominant issue by which all others are considered and has become a concern which catalyzes debate again and again in our nation's capital. In this definitive new work, Joseph White and Aaron Wildavsky describe and analyze the struggles over taxing and spending from Carter's last year through the Reagan administration.The battle of the budget is largely about how we define the role of the government and its relationship to the people. It is a story of congressional horsetrading, partisan posturing, and technical tricks that affect billions of dollars. It is also a story of politicians operating within constraints set by both public opinion and political interpretation of economic reality. Though budgeting has always been important, its impact on the national agenda has grown dramatically in the last decades.Based on extensive interviews with participants and thorough use of documentary sources, this book both explains how budgeting works so the reader can see what is at stake in seemingly arcane disputes and locates budgeting within larger ideological trends in American society. It also explains the relationship of the budget to media, party and policy activists and explores the ways in which the deficit represents a crisis of self-confidence in the ability of our institutions, preeminently Congress and the presidency. Along the way, it provides a uniquely comprehensive account of the entire budget problem, exploring Gramm-Rudman, tax reform, and the continuing stalemate around this issue. The Deficit and the Public Interest offers a wide-ranging "solution" to the deficit that encompasses several ideas: the authors demonstrate that institutions have performed better than their members and critics believe, and they contend that extreme solutions would likely be much worse than the original problems. Further, they redefine the problem as one of reducing interest costs so the deficit becomes manageable, and they proffer political advice on how to make this approach politically acceptable, both at home and abroad.This meticulously researched work provides an invaluable journey through the last decade of American politics. In its theoretical depth and incisive new approach to policymaking, The Deficit and the Public Interest lends a fundamentally new understanding of the place of the federal government in American society.   [brief]
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Title: To the Right: the transformation of American conservatism 
Author: Himmelstein, Jerome L
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Politics | Public Policy | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In this timely book, Jerome Himmelstein offers a new interpretation of the growth of conservatism in American politics. Tracing the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s back to the Old Right of the 1950s, Himmelstein provides an interpretive map of the political landscape over the past decades, showing . . . [more]
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