Campaigns to Change Form of Government in America's Large Cities
Different forms of city government are in widespread use across the United States. The two most common structures are the mayor-council form and the council-manager form. This title offers case studies of fourteen large US cities that have considered changing their form of government over the years.
The study of governance has risen to prominence as a way of describing and explaining changes in our world. The SAGE Handbook of Governance presents an authoritative and innovative overview of this fascinating field, with particular emphasis on the significant new and emerging theoretical issues and policy innovations. The Handbook is divided into three parts. Part one explores the major theories influencing current thinking and shaping future research in the field of governance. Part two deals specifically with changing practices and policy innovations, including the changing role of the state, transnational and global governance, markets and networks, public management, and budgeting and finance. Part three explores the dilemmas of managing governance, including attempts to rethink democracy and citizenship as well as specific policy issues such as capacity building, regulation, and sustainable development. This volume is an excellent resource for advanced students and researchers in political science, economics, geography, sociology, and public administration. Mark Bevir is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Considered a microcosm of the nation, the state of Illinois stretches almost four hundred miles from its northern limit at the Wisconsin line to its southern tip at Cairo, nestled between Kentucky and Missouri. Its political culture is as intriguing as the state is long. Illinois has produced presidents and leading members of Congress. It also has ......
Comprising theoretical and empirical perspectives and drawn from international journals with a global focus, this four-volume set presents the key papers in macro-organizational and micro-organizational studies and their implications on public administration. Divided into two sections, the first part of this collection adopts a sector-wide focus, concentrating on the issues of governance, politics, markets and competition, regulation and inter-organizational relations. The second section concentrates on management issues in an organizational context, addressing leadership, strategy and change management. Drawing on experience of both academic and professional spheres, the editors incorporate a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives spanning organizational behaviour, organizational theory, human resource management and strategy, forming a resource that will be invaluable to all students of management in the public sector.
Compares nine city-county consolidations to similar cities and counties that did not consolidate. This book offers insight into whether consolidation meets those promises made to voters to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of these governments.
Culture has returned to the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of cul-ture in many aspects of poverty, at times even explaining the behavior of low-income populations in reference to cultural factors. Unlike their predecessors, contemporary researchers rarely claim that culture will sustain itself for multiple generations regardless of structural changes, and they almost never use the term "pathology," which implied in an earlier era that people would cease to be poor if they changed their culture. The new generation of scholars conceives of culture in substantially different ways. In this latest issue of the ANNALS, readers are treated to thought-provoking articles that attempt to bridge the gap between poverty and culture scholarship, highlighting new trends in poverty research. The authors identi-fy the scholarly and policy-related basis for why poverty researchers should be deeply concerned with culture, noting the importance of understanding better how people cope with poverty and how they escape it. They then tackle the perplexing question-what is "culture"?-and propose that sociologists and anthropologists studying culture have developed at least seven different analytical tools for cap-turing meaning that could help answer a number of questions central to the study of poverty, including those centered on marriage, educa-tion, neighborhoods, and community participation, among others. While not denying the importance of macro-structural conditions-such as the concentration of wealth and income, the spatial segregation across classes and racial groups, or the persistent international migration of labor and capital-they argue that human action is both constrained and enabled by the meaning people give to their actions and that these dynamics should become central to our understanding of the production and reproduction of poverty and social inequality. By considering poverty in the United States and abroad, examining both the elite, policy-making level and the daily lives of low-income people themselves, the articles convey a composite and multileveled picture of the ways in which meaning-making factors into the production and reproduction of poverty. The volume aims to demonstrate the importance of cultural concepts for poverty research, serve as a model and a resource for poverty scholars who wish to incorporate cultural concepts into their research, assist in the training of future scholars working at the nexus of poverty and culture, and identify crucial areas for future methodological, theoretical, and empirical development. The volume also serves to debunk existing myths about the cultural orientations of the poor for those formulating policy; as the editors point out, "ignoring culture can lead to bad policy." This volume is vital reading, not only for sociologists but also for researchers across the social sciences as a whole.
Fostering Enduring Change in Environmental and Natural Resource Governance
Over the years governments at the local, state, and federal levels have undertaken a wide range of bold innovations to try to address their environmental and natural resource management tasks. This title argues that the key to successful and long-lasting innovation must be a realistic understanding of the challenges that face it.
US capitalism has long been ranked first among nations in production, jobs, wealth, power, and individual freedom. Is this level of pre-eminence likely to continue? This title presents an assessment of our fiscal maladies that explains why the author predicts capitalism is rushing to its demise.
Introduction to Community Development provides students of community and economic development with a theoretical and practical introduction to the field of community development. Bringing together leading scholars in the field of community development, the book follows the curriculum needs in offering a progression from theory to practice, beginning with a theoretical overview, an historical overview, and the various approaches to community development.
