The need for evaluation of public sector research and development activity is critical in today's political environment to assist policymakers with resource allocation. Methodology for evaluating public sector research and development activity is described and illustrated by the author using in-depth case studies drawn from the research programs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. These cases range from newly formed federal laboratory research initiatives to well-established research programs. Managerial and evaluative guidelines are enunciated.

The United States has supported research and development activity on both the applied and basic research levels for most of its history. The importance of public sector research has often been discussed but its effectiveness has not been adequately reviewed. The need for evaluation of public sector research and development activity is critical in today's political environment to assist policymakers with resource allocation. Methodology for evaluating public sector research and development activity is described and illustrated by the author using in-depth case studies drawn from the research programs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. These cases range from newly formed federal laboratory research initiatives to well-established research programs. Managerial and evaluative guidelines are enunciated.

This work should be of interest to scholars who deal with economics in general, public policy, science policy, and public administration. In addition, practitioners in public administration and managers of public sector research laboratories on federal and state levels should find the information useful. Those who depend on research and development done with public sector money or who use it to supplement their research programs will also be interested.

As the state of America's children and families continues to degenerate, the human services system struggles to render the support it was designed to provide. Despite such efforts, American families have difficulty accessing services; they are forced to navigate an incomprehensible system where quantity is often deemed insufficient and quality is compromised. Simultaneously, expenditures on human services have soared to record levels, further spurring both concerns and efforts to reform and better integrate a sadly dysfunctional system. In the first comprehensive synthesis of the history, theory, and practice of service integration, Sharon Lynn Kagan, with Peter R. Neville, explores why past efforts to reform the human service system have had only isolated triumphs and marginal impact in improving the quality of life for children and families. Tracing the history of human services in America from the colonial period to the present, the author analyzes the underlying assumptions, barriers, and strategies that have characterized the service integration movement. Drawing on history, empirical research, and intellectual theory, as well as on the personal experiences of practitioners and leaders, the author extracts principles and insights that offer new directions for future social service reform. Published in cooperation with the National Center for Service Integration

This is a revision and update of Zimmerman's classic study of relations between state and local government. The first edition, published in 1983, was based on three decades of research into intergovernmental affairs and examined the legal, financial, and structural foundations of state-local relations. This new edition adds a fourth decade of research and brings the work up to date through the early 1990s, adding a chapter on state mandates and local governments, reviewing and analyzing the changes in fortune of state and local governments, and the impact of those changes on their relations between each other and between themselves and the federal government.

On Christendom's Far Shore describes and explains American society by first illuminating its foundational stones: the traditional western (Judeo-Christian) faith in God and the West's once common understanding of the natural order and the nature and destiny of man. It explores the biblical concepts of faith, paradox, tragedy and grace, time, gender relations, love, work, play, individual and communal responsibilities, freedom, and the Kingdom of Heaven. The book illustrates how these ideas and values underlie more specifically American values and American social and governmental patterns and structures, such as the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, the creation of families and larger social groups and communities, the mentoring of future generations, and people's understanding of self-governance and how to relate to other nations. On Christendom's Far Shore depicts the present as a time of twilight with the United States caught up in a cataclysmic clash between a traditional understanding of man and of a God-centered universe and a post-modern, existential, man-centered, multicultural worldview that rejects the old values and structures and determinedly seeks a vast restructuring of the nation's social and political order and character.

Voluntarism, Planning, and the State presents a series of case studies of the planning process in the context of modern American history in the period between World War I and World War II. Each essay draws on the works of leading scholars in the field and attempts to make specific evaluations of broad generalizations about the planning experience in the United States. The studies examine such relevant topics as unemployment reform, labor relations, military peacetime planning, New Deal planning, and the postwar debate over price and wage controls.

Reforming public services has become an integral part of instituting austerity measures as governments around the world struggle to balance the books in the wake of the financial crisis. Vital public services and government departments have been given the seemingly impossible task of delivering better services to the public while receiving less funding. This excellent and highly original collection brings together contributors from across the globe to explore and analyse innovational methods aimed at helping overburdened and under-funded public services cope with the demands of austerity and continue to deliver high quality services to the public. In the process this book develops new theoretical models and analyses case studies to provide an important and timely insight into how to reform public services across the globe.

This important new book offers an intellectual history of the 'arts council' policy model, identifying and exploring the ideas embedded in the model and actions of intellectuals, philanthropists and wealthy aesthetes in its establishment in the mid-twentieth century. The book examines the history of arts advocacy for national arts policies in the UK, Canada and the USA, offering an interdisciplinary approach that combines social and intellectual history, political philosophy and literary analysis. The book has much to offer academics, cultural policy and management students, artists, arts managers, arts advocates, cultural policymakers and anyone interested in the history and current moment of public arts funding in the West.

If we were to rely on what the pundits and politicians tell us, we would have to conclude that America is a deeply conservative nation. Americans, we hear constantly, detest government, demand lower taxes and the end of welfare, and favor the death penalty, prayer in school, and an absolute faith in the free market.

And yet Americans believe deeply in progressive ideas. In fact, progressivism has long been a powerful force in the American psyche. Consider that a mere generation ago the struggle for environmentally sound policies, for women's rights, and for racial equality were fringe movements. Today, open opposition to these core ideals would be political suicide.

Drawing on this wellspring of American progressivist tradition, John K. Wilson has penned an informal handbook for the pragmatic progressive. Wilson insists that the left must become more savvy in its rhetoric and stop preaching only to the converted. Progressives need to attack the tangible realities of the corporate welfare state, while explicitly acknowledging that "socialism is," as Wilson writes, "deader than Lenin."

Rather than attacking a "right-wing conspiracy," Wilson argues that the left needs one, too. Tracing how well-funded conservative pressure groups have wielded their influence and transformed the national agenda, Wilson outlines a similar approach for the left. Along the way, he exposes the faultlines of our poll- and money-driven form of politics, explodes the myth of "the liberal media," and demands that the left explicitly change its image.

Irreverent, practical, and urgently argued, How The Left Can Win Arguments and Influence People charts a way to translate progressive ideals into reality and reassert the core principles of the American left on the national stage.

Scholars who have studied rural people and places often have focused on a snapshot in time as they attempt to understand how human beings are impacted by change at the local community level. Community once was declared dead as a unit of analysis for social science scholars, yet the citizens who live in these places find that their attachments to place and to other people in these places are crucial to their lives. Too often those who study such phenomena fail to examine the longterm impacts of shocks to place and people. This methodological failing often leads to exaggerated estimations of the impacts of disasters on communities and their residents. Human beings and the social structures they create are resilient. In this book, the author fills some of the gaps in our knowledge when he returns repeatedly to Buffalo Creek for several years, long after the flash flood departed in 1972. It is not often that a scholar with empathy for rural citizens returns to a place for many years to understand the longer term implications of disasters for individual well-being. This book provides a view of a place long after the tragedy has taken place. It illustrates how community residents struggle to re-create community and well-being after a serious ecological shock. The resilience of the human character and the adaptability of community structures form the core of this book. Taking us through the days before the flash flood at Buffalo Creek, the author paints a portrait of human failings and of growing environmental danger. He draws on the voices that were there on the scene. He also gives us a detailed review of newspaper accounts, government documents, and research studies, including Kai Erikson's classic disaster study, Everything in Its Path. From these many sources, we get a multi-faceted account of how the disaster occurred and how dozens of local, state, and federal agencies responded to it. After the Disaster provides detailed discussions with local residents, survey data, and a gift for integration that allows the reader to gain an understanding of how disasters impact communities in the short term and in the long term. The latter is one of the most important contributions of this book.

A point-counterpoint challenge of the views expressed by Vice President Al Gore in Earth in the Balance, this important study questions current assumptions about the cost and effectiveness of environmental laws and policies, revealing the crucial link between programs of population control and long-term environmental goals. Governmental policy on the environment, as well as private environmental action, has typically been curative and reactive in nature--directed towards cleaning up past disasters and limiting the types and amounts of pollutants emitted. But what is the cost-effectiveness of such policies at a time when the population of the world continues to expand at an exponential rate? And what should be the role of population control in environmental policy? Robert Hardaway explores these issues and questions, refocusing attention on the importance of population growth to environmental quality. Synthesizing contemporary population theories in the context of environmental policy, Hardaway relates population, law, and the environment to abortion, immigration, education, and economic regulation.

This book provides a detailed snapshot of cultural policies in China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. In addition to an historical overview of the culture-state relationships in East Asia, it provides an analysis of contemporary developments occurring in the regions' cultural policies and the challenges they are facing.

The Carter administration took office at an unfortunate time as far as economics is concerned. The economy was floundering, and the oil crisis and energy problems were all too prevalent. The author explains that as Carter turned to fighting inflation, he abandoned the traditional Democratic agenda and became a forerunner of Reagan. In the end, he did not conquer inflation, but he did sacrifice his ambitious programs for restructuring government, crafting a lasting energy program, and reforming the tax structure, welfare, and health care.

Peace support operations are one of the most important tools in the foreign policy of Western democracies. This book is a study of Italian military operations in the last twenty years. Italy's operations are examined through an analysis of parliamentary debates and interviews with leading policy-makers.

"This book explores the origins of the so-called "punitive turn" in penal policy across Western nations over the past two decades. It demonstrates how the context of neoliberalism has informed penal policy-making and argues that it is ultimately neoliberalism which has led to the recent intensification of punishment"--

This book addresses the relationship between the production of social problems in educational policy, the research practices required to inform policy, and the daily production of normalcies and differences in school contexts. It reports on the opportunities and consequences for policy, research, and practice when normalcy is stigmatized at the same level as difference. The book employs a critical analysis combining queer, feminist, and post-representational theories to understand the implications of dominant ways of understanding the division between normal and different subjectivities and how they reiterate structures of inequality in schools.

Using archival sources and interviews with key participants, new insight is gained to how the Lib-Lab Pact of 1977-78 - an agreement, short of a full coalition - came about, was structured and implemented, and how Liberal leader, David Steel, might have achieved significant policy concessions on electoral reform.

This book deals with the role of expertise and public participation in modern governance. It explores the relationship, tensions and compatibility of these increasingly important and partly conflicting sources of legitimacy and authority. By zooming in on the coordinated procedures of environmental policy-making in European consensus systems and by interconnecting theories of democracy, knowledge and science, organisation and decision-making, the author develops institutional solutions to the tensions between epistemic and democratic demands on public policy-making.

This edited volume presents case studies of the transformation of China's public services over the past decade in China. As the country has experienced fundamental changes in its demographic, economic, social and environmental structures, demands on public services have been increasing tremendously, and have become unprecedentedly diverse. In response, innovations to provide new services, expand service recipients, adopt new technologies, engage partners, and streamline service processes have been employed widely in China to increase service efficiency, enhance quality, enlarge coverage, and improve citizen satisfaction. This book examines prominent cases of public service innovations in China, disclosing their causes, patterns, diffusion, and effects. These cases provide interesting evidence about the nature and effectiveness of public service innovations in China while highlighting to what extent these innovations can be explained by accepted theories and whether new theory building is needed. This book will be of value to academics and policymakers seeking to understand the evolving Chinese political system.

This book makes a forthright case for a shift in policy focus from 'community cohesion' to the broader notion of social cohesion, and is distinctive and innovative in its focus on evaluation. It constitutes an extremely valuable source both for practitioners involved in social cohesion interventions and for researchers and students studying theory-based evaluation and the policy areas highlighted (housing, intergenerational issues, the recession, education, communications, community development).

This book provides an accessible overview of the societal relevance of contemporary geosciences. Engaging various disciplines from humanities and social sciences, the book offers philosophical, cultural, economic, and geoscientific insights into how to contextualise geosciences in the node of Culture and Nature. The authors introduce two perspectives of societal geosciences, both informed by the lens of geoethics. Throughout the text core themes are explored; human agency, the integrity of place, geo-centricity, economy and climate justice, subjective sense-making and spirituality, nationalism, participatory empowerment and leadership in times of anthropogenic global change. The book concludes with a discussion on culture, education, or philosophy of science as aggregating concepts of seemingly disjunct narratives.The diverse intellectual homes of the authors offer a rich resource in terms of how they perceive human agency within the Earth system. Two geoscientific perspectives and fourteen narratives from various cultural, social and political viewpoints contextualise geosciences in the World(s) of the Anthropocene.

This book is the fourth in a projected eight-volume series that addresses the origins and development of the idea of legislative sovereignty and the legislative state. A. London Fell's study, which traces ideas and contributions from the Renaissance thinker and legal scholar Corasius to the present, has been praised by such scholars as J. Russell Major in American Historical Review and Dennis M. Patterson in "The American Political Science RevieW." In this volume, the focus is on ancient, medieval, and early modern Europe, as Fell charts the overall patterns of historiographical debates in modern discussion on the origins of legislation, public law, sovereignty, and the state.

The work begins with a brief introduction, and is followed by six sections that cover the different periods and geographical aspects of the topic from a historiographical perspective. Section one proceeds chronologically throughout the entire spectrum of early Europe, from the ancient and medieval periods, through the Renaissance and Reformation, to post-sixteenth-century developments. In each case, the theories that attribute the origins of state to that period are thoroughly examined. In sections two through six, the study proceeds on a nation-by-nation basis, focusing in each case first on the Middle Ages and then on the Renaissance. The nations covered include Italy, France, England, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. The study concludes with a summary chapter, followed by a series of supplemental bibliographical essays that serve as an appendix to the first four volumes. Like the previous volumes in the series, this work is a substantial contribution to the study of jurisprudence and political theory, and will be an important reference source for students and professors of history, law, and political science, as well as philosophy.