Measuring government effectiveness is essential to ensuring accountability, as is an informed public that is willing and able to hold elected officials and policy-makers accountable. There are various forms of measurement, including against prior experience or compared to some ideal. In Yardstick Competition among Governments, Pierre Salmon argues that a more effective and insightful approach is to use common measures across a variety of countries, state, or other relevant political and economic districts. This facilitates and enables citizens comparing policy outputs in their own jurisdictions with those of others. An advantage of this approach is that it reduces information asymmetries between citizens and public officials, decreasing the costs of monitoring by the former of the latter -along the lines of principal-agent theory. These comparisons can have an effect on citizens' support to incumbents and, as a consequence, also on governments' decisions. By increasing transparency, comparisons by common yardsticks can decrease the influence of interest groups and increase the focus on broader concerns, whether economic growth or others. Salmon takes up complicating factors such as federalism and other forms of multi-level governance, where responsibility can become difficult to disentangle and accountability a challenge. Salmon also highlights the importance of publics with heterogeneous preferences, including variations in how voters interpret their roles, functions, or tasks. This results in the coexistence within the same electorate of different types of voting behavior, not all of them forward-looking. In turn, when incumbents face such heterogeneity, they can treat the response to their decisions as an aggregate non-strategic relation between comparative performance and expected electoral support. Combining theoretical, methodological, and empirical research, Salmon demonstrates how yardstick competition among governments, a consequence of the possibility that citizens look across borders, is a very significant, systemic dimension of governance both at the local and at the national levels.

We all negotiate every day, professionally and socially, yet few of us have had any training in how to do so more effectively. For professionals in health, social care and children's services, an ability to negotiate successfully is vital. Commissioning, contracting and negotiating new partnerships for delivering better services are now part of everyday life. Arguing that in the health and social services a different, less aggressive approach is required to that advocated by negotiators in the commercial sectors, Keith Fletcher explains how to prepare for and deal with negotiation situations more confidently so that settlements can be reached which satisfy all parties.

Nonprofit community-based social services teams deliver programs and resources to communities facing the greatest symptoms of inequality in this country. We are fortunate that front-lines professionals triage high-risk situations and cultivate opportunities for generational healing. Yet their work has not been comprehensively explored in the science on workplace chronic stress and vicarious trauma (CSVT). Few know that among tested teams, 52% of individuals face work-based chronic stress and 24% experience vicarious trauma. This work starts a public and transparent conversation about nonprofit community-based social services professionals, their important work, their suffering and the need to mitigate CSVT. In order to make a change, this book contextualizes why CSVT is left primarily unmitigated and unacknowledged in community-based organizations. The science covered in this book demonstrates that the very job duties that require highly adept and empathetic skills pull the professionals closest to the stress and trauma of those who they serve. Social science research also directs attention to nonprofit sector culture and norms that perpetuate inequality internally, further creating an employment context of suffering. Shedding light on the factors that create unmitigated and unacknowledged CSVT allows for the implementation of both short-term and long-term solutions.

There are numerous publications available to help current or aspiring academic faculty members enhance their professional abilities. However, there is a distinct shortage of works that cover the several soft skills junior faculty must possess to be promoted to tenure. This text discusses conflict resolution, negotiation, mediation, time management, understanding the politics of academia and many other vital skills. This book was written to emphasize the significance of these skills and to help junior professors acquire and implement them to improve their chances of getting promoted and tenured. It also covers the promotion and tenure processes, as well as how to remain competitive even after achieving this coveted goal.