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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Institutions & organizations
This book analyses productive systems from a structural relational perspective, linking the structure and evolution of productive systems to economic development. An epistemological approach is adopted, which considers the social nature of economic actors and the importance of historical and geographical aspects. MarIa Semitiel GarcIa uses the structure and evolution of an agro-food and a metal-mechanical regional productive system to illustrate the benefits of adopting the network perspective as a methodological approach in economic research. The existence and persistence of inter-regional development differences, the structure of production systems, the role of services in these systems and the role of social capital in development are also discussed. Highlighting a holistic and comprehensive study of productive systems and its relationship with development, this book will strongly appeal to a wide-ranging audience, encompassing those with a special interest in regional development, institutional economics, industrial economics and policy, social network analysis and economic sociology.
Higher education and research institutions are confronted with changing and sometimes contradictory claims from state, industry and society, today. They have to face growing volatility and an acceleration and internationalization of the knowledge process. This book undertakes to develop a sector specific theory of governance of the public research sector and applies it to the German research system. The book is the outcome of a large interdisciplinary project. It analyzes the reforms in the German research system from an integrated perspective of law, economics and social sciences. The case of Germany is compared to reforms in other European countries such as Austria, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The study emphasizes an integrated approach considering the research function of universities as well as the non-university research sector. The focus is on the integration of external and internal governance. First, we pose the question how external competition and control mechanisms do influence internal governance of research institutions and universities and vice versa. Second, we discuss the consequences of these impacts on research. The book addresses scholars in the field of science and technology studies and research policy as well as actors responsible for establishing and implementing research policies. Managers of research institutions will find insights and guidelines for the strategic positioning of their institutions in a rapidly changing environment. Researchers in the field of governance may profit from the approaches to governance which are applied to the German research system in comparison to other research systems.
The result of major research on development, security and culture, this collection, and second volume "Sustainable Development in a Globalized World," outlines the emerging field of global studies and the theoretical approach of global social theory. It considers social relations and the need for intercultural dialogue to respect "the other."
Global rules are increasingly made without the direct involvement of states. This book explores what this privatisation of global rule-making means for democracy. Based on contemporary theoretical approaches to democratic global governance, it reconstructs three prominent rule-making processes in the field of global sustainability politics: the World Commission on Dams, the Global Reporting Initiative and the Forest Stewardship Council. The book argues that, if designed properly, private transnational rule-making can be as democratic as intergovernmental rule-making.
The rapid social and economic changes in China have brought about
unprecedented challenges and opportunities to international
stakeholders. This book provides valuable information about the key
sectors of China's health care system after its entrance into WTO,
including the pharmaceutical industry, health insurance services,
and hospitals and related health service provision in terms of
policies, legal framework and market potential. It offers a
critical analysis from a multi-disciplinary perspective of the
impact of WTO and globalization on China's health care
system.
"The Europa Directory of International Organizations 2002" is an
extensive and unequalled one-volume research guide to international
organizations around the world. Offering truly international
coverage, it brings together contact details, further data and
definitions on over 1,700 international and regional organizations
world wide. It is extensively researched, covering a wide spectrum
of organizations from the UN and its specialized agencies to the
League of Arab States and Black Sea Economic Cooperation.
Presenting new material and a fresh perspective, Technology, Trade and Growth in OECD Countries, provides a unifying framework for the exploration of the role played by specialisation in economic growth and international competitiveness.
In the early 1970s, fuzzy systems and fuzzy control theories added a new dimension to control systems engineering. From its beginnings as mostly heuristic and somewhat ad hoc, more recent and rigorous approaches to fuzzy control theory have helped make it an integral part of modern control theory and produced many exciting results. Yesterday's "art" of building a working fuzzy controller has turned into today's "science" of systematic design.
This volume explores the unanticipated consequences of emulating, importing, or imposing new institutional models without commensurate attention to the particular constellations of interests, identities, norms, and social relations embedded in local communities. Each chapter is organized around a common problematic that has received only limited attention in the literature on institutional change: the dilemmas of deploying the rules, practices, and design of institutions that have been imported or imposed from external environments in regions where actors are more familiar with and find more legitimate locally embedded norms, practices, social relations, and knowledge structures. The volume strives to illustrate the analytic power of the concept of 'syncretism, ' a concept that can be fruitfully deployed to analyze common aspects of institutional change not easily captured in existing frameworks.
A study of the international NGO advocacy for social and environmental justice, this book looks at the fundamental issues of legitimacy, accountability and democracy that such activities involve and how they are manifested. It presents case studies on trade issues, labour rights, extractive industries and indigenous people in Asia and South America.
Drawing on the heritage of research that demonstrates the thoroughly gendered nature of work organizations, this book explores a key question that, as yet, remains unanswered: how does gendered organizational life affect individuals' identities as they go about their everyday working lives? This question is explored with theoretical insights from disciplines including sociology, geography, history and gender studies interwoven with a major new empirical study of doctors and nurses working in the British National Health Service.
With an ever increasing number of relationships between different companies, overseeing a portfolio of strategic alliances has become one of the most challenging tasks for managers. Indeed, the network, rather than the individual firm, has become the most relevant and effective form of organization in the economy. By integrating the most recent academic literature with practical new insights, this book develops a framework that will help both managers and academics to understand the intricate workings of the network economy. The author explores critical issues such as network strategy, network structures, partner selection, network management, and competition in and between networks. By studying the fundamentals of the managerial process, he is able to create a comprehensive and logical overview of successful management in the network economy. He highlights the fact that companies now need to manage whole networks, not just individual alliances, and that the days when firms operated in isolation are over. He also provides a unique and intriguing look at network tactics, demonstrating the tricks and ploys firms use in a network scenario. Throughout the book, interesting case studies are used to illustrate examples of effective network management in leading companies such as Cisco, Glaxo, Microsoft, Nokia and Toyota. This is the first volume to translate theoretical ideas on network management into practical guidelines. It will become an invaluable aid to business people at all levels including CEOs, alliance and strategy managers, and R&D managers. It will also be of immense value to academics interested in networks, innovation management and organisation, and policymakers involved with technology and anti-trust policy.
Papers on aspects of the growth of royal government during the century. The size and jurisdiction of English royal government underwent sustained development in the thirteenth century, an understanding of which is crucial to a balanced view of medieval English society. The papers here follow three central themes: the development of central government, law and justice, and the crown and the localities. Examined within this framework are bureaucracy and enrolment under John and his contemporaries; the Royal Chancery; the adaptation of the Exchequer in response to the rapidly changing demands of the crown; the introduction of a licensing system for mortmain alienations; the administration of local justice; women as sheriffs; and a Nottinghamshire study examining the tensions between the role of the king as manorial lord and as monarch. Contributors: NICK BARRATT, PAUL R. BRAND, DAVID CARPENTER, DAVID CROOK, ANTHONY MUSSON, NICHOLAS C. VINCENT, LOUISE WILKINSON
The Crown Agents Office played a crucial role in colonial development. The Crown Agents Office played a crucial role in colonial development. Acting in the United Kingdom as the commercial and financial agent for the crown colonies, the Agency supplied all non-locally manufactured stores required bycolonial governments, issued their London loans, managed their UK investments, and supervised the construction of their railways, harbours and other public works. In addition, the Office supervised the award of colonial land and mineral concessions, monitored the colonial banking and currency system, and performed a personnel role, paying colonial service salaries and pensions, recruiting technical officers, and arranging the transport of officers, troopsand Indian indentured labour. In this important book, the first in-depth investigation of the Agency, David Sunderland examines each of these services in turn, determining in each case whether the Crown Agents' performance benefited their clients, the UK economy or themselves. His book is thus both an account of a remarkable and unique organisation and a fascinating examination of the "nuts and bolts" of nineteenth-century development. David Sunderland is Reader in Business History, Greenwich University.
Post-baccalaureate education continues to expand at an accelerated rate as new degree programs are developed, enrollments rise, online instruction matures, and the number of institutions offering advanced degrees increases. Our level of understanding of graduate and professional education has not kept pace, especially in comparison to the depth of scholarship available on primary, secondary, and baccalaureate education. A Research Agenda for Graduate Education is a call to action for the graduate education community to commit to the same level of research and scholarship on itself that it expects from its students in their own disciplinary training. In this book, Brian S. Mitchell explores the current literature on graduate education for theoretical models that need testing, previous research that needs updating, and future research that may be explored. The book is divided into research questions on the science of graduate learning, graduate student career preparation, and graduate program improvement, with special attention placed on current research topics. Targeted at higher education researchers, including educational psychologists and disciplinary-based researchers specializing in graduate education, this volume will also be of interest to funding agencies, university administrators, and faculty mentors.
The theme of this book is that economic growth is key, but institutions and other national and subnational attributes matter as well. They are critical to explaining differences in social development and poverty reduction across countries and subnational areas that cannot be accounted for by growth alone. The book concludes that a more complete strategy needs to consider various institutional factors at the national and subnational levels to achieve rapid and sustained poverty reduction. Indeed, paying attention to these factors will benefit both growth and poverty reduction.
This book offers a new insight into one of the most interesting and long-lived institutions known to historians of science, the Chinese imperial Astronomical Bureau, which for two millennia observed, recorded, interpreted and predicted the movements of the celestial bodies. Utilising archival material, such as the resumes written for imperial audiences and personnel administration records, the book traces the rise and fall of more than thirty hereditary families serving at the Astronomical Bureau from the late Ming period to the end of the Qing dynasty. The book also presents an in-depth view into the organisation and function of the Bureau and succinctly charts the impacts of historical developments during the Ming and Qing periods, including the Regency of Prince Dorgon, the influence of the Jesuits, the relationship between the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors and the He family and the failure of the bureau to predict correctly the solar eclipse of 1730. Presenting a social history of the Qing Astronomical Bureau from the perspective of hereditary astronomer families, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese Imperial history, the history of science and Asian history.
Educational institutions, and in particular educational leaders, play critical roles in identifying and rectifying the many inequities that oppress, marginalize, and exclude individual students, educational actors, and some minoritized groups in Canadian education. Leading for Equity and Social Justice provides a deep look at some of these inequities and injustices and offers transformative leadership as one way for leaders to stimulate, support, and foster equitable and socially just practices in educational institutions. This collection emphasizes the systemic nature of inequality and supports the necessity of systemic change to target not only individuals but also structures, policies, and far-reaching practices. Focusing on various marginalized groups - including the Indigenous community, LGBTQ2S+ peoples, refugees, newcomers, and specific groups of teachers - chapters explore transformative leadership in practice and how to achieve inclusion, respect, and excellence in schools. Arguing that leadership involves much more than simply putting policy into practice, Leading for Equity and Social Justice promotes the need for leaders to recognize their role as advocates and activists.
The value of the book lies in its reassessment of the distinctive features of the Chicago School, of its contributions in the theoretical and methodological fields and of its influence on the growth of sociology throughout the world and in America in particular. The book pays particularly close attention to the eclectic nature of the research methods used by the Chicago sociologists as they sought to integrate subjective and objective aspects of human life. It demonstrates that this eclecticism formed an integral part of their theories but also emphasises that empirical observation, too, was important, although not as an end in itself. While, for example, they were working on the concepts of organization, marginality and interaction, they did not consider these as ends in themselves but as additions to the development of a more general theoretical approach. Often in the past, and wrongly, Chicago’s theoretical contribution has been restricted to the urban sector. The book clearly and unequivocally reveals how the tendency to see the Chicago School as a 'theoretical' is the result of misinterpretation and of a failure to realize that, for the sociologists of the period, understanding the social dynamics of the city of Chicago was tantamount to interpreting the central tendencies of modern society itself. The book analyzes how empirical observation was important but not an end in itself. The Chicago School developed a profusion of sociological theories in many areas of inquiry and never opted for any one particular approach. The various essays in the book also make it clear that the School decisively contributed to the development of qualitative and quantitative techniques.
The growth and development of the Lincoln Record Society in its first hundred years highlights the contribution of such organisations to historical life. In 2010 the Lincoln Record Society celebrates its centenary with the publication of the hundredth volume in its distinguished series. Local record societies, financed almost entirely from the subscriptions of their members, have made an important contribution to the study of English history by making accessible in printed form some of the key archival materials relating to their areas. The story of the Lincoln society illustrates the struggles and triumphsof such an enterprise. Founded by Charles Wilmer Foster, a local clergyman of remarkable enthusiasm, the LRS set new standards of meticulous scholarship in the editing of its volumes. Its growing reputation is traced here througha rich archive of correspondence with eminent historians, among them Alexander Hamilton Thompson and Frank Stenton. The difficulties with which Kathleen Major, Canon Foster's successor, contended to keep the Society alive duringthe dark days of the Second World War are vividly described. The range of volumes published has continued to expand, from the staple cartularies and episcopal registers to more unusual sources, Quaker minutes, records ofCourts of Sewers and seventeenth-century port books. While many of the best-known publications have dealt with the medieval period, notably the magnificent Registrum Antiquissimum of Lincoln Cathedral, there have also beeneditions of eighteenth-century correspondence, twentieth-century diaries, and pioneering railway photographs of the late Victorian era. This story shows the Lincoln Record Society to be in good heart and ready to begin its secondcentury with confidence. Nicholas Bennett is currently Vice-Chancellor and Librarian of Lincoln Cathedral.
A comprehensive introduction to a powerful new approach for planning organizational change and community action. You'll discover a simple framework for understanding the process and clear step-by-step instructions to guide you in conducting your own Search Conferences.
In Newspaper City, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh scrutinizes the reluctance of early Torontonians to pave their streets. He demonstrates how Toronto's two liberal newspapers, the Toronto Globe and Toronto Daily Star, nevertheless campaigned for surface infrastructure as the leading expression of modern urbanity, despite the broad resistance of property owners to pay for infrastructure improvements under local improvements by-laws. To boost paving, newspapers used their broadsheets to fashion two imagined cities for their readers: one overrun with animals, dirt, and marginal people, the other civilized, modern, and crowned with clean streets. However, the employment of capitalism to generate traditional public goods, such as concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads, regulated pedestrianism, and efficient automobilism, is complicated. Thus, the liberal newspapers' promotion of a city of orderly infrastructure and contented people in actual Toronto proved strikingly illiberal. Consequently, Mackintosh's study reveals the contradictory nature of newspapers and the historiographical complexities of newspaper research.
Over the past three decades, Meyer, Jepperson, and colleagues have contributed to the development of one of the leading approaches in social theory, by analyzing the cultural frameworks that have shaped modern organizations, states, and identities. Bringing together key articles and new reflections, this volume collects the essential theoretical ideas of 'sociological neoinstitutionalism.' It clarifies the core ideas and situates them within social theory writ large. Among other topics, the authors discuss the changing nature of the "actors" that have operated within contemporary social structure. The book concludes with the evolving frameworks that have structured social activity in the post-World War II period of 'embedded liberalism,' in the more recent neoliberal period, and in an emergent post-liberal period that appears to be a radical departure. |
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