As citizens, why do we care about the everyday life of ministers and civil servants? We care because the decisions of the great and the good affect all our lives, for good or ill. For all their personal, political, and policy failings and foibles, they make a difference. So, we want to know what ministers and bureaucrats do, why, and how. We are interested in their beliefs and practices.
In Everyday Life in British Government, a fascinating, new piece of political anthropology, R.A.W. Rhodes uncovers exactly how the British political elite thinks and acts. Drawing on unprecedented access to ministers and senior civil servants in three government departments, he answers a simple question: 'what do they do?' On the basis of extensive fieldwork, supplemented by revealing interviews, Rhodes tries to capture the essence of their everyday life, describes the ministers' and permanent secretaries' world through their own eyes, and explores how their beliefs and practices serve to create meaning in politics, policy making, and public-service delivery. Everyday Life in British Government goes on to analyze how such beliefs and practices are embedded in traditions; in webs of protocols, rituals, and languages.
The story Rhodes has to tell is dramatized through in-depth accounts of specific events to show ministers and civil servants 'in action'. He challenges the conventional constitutional, institutional, and managerial views of British governance. Instead, he describes a storytelling political-administrative elite, with beliefs and practices rooted in the Westminster model, which uses protocols and rituals to domesticate rude surprises and cope with recurrent dilemmas.

In 1994, the mountain territory of Chechnya was the target of the largest military campaign staged on Russian soil since World War II. In 1996, the Kremlin eventually ordered its 40,000 strong troops to withdraw from what had been a savage conflict with the Chechen guerillas. This book charts the bitter history between Russia and the Chechens and explains why the war took place. Points are raised about the nature of Soviet politics and army and the successes and failures of the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet political values.

This book examines the problem of accountability in two African political systems, South Africa and Nigeria. Despite the principle of separation of powers and the doctrine of checks and balances among the institutions of governance, a burgeoning governance crisis stifles the potential of accountability and good governance. Legislative oversight in the two countries remains largely ineffective while citizens are left to face the consequences of the mismanagement of public resources by political elites. This book critically assesses how the legislative institutions in South Africa and Nigeria have been unable to harness the requisite constitutional powers to ensure accountability in government and explores the feasibility of their effectiveness. The book begins with a comparative analysis of the principles, tradition, and powers associated with legislative capability in South Africa and Nigeria. The chapters explore constitutional provisions and analyze the capacity of each legislature to function within its respective political environment. The book also examines the process and challenges associated with the various measures and mechanisms available for legislatures to ensure accountability in the two countries. Researchers, scholars and students of African politics will find this book useful in their understanding of the problems associated with the simmering governance crisis in South Africa and Nigeria.

Have bureaucrats taken over the decision making role of politicians? This book offers a direct assessment of the role of bureaucrats in policy making by analysing how they shape policy in making decrees - laws that generally do not pass through full legislative scrutiny. These are often described as "secondary legislation" and are known by a variety of names (including decrets, arretes, administrative regulations, Verordnungen, statutory instruments). Such decrees offer an important vantage point for understanding bureaucratic power not only because they account for a large proportion of policy making activity within the executive, but also because they are made largely away from the glare of publicity. If bureaucrats have strong policy making powers and use them in a way that minimises political involvement in policy making, we would expect to find these powers especially evident in this "everyday" decision making. The book is based on research examining 52 decrees produced between 2005 and 2008 in six jurisdictions: France, the UK, Germany, Sweden, the United States and the European Union. The comparative perspective allows one to see how far different patterns of bureaucratic involvement in policy making are characteristic of particular political systems and how far they are a general feature of modern bureaucracies. The book asks three main questions about how these decrees are produced: when do politicians become involved in making them? What happens when politicians become involved? And what happens when they are not involved? The answers to these questions are provided by examination of primary source material as well as interviews with over 90 officials.

The debate on governance originates in the OECD world. At the latest since the postcolonial debate, we know that we need to "test" our assumptions under radically different conditions. This book offers an extended perspective of local self-governance by examining cases from South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, together with a study of militias in the USA. The chapters present a wide variety of local actors who pursue different notions of order legitimized by local traditions based on hierarchy or deeply rooted communalism, Islamic theology, or grassroots democracy. Some local actors claim a state-like authority and challenge the territorial state. In such cases, there is no longer "a shadow hierarchy" but opposition to the state. Different violent actors fight for supremacy, and the state is just one actor among others. The empirical studies presented in this book show how different kinds of local self-governance are combined with varieties of statehood, and thus contribute to an understanding of the notion of governance in a fundamental sense that goes beyond the special case of the OECD world.

This book provides an analysis of the various challenges and opportunities facing the Japanese broadcasting industry. It is the first book in English that explores how Japanese broadcasting, especially commercial broadcasting, fulfills its social mission under the threat of the increased popularity of Internet-based media services as it reexamines the role and nature of broadcasting. During a series of disasters and the spread of the new coronavirus in Japan, while varied media connected people and supported socio-economic activities, broadcasting continued to be the most trusted. However, as Internet media attract increasing attention, the trend in broadcast viewership is downward. Commercial broadcasting, in particular, will be strongly affected by that trend and the impact of the shrinking population. Recognizing that such dramatic technological and environmental changes are under way, in addition to the eleven researchers participating in the visiting researcher committee at the Research Institute of the Japan Commercial Broadcasters Association (JBA), four research collaborators and the secretariat (director of the JBA) have contributed to this book. They have taken up issues related to challenges and opportunities for the broadcasting industry based on their respective areas of awareness of the problems, including policies for broadcasting, fake news, disaster responses, viewer trust in television programs, competition with Internet-based services, and the business model for broadcasting.

Topics covered include: The fundamentals of business process modeling, including workflow patterns, an in-depth treatment of process flexibility, including approaches to dealing with on-the-fly changes, unexpected exceptions, and constraint-based processes, Technological aspects of a modern BPM environment, including its architecture, process design environment, process engine, resource handler and other support services, a comparative insight into current approaches to business process modeling and execution such as BPMN, EPCs, BPEL, jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark, process mining, verification, integration and configuration; and case studies in health care and screen business.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the field of Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on Business Process Automation. It achieves this by covering a wide range of topics, both introductory and advanced, illustrated through and grounded in the YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) language and corresponding open-source support environment. In doing so it provides the reader with a deep, timeless, and vendor-independent understanding of the essential ingredients of business process automation.

The BPM field is in a continual state of flux and is subject to both the ongoing proposal of new standards and the introduction of new tools and technology. Its fundamentals however are relatively stable and this book aims to equip the reader with both a thorough understanding of them and the ability to apply them to better understand, assess and utilize new developments in the BPM field.

As a consequence of its topic-based format and the inclusion of a broad range of exercises, the book is eminently suitable for use in tertiary education, both at the undergraduate and the postgraduate level, for students of computer science and information systems. BPM researchers and practitioners will also find it a valuable resource. The book serves as a unique reference to a varied and comprehensive collection of topics that are relevant to the business process life-cycle.

THE COMMODIFICATION GAP 'In an elegant and careful theoretical analysis, this book demonstrates how gentrification is always entwined with institutions and distinctive contextual processes. Matthias Bernt develops a new concept, the "commodification gap", which is tested in three richly researched cases. With this, the concept of gentrification becomes a multiplicity and the possibility of conversations across different urban contexts is expanded. A richly rewarding read!' --Jennifer Robinson, Professor of Human Geography, University College London, UK 'Urban studies has reached a stalemate of universalism versus particularism. Matthias Bernt is breaking out of this deadlock by being very precise about what exactly is universal and what is not - and how one can conceptualize both. The Commodity Gap is a key contribution to not only gentrification studies, but also to comparative urbanism and urban studies at large.' --Manuel B. Aalbers, Division of Geography & Tourism, KU Leuven, Belgium The Commodification Gap provides an insightful institutionalist perspective on the field of gentrification studies. The book explores the relationship between the operation of gentrification and the institutions underpinning - but also influencing and restricting - it in three neighborhoods in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg. Matthias Bernt demonstrates how different institutional arrangements have resulted in the facilitation, deceleration or alteration of gentrification across time and place. The book is based on empirical studies conducted in Great Britain, Germany and Russia and contains one of the first-ever English language discussions of gentrification in Germany and Russia. It begins with an examination of the limits of the widely established "rent-gap" theory and proposes the novel concept of the "commodification gap." It then moves on to explore how different institutional contexts in the UK, Germany and Russia have framed the conditions for these gaps to enable gentrification. The Commodification Gap is an indispensable resource for researchers and academics studying human geography, housing studies, urban sociology and spatial planning.

Present day knowledge about public sector reforms in Asia is quite scattered and seldom focuses on the challenges of leadership. This edited collection seeks to address this issue by presenting country cases that reflect the great diversity of the region. Home to roughly one-third of the world's population, Asia-Pacific governments typically play leading roles in social and economic development, yet by measures of expenditures or civil servants per capita, most are among the smaller ones in the world. These regimes include democracies, one-party states and unstable systems; there is a broad range of cultural legacies including Confucian, Buddhist, and Western, and vastly different levels of economic development; the region includes some of the very least corrupt countries and those with high corruption levels; it includes the world's most populous country, as well as some of the smallest. Public sector reforms are very relevant to these countries and their leaders. In Asia, a strong government is invaluable and public sector reforms are relevant to helping modern states meet their goals and performance. This collection explores what is known about these reforms with an eye towards helping leaders responsible for reforms. Clearly, there is very large variation; some Asia-Pacific countries are leading in public sector reforms, while others are not, and this book also seeks to further our understanding what leaders might need to do to be successful.

This book provides a comprehensive picture of fog computing technology, including of fog architectures, latency aware application management issues with real time requirements, security and privacy issues and fog analytics, in wide ranging application scenarios such as M2M device communication, smart homes, smart vehicles, augmented reality and transportation management. This book explores the research issues involved in the application of traditional shallow machine learning and deep learning techniques to big data analytics. It surveys global research advances in extending the conventional unsupervised or clustering algorithms, extending supervised and semi-supervised algorithms and association rule mining algorithms to big data Scenarios. Further it discusses the deep learning applications of big data analytics to fields of computer vision and speech processing, and describes applications such as semantic indexing and data tagging. Lastly it identifies 25 unsolved research problems and research directions in fog computing, as well as in the context of applying deep learning techniques to big data analytics, such as dimensionality reduction in high-dimensional data and improved formulation of data abstractions along with possible directions for their solutions.

This book brings together scholars from economic and political science to study the interactions within the European Union from a strategic or rational choice perspective. The contributors seek to understand the relationship between member states and competing European institutions. The book focuses on the horizontal checks and balances including the countervailing forces of legislative, regulatory, bureaucratic, and constitutional decision-making. Other examinations analyze the vertical structures, in particular the impact of the federal distributions of power on policy choices.

Energy Systems Transition: Digitalization, Decarbonization, Decentralization, and Democratization provides a thorough multidisciplinary overview of the operation of modern green energy systems and examines the role of 4D energy transition in global decarbonization mitigation efforts for meeting long-term climate goals. Contributions present practical aspects and approaches with evidence from applications to real-world energy systems, offering in-depth technical discussions, case studies, and examples to help readers understand the methods, current challenges, and future directions. A hands-on reference to energy distribution systems, it is suitable for researchers and industry practitioners from different branches of engineering, energy, data science, economics, and operation research.

The book is devoted to the subject of Venezuela's politics and the different dimensions of its longstanding crisis, with various researchers exchanging ideas on the current problems affecting the country. It is the first comprehensive overview on the dimensions of Venezuela's current crisis written in English, thus filling an important research gap. Especially the participation of international, well-known scholars make it a global enterprise. The book covers historical and theoretical facts surrounding the case of Venezuela and also focuses on the parties and actors that play decisive roles in the conflict. Subjects include the military, public administration, ideology, the opposition, the party landscape along with its crisis and Venezuela's oil policy. Furthermore the book touches upon international and regional aspects: Venezuela's diplomatic relations with the EU, the USA, Cuba and Colombia, respectively. The volume addresses a wider audience, such as scholars on Latin American and especially Venezuelan Politics, International Relations, as well as an interested public, including journalists and politicians.

The management of conflict has long been of concern to social scientists, urban planners and community-minded citizens. While differing mechanisms of managing ethno-national or ethno-linguistic tensions exist, few studies advance our understanding of how conflicts are actually managed - in other words, the study of ethnic peace. Public Administration in Contested Societies draw on the experiences of two differing examples of ethnic peace: Belfast and Brussels in the expectation that other contested cities such as Kirkuk, Jerusalem, Nicosia or Mostar, who may one day consider power-sharing as a form of governance, may learn from what have been categorised as sites of successful power-sharing. While there are few studies of ethnic peace, fewer studies again seek to understand the role of the elite level bureaucrat in sustaining this peace. The book ascertains the extent of discretion available to the bureaucratic elite and further, through determining core beliefs, establishes how this discretion is employed.

This book examines the politics of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in Namibia. CBNRM and similar forms of conservation across southern Africa have long been studied for their potential benefits as domestic policy tools to help improve sustainable development. However, they have often failed to achieve their stated goals. By assessing the initiation, design, implementation and outcomes of CBNRM, the book argues that communities are often unable to attain the degree of empowerment that these forms of resource governance promise. It also considers the impact of climate change on CBNRM programmes, and the responses of international actors involved in their governance. In doing so, the book demonstrates how the power imbalances that are built into the global political economy have ensured that those most marginalized in society are no better off as a result of this new form of resource governance. It will appeal to all those interested in CBNRM, conservation studies and environmental governance in Africa, as well political economy and international relations.

The book deals with the concept of urban infrastructure and the strong evolution of globalization, in particular the driving force taken by global cities. Urban infrastructure is a constituent part of the global cities, both have a synergistic evolution. The main reference is to western global cities in the intertwining of financialization, settling and brownfield which is a little different from the urbanization of other global cities of other non- developed countries, or emerging countries. There is therefore a significant link between globalization and urban infrastructure. The occurrence of slowbalization can have consequences on urban areas infrastructures and more generally on the different dichotomy between global city and nation. With the pandemic infectious and the post COVID, there is already a different configuration between the global city and the rest of the national territory. A driving element of the urban infrastructure and the global city has been the financialization and identification of assets within global cities. Urban infrastructure as an asset has grown considerably in the last two decades, in the wake of what has already been highlighted previously for real estate. There are contiguous issues that affect the concept of urban infrastructures and they are the enormous growth of finance and the landings of this in the great cities of the world with investments that first involved Real Estate and then urban infrastructures. There has also been a technological revolution that has merged the ubiquitous technological infrastructure with other more traditional components of the infrastructure, even apparently recent themes, such as smart cities, come from this evolutionary trend and merge with urban infrastructures. The theme of smart cities, if properly interpreted, gives strength to the concept of urban infrastructure.

Over the past five years Europe has continued its growth towards closer financial ties and economic integration. Through specific policies on subfields including agriculture, trade, competition, banking and economic governance the economic fortunes of individual European countries are more closely tied than ever. The aim of this comprehensive collection is to provide an overview of these policy developments for those who wish to gain an understanding of European economic integration without assuming prior knowledge of economics or using technical terms but rather is written in an accessible style and geared towards a wider-readership. On top of this, the volume also deals with many of the current issues that the European economic integration is faced with such as the global financial economic and sovereign debt crisis.

This book focuses on processes of bordering and governmentality around the Greek border islands from the declaration of a 'refugee crisis' in the summer of 2015 up until the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The chapters trace the implementation of the EU migration hotspot approach across space and time, from the maritime Aegean border to the islands (Lesvos and Samos) and from the islands to the Greek mainland. They do so through the lenses of peoples' refusal to succumb to categories that get reified as identities through the hotspot approach, such as that of the 'deserving refugee', the 'undeserving economic migrant', the 'translator', the 'volunteer', the 'tourist' and the 'researcher'. This book explores how 'migration management' in Greece from 2015-2020, along with the reshaping of space and time, reconfigured peoples' relationships with one another and ultimately with one's self.

"People/States/Territories" examines the role of state personnel in shaping, and being shaped by, state organizations and territories. The text develops a conceptual understanding of the state as a continually emerging and contingent territorial organization, which is reproduced, transformed, and contested by state personnel. Rhys Jones demonstrates how the iterative practices of state actors may give meaning and permanence to - or, alternatively, may question and transform - the state apparatus. In addition, Jones highlights how the state's territory is continuously negotiated and translated by those individuals working within this state apparatus, and he illustrates how the identities and practices of state personnel have been influenced by the organizational and territorial networks of power that characterize the state. "People/States/Territories" views the state, along with the process of state transformation, as the product of a continual - yet temporally specific - interplay between state personnel, state organizations, and state territories.

Featuring accessible, relevant case studies of four key periods in the transformation of the state within Britain, this book focuses specifically on: the medieval process of state formation in Wessex, north-west Scotland, and north Wales; the consolidation of state organizations that took place in England and Wales during the early modern period; the peopling of a state- and territorially-organized process of government inspection in the nineteenth century in the north of England; and the territorial, organizational and peopled contexts for the current process of devolution being experienced in the UK.

This volume provides a methodological toolbox for conducting policy research. Recognizing that policy research spans various academic disciplines, each of which takes a different view on causality, the volume introduces a methodologically pluralistic approach to policy studies. Each chapter clarifies the research question that each technique can answer, the research design and data treatment that each technique requires for its results to be sound, the validity domain of its results, and the actual deployment of the technique through a replicable example. Techniques covered include quasi-experimental designs, approaches to account for selection bias and observed imbalances, directed acyclic graphs and structural equation models, Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Bayesian case study and process tracing, and Agent-Based Modelling. By working through the volume, readers will understand how to learn from different techniques, apply them consciously, and triangulate them to make better sense of findings. This volume is intended for advanced academic courses, as well as scholars and practitioners in policy-related fields, such as political science, economics, sociology, and public administration. This is an open access book.