Bureaucratic Muse PDF Download

Author: Ethan Knapp
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271039876
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Author: Ethan Knapp
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780271052649
Category : Bureaucracy
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Author: Manuel P. Teodoro
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421402459
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Winner of the Herbert A. Simon Book Award of the American Political Science Association, American Society for Public Administration Book Award of the American Society for Public Administration Political scientists and public administration scholars have long recognized that innovation in public agencies is contingent on entrepreneurial bureaucratic executives. But unlike their commercial counterparts, public administration “entrepreneurs” do not profit from their innovations. What motivates enterprising public executives? How are they created? Manuel P. Teodoro’s theory of bureaucratic executive ambition explains why pioneering leaders aren not the result of serendipity, but rather arise out of predictable institutional design. Teodoro explains the systems that foster or frustrate entrepreneurship among public executives. Through case studies and quantitative analysis of original data, he shows how psychological motives and career opportunities shape administrators’ decisions, and he reveals the consequences these choices have for innovation and democratic governance. Tracing the career paths and political behavior of agency executives, Teodoro finds that, when advancement involves moving across agencies, ambitious bureaucrats have strong incentives for entrepreneurship. Where career advancement occurs vertically within a single organization, ambitious bureaucrats have less incentive for innovation, but perhaps greater accountability. This research introduces valuable empirical methods and has already generated additional studies. A powerful argument for the art of the possible, Bureaucratic Ambition advances a flexible theory of politics and public administration. Its lessons will enrich debate among scholars and inform policymakers and career administrators.

Author: Daniel Carpenter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214077
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Until now political scientists have devoted little attention to the origins of American bureaucracy and the relationship between bureaucratic and interest group politics. In this pioneering book, Daniel Carpenter contributes to our understanding of institutions by presenting a unified study of bureaucratic autonomy in democratic regimes. He focuses on the emergence of bureaucratic policy innovation in the United States during the Progressive Era, asking why the Post Office Department and the Department of Agriculture became politically independent authors of new policy and why the Interior Department did not. To explain these developments, Carpenter offers a new theory of bureaucratic autonomy grounded in organization theory, rational choice models, and network concepts. According to the author, bureaucracies with unique goals achieve autonomy when their middle-level officials establish reputations among diverse coalitions for effectively providing unique services. These coalitions enable agencies to resist political control and make it costly for politicians to ignore the agencies' ideas. Carpenter assesses his argument through a highly innovative combination of historical narratives, statistical analyses, counterfactuals, and carefully structured policy comparisons. Along the way, he reinterprets the rise of national food and drug regulation, Comstockery and the Progressive anti-vice movement, the emergence of American conservation policy, the ascent of the farm lobby, the creation of postal savings banks and free rural mail delivery, and even the congressional Cannon Revolt of 1910.

Author: Matthew S. Hull
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520272145
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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“Drawing inspiration from actor-network theory, science studies, and semiotics, this brilliant book makes us completely rethink the workings of bureaucracy as analyzed by Max Weber and James Scott. Matthew Hull demonstrates convincingly how the materiality of signs truly matters for understanding the projects of ‘the state.’” - Katherine Verdery, author of What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? “We are used to studies of roads and rails as central material infrastructure for the making of modern states. But what of records, the reams and reams of paper that inscribe the state-in-making? This brilliant book inquires into the materiality of information in colonial and postcolonial Pakistan. This is a work of signal importance for our understanding of the everyday graphic artifacts of authority.” - Bill Maurer, author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason "This is an excellent and truly exceptional ethnography. Hull presents a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich reading that will be an invaluable resource to scholars in the field of Anthropology and South Asian studies. The author’s focus on bureaucracy, “corruption," writing systems and urban studies (Islamabad) in a post-colonial context makes for a unique ethnographic engagement with contemporary Pakistan. In addition, Hull’s study is a refreshing voice that breaks the mold of current representation of Pakistan through the security studies paradigm." - Kamran Asdar Ali, Director, South Asia Institute, University of Texas

Author: Brian J. Cook
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421415534
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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A thorough update to this well-regarded political history of American public administration. In this new edition of his provocative book Bureaucracy and Self-Government, Brian J. Cook reconsiders his thesis regarding the inescapable tension between the ideal of self-government and the reality of administratively centered governance. Revisiting his historical exploration of competing conceptions of politics, government, and public administration, Cook offers a novel way of thinking constitutionally about public administration that transcends debates about “big government.” Cook enriches his historical analysis with new scholarship and extends that analysis to the present, taking account of significant developments since the mid-1990s. Each chapter has been updated, and two new chapters sharpen Cook’s argument for recognizing a constitutive dimension in normative theorizing about public administration. The second edition also includes reviews of Jeffersonian impacts on administrative theory and practice and Jacksonian developments in national administrative structures and functions, a look at the administrative theorizing that presaged progressive reforms in civil service, and insight into the confounding complexities that characterize public thinking about administration in a postmodern political order.

Author: D. Vance Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022664099X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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People in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory—but they were still unable to talk about death. Their inability wasn’t due to religion, but philosophy: saying someone is dead is nonsense, as the person no longer is. The one thing that can talk about something that is not, as D. Vance Smith shows in this innovative, provocative book, is literature. Covering the emergence of English literature from the Old English to the late medieval periods, Arts of Dying argues that the problem of how to designate death produced a long tradition of literature about dying, which continues in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot, and Gillian Rose. Philosophy’s attempt to designate death’s impossibility is part of a literature that imagines a relationship with death, a literature that intensively and self-reflexively supposes that its very terms might solve the problem of the termination of life. A lyrical and elegiac exploration that combines medieval work on the philosophy of language with contemporary theorizing on death and dying, Arts of Dying is an important contribution to medieval studies, literary criticism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy.

Author: K. Robertson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113707552X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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This timely volume examines the commitments of historicism in the wake of New Historicism. It contributes to the construction of a materialist historicism while, at the same time, proposing that discussions of work need not be limited to the clash between labour and capital. To this end, the essays offer more than a strictly historical view of the complex terms, social and literary, within which labour was treated in the medieval period. Several of the essays strive to reformulate the very critical language we use to think about the categories of labour and work through a continually doubled engagement with modern theories of labour and medieval theories and practices of labour.

Author: Holly Crocker
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000948269
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 755

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Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates combines classic critical essays alongside new voices and approaches, highlighting vibrant debates on medieval literature that will continue to shape critical conversations for the coming decades. Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith present a fascinating collection of essays from leading contemporary scholars of medieval literature and culture, examining topics including gender, sexuality, politics, belief, language, nationhood, science and desire. The volume sheds light on critical discussions of the medieval period and shows the continuing relevance and vivacity of Medieval English literature in the twenty-first century. Each section is thoroughly introduced and the essays develop various debates in key areas, providing a springboard for readers to establish their own study, arguments and opinions. Further reading sections make this volume an accessible and important resource for those studying literature from the Medieval period and beyond. Contributors: Anthony Bale, Sarah Beckwith, Anke Bernau, Glenn Burger, Ardis Butterfield, Christopher Cannon, Christine Chism, Lisa H. Cooper, Susan Crane, Holly A. Crocker, George Edmondson, Ruth Evans, Sylvia Federico, Laurie Finke, Aranye Fradenburg, Frank Grady, Richard Firth Green, Patricia Clare Ingham , Hannah Johnson, Steven Justice, David Lawton, Robert Mills, J. Allan Mitchell, Nicholas Perkins, Tison Pugh, Elizabeth Robertson, Kellie Robertson, Jessica Rosenfeld, Sarah Salih, Corinne Saunders, Martin Shichtman, D. Vance Smith, Emily Steiner, Jennifer Summit, Stephanie Trigg, Marion Turner, David Wallace, Angela Jane Weisl, Nicolette Zeeman

Author: Taylor Cowdery
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009223747
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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This revisionist literary history of early court poetry illuminates late-medieval and early modern theories of literary production.