Bureaucratic Muse
Author: Ethan Knapp
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2010-11-01
Total Pages: 226
ISBN-13: 0271039876
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The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy
Author: Daniel Carpenter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-06-16
Total Pages: 500
ISBN-13: 0691214077
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUntil 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.
The Politics of Presidential Appointments
Author: David E. Lewis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-12-16
Total Pages: 311
ISBN-13: 1400837685
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many questioned whether the large number of political appointees in the Federal Emergency Management Agency contributed to the agency's poor handling of the catastrophe, ultimately costing hundreds of lives and causing immeasurable pain and suffering. The Politics of Presidential Appointments examines in depth how and why presidents use political appointees and how their choices impact government performance--for better or worse. One way presidents can influence the permanent bureaucracy is by filling key posts with people who are sympathetic to their policy goals. But if the president's appointees lack competence and an agency fails in its mission--as with Katrina--the president is accused of employing his friends and allies to the detriment of the public. Through case studies and cutting-edge analysis, David Lewis takes a fascinating look at presidential appointments dating back to the 1960s to learn which jobs went to appointees, which agencies were more likely to have appointees, how the use of appointees varied by administration, and how it affected agency performance. He argues that presidents politicize even when it hurts performance--and often with support from Congress--because they need agencies to be responsive to presidential direction. He shows how agency missions and personnel--and whether they line up with the president's vision--determine which agencies presidents target with appointees, and he sheds new light on the important role patronage plays in appointment decisions.
Working, Shirking, and Sabotage
Author: John O. Brehm
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 1999-04-23
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13: 9780472086122
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDIVExamines who influences how federal, state, and local bureaucrats allocate their efforts /div
Bureaucracy and Self-Government
Author: Brian J. Cook
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2014-12-15
Total Pages: 295
ISBN-13: 1421415534
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA 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.
Bureaucratic Fanatics
Author: Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2019-05-20
Total Pages: 339
ISBN-13: 3110606046
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIs justice only achievable by means of bureaucratization or might it first arrive with the end of bureaucracy? Bureaucratic Fanatics shows how this ever more contentious question in contemporary politics belongs to the political-theological underpinnings of bureaucratization itself. At the end of the 18th century, a new and paradoxical kind of fanaticism emerged - rational fanaticism - that propelled the intensive biopolitical management of everyday life in Europe and North America as well as the extensive colonial exploitation of the earth and its peoples. These excesses of bureaucratization incited in turn increasingly fanatical forms of resistance. And they inspired literary production that provocatively presented the outrageous contours of rationalization. Combining political theory with readings of Kleist, Melville, Conrad, and Kafka, this genealogy of bureaucratic fanaticism relates two extreme figures: fanatical bureaucrats driven to the ends of the earth and to the limits of humanity by the rationality of the apparatuses they serve; and peculiar fanatics who passionately, albeit seemingly passively, resist the encroachments of bureaucratization.
Arts of Dying
Author: D. Vance Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-04-01
Total Pages: 310
ISBN-13: 022664099X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPeople 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.
The Middle Ages at Work
Author: K. Robertson
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2016-04-30
Total Pages: 266
ISBN-13: 113707552X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis 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.
Medieval Literature
Author: Holly Crocker
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2023-05-31
Total Pages: 755
ISBN-13: 1000948269
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMedieval 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
Matter and Making in Early English Poetry
Author: Taylor Cowdery
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2023-06-29
Total Pages: 343
ISBN-13: 1009223747
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis revisionist literary history of early court poetry illuminates late-medieval and early modern theories of literary production.
