Edward Said has long been considered one of the world’s most compelling public intellectuals, taking on a remarkable array of topics with his many publications. But no single book has encompassed the vast scope of his stimulating erudition quite like Power, Politics, and Culture, a collection of interviews from the last three decades. In these twenty-eight interviews, Said addresses everything from Palestine to Pavarotti, from his nomadic upbringing under colonial rule to his politically active and often controversial adulthood, and reflects on Austen, Beckett, Conrad, Naipaul, Mahfouz, and Rushdie, as well as on fellow critics Bloom, Derrida, and Foucault. The passion Said feels for literature, music, history, and politics is powerfully conveyed in this indispensable complement to his prolific life's work.
Confucianism has shaped a certain perception of Chinese security strategy, symbolized by the defensive, nonaggressive Great Wall. Many believe China is antimilitary and reluctant to use force against its enemies. It practices pacifism and refrains from expanding its boundaries, even when nationally strong. In a path-breaking study traversing six centuries of Chinese history, Yuan-kang Wang resoundingly discredits this notion, recasting China as a practitioner of realpolitik and a ruthless purveyor of expansive grand strategies. Leaders of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) prized military force and shrewdly assessed the capabilities of China's adversaries. They adopted defensive strategies when their country was weak and pursued expansive goals, such as territorial acquisition, enemy destruction, and total military victory, when their country was strong. Despite the dominance of an antimilitarist Confucian culture, warfare was not uncommon in the bulk of Chinese history. Grounding his research in primary Chinese sources, Wang outlines a politics of power that are crucial to understanding China's strategies today, especially its policy of "peaceful development," which, he argues, the nation has adopted mainly because of its military, economic, and technological weakness in relation to the United States.
This book examines the causes and consequences of a major transformation in both domestic and international politics: the shift from dynastically legitimated monarchical sovereignty to popularly legitimated national sovereignty. It analyzes the impact of Enlightenment discourse on politics in eighteenth-century Europe and the United States, showing how that discourse facilitated new authority struggles in Old Regime Europe, shaped the American and French Revolutions, and influenced the relationships between the revolutionary regimes and the international system. The interaction between traditional and democratic ideas of legitimacy transformed the international system by the early nineteenth century, when people began to take for granted the desirability of equality, individual rights, and restraint of power. Using an interpretive, historically sensitive approach to international relations, the author considers the complex interplay between elite discourses about political legitimacy and strategic power struggles within and among states. She shows how culture, power, and interests interacted to produce a crucial yet poorly understood case of international change. The book not only shows the limits of liberal and realist theories of international relations, but also demonstrates how aspects of these theories can be integrated with insights derived from a constructivist perspective that takes culture and legitimacy seriously. The author finds that cultural contests over the terms of political legitimacy constitute one of the central mechanisms by which the character of sovereignty is transformed in the international system--a conclusion as true today as it was in the eighteenth century.
Although much as been written about how to make better decisions, a decision by itself changes nothing. The big problem facing managers and their organizations today is one of implementation--how to get things done in a timely and effective way. Problems of implementation are really issues of how to influence behavior, change the course of events, overcome resistance, and get people to do things they would not otherwise do. In a word, power. Managing With Power provides an in-depth look at the role of power and influence in organizations. Pfeffer shows convincingly that its effective use is an essential component of strong leadership. With vivid examples, he makes a compelling case for the necessity of power in mobilizing the political support and resources to get things done in any organization. He provides an intriguing look at the personal attributes—such as flexibility, stamina, and a high tolerance for conflict—and the structural factors—such as control of resources, access to information, and formal authority—that can help managers advance organizational goals and achieve individual success.
This book explores how power operates in workplace settings at local, national and transnational levels. It argues that how people are valued in and out of work is a political dynamic, which reflects and shapes how societies treat their citizens. Offering vital resources for activists and students on labour rights, employment issues and trade unions, this book argues that the influence workers can exert is changing dramatically and future challenges for change can be positive and progressive.
The current political conflicts in Somalia and Russia make the reappearance of this book as relevant as ever. Politics and Culture in International History illumines world politics by identifying the causes of conflict and war and assessing the validity of schemes for peace and unity. Bozeman maintains that political systems are grounded in cultures; thus, international relations are by definition hitercultural relations. She deals exclusively with the thought patterns of the world's literate civilizations and societies between the fourth millenium B.C. and the fifteenth century A.D. In a substantial new introduction, Bozeman analyzes world politics over the last half century, showing how the interplay of politics and culture has intensified. She notes that the world's assembly of states is no longer held together by substantive accords on norms, purposes, and values, but by loose agreements on the use offorms, techniques, and words. The causes and effects of these changes between the 1950s and 1990s are assayed by Bozeman.
Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power—the power to dominate—is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more subtle and influential ways that cultural resources and symbolic categories prevail in power arrangements and practices had gained broad recognition. In Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals, David L. Swartz delves deeply into Bourdieu’s work to show how central—but often overlooked—power and politics are to an understanding of sociology. Arguing that power and politics stand at the core of Bourdieu’s sociology, Swartz illuminates Bourdieu’s political project for the social sciences, as well as Bourdieu’s own political activism, explaining how sociology is not just science but also a crucial form of political engagement.
From decolonization and democratization to religion and gender, Politics and Culture in the Developing World is a comprehensive survey of the global context of development. With in-depth and current examples from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East., this text examines the central political themes in the developing world. Throughout, Politics and Culture in the Developing World demonstrates how globalization both accelerates change and increases interdependence between developing and developed countries.
A salient feature of modern poetics is its direct connection with cultural history and politics. Among the great American poets of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams offer a significant contrast with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Where the latter advocated a theocentric or reactionary response to the cultural crises of modernity, the former affirmed an essentially humanist and democratic social and aesthetic ethos. In Poetry, Politics, and Culture, Harold Kaplan offers a penetrating comparative study of these representative and distinctively influential poets.All four poets wrote in an atmosphere of cultural crisis following World War I, caught as they were between outmoded belief systems and various forms of artistic and political nihilism. While each believed in poetry as a source of cultural values and beliefs, they nevertheless experienced loss of confidence in their own vocation in a world characterized by scientific, rationalist thinking and the mundane struggle for survival. For each, therefore, the poetic imagination was a means of restoring order, or building a new civilization out of chaos. In trying to define a revitalized culture, the four exemplified the perennial quarrel between Europe and America.
Performing a political identity usually involves more than just casting a vote. For Left-wingers in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus – countries that emerged as the only non-socialist constituents of South-eastern Europe after WWII – political preference meant immersion to distinct ways of life, to ‘cultures’: in times of dictatorship or persecution, the desire to find alternative ways to express themselves gave content to these cultures. In times of political normality, it was the echoes of such memories of precarity and loss that took the lead. This book explores the intersection between the politics and cultures of the Left since the sixties in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. With the use of 12 case studies, the contributors expose the moments in which the Left has been claimed and performed, not only through political manifestos and traditional political boundaries, but also through corporeal acts, discursive practices and affective encounters. These are all transformed into distinct modalities of everyday life and conduct, which are commemorated, narrated or sung, versed, painted, or captured in photographic images and on reels of tape. By focusing on culture and performance, this book highlights the complex link between nationalism and internationalism in left-wing cultures, and illuminates the entanglements between the ways in which left-wingers experienced transitions from dictatorship to democracy and vice versa. As the first book to analyse cultures and performances of the Left in the three countries, The Politics of Culture in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus causes a rethinking of the boundaries of political practice and fosters new understandings of the formation of diverse expressions of the Left. As such, it will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of cultural and social anthropology, modern European history and political science.
