This volume advances a comprehensive transdisciplinary approach to the affective lives of institutions – theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and critical. With this approach, the volume foregrounds the role of affect in sustaining as well as transforming institutional arrangements that are deeply problematic. As part of its analysis, this book develops a novel understanding of institutional affect. It explores how institutions produce, frame, and condition affective dynamics and emotional repertoires, in ways that engender conformance or resistance to institutional requirements. This collection of works will be important for scholars and students of interdisciplinary affect and emotion studies from a wide range of disciplines, including social sciences, cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, organizational and institution studies, media studies, social philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory.
This book moves scholarly debates beyond the old question of whether or not international institutions matter in order to examine how they matter, even in a world of power politics. Power politics and international institutions are often studied as two separate domains, but this is in need of rethinking because today most states strategically use institutions to further their interests. Anders Wivel, T.V. Paul, and the international group of contributing authors update our understanding of how institutions are viewed among the major theoretical paradigms in international relations, and they seek to bridge the divides. Empirical chapters examine specific institutions in practice, including the United Nations, International Atomic Energy Agency, and the European Union. The book also points the way to future research. International Institutions and Power Politics provides insights for both international relations theory and practical matters of foreign affairs, and it will be essential reading for all international relations scholars and advanced students.
What is the relationship between states' economic power and their formal political power in multilateral economic institutions? Why do we see variation in states' formal political power across economic institutions of the same era? In this book, Ayse Kaya examines these crucial under-explored questions, drawing on multiple theoretical traditions within international relations to advance a new approach of 'adjusted power'. She explains how the economic shifts of our time, marked by the rise of Brazil, Russia, India, China and other emerging economies, have affected and will impact key multilateral economic institutions. Through detailed contemporary and historical analyses of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the G20, and the International Trade Organization, Kaya shows that the institutional setting mediates the significance of the underlying distribution of economic power across states. The book presents both case studies and key statistics.
This book identifies and explores the mechanisms linking political institutions and variation in capitalist systems. A strong correlation exists between varieties of political regimes and varieties of capitalism: majoritarian political regimes are correlated with liberal market economies (LMEs) and consensus political regimes are correlated with coordinated market economies (CMEs). Still, correlation is not causation. Empirical findings illustrate that partisanship and policy legacies, the number of political parties, electoral rules, and constitutional constraints are significant indicators of LMEs and CMEs. Arsenault finds that majoritarian institutions create an environment of adversarial politics and strong competition between actors, which makes credible commitment to nonmarket coordination mechanisms unlikely. Consensus institutions, on the other hand, promote an atmosphere of cooperation and coordination between actors, thus encouraging credible commitment to nonmarket coordination mechanisms. Qualitative case studies of Germany, Britain, and New Zealand confirm the quantitative findings and suggest that political regimes were instrumental in shaping the economic adjustment paths of these countries during the era of liberalization in the 1980s.
Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.
Whether we are watching TV, surfing the Internet, listening to our iPods, or reading a novel, we all engage with media as an audience. . Despite the widespread use of this term in our popular culture, the meaning of "audience" is complex, and it has undergone significant historical shifts as new forms of mediated communication have developed from print, telegraphy, and radio to film, television, and the Internet. Media Audiences: Effects, Users, Institutions, and Power 2nd Edition explores the concept of media audiences from four broad perspectives: as "victims" of mass media, as market constructions and commodities, as users of media, and as producers and subcultures of mass media. The goal of the text is for students to be able to think critically about the role and status of media audiences in contemporary society, reflecting on their relative power in relation to institutional media producers.
Economy, Society, and Public Policy is a new way to learn economics. It is designed specifically for students studying social sciences, public policy, business studies, engineering and other disciplines who want to understand how the economy works and how it can be made to work better. Topical policy problems are used to motivate learning of key concepts and methods of economics. It engages, challenges and empowers students, and will provide them with the tools to articulate reasoned views on pressing policy problems. This project is the result of a worldwide collaboration between researchers, educators, and students who are committed to bringing the socially relevant insights of economics to a broader audience.KEY FEATURESESPP does not teach microeconomics as a body of knowledge separate from macroeconomicsStudents begin their study of economics by understanding that the economy is situated within society and the biosphereStudents study problems of identifying causation, not just correlation, through the use of natural experiments, lab experiments, and other quantitative methodsSocial interactions, modelled using simple game theory, and incomplete information, modelled using a series of principal-agent problems, are introduced from the beginning. As a result, phenomena studied by the other social sciences such as social norms and the exercise of power play a roleThe insights of diverse schools of thought, from Marx and the classical economists to Hayek and Schumpeter, play an integral part in the bookThe way economists think about public policy is central to ESPP. This is introduced in Units 2 and 3, rather than later in the course.
While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.
An examination of the three-year border war between Peru and Ecuador reveals new approaches to Latin American leadership and a transformed power structure that integrates domestic and international factors
The notion of technological power is fast becoming an object of both academic and policy discourses. Within such discourses one can observe several different senses of power being employed, especially when viewed from a multi-disciplinary angle. This demonstrates the need for the creation of a cross-disciplinary and integrative framework for identifying and clarifying different conceptions of the relations between technology and power. In this respect, the book aims to offer an empirically-informed philosophical framework for understanding the technological construction of power, which allows for a differentiated vocabulary for describing various senses of technological power, while bridging together social and political theory, critical studies of technology, philosophy and ethics of technology. In addition, the framework presented in this book aims to contribute to better critical and ethical evaluation of technologies and their powers. Any adequate ethics or critique of technology must be based on a better, clearer, and more nuanced and differentiated understanding of the many ways in which technology can be described as ‘powerful’.
