Paper, Performance, and the State
Paper, Performance, and the State

Author: Farhat Hasan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-10-31

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1009032445

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This book explores the changing socio–cultural world in early modern South Asia, and locates the agency of the Mughal state therein. The development of literacy and new forms of engagement between literacy and performance prompted the opening up of new spaces of social communication, and led to the development of a performative (and somatic) public sphere in South Asia. The work highlights the significance of legal spaces, along with the markets and coffeehouses, in shaping the emergent public sphere. While defending the case for legal pluralism, it argues that the Mughal state endured and enhanced the diversity in the legal order. Focusing on the socially embedded attributes of the state, it looks at how the state's relations with the local powers impinged on, and reproduced community identities, identity conflicts, legal pluralism, property relations, and different forms of social communication.

Looks Good on Paper?
Looks Good on Paper?

Author: Leslie S. Pratch

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-06-17

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0231537646

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Leslie S. Pratch is a practicing psychologist who focuses on assessing and coaching executives who occupy or are candidates for top positions in business organizations. In this book, she shares insights from more than twenty years of executive evaluations and offers an empirical method of identifying executives who will be effective within organizations—and to flag those who will ultimately fail—by evaluating hidden aspects of personality and character. Pratch compares candidates with impressive careers and tries to determine which are likely to act with consistently high integrity and exhibit sound, timely judgment when faced with unanticipated business problems. Central to effective leadership is a psychological quality called "active coping," which Pratch defines and explores by referencing case studies, historical figures, and her own scholarly work. This book speaks not only to those in hiring positions and their advisors but also more widely to leaders and anyone who wishes to learn more about their own character and the abilities of those around them. Pratch offers knowledge, asks questions, and challenges common perceptions, providing a practical tool for those in business and for the general reader.

Performing the State
Performing the State

Author: Paul Henman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-22

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1351591266

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Performance measurement is now a key management tool used by government to assess and enhance public services. It is also used as a tool for public sector transparency and accountability. Despite these noble objectives, performance measurement can also generate counterproductive and sometimes paradoxical outcomes. This book innovatively conceptualises performance measurement as a ‘policy instrument’. Such an approach necessarily invites careful and critical examination of instances of the formation, application and contestation of particular performance measurement regimes, the tools used to measure performance, the way in which performance data is produced and used, and the complex dynamics between professionals, managers and service users that arise from these practices. The book provides detailed empirical examples of performance measurement in the delivery of health, schooling and child welfare services, as well as the problematics of assessing national wellbeing. Instead of a form of scientific and rational management, performance measurement is revealed as an intrinsically contested, socio-politically charged and value laden practice. The book concludes that to succeed in delivering authentic performance improvements public sector managers must be aware of these complex, paradoxical dynamics and the circumstances that make performance measurement perform. This book was originally published as a special issue of Policy Studies.

Peripheral Visions
Peripheral Visions

Author: Lisa Wedeen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0226877922

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The government of Yemen, unified since 1990, remains largely incapable of controlling violence or providing goods and services to its population, but the regime continues to endure despite its fragility and peripheral location in the global political and economic order. Revealing what holds Yemen together in such tenuous circumstances, Peripheral Visions shows how citizens form national attachments even in the absence of strong state institutions. Lisa Wedeen, who spent a year and a half in Yemen observing and interviewing its residents, argues that national solidarity in such weak states tends to arise not from attachments to institutions but through both extraordinary events and the ordinary activities of everyday life. Yemenis, for example, regularly gather to chew qat, a leafy drug similar to caffeine, as they engage in wide-ranging and sometimes influential public discussions of even the most divisive political and social issues. These lively debates exemplify Wedeen’s contention that democratic, national, and pious solidarities work as ongoing, performative practices that enact and reproduce a citizenry’s shared points of reference. Ultimately, her skillful evocations of such practices shift attention away from a narrow focus on government institutions and electoral competition and toward the substantive experience of participatory politics.

The Indigenous State
The Indigenous State

Author: Nancy Postero

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-05-05

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0520294033

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In 2005, Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Ushering in a new "democratic cultural revolution," Morales promised to overturn neoliberalism and inaugurate a new decolonized society. Nancy Postero examines the successes and failures in the ten years since Morales's election

The Festive State
The Festive State

Author: David M. Guss

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001-01-02

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780520924864

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If, as David Guss argues, culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds, where people come to fight and dispute in large acts of public display. Festive behavior, long seen by anthropologists and folklorists as the "uniform expression of a collective consciousness, is contentious and often subversive," and The Festive State is an eye-opening guide to its workings. Guss investigates "the ideology of tradition," combining four case studies in a radical multisite ethnography to demonstrate how in each instance concepts of race, ethnicity, history, gender, and nationhood are challenged and redefined. In a narrative as colorful as the events themselves, Guss presents the Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, the "neo-Indian" Day of the Monkey, the mestizo ritual of Tamunangue, and the cultural policies and products of a British multinational tobacco corporation. All these illustrate the remarkable fluidity of festive behavior as well as its importance in articulating different cultural interests.

Sub-national Fiscal Sustainability in a Globalised Setting
Sub-national Fiscal Sustainability in a Globalised Setting

Author: Jacob John

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-10-02

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1443815268

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This collection of papers addresses the issues of fiscal federalism, centre-state relations, fiscal decentralization, unconventional methods of resource mobilization for filling the huge gap in infrastructure financing and strategies for achieving fiscal sustainability at the national and sub-national level in the globalized setting. Though a number of articles are in the context of Kerala, the overarching fiscal problems of sub-national governments are common to all. It contains detailed and in-depth analysis by eminent scholars and seasoned economic administrators, based on empirical and theoretical studies. Six decades of federal fiscal arrangement in India has resulted in centralization of fiscal powers, increase in regional imbalances and increased vertical and horizontal imbalances. Central and state government finances came under great stress during the last decade, and the situation continued in the early years of the current decade on account of a variety of reasons. The five-year period since 2003-04, however, saw significant fiscal correction and consolidation at the central and state levels. The still-unfolding implications of the global financial and economic crisis on the union and state finances are going to be severe. Both the centre and the states may take years before the targets of deficits set for March 2009 under fiscal responsibility legislations could be realized.

Afro-Paradise
Afro-Paradise

Author: Christen A Smith

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2016-03-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0252098099

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Tourists exult in Bahia, Brazil, as a tropical paradise infused with the black population's one-of-a-kind vitality. But the alluring images of smiling black faces and dancing black bodies masks an ugly reality of anti-black authoritarian violence. Christen A. Smith argues that the dialectic of glorified representations of black bodies and subsequent state repression reinforces Brazil's racially hierarchal society. Interpreting the violence as both institutional and performative, Smith follows a grassroots movement and social protest theater troupe in their campaigns against racial violence. As Smith reveals, economies of black pain and suffering form the backdrop for the staged, scripted, and choreographed afro-paradise that dazzles visitors. The work of grassroots organizers exposes this relationship, exploding illusions and asking unwelcome questions about the impact of state violence performed against the still-marginalized mass of Afro-Brazilians. Based on years of field work, Afro-Paradise is a passionate account of a long-overlooked struggle for life and dignity in contemporary Brazil.