Shows that the politics of democratic societies is moving towards a presidentialized working mode, even in the absence of formal institutional changes. These developments can be explained by a ...combination of long-term structural changes in modern politics and societies’ contingent factors that fluctuate over time. While these contingent, short-term factors relate to the personalities of office holders, the overall political agenda, and the majority situation in parliament, there are several structural factors that are relatively uniform across modern nations. First, the internationalization of modern politics (which is particularly pronounced within the European Union) has led to an ‘executive bias’ of the political process that has strengthened the role of political top elites vis-à-vis their parliamentary groups and/or their parties. Their predominance has been amplified further by the vastly expanded steering capacities of state machineries, which have severely reduced the scope of effective parliamentary control. At the same time, the declining stability of political alignments has increased the proportion of citizens whose voting decisions are not constrained by long-standing party loyalties. In conjunction with the mediatization of politics, this has increased the capacity of political leaders to bypass their party machines and to appeal directly to voters.As a result, three interrelated processes have led to a political process increasingly moulded by the inherent logic of presidentialism: increasing leadership power and autonomy within the political executive; increasing leadership power and autonomy within political parties; and increasingly leadership-centered electoral processes.The book presents evidence for this process of presidentialization for 14 modern democracies (including the USA and Canada). While there are substantial cross-national differences, the overall thesis holds: modern democracies are increasingly following a presidential logic of governance through which leadership is becoming more central and more powerful, but also increasingly dependent on successful immediate appeal to the mass public. Implications for democratic theory are considered.
Action leadership is a creative, innovative, collaborative and self-developed way to lead. It eschews the hierarchical structure usually associated with leadership and is based instead on the ...democratic values of freedom, equality, inclusion and self-realization. It take responsibility for, not control over, people through networking and orchestrating human energy towards a holistic outcome that benefits the common interest. Action leaders are passionate people who abide by the motto that Learning does not mean to fill a barrel but rather to ignite a flame in others. And in this time of rapid economic, political, technological, social and ecological changes, action leadership and action leaders are precisely what's needed to improve how people and organizations engage constructively to address the myriad complex issues challenging society at all levels. Action Leadership: Towards a Participatory Paradigm explains and illustrates how action leadership can be developed through participatory action learning and action research (PALAR). It addresses real-life issues by people who choose to work collaboratively towards shared goals while developing their learning, insights, knowledge, people skills and personal relationships through involvement in a PALAR project. The book provides a conceptual framework for action leadership and for the integrative, practical theory of PALAR, and examples of applications in higher education, management education for organization development, and community development. Readers are encouraged to adopt, adapt and further develop the evolving concepts of action leadership and PALAR in a participatory paradigm of learning, research and development.
This article analyzes the possible effects that continuous head teacher turnover can have on school organizational climate. The article first presents the transformations that the Italian school ...system has experienced in the last fifteen years since the introduction of the autonomy law, and then provides a brief overview of the main theories regarding the organizational climate making a comparison among them, followed by the presentation of methodologies and tools to study the organizational climate. Finally, it presents a case study illustrating the difficulties faced by leaders and teachers of an Italian school that has experienced management turnover for years. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis has been performed comparing two schools located in the same area. Some diagrams show results obtained by the questionnaire filled in by teachers. Some extracts from head teacher interviews help us to understand the main issues they face when they take up their appointment in a school with a high turnover rate.
Headhunters Finlay, William; Coverdill, James E
10/2018
eBook
Headhunters are third-party agents paid a fee by companies for locating job candidates perform a unique sales role. The product they sell is people, matching candidates with jobs and companies with ...candidates. Headhunters affect the professional lives of thousands of employees every day, and their work has a profound, though hidden, effect on the employment picture in the United States. William Finlay and James E. Coverdill draw on interviews with and observations of headhunters and on analysis of headhunting training seminars, lectures, industry newsletters, and a mail survey of headhunting firms. The result is a frank and sometimes unsettling portrait of the aims, attitudes, and tactics of practitioners. The payment of fees has shifted from candidates to employers, and recruiters now find people to fit jobs rather than the other way around. Finlay and Coverdill address what they feel is a serious lack of research about the work headhunters do and how they do it. Their book is built around three major questions: What advantages do employers derive from using third-party agents to handle candidate search and recruitment? How are headhunters able to accomplish the double sale ('selling' candidates to employers and employers to candidates)? What criteria do headhunters use for selecting candidates? In the process, Finlay and Coverdill link their findings to larger issues of institutional and historical context, revealing the economic and political reasons clients use headhunters, demonstrating how headhunters manipulate clients and candidates, and assessing the impact of headhunters' actions on hiring decisions.
This article draws on the work conducted within the context of the European Policy Network on School Leadership. Its aim is to discuss and reflect upon school leadership policy development in the ...context of European education systems. The first section focuses on the concept of school leadership, identifying connections between school leadership practices and the promotion of equity and learning in schools. The second section discusses critical factors in policy implementation that shape the capacity of school leaders to combat inequalities and promote learning performance in schools. The article ends with an outlining of key policy actions for the promotion of distributed leadership practices in schools. In effect, this section stresses the need for a conceptual shift in understanding school leadership, from the position, roles, responsibilities, traits and capacities of the individuals holding formally assigned leadership roles in schools, to leadership as a function inside schools. As it is argued, such a conceptual shift calls for a policy shift in school leadership capacity-building that strengthens, but also goes beyond, the traditional repertoire of policies that focus on the preparation and professional training of school heads or other members of formal teams responsible for school management.
The article deals with entrepreneurship in local development. It maintain the utility of focused analysis of specific situations and suggest that the individualistic paradigm of analysis allows ...combined interpretations of different social sciences perspectives. The middle-range theory of social capital seems an useful instrument for the particular perspective of sociology in this interdisciplinary game. The social capital is intended as a localized resource for entrepreneurial action. In reference to that particular resource, the paper concludes that specific national policies can improve the mobilization and formation of appropriated social capital for entrepreneurship in local economic systems, encouraging the cooperation of different local private and public actors for long-term and coordinated strategies of growth.
This article aims at pointing out the figure of Luigi Alfonso Casella (1865-1945) within the ruling class of Calabria. He devoted most of his work (from 1911 to 1934) to the management of the ...Sericultural Institute in Cosenza and was engaged in the development of silk production in Calabria and the other Southern areas. He attempted to promote the interaction between the national economic policy and the local interests. During the early XX century, Italian sericulture began to show some weakening signs due to the Asian production. The government planned a project in order to support one of the most important field of Italian economy involving technicians in order to encourage production and productivity in the local areas, mainly in the silkworm breeding sector. Using unpublished sources, together with a careful analysis of some little known aspects of Italian sericulture, the author critically restores the outcome of this promotional project in Calabria, by pointing out the considerable results achieved, mostly thanks to Casella's specific intervention. Such results were forgotten due to the decay of sericulture after the 1930s.
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