Since the momentous events of the late 1980s, democratic transition has been a widely studied phenomenon. Most scholars who have investigated the causes and implications of the global trend to ...democracy have argued that domestic politics is the leading determinant in the success or failure of transitions to democracy. In this book, Jon Pevehouse argues that international factors, specifically regional organizations, play an important role in the transition to and endurance of democracy. Domestic elites use membership of regional organizations to advance the cause of democracy since these organizations can manipulate the costs and benefits of democracy to important societal groups such as business elites or the military. Six cases (Hungary, Peru, Greece, Paraguay, Guatemala, and Turkey) examine the causal processes behind the statistical association between regional organizations and democratization. These findings bridge international relations and comparative politics while also providing guidelines for policy-makers who wish to use regional organizations to promote democracy.
This work posits that, over the past two centuries, democratic norms have spread from domestic politics to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Grigorescu explores how norms shaped IGO ...decision-making rules such as those driving state participation, voting, access to information, and the role of NGOs and transnational parliaments. The study emphasizes the role of 'normative pressures' (the interaction between norm strength and the degree to which the status quo strays from norm prescriptions). Using primary and secondary sources to assess the plausibility of its arguments across two centuries and two dozen IGOs, the study focuses on developments in the League of Nations, the International Labor Organization, the United Nations, the World Bank, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization.
Sustainability Farley, Heather M.; Smith, Zachary A.
2020, 20200331, 2020-03-31
eBook
In this second edition, the authors present new developments in the sustainability discussion and argue that a new understanding of sustainability is needed if we are to truly serve future ...generations ecologically, economically, and equitably.
Despite the great flurry of activity around sustainability, the concept itself remains highly contested. This book argues that a new conceptualization of sustainability is needed if we are to achieve a healthful and sustainable environment for the long term. The authors examine the uses, misuses, and abuses of sustainability and provide case studies of faux sustainability in practice. Seeking to redefine and clarify the concept and its application, they offer a new definition of sustainability - what they call neo-sustainability - to help guide policies and practices that respect the primacy of the environment, the natural limits of the environment, and the relationship between environmental, social, and economic systems.
Offering a comprehensive view of sustainability, this text is essential reading for all students and scholars in the field. It will also be of interest to environmental professionals and activists.
Globalization involves a profound re-ordering of our world with the proliferation everywhere of rules and transnational modes of governance. This book examines how this governance is formed, changes ...and stabilizes. Building on a rich and varied set of empirical cases, it explores transnational rules and regulations and the organizing, discursive and monitoring activities that frame, sustain and reproduce them. Beginning from an understanding of the powerful structuring forces that embed and form the context of transnational regulatory activities, the book scrutinizes the actors involved, how they are organized, how they interact and how they transform themselves to adapt to this new regulatory landscape. A powerful analysis of the modes and logics of transnational rule-making and rule-monitoring closes the book. This authoritative resource offers ideal reading for all academic researchers and graduate students of governance and regulation.
The emergence of transnational social movements as major actors in international politics - as witnessed in Seattle in 1999 and elsewhere - has sent shockwaves through the international system. Many ...questions have arisen about the legitimacy, coherence and efficiency of the international order in the light of the challenges posed by social movements. This book offers a fundamental critique of twentieth-century international law from the perspective of Third World social movements. It examines in detail the growth of two key components of modern international law - international institutions and human rights - in the context of changing historical patterns of Third World resistance. Using a historical and interdisciplinary approach, Rajagopal presents compelling evidence challenging debates on the evolution of norms and institutions, the meaning and nature of the Third World as well as the political economy of its involvement in the international system.
How do a few Third World political movements become global causes célèbres, while most remain isolated? This book rejects dominant views that needy groups readily gain help from selfless ...nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Instead, they face a Darwinian struggle for scarce resources where support goes to the savviest, not the neediest. Examining Mexico's Zapatista rebels and Nigeria's Ogoni ethnic group, the book draws critical conclusions about social movements, NGOs, and 'global civil society'.
The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that ...is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life-how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls "the specter of uselessness" haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.
In recent years, reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies Max Weber once called an "iron cage." Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. In a concluding section, Sennett examines a more durable form of self hood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of "reform."
This essay is motivated by two related observations about the field of organization studies. First, organization studies researchers have traditionally been good at importing ideas from other areas ...of research but poor at exporting their own ideas to other fields. Second, even within the field of organization studies, interest in organizations has decreased over the past decades as organization scholars have turned away from organizations to address such other phenomena as institutions or networks. Both developments are undermining the significance of organization studies as a distinctive field of research, the insights of which are necessary for understanding modern society. In this essay, we elaborate on recent suggestions by distinctively European scholars for strengthening concern for the particularities of organization in social theorizing. The first suggestion is to move decisions back to the core of the field. The second suggestion is to extend the notion of organization beyond organizations. We illustrate these two moves with examples from the literature and discuss implications for the future of organization studies.
