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.
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."
Impressive in scope and inventiveness, Democracy Beyond Borders stands at the forefront of a new generation of political thought which reassesses the philosophical foundations of global order. ...Developing an innovative political theory of representation, it tackles one of today's most pressing issues: how to tame and harness globalization.
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.
After World War II dozens of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) emerged on the global scene, committed to improving the lives of the world's most vulnerable people. Some focused on protecting ...human rights; some were dedicated to development, aimed at satisfying basic economic needs. Both approaches had distinctive methods, missions, and emphases. In the 1980s and 90s, however, the dividing line began to blur. In the first book to track the growing intersection and even overlap of human rights and development NGOs, Paul Nelson and Ellen Dorsey introduce a concept they call "new rights advocacy." New rights advocacy has at its core three main trends: the embrace of human rights-based approaches by influential development NGOs, the adoption of active economic and social rights agendas by major international human rights NGOs, and the surge of work on economic and social policy through a human rights lens by specialized human rights NGOs and social movement campaigns. Nelson and Dorsey draw on rich case studies of internationally well-known individual NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, CARE, ActionAid, and Save the Children, and employ perspectives from fields of human rights, international relations, the sociology of social movements and of complex organizations, and development theory, in order to better understand the changes occurring within NGOs. In questioning current trends using new theoretical frameworks, this book breaks new ground in the evolution of human rights-development interaction. The way in which NGOs are reinventing themselves has great potential for success-or possibly failure-and profound implications for a world in which the enormous gap between the wealthiest and poorest poses a persistent challenge to both development and human rights.
Although the lion’s share of scholarship in management and organization studies conceives of organizations as entities within which communication occurs, “Communication Constitutes Organization” ...(CCO) scholarship has attracted interest because it makes a productive reversal, that is, by asking how organization happens in communication. Over the past decade, Organization Studies has become the key scholarly outlet for CCO thinking in the management and organization studies field. Accordingly, in this paper we discuss seven articles that have appeared in this journal as evidence of the perspective’s centrality. We first situate CCO theorizing within the linguistic turn, and position CCO with respect to other lines of scholarship underwritten by a rich conception of language and discourse. We examine the varied ways CCO thinking has found organization in communication, locating in the seven articles productive tensions between the process of communication, on the one hand, and organization, organizing, and organizationality, on the other. We contribute to CCO scholarship with reflections on these three theoretical orientations and provide a set of possibilities for its further development.
Since they were pioneered in the 1970s by Robert Keohane and others, the broad range of neoliberal institutionalist theories of international relations have grown in importance. In an increasingly ...globalized world, the realist and neorealist focus on states, military power, conflict, and anarchy has more and more given way to a recognition of the importance of nonstate actors, nonmilitary forms of power, interdependence, international institutions, and cooperation. Drawing together a group of leading international relations theorists, this book explores the frontiers of new research on the role of such forces in world politics.
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