Performing the State

Performing the State PDF Author: Paul Henman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351591266
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
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.

Performing the State

Performing the State PDF Author: Paul Henman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351591266
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Performing the Iranian State

Performing the Iranian State PDF Author: Staci Gem Scheiwiller
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 178308328X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book discusses what it means to “perform the State,” what this action means in relation to the country of Iran and how these various performances are represented. The concept of the “State” as a modern phenomenon has had a powerful impact on the formation of the individual and collective, as well as on determining how political entities are perceived in their interactions with one another in the current global arena.

Short of the Goal

Short of the Goal PDF Author: Nancy Birdsall
Publisher: CGD Books
ISBN: 1933286059
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
'Short of the Goal' analyses US policy toward poorly performing states that are ineligible for new U.S. foreign assistance programs and examines the role of specific policy instruments in building state capacity to prevent deterioration and collapse.

Performing State Boundaries

Performing State Boundaries PDF Author: Christof Lammer
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805396528
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Polarizing images of authoritarian, socialist or culturalist otherness compromise analyses of the Chinese state. Still, such images produce effects beyond academia when they inform performances of the boundaries between state and non-state. This book shows how performative boundary work leads to contrasting judgements that decide about support and access to resources. In an ecological village in Sichuan, citizen participation in food networks and bureaucracy signaled Western liberalism, Maoism or traditional rural culture for different audiences. Attention to the multiplicity of performed state boundaries helps China studies and political anthropology to understand such diverging classifications – and how they sometimes co-exist without causing tensions.

Performing Pedagogy

Performing Pedagogy PDF Author: Charles R. Garoian
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438403879
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Performing Pedagogy examines the theory and practice of performance art as an art of politics. It discusses the different ways in which performance artists use memory and cultural history to critique dominant cultural assumptions, to construct identity, and to attain political agency. In doing so, Garoian argues, performance artists like Rachel Rosenthal, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Robbie McCauley, Suzanne Lacy, and the performance art collective Goat Island engage in the practice of critical citizenship and radical forms of democracy that have significant implications for teaching in the schools. Finally, Garoian contextualizes performance art pedagogy within his own cultural work to illustrate how his own memory and cultural history have informed his production of performance art works and his classroom teaching practices.

Rebel Governance in Civil War

Rebel Governance in Civil War PDF Author: Ana Arjona
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316432386
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
This is the first book to examine and compare how rebels govern civilians during civil wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including political science, sociology, and anthropology, the book provides in-depth case studies of specific conflicts as well as comparative studies of multiple conflicts. Among other themes, the book examines why and how some rebels establish both structures and practices of rule, the role of ideology, cultural, and material factors affecting rebel governance strategies, the impact of governance on the rebel/civilian relationship, civilian responses to rebel rule, the comparison between modes of state and non-state governance to rebel attempts to establish political order, the political economy of rebel governance, and the decline and demise of rebel governance attempts.

Performing the Nation

Performing the Nation PDF Author: Kelly Askew
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226029816
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Since its founding in 1964, the United Republic of Tanzania has used music, dance, and other cultural productions as ways of imagining and legitimizing the new nation. Focusing on the politics surrounding Swahili musical performance, Kelly Askew demonstrates the crucial role of popular culture in Tanzania's colonial and postcolonial history. As Askew shows, the genres of ngoma (traditional dance), dansi (urban jazz), and taarab (sung Swahili poetry) have played prominent parts in official articulations of "Tanzanian National Culture" over the years. Drawing on over a decade of research, including extensive experience as a taarab and dansi performer, Askew explores the intimate relations among musical practice, political ideology, and economic change. She reveals the processes and agents involved in the creation of Tanzania's national culture, from government elites to local musicians, poets, wedding participants, and traffic police. Throughout, Askew focuses on performance itself—musical and otherwise—as key to understanding both nation-building and interpersonal power dynamics.

Performing Whiteness

Performing Whiteness PDF Author: Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487350
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
2003 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Performing Whiteness crosses the boundaries of film study to explore images of the white body in relation to recent theoretical perspectives on whiteness. Drawing on such diverse critical methodologies as postcolonial studies, feminist film criticism, anthropology, and phenomenology, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster examines a wide variety of films from early cinema to the present day in order to explore the ways in which American cinema imposes whiteness as a cultural norm, even as it exposes its inherent instability. In discussions that range from The Philadelphia Story to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Foster shows that, though American cinema is an all-white construct, there exists the possibility of a healthy resistance to cultural norms of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China

Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China PDF Author: Cong Ellen Zhang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082488440X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Cong Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than two thousand funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.

Performing Marginality

Performing Marginality PDF Author: Joanne R. Gilbert
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814328033
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
An academic study of stand-up comedy performed by females. This will aid in the understanding of power structures in our society.