Beyond the Stable State

Beyond the Stable State PDF Author: Donald A. Schön
Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9780393006858
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Offers individuals and institutions guidelines for coping with the radical changes confronting civilization

Beyond the Stable State

Beyond the Stable State PDF Author: Donald A. Schön
Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9780393006858
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Offers individuals and institutions guidelines for coping with the radical changes confronting civilization

Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice

Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice PDF Author: Chris Blackmore
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1849961336
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice is a collection of classical and contemporary writing associated with learning and systemic change in contexts ranging from cities, to rural development to education to nursing to water management to public policy. It is likely to be of interest to anyone trying to understand how to think systemically and to act and interact effectively in situations experienced as complex, messy and changing. While mainly concerned with professional praxis, where theory and practice inform each other, there is much here that can apply at a personal level. This book offers conceptual tools and suggestions for new ways of being and acting in the world in relation to each other, that arise from both old and new understandings of communities, learning and systems. Starting with twentieth century insights into social learning, learning systems and appreciative systems from Donald Schön and Sir Geoffrey Vickers, the book goes on to consider the contemporary traditions of critical social learning systems and communities of practice, pioneered by Richard Bawden and Etienne Wenger and their colleagues. A synthesis of the ideas raised, written by the editor, concludes this reader. The theory and practice of social learning systems and communities of practice appear to have much to offer in influencing and managing systemic change for a better world.

Searching

Searching PDF Author: Merrelyn Emery
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027217752
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Searching explains how to make the fundamental cultural change required for a desirable sustainable future. It describes the 'two-stage model' of open-systems social science in action and covers two major methods: the Search Conference for strategic planning and community development; and the Participative Design Workshop for the genotypical design and redesign of organizational structures. The result of nearly 50 years of integrated conceptual and practical development, Searching shows that by replacing 200 years of mechanistic assumptions with concepts and principles which accurately capture human and social realities, these methods generate intrinsic motivation and release human potentials for change. Starting with the building blocks of this internally consistent theoretical framework, Part I explains the interrelations and shows how the power of the methods for achieving this cultural change is generated. Part II of the book describes the methods and illustrates their flexibility by discussing some of their most common variations.

Yearnings in the Meantime

Yearnings in the Meantime PDF Author: Stef Jansen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782386513
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Shortly after the book’s protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people’s sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless “Meantime.” Ethnographically investigating yearnings for “normal lives” in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.

Shaped by the State

Shaped by the State PDF Author: Brent Cebul
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659646X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
American political history has been built around narratives of crisis, in which what “counts” are the moments when seemingly stable political orders collapse and new ones rise from the ashes. But while crisis-centered frameworks can make sense of certain dimensions of political culture, partisan change, and governance, they also often steal attention from the production of categories like race, gender, and citizenship status that transcend the usual break points in American history. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams have brought together first-rate scholars from a wide range of subfields who are making structures of state power—not moments of crisis or partisan realignment—integral to their analyses. All of the contributors see political history as defined less by elite subjects than by tensions between state and economy, state and society, and state and subject—tensions that reveal continuities as much as disjunctures. This broader definition incorporates investigations of the crosscurrents of power, race, and identity; the recent turns toward the history of capitalism and transnational history; and an evolving understanding of American political development that cuts across eras of seeming liberal, conservative, or neoliberal ascendance. The result is a rich revelation of what political history is today.

Red Skin, White Masks

Red Skin, White Masks PDF Author: Glen Sean Coulthard
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.

Shadow Courts

Shadow Courts PDF Author: Haley Sweetland Edwards
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780997126402
Category : Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
"Haley Sweetland Edwards explains the history of global shadow courts and how these courts have spun out of control, threatening the interests of citizens everywhere including the United States. Her fantastic book is exactly what long-form journalism is meant to do, to move beyond current events and provide historical perspective that aims at future reform. SHADOW COURTS should be at the top of the reading list of all those interested in redesigning trade agreements to be in the publicinterest." -- Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor, Columbia University and author ofThe End of Poverty International trade deals have become vastly complex documents, seeking to govern everything from labor rights to environmental protections. This evolution has drawn alarm from American voters, but their suspicions are often vague. In this book, investigative journalist Haley Sweetland Edwards offers a detailed look at one little-known but powerful provision in most modern trade agreements that is designed to protect the financial interests of global corporations against the governments of sovereign states. She makes a devastating case that Investor-State Dispute Settlement -- a "shadow court" that allows corporations to sue a nation outside its own court system -- has tilted the balance of power on the global stage. Acorporation can use ISDS to challenge a nation's policies and regulations, if it believes those laws are unfair or diminish its future profits. From the 1960s to 2000, corporations brought fewer than 40 disputes, but in the last fifteen years, they have brought nearly 650 -- 54 against Argentina alone. Edwards conducted extensive research and interviewed dozens of policymakers, activists, and government officials in Argentina, Canada, Bolivia, Ecuador, the European Union, and in the Obama administration. The result is a major story about a significant shift in the global balance of power.

The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty

The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty PDF Author: Rebecca Bryant
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501755757
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to "take back" sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty offers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world. Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace Dzenovska, Sara L. Friedman, Azra Hromadžić, Louisa Lombard, Alice Wilson, and Torunn Wimpelmann.

The Fragile Balance of Terror

The Fragile Balance of Terror PDF Author: Vipin Narang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501767038
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In The Fragile Balance of Terror, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dictators, and many are situated in highly unstable regions of the world—a volatile mix of variables. The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision making that encourages rash choices. The nuclear threats posed by India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea are thus fraught with danger. The Fragile Balance of Terror, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott D. Sagan, brings together a diverse collection of rigorous and creative scholars who analyze how the nuclear landscape is changing for the worse. Scholars, pundits, and policymakers who think that the spread of nuclear weapons can create stable forms of nuclear deterrence in the future will be forced to think again. Contributors: Giles David Arceneaux, Mark S. Bell, Christopher Clary, Peter D. Feaver, Jeffrey Lewis, Rose McDermott, Nicholas L. Miller, Vipin Narang, Ankit Panda, Scott D. Sagan, Caitlin Talmadge, Heather Williams, Amy Zegart

Beyond the Crystalline State

Beyond the Crystalline State PDF Author: Ganesan Venkataraman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642834345
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Condensed matter exhibits a rich variety of phases. Of these, the crystalline state has, until recently, received most attention. This is not surprising, given the geometric regularity of crystals. At the other extreme one has amorphous materials. In between there are the various types of liquid crystals, the recently discovered quasicrystals, and so on. While the absence of the high degree of regularity that characterizes the crystalline phase is certainly a problem, these noncrystalline states have nevertheless been receiving some attention over the years. However, it is only during the last few years that something like a uni fied view of all these phases has begun to emerge, through an application of various sophisticated concepts. Geometry and symmetry (and unusual realiza tions of the latter) provide a unifying thread in this new and emerging perspec tive. This book is an attempt to capture the flavour of some of these recent de velopments. The approach is substantially descriptive, being intended to be accessible not only to experimental physicists, but also to chemists, materials scientists, metallurgists and ceramicists, whose work borders on physics. The prerequisites for a study of this book are a familiarity with basic solid-state physics and, in places, the elements of group theory and statistical mechanics. A few special topics are included at the end to aid those who wish to pur sure further the subject matter treated here.