Download or read book Imperfect Alternatives written by Neil K. Komesar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-01-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major approaches to law and public policy, ranging from law and economics to the fundamental rights approach to constitutional law, are based on the belief that the identification of the correct social goals or values is the key to describing or prescribing law and public policy outcomes. In this book, Neil Komesar argues that this emphasis on goal choice ignores an essential element—institutional choice. Indeed, as important as determining our social goals is deciding which institution is best equipped to implement them—the market, the political process, or the adjucative process. Pointing out that all three institutions are massive, complex, and imperfect, Komesar develops a strategy for comparative institutional analysis that assesses variations in institutional ability. He then powerfully demonstrates the value of this analytical framework by using it to examine important contemporary issues ranging from tort reform to constitution-making.
Download or read book Understanding Institutions written by Francesco Guala and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking new synthesis and theory of social institutions Understanding Institutions proposes a new unified theory of social institutions that combines the best insights of philosophers and social scientists who have written on this topic. Francesco Guala presents a theory that combines the features of three influential views of institutions: as equilibria of strategic games, as regulative rules, and as constitutive rules. Guala explains key institutions like money, private property, and marriage, and develops a much-needed unification of equilibrium- and rules-based approaches. Although he uses game theory concepts, the theory is presented in a simple, clear style that is accessible to a wide audience of scholars working in different fields. Outlining and discussing various implications of the unified theory, Guala addresses venerable issues such as reflexivity, realism, Verstehen, and fallibilism in the social sciences. He also critically analyses the theory of "looping effects" and "interactive kinds" defended by Ian Hacking, and asks whether it is possible to draw a demarcation between social and natural science using the criteria of causal and ontological dependence. Focusing on current debates about the definition of marriage, Guala shows how these abstract philosophical issues have important practical and political consequences. Moving beyond specific cases to general models and principles, Understanding Institutions offers new perspectives on what institutions are, how they work, and what they can do for us.
Download or read book Externality and Institutions written by Andreas A. Papandreou and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debate over the important concept of externality has influenced our perception of the role of governing authorities and has become central to our appraisal of the ecology-economy connection. Despite this, it remains hazy as a concept. This book examines ideas of externality and some of the ways that these have influenced and should continue to influence economics. The difficult issue of defining or characterising externalities is tackled and the effect that externality theory has had on major economic issues is investigated. The author provides a distinctive and non-technical survey of the various methodological approaches taken by economists to the issue of externalities. He fully explains and analyses the ideas lying behind the theory and looks at the failure of some markets to reconcile individual and social costs and benefits. The book's major theme is an exploration of institutional inefficiency and the implications of incorporating organizational costs into economic models.
Download or read book Fostering Communication and Learning With Underutilized Technologies in Higher Education written by Ali, Mohammed Banu and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2020-09-04 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Higher education is undergoing radical changes with the arrival of emerging technology that can facilitate better teaching and learning experiences. However, with a lack of technical awareness, technophobia, and security and trust issues, there are several barriers to the uptake of emerging technologies. As a result, many of these new technologies have been overlooked or underutilized. In the information systems and higher education domains, there exists a need to explore underutilized technologies in higher education that can foster communication and learning. Fostering Communication and Learning With Underutilized Technologies in Higher Education is a critical reference source that provides contemporary theories in the area of technology-driven communication and learning in higher education. The book offers new knowledge about educational technologies and explores such themes as artificial intelligence, digital learning platforms, gamification tools, and interactive exhibits. The target audience includes researchers, academicians, practitioners, and students who are working or have a keen interest in information systems, learning technologies, and technology-led teaching and learning. Moreover, the book provides an understanding and support to higher education practitioners, faculty, educational board members, technology vendors and firms, and the Ministry of Education.
Download or read book Community Development Institutions written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs. Subcommittee on Financial Institutions Supervision, Regulation, and Deposit Insurance and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Institutions in Turbulent Environments written by T.P. Keating and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1999. Contemporary organizations are faced with increasingly rapid and dramatic change within their political, cultural and technological environments. Institutions in Turbulent Environments critically examines the way organizations respond to these changes,with a particular focus upon the institutional disability sector. The book examines available theory concerning organizational contingency, adaptation and population ecology. It utilizes a framework developed from this theory to examine the ways in which a major institution for the intellectually disabled responded to the turbulence within its environment. It uses this data to re-examine theory and to propose changes to the way organization/environment relationships are understood.
Download or read book Alternative Universities written by David J. Staley and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the universities of the future. How can we re-envision the university? Too many examples of what passes for educational innovation today—MOOCs especially—focus on transactions, on questions of delivery. In Alternative Universities, David J. Staley argues that modern universities suffer from a poverty of imagination about how to reinvent themselves. Anyone seeking innovation in higher education today should concentrate instead, he says, on the kind of transformational experience universities enact. In this exercise in speculative design, Staley proposes ten models of innovation in higher education that expand our ideas of the structure and scope of the university, suggesting possibilities for what its future might look like. What if the university were designed around a curriculum of seven broad cognitive skills or as a series of global gap year experiences? What if, as a condition of matriculation, students had to major in three disparate subjects? What if the university placed the pursuit of play well above the acquisition and production of knowledge? By asking bold "What if?" questions, Staley assumes that the university is always in a state of becoming and that there is not one "idea of the university" to which all institutions must aspire. This book specifically addresses those engaged in university strategy—university presidents, faculty, policy experts, legislators, foundations, and entrepreneurs—those involved in what Simon Marginson calls "university making." Pairing a critique tempered to our current moment with an explanation of how change and disruption might contribute to a new "golden age" for higher education, Alternative Universities is an audacious and essential read.
Download or read book Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the United States written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-04-13 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integration of complementary and alternative medicine therapies (CAM) with conventional medicine is occurring in hospitals and physicians offices, health maintenance organizations (HMOs) are covering CAM therapies, insurance coverage for CAM is increasing, and integrative medicine centers and clinics are being established, many with close ties to medical schools and teaching hospitals. In determining what care to provide, the goal should be comprehensive care that uses the best scientific evidence available regarding benefits and harm, encourages a focus on healing, recognizes the importance of compassion and caring, emphasizes the centrality of relationship-based care, encourages patients to share in decision making about therapeutic options, and promotes choices in care that can include complementary therapies where appropriate. Numerous approaches to delivering integrative medicine have evolved. Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the United States identifies an urgent need for health systems research that focuses on identifying the elements of these models, the outcomes of care delivered in these models, and whether these models are cost-effective when compared to conventional practice settings. It outlines areas of research in convention and CAM therapies, ways of integrating these therapies, development of curriculum that provides further education to health professionals, and an amendment of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act to improve quality, accurate labeling, research into use of supplements, incentives for privately funded research into their efficacy, and consumer protection against all potential hazards.
Download or read book Recovering Nonviolent History written by Maciej J. Bartkowski and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from the American Revolution to Kosovo in the 1990s, from Egypt under colonial rule to present-day West Papua and Palestine, the authors of Recovering Nonviolent History consider several key questions: What kinds of civilian-based nonviolent strategy and tactics have been used in liberation struggles? What accounts for their successes and failures? Not least, how did nonviolent resistance influence national identities and socioeconomic and political institutions both prior to and after liberation, and why has this history been so often ignored?
Download or read book Contesting Media Power written by Nick Couldry and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contesting Media Power is the most ambitious international collection to date on the worldwide growth of alternative media that are challenging the power concentration in large media corporations. Media scholars and political scientists develop a broad comparative framework for analyzing alternative media in Australia, Chile, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Topics include independent media centers, gay online networks and alternative web discussion forums, feminist film, political journalism and social networks, indigenous communication, and church-sponsored media. This important book will help shape debates on the media's role in current global struggles, such as the anti-globalization movement.
Download or read book Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy written by Avner Greif and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-16 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Institutions and Development written by M. M. Shirley and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both economic research and the history of foreign aid suggest that the largest barriers to development arise from a society's institutions - its norms and rules. This book explains how institutions drive economic development. It provides numerous examples to illustrate the complex, interlocking, and persistent nature of real world rules and norms.
Download or read book Understanding Institutions written by Francesco Guala and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking new synthesis and theory of social institutions Understanding Institutions proposes a new unified theory of social institutions that combines the best insights of philosophers and social scientists who have written on this topic. Francesco Guala presents a theory that combines the features of three influential views of institutions: as equilibria of strategic games, as regulative rules, and as constitutive rules. Guala explains key institutions like money, private property, and marriage, and develops a much-needed unification of equilibrium- and rules-based approaches. Although he uses game theory concepts, the theory is presented in a simple, clear style that is accessible to a wide audience of scholars working in different fields. Outlining and discussing various implications of the unified theory, Guala addresses venerable issues such as reflexivity, realism, Verstehen, and fallibilism in the social sciences. He also critically analyses the theory of "looping effects" and "interactive kinds" defended by Ian Hacking, and asks whether it is possible to draw a demarcation between social and natural science using the criteria of causal and ontological dependence. Focusing on current debates about the definition of marriage, Guala shows how these abstract philosophical issues have important practical and political consequences. Moving beyond specific cases to general models and principles, Understanding Institutions offers new perspectives on what institutions are, how they work, and what they can do for us.
Download or read book Defective Institutions written by Jacques Lezra and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defective Institutions overturns the basis of institutionalism. Faith in classic institutions—exposed as clamorously inadequate by the failure of governance under neoliberalism--does not result in greater democracy, greater horizontality, or more equitable living. Nor does trust in the standing of decisions, in the authority of antecedent cases, in the coherence, strength, continuity, or solidity of the institutions that frame and render legitimate these decisions and the rules they buttress. To the contrary: the classically-imagined institution and our faith in it lie at the heart of neoliberal unfreedom and racialized violence. Working at the point of contact and conflict between socialist and anarcho-philosophical traditions, Defective Institutions offers an alternative, which is also an alternative to the figures of governance associated with the liberal conception of the state: an aberrant republicanism comprised of defective institutions, run through with the necessity of their abolition. Lezra’s book moves from the primitive scenes of Western political institution—the city; the family; the university; the first person; “race”—through recent work in the philosophy of translation, decolonial studies, abolitionism, Afropessimism and its critiques, psvchoanalysis, and musicology. To offer an original wedding of abolition and institution, Lezra brings together genealogies of contemporary institutionalism (from Durkheim and Hauriou to Searle); post-Marxist accounts of the state (Balibar, Abensour); philosophical and anthropological anarchism (Wolff, Malabou, Graeber, Scott); critical legal theory (analyses of Marbury v. Madison as well as Dobbs v. Jackson); continental and analytic versions and critiques of foundationalism (Heidegger, Lyotard and Butler; Quine, Searle and Fine); and political and sociological abolitionism (Lewis, O’Brien). At a time when some call for strengthening institutions and for defending liberties ostensibly protected by such institutions, and others long for the destruction of institutions that have long been oppressive, Lezra’s book offers today’s Left a new framework for confronting institutions’ necessity and their necessary abolition.
Download or read book Theories of Institutions written by Joseph Jupille and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human condition teems with institutions – intertemporal social arrangements that shape human relations in support of particular values – and the social scientific work developed over the last five decades aimed at understanding them is similarly vast and diverse. This book synthesizes scholarship from across the social sciences, with special focus on political science, sociology, economics, and organizational studies. Drawing out institutions' essentially social and temporal qualities and their varying relationships to efficiency and power, the authors identify more underlying similarity in understandings of institutional origins, maintenance, and change than emerges from overviews from within any given disciplinary tradition. Most importantly, Theories of Institutions identifies dozens of avenues for cross-fertilization, the pursuit of which can help keep this broad and inherently diverse field of study vibrant for future generations of scholars.
Download or read book Reform and Regulation of Economic Institutions in Afghanistan written by Haroun Rahimi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-21 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taliban's return to power in August of 2021 caused everyone to ask why the two decades of institution building in Afghanistan failed. This book investigates the root causes of failed reforms in an important area of reform: trade and credit institutions. It explains why the efforts to reform and regulate the economic institutions in Afghanistan failed and what we can learn from their failure. It draws on more than eighty interviews with Afghan merchants, business leaders, money dealers, and government officials in five major provinces of Afghanistan to identify the barriers to access to credit and to understand the performance of formal institutions (banks) and their informal counterparts. This book finds that Afghan merchants were often unable to benefit from the offerings of formal institutions for three reasons: a highly volatile business climate, uncertain contract enforcement, and an unsupportive property rights system. Several informal institutions have emerged that alleviate some of the credit constraints on Afghan merchants. These informal institutions include risk-sharing trade credit operations, money dealers’ short-term working capital loans, Gerawee, and Sar qufli. Although these informal institutions have helped Afghan merchants survive, they are unable to support economic growth. This book argues that countries like Afghanistan should solve their institutional dilemma by adopting an approach which the author calls "Grounded Institutional Reform." Using this approach, a country would formalize existing informal institutions, a development that would vastly increase their effectiveness. While this book focuses on credit and trade in Afghanistan, the analysis of "formalizing the informal" can easily be extended to solve other types of economic problems in similarly situated countries. This book should be of great interest to scholars, policymakers, and development workers in the field of law, finance, and development.
Download or read book Institutions and Governance in Comparative Policy Analysis Studies written by Iris Geva-May and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume Two of the Classics of Comparative Policy Analysis, contains chapters concerned with "Institutions and Governance in Comparative Policy Analysis Studies". They highlight that at the core of any policy making, the different institutions and modes of governance have a significant effect. Questions about the impact of governance have become more central to comparative policy analysis as scholars have given more attention to globalization, organizational cultural differences, policy learning, transfer, and diffusion. The chapters included in this volume tackle the nature of policies and policy analytic practices within and across organizations, actors and institutions as well as among governance modes. The chapters demonstrate the ways in which institutions and governance in the public and private sectors, shape policies, and conversely, how policy choices can shape the institutions associated with them. Other chapters focus on how the diffusion of knowledge and lesson drawing address challenges of policy making, cooperation and harmonization. "Institutions and Governance in Comparative Policy Analysis Studies" will be of great interest to scholars and learners of public policy and social sciences, as well as to practitioners considering what can be reliably contextualized, learned, facilitated or avoided given their own institutional or governance systems. The chapters were originally published as articles in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis which in the last two decades has pioneered the development of comparative public policy. The volume is part of a four-volume series, the Classics of Comparative Policy Analysis including Theories and Methods, Institutions and Governance, Regional Comparisons, and Policy Sectors. Each volume also showcases a new chapter comparing interrelated domains of study with comparative public policy: political science, public administration, governance and policy design, authored by JCPA co-editors Giliberto Capano, Iris Geva-May, Michael Howlett, Leslie Pal and B. Guy Peters.
