EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Democratization of Expertise

Download or read book Democratization of Expertise written by Sabine Maasen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-06-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Scientific advice to politics’, the ‘nature of expertise’, and the ‘relation between experts, policy makers, and the public’ are variations of a topic that currently attracts the attention of social scientists, philosophers of science as well as practitioners in the public sphere and the media. This renewed interest in a persistent theme is initiated by the call for a democratization of expertise that has become the order of the day in the legitimation of research funding. The new significance of ‘participation’ and ‘accountability’ has motivated scholars to take a new look at the science – politics interface and to probe questions such as "What is new in the arrangement of scientific expertise and political decision-making?", "How can reliable knowledge be made useful for politics and society at large, and how can epistemically and ethically sound decisions be achieved without losing democratic legitimacy?", "How can the objective of democratization of expertise be achieved without compromising the quality and reliability of knowledge?" Scientific knowledge and the ‘experts’ that represent it no longer command the unquestioned authority and public trust that was once bestowed upon them, and yet, policy makers are more dependent on them than ever before. This collection of essays explores the relations between science and politics with the instruments of the social studies of science, thereby providing new insights into their re-alignment under a new régime of governance.

Book Mobilizing Science

Download or read book Mobilizing Science written by Sabrina McCormick and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mobilizing Sciencetheoretically and empirically explores the rise of a new kind of social movement-one that attempts to empower citizens through the use of expert scientific research. Sabrina McCormick advances theories of social movements, development, and science and technology studies by examining how these fields intersect in cases around the globe. McCormick grounds her argument in two very different case studies: the anti-dam movement in Brazil and the environmental breast cancer prevention movement in the U.S. These, and many other cases, show that the scientization of society, where expert knowledge is inculcated in multiple institutions and lay people are marginalized, give rise to these new types of movements. While activists who consequently engage in science often instigate new methods that result in new findings and scientific tools, these movements still often fail due to superficial participatory institutions and tightly knit corporate/government relationships.

Book Democratizing Health

Download or read book Democratizing Health written by the late Hans Löfgren and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the important role of consumer activism in health policy in different national contexts. In an age of shifting boundaries between state and civil society, consumer groups are potentially drivers of democratisation in the health domain. The expert contributors explore how their activities bring new dynamics to relations between service providers, the medical profession, government agencies, and other policy actors. This book is unique in comprehensivelyanalysing the opportunities and dilemmas of this type of activism, including ambiguous partnerships between consumer groups and stakeholders such as the pharmaceutical industry. These themes are explored within aninternationally comparative framework, with case studies from various countries.

Book Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management

Download or read book Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management written by Jiuping Xu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-25 with total page 1752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This proceedings book is divided in 2 Volumes and 8 Parts. Part I is dedicated to Decision Support System, which is about the information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities; Part II is on Computing Methodology, which is always used to provide the most effective algorithm for numerical solutions of various modeling problems; Part III presents Information Technology, which is the application of computers to store, study, retrieve, transmit and manipulate data, or information in the context of a business or other enterprise; Part IV is dedicated to Data Analysis, which is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision-making; Part V presents papers on Operational Management, which is about the plan, organization, implementation and control of the operation process; Part VI is on Project Management, which is about the initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time in the field of engineering; Part VII presents Green Supply Chain, which is about the management of the flow of goods and services based on the concept of “low-carbon”; Part VIII is focused on Industry Strategy Management, which refers to the decision-making and management art of an industry or organization in a long-term and long-term development direction, objectives, tasks and policies, as well as resource allocation.

Book Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism

Download or read book Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism written by Yoram Levy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-31 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, environmental issues have increasingly been incorporated into liberal democratic thought and political practice. Environmentalism and ecologism have become fashionable, even respectable schools of political thought. This apparently successful integration of environmental movements, issues and ideas in mainstream politics raises the question of whether there is a future for what once was a counter-movement and counter-ideology. Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism provides a reflective assessment of recent developments, social relevance and future of environmental political theory, concluding that although the alleged pacification of environmentalism is more than skin deep, it is not yet quite deep enough. This book will appeal to students and researchers of social science and philosophers with an interest in environmental issues.

Book International Regulation of Gene Editing Technologies in Crops

Download or read book International Regulation of Gene Editing Technologies in Crops written by Lisa F. Clark and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Transboundary Risk Governance

Download or read book Transboundary Risk Governance written by Rolf Lidskog and published by Earthscan. This book was released on 2010 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governing environmental risk, particularly large-scale transboundary risks associated with climate change and pollution, is one of the most pressing problems facing society.

Book The Condition of Democracy

Download or read book The Condition of Democracy written by Jürgen Mackert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-12 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent years have seen contestations of democracy all around the globe. Democracy is challenged as a political as well as a normative term, and as a form of governance. Against the background of neoliberal transformation, populist mobilization, and xenophobic exclusion, but also of radical and emancipatory democratic projects, this collection offers a variety of critical and challenging perspectives on the condition of democracy in the 21st century. The volumes provide theoretical and empirical enquiries into the meaning and practice of liberal democracy, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the consequences for citizenship and everyday lives. With a pronounced focus on national and transnational politics and processes, as well as postcolonial and settler colonial contexts, individual contributions scrutinize the role of democratic societies, ideals, and ideologies of liberal democracy within global power geometries. By employing the multiple meanings of The Condition of Democracy, the collection addresses the preconditions of democratic rule, the state this form of governance is in, and the changing ways in which citizens can (still) act as the sovereign in liberal democratic societies. The books offer both challenging theoretical perspectives and rigorous empirical findings of how to conceive of democracy in our times, which will appeal to academics and students in social and political science, economics, and international relations amongst other fields. The focus on developments in the Middle East and North Africa will furthermore be of great usefulness to academics and the wider public interested in the repercussions of western democracy promotion as well as in contemporary struggles for democratization ‘from below’. During the last 50 years, liberal democracies have been exposed to a fundamental reorganization of their politico-economic structure that transformed them through the impact of neo-liberal economic doctrines focused on low taxation, free markets, and out-sourcing that have little regard in reality for democratic institutions or liberal values. The failures of the neoliberal ‘remedy’ for capitalism are now dramatically obvious through the banking crisis of 2008-2011, the increase in income inequality, the social and psychological damage caused by the austerity packages across Europe, and widespread dependence on experts whose influence over government policies typically goes without public scrutiny. While this has only accelerated the destruction of the social fabric in modern Western societies, the dramatic redistribution of wealth and an open 'politics for the rich' have also revealed the long-time well-covered alliance of the global oligarchy with the Far Right that has the effect of undermining democracy. The contributions to this volume discuss a wide variety of processes of transformation, the social consequences, dedemocratization and illiberalization of once liberal democracies through the destructive impact of neoliberal strategies. These strongly politico-economic contributions are complemented with general sociological analyses of a number of cultural aspects often neglected in analyses of democracy.

Book The Third Wave of Science Studies

Download or read book The Third Wave of Science Studies written by Harry M. Collins and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Contested Knowledges

Download or read book Contested Knowledges written by Esha Shah and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water acquisition, storage, allocation and distribution are intensely contested in our society, whether, for instance, such issues pertain to a conflict between upstream and downstream farmers located on a small stream or to a large dam located on the border of two nations. Water conflicts are mostly studied as disputes around access to water resources or the formulation of water laws and governance rules. However, explicitly or not, water conflicts nearly always also involve disputes among different philosophical views. The contributions to this edited volume have looked at the politics of contested knowledge as manifested in the conceptualisation, design, development, implementation and governance of large dams and mega-hydraulic infrastructure projects in various parts of the world. The special issue has explored the following core questions: Which philosophies and claims on mega-hydraulic projects are encountered, and how are they shaped, validated, negotiated and contested in concrete contexts? Whose knowledge counts and whose knowledge is downplayed in water development conflict situations, and how have different epistemic communities and cultural-political identities shaped practices of design, planning and construction of dams and mega-hydraulic projects? The contributions have also scrutinised how these epistemic communities interactively shape norms, rules, beliefs and values about water problems and solutions, including notions of justice, citizenship and progress that are subsequently to become embedded in material artefacts.

Book The Crisis of Expertise

Download or read book The Crisis of Expertise written by Gil Eyal and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change, and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the “death of expertise,” or is the handwringing about an “assault on science” merely the hysterical reaction of threatened elites? In this new book, Gil Eyal argues that what needs to be explained is not a one-sided “mistrust of experts” but the two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance on science and expertise, on the one hand, coupled with increased skepticism and dismissal of scientific findings and expert opinion, on the other. The current mistrust of experts is best understood as one more spiral in an on-going, recursive crisis of legitimacy. The “scientization of politics,” of which critics warned in the 1960s, has brought about a politicization of science, and the two processes reinforce one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture. This timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and to anyone concerned about the political uses of, and attacks on, scientific knowledge and expertise.

Book The Merger of Knowledge with Power

Download or read book The Merger of Knowledge with Power written by Jerome R. Ravetz and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1990 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Science and Environment in Chile

Download or read book Science and Environment in Chile written by Javiera Barandiaran and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics of scientific advice across four environmental conflicts in Chile, when the state acted as a “neutral broker” rather than protecting the common good. In Science and Environment in Chile, Javiera Barandiarán examines the consequences for environmental governance when the state lacks the capacity to produce an authoritative body of knowledge. Focusing on the experience of Chile after it transitioned from dictatorship to democracy, she examines a series of environmental conflicts in which the state tried to act as a “neutral broker” rather than the protector of the common good. She argues that this shift in the role of the state—occurring in other countries as well—is driven in part by the political ideology of neoliberalism, which favors market mechanisms and private initiatives over the actions of state agencies. Chile has not invested in environmental science labs, state agencies with in-house capacities, or an ancillary network of trusted scientific advisers—despite the growing complexity of environmental problems and increasing popular demand for more active environmental stewardship. Unlike a high modernist “empire” state with the scientific and technical capacity to undertake large-scale projects, Chile's model has been that of an “umpire” state that purchases scientific advice from markets. After describing the evolution of Chilean regulatory and scientific institutions during the transition, Barandiarán describes four environmental crises that shook citizens' trust in government: the near-collapse of the farmed salmon industry when an epidemic killed millions of fish; pollution from a paper and pulp mill that killed off or forced out thousands of black-neck swans; a gold mine that threatened three glaciers; and five controversial mega-dams in Patagonia.

Book Knowledge  Power and Dissent

Download or read book Knowledge Power and Dissent written by Guy R. Neave and published by UNESCO. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication is based on the discussions of the 2004 Global Colloquium on Research and Higher Education Policy of the UNESCO Forum for Higher Education, Research and Knowledge, held in Paris in December 2004. It contains contributions from 17 international experts in the field of higher education which explore the global rise of the 'knowledge society' and its implications for higher education and for sustainable human development in the future.

Book The Frankfurt School Revisited

Download or read book The Frankfurt School Revisited written by Richard Wolin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of essays by Richard Wolin, a leading political theorist and intellectual historian. It is the follow up to Wolin’s two recent, widely acclaimed books: Heidegger’s Children and The Seduction of Unreason. In those books, he explored the legacy of Martin Heidegger and his impact on some of his most influential and notable students. He dealt particularly with the effect that Heidegger’s subsequent embrace of fascism and National Socialism had on these students. Delving further in his next book, Wolin explored the question of why philosophers and intellectuals have been drawn to antiliberal, antidemocratic fascism. The essays in this book are focused on European Political Thought particularly with figures associated with the Frankfurt School. The collection represents a virtual who’s who of European political thinkers with essays on Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Arendt, Heidegger, Weber, Jaspers, and Carl Schmitt. Moving beyond these thinkers and those books, this collection will also include essays on contemporary political issues such as post-communist revolutions, human rights, global democracy, the revival of republicanism, and religion and public life.

Book The Cambridge History of Science  Volume 7  The Modern Social Sciences

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Science Volume 7 The Modern Social Sciences written by David C. Lindberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-04 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the history of the social sciences since the late eighteenth century.

Book Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Higher Education

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Higher Education written by James E. Côté and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-21 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Higher education has come under increasing public scrutiny in recent years, assailed with demands for greater efficiency, accountability, cost reduction, and, above all, job training. Drawing upon examples from across the world, with an emphasis on Anglo-American higher-education systems, this handbook employs sociological approaches to address these pressing concerns. The second edition is thoroughly updated and adds several new chapters to shed further light on the transformations wrought by the interrelated processes of massification, vocationalization, and marketization that have swept through universities in the wake of neoliberal reforms introduced by governments since the 1980s. The handbook explores recent developments in higher-education systems and policy as well as the everyday experiences of students and staff and ongoing problems of inequality and diversity within universities. In doing so, the chapters address a number of current issues concerning the legitimacy of higher-educational credentials, from the continuing debate regarding traditional pedagogies and the role of universities in social class reproduction to more recent concerns about standards in mass systems. Collectively, this handbook demonstrates that the sociology of higher education has the potential to play a leadership role in improving the myriad higher-education systems around the world that are now part of an interrelated set of subsystems, replete with both persistent problems and promising prospects. This book is therefore necessary reading for a variety of stakeholders within academia as well as professionals and policy-makers interested in understanding higher education and the acute challenges it faces.