′A comprehensive, multidisciplinary examination of the concepts embodied in governance and their wide-ranging applications and implications. An important read and reference for students and academics in the social sciences, particularly those engaged in public policy studies′ - Professor Carolyn J. Heinrich, University of Wisconsin-Madison′An authoritative short survey for which students and teachers alike will be profoundly grateful′ - Professor Rod Rhodes, University ...

The word 'governance' is ubiquitous. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund make loans conditional on 'good governance'. Climate change and avian flu appear as issues of 'global governance'. The European Union issues a White Paper on 'Governance'. The U.S. Forest Service calls for 'collaborative governance'. What accounts for the pervasive use of the term 'governance' and to what does it refer? It has a bewildering set of answers. The word 'governance' is used in a variety of c...

This Element denaturalises political science, stressing the contestability and contingency of ideas, traditions, subfields, and even the discipline itself. The history of political science is less one of scholars testing and improving theories by reference to data than of their appropriating and transforming ideas, often obscuring or obliterating former meanings, to serve new purposes in shifting political contexts. Political science arose in the late nineteenth century as part of a wider ...

A compelling look at the origins of British socialismThe Making of British Socialism provides a new interpretation of the emergence of British socialism in the late nineteenth century, demonstrating that it was not a working-class movement demanding state action, but a creative campaign of political hope promoting social justice, personal transformation, and radical democracy. Mark Bevir shows that British socialists responded to the dilemmas of economics ...

In this book Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely set out to make the most comprehensive case yet for an 'interpretive' or hermeneutic approach to the social sciences. Interpretive approaches are a major growth area in the social sciences today. This is because they offer a full-blown alternative to the behavioralism, institutionalism, rational choice, and other quasi-scientific approaches that dominate the study of human behavior. In addition to presenting a systematic case for interpretivism and...

How is Britain governed? Have we entered a new era of governance? Can traditional approaches to governance help us to interpret 21st century Britain? This book develops the argument that we can understand political practices only by grasping the beliefs on which people act. It offers a governance narrative as a challenge to the Westminster model of British government and searches for a more accurate and open way of speaking about British government.

An incisive examination of Britain today, which breaks from traditional studies, and takes a new approach to account for massive changes in the make-up of the nation.Over the last twenty years Britain has changed from being governed as a unitary state to a country ruled by the interplay of various forces: central government, the market, public-private partnerships, new local government structures (eg. the new Mayoral system), greater regional autonomy as well as the EU and transnat...

The State as Cultural Practice offers a fully worked out account of the authors' distinctive interpretive approach to political science. It challenges the new institutionalism, probably the most significant present-day strand in both American and British political science. It moves away from such notions as 'bringing the state back in', 'path dependency' and modernist empiricism. Instead, Bevir and Rhodes argue for an anti-foundational analysis, ethnographic and historical methods...

Democratic Governance examines the changing nature of the modern state and reveals the dangers these changes pose to democracy. Mark Bevir shows how new ideas about governance have gradually displaced old-style notions of government in Britain and around the world. Policymakers cling to outdated concepts of representative government while at the same time placing ever more faith in expertise, markets, and networks. Democracy exhibits blurred lines of accountability and declining l...

New Labour is the most innovative and powerful political movement in Britain today. However, New Labour: A Critique argues that its apparent pragmatism disguises an ideological commitment to particular forms of social science, deploying new institutionalism and communitarianism to respond to the New Right.Bevir traces the impact of these forms of social science on the ideas and policies of New Labour, paying particular attention to the welfare state and the economy. New La...

How do we arrange our collective affairs? Why do we live together in the ways we do? How ought we to live together? All humans think about the world they live in, its history and future, and the ideals by which they want to live in relation to others. How we think today decisively influences the world of tomorrow. This encyclopedia attempts to bring greater clarity and understanding to political debate.Drawing together a team of international scholars, the Encyclopedia of P...

Histories of Postmodernism reexamines the history of the constellation of ideas and thinkers associated with postmodernism. The increasingly dominant historical narrative depicts a relatively smooth development of ideas from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, through a range of French theorists, most notably Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, to contemporary American thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Edward Said, and Judith Butler. Histories of Postmodernism challe...