The federal government is having increasing difficulty faithfully executing the laws, which is what Alexander Hamilton called “the true test” of a good government. This book diagnoses the symptoms, explains their general causes, and proposes ways to improve the effectiveness of the federal government. Employing Hamilton’s seven measures of an energetic federal service, Paul Light shows how the government is wanting in each measure.After assessing the federal report card, Light offe...

In his 1961 Farewell Address, President Eisenhower famously referred to the emergence of a "military-industrial complex" so powerful that it threatened to warp America's political institutions and economy. However, the military was not the only part of a blended government workforce that was growing by leaps and bounds. Over the next half century, the true size of the federal government expanded in almost every department and agency as it came to depend on 7-9 million federal, contract, an...

Strategies for long-term social impactThis important new book illustrates how to create the social breakthroughs needed to solve urgent global threats such as poverty, disease, and hunger. It then turns to three alternative, but complementary, paths to social breakthrough: social protecting, social exploring, and social advocacy, providing a detailed map of the journey from initial commitment to a world of justice and opportunityExamines the current c...

Paul C. Light examines and evaluates the 100 most significant investigations of policy failures, bureaucratic mistakes, and personal misconduct undertaken by the U.S. federal government between 1945 and 2012. Launched by Congress or the president, sometimes by both at the same time, the investigations at the core of this book were driven by the search for answers about significant breakdowns in government performance. Light reveals which investigations were most effective, and why.

This ebook is now available from Bloomsbury Academic. Bloomsbury Academic publish acclaimed resources for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as the general reader, across a broad range of subjects including Archaeology, Art & Visual Culture, Biblical Studies, Business & Management, Drama & Performance Studies, Economics, Education, Film & Media, History, Linguistics, Literary Studies, Music & Sound Studies, Philosophy, Politics & International Relations, Psychology, Religious ...

Government is under enormous pressure to change. Call it reinventing, reengineering, or plain old change, but the mandate remains the same: produce more with less, and satisfy the customer while doing it.Paul Light argues that a failure to pay attention to the thickening of government over the past half century may doom any reinventing effort. The federal government has never had so many leaders. There are more layers of management between the top and bottom of government, with more...

It has occurred to the writer that throughout the Bible, but especially in the Old Testament, there were many references to the word "Covenant." The urge to write a book which would thoroughly investigate every occurrence of that word (in the King James Version) just would not be dismissed from my mind. And so it lingered there until I finally decided that I would tackle the job.If I am not mistaken, the word "Covenant" appears 292 times in the Bible and only ten of them are in the...

This book addresses a seemingly simple question: Just how many people really work for the federal government? Official counts show a relatively small total of 1.9 million full-time civil servants, as of 1996. But, according to Paul Light, the true head count is nearly nine times higher than the official numbers, with about 17 million people actually providing the government with goods and services. Most are part of what Light calls the ""shadow of government""-nonfederal employees working ...

In this broad-based, imaginative and challenging volume by front-runners in the domain of immigrant and refugee entrepreneurship, Ivan Light, Leo-Paul Dana and Didier Chabaud contribute a near boundless magnitude to our understanding of this realm of scholarship, agency, endurance, and survivorship. Their insights into the saliency of these forms of collective effort are as impressive as they are persuasive.Seven Gold, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University.

In an era of promises to create smaller, more limited government, Americans often forget that the federal government has amassed an extraordinary record of successes over the past half century. Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, it helped rebuild Europe after World War II, conquered polio and other life-threatening diseases, faced down communism, attacked racial discrimination, reduced poverty among the elderly, and put men on the moon. In Government's Greatest Achievements, Paul C. Li...

This book brings together research and studies in the fields of organised crime and of ‘green criminality’ against the natural environment. By bringing the research traditions of organised crime and ‘green criminology’ into closer proximity and combining contributions on traditional organised crime and ecological crime in one volume, it questions the need to draw artificial dividing lines between criminological sub-disciplines. Including chapters on the illegal trade in cobalt, in stolen m...

Contrary to the belief that computers isolate users, Karen Littleton and Paul Light demonstrate that learning with computers is often a collaborative and social activity. Learning with Computers brings together a significant body of research that shows how working with others at the computer can be beneficial to learners of all ages, from the early school years to the highest levels of education. It also investigates factors such as gender that explain why some interactions are no...