The current world is absurd. Faced with climate change, health pandemics, and ever-growing inequality, it is striking how globally, governments and organizations are malingering to find effective responses to these crises, leading to absurd situations where we are facing the destruction of the planet, while humankind is not making the necessary transformation towards truly sustainable societies and workplaces.Focusing on these grand, global challenges from an absurdity and hypernor...

When the State Meets the Street probes the complex moral lives of street-level bureaucrats: the frontline social and welfare workers, police officers, and educators who represent government’s human face to ordinary citizens. Too often dismissed as soulless operators, these workers wield a significant margin of discretion and make decisions that profoundly affect people’s lives. Combining insights from political theory with his own ethnographic fieldwork as a receptionist in an urb...

This book is an edited collection of original papers which challenge in a very direct manner the dominant behviourist and functionalist views that have come to entrap those who live, work and conduct research in the areas of educational leadership, and focusing instead on the structures and processes within schools as organisations that frustrate, distort and ultimately stifle educative relationships the writers provide a much needed way of reconceptualising both thought and action in so-c...

The radical transformation that universities are undergoing today is no less far-reaching than the upheavals that it experienced in the 1960s. However today, when almost 50 per cent of young people participate in higher education, what occurs in universities matters directly to the whole of society.On both sides of the Atlantic curious and disturbing events on campuses has become a matter of concern not just for academics but also for the general public. What is one to make of the ...

This book examines an intercultural translation of economics as an academic field from Western to post-Soviet university settings.

Contemporary educational practices are heeding the calls of Wall Street for more corporate control, privatisation and standardised accountability. In many cases, educational policies are created to uphold and serve particular social, political and economic ends. Schools, in a sense, have been tools to reproduce hierarchical, authoritarian and hyper-individualistic models of social order. The important news is that emancipatory educational practices are emerging. Out of the Ruins sets out t...

With chapters on all the major theories of international relations, accompanied by contemporary examples from popular culture, film and literature, this Third Edition is the ideal introduction to the key perspectives in the field.Key features:30% new content, with all chapters revised and updatedUseful learning features including further reading, ′questions to ponder′, ′common pitfalls′ and ′taking it further′ boxes, to help you extend your ...

In his provocative new book, The Tyranny of the Ideal, Gerald Gaus lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. Gaus shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. He argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice—esse...

What is at stake in compromising the Enlightenment ideals of a liberal education with new educational policies engendered by a neo-liberalized, global marketplace? Richly grounding his arguments in the social philosophy of European and American intellectuals, Raphael Sassower explores Western culture's long-standing ambivalence toward 'the life of the mind.' He shows how and why this historical legacy contributes to today's confusion over goals and values in contemporary education. He shed...

American education as we know it today—guaranteed by the state to serve every child in the country—is still less than a hundred years old. It's no wonder we haven't agreed yet as to exactly what role education should play in our society. In these Tanner Lectures, Danielle Allen brings us much closer, examining the ideological impasse between vocational and humanistic approaches that has plagued educational discourse, offering a compelling proposal to finally resolve the dispute.All...

This innovative book is written in an accessible, compact style that sets forth and explains a sound framework for professional ethics that readers can quickly put into practice in analyzing and writing about cases. Through a series of moral conflicts, it aims at improving the skills of moral reasoning and achieving moral development.Contents: List of Diagrams; Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; What is Ethics?; The Structure of Moral Development: Interest, Ro...

Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, individually and collectively, to develop capacities of resilience. We must accept and adapt to the ‘realities’ of an endemic condition of global insecurity and to the practice of so-called sustainable development. But in spite of claims that resilience make us more adept and capable, does the discourse of resilience undermine our ability to make our own decisions as to how we wish to live?...