By reconsidering the nature of professional work, renowned scholar Douglas E. Mitchell argues for reconceptualizing educational practices and institutional structures in ways that facilitate and protect educator professional responsibility.This book explores ways educators and their political supporters can seize the social and political power necessary to accept professional responsibility for the design of their work environment. Chapters explore how unionization, ethics, public ...

This book probes the intellectual foundations of scholarly inquiry into educational administration, policy, and politics. The question of whether, and if so how, social science theories and methods contribute to an understanding of these issues is hotly debated today. Is there really a scientific basis for evaluating and/or improving educational administration, politics and policy? The contributors—all recognized scholars in the fields of educational organization, administration, policy an...

Shaping Education Policy is a comprehensive overview of education politics and policy, which provides conceptual guideposts for future policy development and strategies for change. Leading scholars explore the interacting social processes and the dynamics of power politics as they intersect with democratic ideals and shape school performance. Chapters cover major themes that have influenced education, including the Civil Rights Movement, federal involvement, the accountability mov...

At the center of this book is the complex and perplexing question of how to design professional preparation programs, organizational management practices, public policy systems and robust professional associations committed to and capable of, maintaining confidence, trust and the other hallmarks of responsible professionalism. To do this, we need to rebuild our understanding of professional responsibility from the ground up. We describe how individuals might be prepared to engage in respon...

This groundbreaking book represents the most systematic examination to date of the often-invoked but rarely examined declaration that "history matters." Most contemporary social scientists unconsciously take a "snapshot" view of the social world. Yet the meaning of social events or processes is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. Paul Pierson argues that placing politics in time--constructing "moving pictures" rather than snapshots--can vastly enrich our ...

The discipline of public administration draws predominantly from political and organizational theory, but also from other social and behavioral sciences, philosophy, and even theology. This diversity results in conflicting prescriptions for the "proper" administrative role. So, how are those new to public administration to know which ideas are "legitimate"?Rather than accepting conventional arguments for administrative legitimacy through delegated constitutional authority or expert...

In this timely and important new book, Gary Anderson provides a devastating critique of why a managerial role for educational leaders is counterproductive, especially for improving opportunities for low-income students and students of color, and instead proposes ways of re-theorizing educational leadership to emphasize its advocacy role. Advocacy Leadership lays out a post-reform agenda that moves beyond the neo-liberal, competition framework to define a new accountabilit...

In this book, philosopher Harry Brighouse and Spencer Foundation president Michael McPherson bring together leading philosophers to think about some of the most fundamental questions that higher education faces. Looking beyond the din of arguments over how universities should be financed, how they should be run, and what their contributions to the economy are, the contributors to this volume set their sights on higher issues: ones of moral and political value. The result is an accessible c...

Long a fruitful area of scrutiny for students of organizations, the study of institutions is undergoing a renaissance in contemporary social science. This volume offers, for the first time, both often-cited foundation works and the latest writings of scholars associated with the "institutional" approach to organization analysis.In their introduction, the editors discuss points of convergence and disagreement with institutionally oriented research in economics and political science,...

Until very recently, American universities were led mainly by their faculties, which viewed intellectual production and pedagogy as the core missions of higher education. Today, as Benjamin Ginsberg warns in this eye-opening, controversial book, "deanlets"--administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience--are setting the educational agenda. The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's univer...

No study of international relations is complete without consideration of foreign policy processes and an understanding of state security, conflict in global politics, and the relationship between the world economy and international behavior. Conflict, Security, Foreign Policy, and International Political Economy: Past Paths and Future Directions in International Studies consists of twelve original essays that point out the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches in these research ar...

Individual decision making can often be wrong due to misinformation, impulses, or biases. Collective decision making, on the other hand, can be surprisingly accurate. In Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore demonstrates that the very factors behind the superiority of collective decision making add up to a strong case for democracy. She shows that the processes and procedures of democratic decision making form a cognitive system that ensures that decisions taken by the many are more...