Books about Hierarchies from Amazon.com

The New York Times Bestseller

WIN THE WAR FOR SUCCESS

It's not enough anymore to be smart, hard-working, and able to show results; At this level, everybody is smart, hard-working, and able to show results Now it's a game for grown-ups What really sets you apart is the relationships you build with people of influence These people can include your peers, your employees, your organization's directors, reporters, vendors, and regulators-as well as the people directly above you in the organizational hierarchy.

In senior management, you no longer answer to just one boss. There is now a hazy matrix of hundreds of bosses both inside and outside the office, any one of whom can stop you cold or give you a tremendous push forward. Executive Warfare offers concrete advice for handling all of them, including

• YOUR PEERS: They are the most valuable of allies or the most dangerous of enemies
• THE CEO: Her office is often where the real fairy dust is kept. Make sure you have a good relationship here
• THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS: They won't judge you fairly if all they see of you is your PowerPoints
• YOUR DIRECT REPORTS: They are your vital organs, so treat them accordingly. And if you find a blood clot among them-excise that person before he kills you
• YOUR RIVALS: It's not always wise to shoot at them, but if you do, do not shoot to wound

In his bestsellers Brand Warfare and Career Warfare, author David D'Alessandro offered sharp advice for building a brand and building a career. Now Executive Warfare is the advanced class for the truly ambitious. Learn what it takes to rise to the top-and to do the even harder thing, which is survive there.

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Utterly compelling!
Barbara Ann Kipfer has elevated the list to high art and bestselling pleasure. A foremost expert of classification, in The Order of Things, she does for life what her previous books do for happiness and wisdom—organize it in a way that is brilliantly conceived.
The The Order of Things is practical, entertaining, eclectic, and impossible to put down. Beginning with Earth—Smog Alert States, Rain Forest Layers, Coal Sizes— and ending with General Knowledge and Philosophy (the I Ching's 64 "chapters," Ludwig Wittgenstein's four-step Method of Overcoming Puzzlement), it is a 14-chapter taxonomy of the world as we know it:

• The Seven Hills of Rome, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Seven Dwarfs—check.
• The belt degrees of karate and judo, weight classes of professional and amateur boxing, flower names of the golf holes at Augusta—check.
• The hierarchy of the FBI, publication order of Shakespeare's plays, cuts of beef, Freud's divisions of the human psyche, order of rank in world armies and navies, Jupiter's satellites, ships' bells, traditional and modern wine measures, blood-pressure levels, fastest animals—check.

A completely indispensable reference—check..
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"The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human." With this succinct formulation, Murray Bookchin launches his most ambitious work, The Ecology of Freedom. An engaging and extremely readable book of breathtaking scope, its inspired synthesis of ecology, anthropology and political theory traces our conflicting legacies of hierarchy and freedom from the first emergence of human culture to today's globalized capitalism, constantly pointing the way to a sane, sustainable ecological future.

Murray Bookchin, cofounder of the Institute for Social Ecology, has been an active voice in the ecology and anarchist movements for more than 40 years. The author of numerous books and articles, he lives in Burlington, Vermont.

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Price: $13.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are.

For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms--Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow--enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America--housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy--now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between "serious" and "popular," between "high" and "low" culture came to dominate America's expressive arts.

"If there is a tragedy in this development," Levine comments, "it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period--and many have still not regained--their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit."

In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.

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Don't Kill the Bosses! is a cool-headed blueprint for changing companies by challenging the idea of boss-dominated relationships. The book explores the critical flaw of the boss/subordinate relationship: Management fails to establish a framework for subordinates to communicate in a forthright manner, so subordinates spin the facts for their bosses.

The book identifies the culprit as one-sided accountability and shows the consequences: warped communication, corrupt internal politics, illusionary teamwork, and a pass-the-buck mentality. The proposed solution is surprisingly simple: Replace this particular hierarchical relationship -- without disposing of the organizational chart -- with an alternative model. The authors demonstrate how to establish candid, equal-footing relationships that allow organizations to work effectively and productively..
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“If anthropology consists of making the apparently wild thought of others logically compelling in their own cultural settings and intellectually revealing of the human condition, then David Graeber is the consummate anthropologist. Not only does he accomplish this profound feat, he redoubles it by the critical task—now more urgent than ever—of making the possibilities of other people’s worlds the basis for understanding our own.” —Marshall Sahlins, University of Chicago

“Graeber’s ideas are rich and wide-ranging; he pushes us to expand the boundaries of what we admit to be possible, or even thinkable.”—Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University

In this new collection, David Graeber revisits questions raised in his popular book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Written in an unpretentious style that uses accessible and entertaining language to convey complex theoretical ideas, these twelve essays cover a lot of ground, including the origins of capitalism, the history of European table manners, love potions in rural Madagascar, and the phenomenology of giant puppets at street protests. But they’re linked by a clear purpose: to explore the nature of social power and the forms that resistance to it have taken, or might take in the future.

Anarchism is currently undergoing a worldwide revival, in many ways replacing Marxism as the theoretical and moral center of new revolutionary social movements. It has, however, left little mark on the academy. While anarchists and other visionaries have turned to anthropology for ideas and inspiration, anthropologists are reluctant to enter into serious dialogue. David Graeber is not. These essays, spanning almost twenty years, show how scholarly concerns can be of use to radical social movements, and how the perspectives of such movements shed new light on debates within the academy.

David Graeber has written for Harper’s Magazine, New Left Review, and numerous scholarly journals. He is the author or editor of four books and currently lives in New York City.

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