Books about Rationalizing from Amazon.com

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Price: $18.03 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Anthropologist Georgina Born presents one of the first ethnographies of a powerful western cultural organization, the renowned Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. As a year-long participant-observer, Born studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for research and production of avant-garde and computer music. She gives a unique portrait of IRCAM's composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992.
Born depicts a major artistic institution trying to maintain its status and legitimacy in an era increasingly dominated by market forces, and in a volatile political and cultural climate. She illuminates the erosion of the legitimacy of art and science in the face of growing commercial and political pressures. By tracing how IRCAM has tried to accomodate these pressures while preserving its autonomy, Born reveals the contradictory effects of institutionalizing an avant-garde.
Contrary to those who see postmodernism representing an accord between high and popular culture, Born stresses the continuities between modernism and postmodernism and how postmodernism itself embodies an implicit antagonism toward popular culture..
Price: $18.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Rationalizing Parliament examines how institutional arrangements in the French Constitution shape the bargaining strategies of political parties. Professor Huber investigates the decision by French elites to include in the Constitution legislative procedures intended to "rationalize" the policy-making role of parliament and analyzes the impact of these procedures on policy outcomes, cabinet stability, and political accountability. Through its use of theories developed in the American politics literature, the study reveals important similarities between legislative politics in the United States and in parliamentary systems and the shortcomings in conventional interpretations of French institutional arrangements..
Price: $70.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ever since their arrival in North America, European colonists and their descendants have struggled to explain the epidemics that decimated native populations. Century after century, they tried to understand the causes of epidemics, the vulnerability of American Indians, and the persistence of health disparities. They confronted their own responsibility for the epidemics, accepted the obligation to intervene, and imposed social and medical reforms to improve conditions. In Rationalizing Epidemics, David Jones examines crucial episodes in this history: Puritan responses to Indian depopulation in the seventeenth century; attempts to spread or prevent smallpox on the Western frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; tuberculosis campaigns on the Sioux reservations from 1870 until 1910; and programs to test new antibiotics and implement modern medicine on the Navajo reservation in the 1950s. These encounters were always complex. Colonists, traders, physicians, and bureaucrats often saw epidemics as markers of social injustice and worked to improve Indians' health. At the same time, they exploited epidemics to obtain land, fur, and research subjects, and used health disparities as grounds for "civilizing" American Indians. Revealing the economic and political patterns that link these cases, Jones provides insight into the dilemmas of modern health policy in which desire and action stand alongside indifference and inaction.

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Price: $54.71 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Presidents, like kings, lead cloistered lives. Protecting the president from too much isolation are advisers and aides who help ensure that the administration achieves its policy goals while enjoying broad political support. In economics and environmental policy, where disagreement among stakeholders and expert opinion is especially strong, the president needs good advice about political strategy, as well as unbiased information about the substance of policy issues. It is the second need that the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is intended to address.

Painting the White House Green collects personal essays by seven former Senior Staff Economists for Environmental and Natural Resource Policy who worked within the CEA from 1992 to 2002. These authors confirm the council's "severe" view of many environmental initiatives, a perspective that led a president to label his economic advisers as "lemon suckers." At the same time, they demonstrate that the emphasis on efficiency was to offer more effective environmental protection at lower cost. Thinking "green" meant thinking consistently about both economics and the environment.

The essays in this innovative book present lively debates on clean air, climate change, and electricity deregulation that pitted economists at CEA, the Office of Management and Budget, and often the Treasury Department, against political advisors in the White House and officials at EPA and other agencies. The essays present portraits of the power plays involved in environmental policymaking, rare insights into presidential decisionmaking, and revealing details of the ways that economic thinking influences—or is ignored—in a wide range of policy decisions..
Price: $6.17 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Lucidly argued and carefully documented, Stephen Shalom's study of the pretexts for intervention is an invaluable guide to the recent past and unlikely future".--Noam Chomsky, author of "Necessary Illusions". Lightning Print On Demand Title.
Price: $33.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]