The Oxford Handbook of Regulation

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Edited by Robert Baldwin, Martin Cave, and Martin Lodge
Oxford Handbooks in Business and Management
680 pages
978-0-19-956021-9 | Hardback | 09 September 2010

• 'State of the art' interdisciplinary study of regulation in an international context
• Each chapter provides a broad overview of key current issues and perspectives from a leading expert
• Particular focus on the issues of the application of specific regulatory approaches in different contexts

Regulation is often thought of as an activity that restricts behaviour and prevents the occurrence of certain undesirable activities, but the influence of regulation can also be enabling or facilitative, as when a market could potentially be chaotic if uncontrolled. This Handbook provides a clear and authoritative discussion of the major trends and issues in regulation over the last thirty years, together with an outline of prospective developments. It brings together contributions from leading scholars from a range of disciplines and countries.

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Governance of Public Sector Organizations

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Edited by Per Lægreid and Koen Verhoest
Series: Governance and Public Management
Palgrave Macmillan

Governance of Public Sector Organizations examines recent changes in central governmental administration in contemporary democracies by focusing on organizational forms and their effects. There is a considerable need for such knowledge in a period when governments are constantly restructuring their administration. This book studies and explains how New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM reforms affect the organizational proliferation and specialization, as well as the autonomy and control of central agencies. New empirical data sheds light on the effects of these changes on organizational performance. The book describes how 'whole-of-government' initiatives with emphasis on reassertion of the centre and horizontal coordination supplement NPM reforms, producing increased layering and complexity in government organizations.

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Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research

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Edited by Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox
ISBN13: 9780199736874ISBN10: 0199736871 Paperback, 288 pages

Description
Writing about ideas, John Maynard Keynes noted that they are "more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else." One would expect, therefore, that political science--a discipline that focuses specifically on the nature of power--would have a healthy respect for the role of ideas. However, for a variety of reasons--not least of which is the influence of rational choice theory, which presumes that individuals are self-maximizing rational actors--this is not the case, and the literature on the topic is fairly thin. As the stellar cast of contributors to this volume show, ideas are in fact powerful shapers of political and social life.

In Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research , Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox have gathered leading scholars from a variety of subdisciplines in political science and sociology to provide a general overview of the theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues raised by social science research on ideas and politics. Throughout, they hone in on three central questions. What is the theoretical basis for studying ideas in politics? What are the best methods? What sort of empirical puzzles can be solved by examining ideas and related phenomena such as discourse, policy paradigms, and framing processes? In sum, this is a state-of-the-art academic work on both the role of ideas in politics and the analytical utility that derives from studying them.

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The Oxford Handbook of Business and Government

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Edited by David Coen, Professor of Public Policy, University College London, Wyn Grant, Professor of Politics, University of Warwick, and Graham Wilson, Professor of Political Science, Boston University

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