Refounding Corporate Governance: The Metaphysics of Corporate Leadership is a deconstructive tour-de-force and leads the reader to an understanding of the further evolution of corporate governance in considered ways and brings them together in a coherent and understandable way. This book looks at the role of the individual in the organization and allows readers to reflect on their own role and interaction within their organization. It focuses particularly on leaders, managers and corporate board members and on how power and leadership in the corporation are operating now. The volume also looks comparatively at the governance dynamics of other organizations, such as the Catholic Church and Universities. The book provides an in-depth look at the way society’s organizations operate in the most important spheres of society and, in so doing, presents a comprehensive understanding of governance. The book should prove to be very useful for scholars and professionals interested in management theory and organizational leadership studies.

Refounding Political Governance: The Metaphysics of Public Administration points to a possible paradigm shift in the way Anglo-American Public Administration should be understood and analyzed. The book presents a unique approach to the analysis of power, leadership and management in Public Administration. The central theme is that humans make organizations in their own image and these organizations, in turn, are a product of the way humans think and act. The book extrapolates from historical philosophy and personality typologies to explain the dynamics and evolution of Public Administration. With the philosophical framework and approach clearly explained, the book provides a critique of current practice and recommends what is required to re-invent Public Administration, rather than New Public Management, in Anglo-American contexts. The book explains a new, more complex, and more useful, understanding of the dynamics of contemporary US Public Administration situated within the American Constitution. This book is ground-breaking and should be useful in all graduate Public Administration courses and professionals in the field of Public Administration.

This text describes important considerations for conceptualizing, designing and carrying out qualitative research in community settings. The book covers various research aspects with respect to teaching, learning, practicing and assessing. Readers will gain insights into qualitative methodology as a vital stand-alone approach and find it to be an illuminating supplement to quantitative methodology and a core component of mixed methods studies. Some key questions answered by the book are: What’s in it for us? What are collaborations and partnerships? How can knowledge and skills to achieve meaningful outcomes be acquired and applied? How can scientific rigor be achieved? What are the challenges and how can they be resolved? What is ethical? Whose voices and narratives should be portrayed? What is culturally competent qualitative research? Who and what determine assessments? Can qualitative research help sustain community? What happens when the project ends? How can research shape public policy? The e-book should serve as a useful guide for social science and community research students and teachers alike.

This volume presents an illuminating analysis of the ways in which normalization processes and practices operate in a welfare state in an age of neoliberalism. This informative book problematizes the meaning of the phrase ‘normalization processes and practices’, that for an Anglophone audience may smack of functionalism. The historical context of the deliberate adoption of normalization processes and practices in Sweden in the post-World War II era was, in the first instance, an expression of the inclusivity designed to decrease inequalities and to achieve social justice. However all the contributors to this volume, show very clearly how notions of normalcy, of normalization, in a neoliberal time operate not only to create an integrating and equalizing context but also, and much more critically, to exclude certain groups of people, and produce a structural inequality that in recent years has been discussed under the term of ‘utanförskap’ or outsiderhood. Critiquing these interventions, the contributors to this volume show how diverse groups of people - immigrants, families considered 'at risk' by social services, pregnant women, young girls - are variously the objects of context-specific normalization processes and practices that make any resistance to such interventions difficult, if not impossible. What people 'normally do', cloaks that 'normal doing' with a fog of invisibilization that suffocates any form of protest. Normalization thus takes on specific forms of repression in particular circumstances, for instance through the ethnocentric imposition of norms of behaviour on migrants where that ethnocentricity is neither made evident nor acknowledged. This system of normalization also operates in schools, resulting in the reproduction of inequalities and discrimination from an early age. In such normalization processes 'the normal' or 'the usual' becomes a means for reinterpreting structural inequalities in terms of individual choice, and for displacing the responsibilities for change onto those positioned as outsiders. The individual chapters highlight how the operations of normalizing processes work to obscure their functioning, thus making any critique of both the underlying assumptions and their operationalization almost impossible.

We live in a time where organizational change has become the norm. Organizations are constantly undergoing major restructurings be it outsourcing, downsizing or major reorganizational changes, e.g., team or LEAN implementation. Stability has become the exception. Managing good and healthy change seems to be a prerequisite to secure the organization’s survival. Research has indicated that the way the change is implemented greatly influences the results of changes and that organizational change may have detrimental effects on employees’ working environment, health and well-being. The unique contribution of this Ebook is the healthy change perspective. This book is about how change can benefit the health of the organization and the individual employee, and it is hoped that it will be of interest to many readers.

Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries makes an invaluable contribution to gender and sexuality studies, engaging with queer theory to reconceptualize everyday interactions. The scholars in this book respond to J. Halberstam’s call to engage in alternative imaginings to reconceptualize forms of being, the production of knowledge, and envisage a world with different sites for justice and injustice. The recent work of cultural theorist, Judith Halberstam, makes new investments in the notion of the counter-hegemonic, the subversive and the alternative. For Halberstam, the alternative resides in a creative engagement with subjugated histories, an ecstatic investment in the subcultural and a defiant refusal of a dominant model of theory. Working across Rhetoric and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Performance Studies, Television and Media Studies, Animation, Sociology, History, Social Policy, Childhood Studies, Education, and Cultural Geography, this unique interdisciplinary text aimed at academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students provides challenging new frameworks for generating knowledge.

In our increasingly global world, individuals are highly mobile and interconnected. Politics, policies and technologies foster interconnection amongst and within countries as individuals relocate from one place to another. One key issue facing developed and developing countries is urban overcrowding. In Australia, urban density is one factor prompting institutions and individuals to embrace ‘rural revival’ as a possible solution to urban congestion and rural decline. In the past decade, rural Australia has received heightened publicity and interest as a lifestyle destination encouraged by national decentralization policies to alleviate urban overcrowding, particularly the metropolises Melbourne and Sydney, regional councils’ marketing initiatives and international refugee relocation. Rural communities struggle in contrast with urban counterparts for several, often complex, reasons. The ‘realities’ of rural life are frequently marginalized while marketing campaigns evoke stereotypical imagery of idyllic lifestyles and bucolic pastures to sell dreams of country bliss to fatigued urbanites. This edited e-book is a collection of articles that explores ‘rural realities’ of country life in Australia for global audiences interested in rurality, health and well-being. By transcending disciplinary-specific boundaries, this multi-disciplinary book not only presents contemporary challenges, but also equips readers with evidence-based knowledge to improve resilience in communities and individuals facing key issues such as aging, depression, disability, environmental degradation, limited service delivery and social isolation. Utilizing a variety of social science research methods, each chapter will enhance readers’ insights about rural amenities, geography, identity, culture, health and governance which impact wellbeing and lifestyle satisfaction. Collectively, this book exposes readers to ideas from a dynamic range of experts in the humanities, social and natural sciences to encourage a holistic approach to developing solutions for a complex social world. The content of this volume will interest a wide audience of graduates and undergraduates, researchers, professional practitioners and policymakers involved with non-profit and government organizations, and interested community members.

A refreshing and useful resource for understanding the multidimensional aspects linking social determinants to health equity and development. The book is written for researchers, students, public health practitioners, health decision makers, health economists, epidemiologists, sociologists, demographers and general public audience with interest in health equity and development. The nine chapters presented are clear and comprehensive, reinforced by several diagrams and real examples illustrating inequity in health. The book is Illustrated with 45 tables and figures, and contain 355 recent references to the literature.

The Paradox in Partnership: The Role of Conflict in Partnership Building elucidates on alliances that are - on one hand, designed to promote collaboration between individuals, groups and organizations - but on the other hand, the processes of their formation and maintenance entail continuous engagement with competitive orientation, power struggles and conflict. Theoretical frameworks with praxis are integrated as reflected in a variety of organizational, community and national contexts. In the theoretical domain, it expands knowledge on partnerships in general and their paradoxical nature in particular. On the practical level, the dual partnership phenomenon is explained along with considerable advantages it may offer to all partners when it is developed systematically and is accompanied by reflection and learning, especially while facing the reality of dwindling resources.

Sociologists have suggested that being on the move entails a complex choreography, comprised of passenger comportment, signage, announcements and posters. Employing insights from mobility theory, Transporting moments provides an account of railway culture from a passenger’s perspective. The book uses the context of commuting in Sydney, at a time when elements of its intra-urban rail network were being upgraded as its principal case study. This upgrade covers its rolling stock, infrastructure and linguistic landscape. It is argued that understanding the rationale behind these changes requires an understanding of the historical and policy context in which the railways of Sydney’s, New South Wales and Australia are embedded. This is also the case with the nation’s long distance trains, whose operators have fought hard to stave off competition from airliners and cars. Transporting moments, therefore, presents strong case for preserving public transport as a more equitable and sustainable form of mobility. Governments, Australian or otherwise, can use these insights for productive investment in their rail networks and public transportation service in general, and for reducing the nation’s addiction to the automobile. With its invaluable insights into travelling on trains, Transporting moments is a fascinating addition to the growing corpus of literature on day-to-day mobility.