You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book describes the role of technological experts and expertise in a democratic society. It places decision-making strategies - studied in organization theory and policy studies - into a political context. Fischer brings theory to bear on the practical technocratic concerns of these disciplines and hopes to facilitate the development of nontechnocratic discourse within these fields. The book adopts a critical perspective and addresses the restructuring of the policy sciences.
In recent years a set of radical new approaches to public policy has been developing. These approaches, drawing on discursive analysis and participatory deliberative practices, have come to challenge the dominant technocratic, empiricist models in policy analysis. In his major new book Frank Fischer brings together this new work for the first time and critically examines it. In an accessible way he describes the theoretical, methodological, and political requirements and implications of the new "post-empiricist" approach to public policy. The volume includes a discussion of the social construction of policy problems, the role of interpretation and narrative analysis in policy inquiry, the dialectics of policy argumentation, and the uses of participatory policy analysis. The book will be required reading for anyone studying, researching, or formulating public policy.
J�rgen Habermas's critical communications theory of society has excited widespread interest in recent years. The essays in this book explore the research implications of Habermas's theory for the analysis of modern problems of public life. Spanning the spectrum of the social sciences, the essays relate critical theory to industrial policy under advanced capitalism, education, the mass media and consumerism, public participation in planning, policy analysis, and critical historical studies.John Forester is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Critical Theory and Public Life is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.
Revealing biography of the controversial chess champion, written by a chess player who knew Fischer since the latter was 11. It chronicles Fischer's tumultuous public and private lives, including an analysis of 90 games that trace his rise to supremacy plus a complete history of the1972 Fischer-Spassky match. 26 photographs.
DIVClaims that the problematic communication gap between experts and ordinary citizens is best remedied by a renewal of local citizen participation in deliberative structures./div
Rapid advances and new technologies in the life sciences - such as biotechnologies in health, agricultural and environmental arenas - pose a range of pressing challenges to questions of citizenship. This volume brings together for the first time authors from diverse experiences and analytical traditions, encouraging a conversation between science and technology and development studies around issues of science, citizenship and globalisation. It reflects on the nature of expertise; the framing of knowledge; processes of public engagement; and issues of rights, justice and democracy. A wide variety of pressing issues is explored, such as medical genetics, agricultural biotechnology, occupational health and HIV/AIDS. Drawing upon rich case studies from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, Science and Citizens asks: · Do new perspectives on science, expertise and citizenship emerge from comparing cases across different issues and settings? · What difference does globalisation make? · What does this tell us about approaches to risk, regulation and public participation? · How might the notion of ‘cognitive justice‘ help to further debate and practice?
In this book, an international group of public policy scholars revisit the stage of formulating policy solutions by investigating the basic political dimensions inherent to this critical phase of the policy process. The book focuses attention on how policy makers craft their policy proposals, match them with public problems, debate their feasibility to build coalitions and dispute their acceptability as serious contenders for government consideration. Based on international case studies, this book is an invitation to examine the uncertain and often indeterminate aspects of policy-making using qualitative analysis embedded in a political perspective.
This book examines the role of policy expertise in a democratic society. From the perspectives of both political theory and policy studies, the chapters explore the implications of deliberative democratic governance for professional expertise and extends them to specific policy practices. Following the lead of John Dewey, the discussion focuses in particular on the ways professional practices might be reoriented to assist citizens in understanding and discussing the complex policy issues of an advanced technological society. In doing so, it also explores how public deliberation can be improved through more cooperative forms of policy inquiry. Adopting a deliberative-analytic approach , polic...
With the increasing use of algorithms to govern public life, a proliferation of promises surrounding ‘big data,’ and an ever tighter union of academic specialists and the state bureaucracy, we are, it seems, on our way to an administrative utopia. At what cost, though? Executing Truth critically appraises this reformation of politics by way of the social sciences. It argues that what is lost with this reformation is a deeper consideration of the problematic relation of truth to politics; a problem which cuts deeper than any social science might plumb. In seeking to recover what is lost, this book offers a comprehensive study of the problem. The author works his way back from the debates in politically applied social science (or policy science) to the foundational thinkers. These include Harold Lasswell, John Dewey, Max Weber, and Georg Hegel. At the end of this journey, Executing Truth calls for a return to the everyday (or the most comprehensive basis for distinguishing between theoretical perspectives), and outlines the implications of this return for those political advisors – state executive actors – tasked with ‘speaking truth to power.’