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Lewis Anthony Dexter may well have been one of the better known and least appreciated political scientists of the last century. This outstanding collection of Dexter's writings, demonstrates why Dexter remains important. The volume off ers solid reasons for researching the topics Dexter pioneered, and is a masterful guide to his thought and analyses. Dexter's writings derive from a multifaceted career. The Management of Purpose is organized into three broad subject areas: sociology, political science, and practicing social science. Dexter's notions of what constituted sociology and anthropology and his understandings of these areas and how to use them to illumine political matters are unusua...
Lewis Anthony Dexter may well have been one of the better known and least appreciated political scientists of the last century. This outstanding collection of Dexter's writings, demonstrates why Dexter remains important. The volume off ers solid reasons for researching the topics Dexter pioneered, and is a masterful guide to his thought and analyses. Dexter's writings derive from a multifaceted career. The Management of Purpose is organized into three broad subject areas: sociology, political science, and practicing social science. Dexter's notions of what constituted sociology and anthropology and his understandings of these areas and how to use them to illumine political matters are unusua...
Lewis Anthony Dexter (1915-1995) pioneered the use of specialized interviewing as a tool in the social sciences. He argued that interviewing persons who have specialized information about, or who have involvement with, any social or political processes is different from standardized interviewing. In 'elite' interviewing the investigator must be willing to let the interviewee teach him what the problem, the question, or the situation is. He demonstrated that interviewing was a useful tool, but he also argued that it was not always the most appropriate method for revealing the information required. In Elite and Specialized Interviewing decades of his practical experience, of both how to interview and how to use interviews, was distilled into a readable, yet rigorously analytical, book. First published in 1969, it remains as good a guide to the subject as the 21st century researcher can find.
The one subject that serious students want most to know about, other than their specialty, is how academic life is lived and how scholarly work is carried out. Their curiosity is equally shared by those interested in how to improve the quality and quantity of their work. With few exceptions, the time honored word-of-mouth approach is all there has been until now; how one works is rarely a subject seriously discussed in print. Craftways is intended to address these concerns and needs. Aaron Wildavsky has long been admired as one of the most productive political scientists of his generation. Repeated expressions of interest in his scholarly craft led him to gather together his essays on how he...
A study of the process by which members of Congress arrive at roll call voting decisions
Corporate lobbyists are everywhere in Washington. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 represent business. The largest companies now have upwards of 100 lobbyists representing them. How did American businesses become so invested in politics? And what does all their money buy? Drawing on extensive data and original interviews with corporate lobbyists, The Business of America is Lobbying provides a fascinating and detailed picture of what corporations do in Washington, why they do it, and why it matters. Prior to the 1970s, very few corporations had Washington offices. But a wave of new government regulations and declining economic conditions mobilized business leaders....
In this absorbing story of how child abuse grew from a small, private-sector charity concern into a multimillion-dollar social welfare issue, Barbara Nelson provides important new perspectives on the process of public agenda setting. Using extensive personal interviews and detailed archival research, she reconstructs an invaluable history of child abuse policy in America. She shows how the mass media presented child abuse to the public, how government agencies acted and interacted, and how state and national legislatures were spurred to strong action on this issue. Nelson examines prevailing theories about agenda setting and introduces a new conceptual framework for understanding how a social issue becomes part of the public agenda. This issue of child abuse, she argues, clearly reveals the scope and limitations of social change initiated through interest-group politics. Unfortunately, the process that transforms an issue into a popular cause, Nelson concludes, brings about programs that ultimately address only the symptoms and not the roots of such social problems.
In recent years there has been growing recognition of the role played in American politics by groups such as Common Cause, the Sierra Club, and Zero Population Growth. This book considers their work in terms of their origins and development, resources, patterns of recruitment, decision-making processes, and lobbying tactics. How do public interest groups select the issues on which they work? How do they allocate their resources? How do they choose strategies for influencing the federal government? Professor Berry examines these questions, focusing in particular on the process by which organizations make critical decisions. His findings are based on a survey of eighty-three national organizat...