Berlin. Agent Vicki Kahn is on her first foreign mission for the South African government, on the trail of an international child-trafficker. A complication she doesn't need is that the President's son is somewhere in the mix. Cape Town. A rebel colonel from the Central African Republic is taken down in a spray of bullets. Next day, Vicki's boyfriend, PI 'Fish' Pescado, picks up a new brief. Find out who killed my husband. Even if it was the President. A brief like that, Fish knows he should say no. Only saying no isn't his strong point. Bambatha Palace, Natal. The President is giving a party to celebrate his latest marriage. The great, the good and the not-so-good of the rainbow nation are all there. Also present are Agent Kahn and PI Pescado. The players are assembled. Now it's show-time.

This book shows how responsiveness in European welfare programs is institutionalized through nationally distinct legal foundations, professional traditions, and resource networks, while revealing how resource scarcities threaten to erode these capabilities.

A groundbreaking account of how the welfare state began with early nineteenth-century child labor laws, and how middle-class and elite reformers made it happen The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers’ efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But in Agents of Reform, Elisabeth Anderson shows that the regulatory welfare state began a half century earlier, in the 1830s, with the passage of the first child labor laws. Agents of Reform tells the story of how middle-class and elite reformers in Europe and the United States defined child labor as a threat to social order, and took the lead in bringing regulatory welfare into being. They built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks and instituted pathbreaking new employment protections. Later in the century, now with the help of organized labor, they created factory inspectorates to strengthen and routinize the state’s capacity to intervene in industrial working conditions. Agents of Reform compares seven in-depth case studies of key policy episodes in Germany, France, Belgium, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Foregrounding the agency of individual reformers, it challenges existing explanations of welfare state development and advances a new pragmatist field theory of institutional change. In doing so, it moves beyond standard narratives of interests and institutions toward an integrated understanding of how these interact with political actors’ ideas and coalition-building strategies.

The agent-structure problem is a much discussed issue in the field of international relations. In his comprehensive 2006 analysis of this problem, Colin Wight deconstructs the accounts of structure and agency embedded within differing IR theories and, on the basis of this analysis, explores the implications of ontology - the metaphysical study of existence and reality. Wight argues that there are many gaps in IR theory that can only be understood by focusing on the ontological differences that construct the theoretical landscape. By integrating the treatment of the agent-structure problem in IR theory with that in social theory, Wight makes a positive contribution to the problem as an issue of concern to the wider human sciences. At the most fundamental level politics is concerned with competing visions of how the world is and how it should be, thus politics is ontology.

A suspected terrorist is frisked for explosives on the Embankment. Operators do this so skilfully he remains completely unaware... In New Scotland Yard a new brand of manager fails to deal with escalating threats - 'aggressive indecision' is what Detective Chief Inspector John Kerr calls it... He discovers that cocaine-fuelled sex parties in Knightsbridge are pulling in businessmen, Russian diplomats and senior members of the British government... When Kerr's investigations are blocked by his bosses in Scotland Yard, he decides to go it alone and begins to expose a cover-up that extends to all levels of the British Establishment. Agent of the State is the first novel by Roger Pearce, a former Special Branch officer at New Scotland Yard who rose to become its Commander and a key player in Whitehall's intelligence network. It is an authentic account of the way the British intelligence services work at all levels and of the hypocrisy of the British establishment.

Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? How do we explain their behaviour? Can we treat them as accountable for their actions? List and Pettit offer original arguments, grounded in cutting-edge work on social choice, economics, and philosophy, to show there really are group agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them.