Author Shane Butler tells the story of how Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was established in Ireland - the first European country to start an AA group - in 1946, and how it gradually came to establish itself as a mainstream Irish institution, the need for which has become clearer as alcohol consumption levels increase. AA is described as a hybrid institution, straddling healthcare and religion, and the book looks in detail at how early Irish members negotiated working relationships with the mental health system and the dominant Catholic Church. The book also focuses on AA's commitment to the avoidance of conventional, organizational management systems, involving clearly-identified leaders and top-down instructions for front-line members. The survival of AA in Ireland, as elsewhere, is attributed primarily to the fact that it has remained firmly outside of alcohol politics, seeing itself as a 'fellowship' which exists only to help individuals who seek its help in relation to their own powerlessness over alcohol. It is recognized, paradoxically, that AA in Ireland could not have negotiated such a smooth entry to this country without the energies and skills of its early leaders, and this book documents the activities of these leaders who - with the assistance of AA in the United States - strategically managed the fellowship's establishment in a potentially hostile environment.

This book elaborates and defends law without the state. It explains why the state is illegitimate, dangerous and unnecessary.

Public administration scholars and practitioners are increasingly concerned with the need to broaden the field's scope beyond particularistic accounts of administration in given countries. This title brings together seminal readings in comparative, development public administration and contemporary public management scholarship.

It is a widespread phenomenon among Hispanics both in the United States and abroad. The question is whether this grandparent of the self-help movement, born among middle-class, Midwestern Anglophones, is truly adaptable and liberating for the Hispanic community

Considers the contributions and contemporary significance of Alan Watts.

We know what actors do. We know what writers do. But what does a movie producer do, other than arrange financing for films and accept Academy Awards? Featuring in-depth interviews with 14 top movie producers, including eight who have won Oscars for Best Picture, this book describes how they nurture a project from concept to casting to screen. They are entrepreneurs, essentially creating a new business every time they start work on a film. They possess an array of skills and talents and the resilience and the fortitude to not take "no" for an answer. The interviewees are Marc Abraham, Tony Bill, Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa, Clint Eastwood, Taylor Hackford, Mark Johnson, Arnold Kopelson, Alan Ladd, Jr., Michael London, Fred Roos, Paula Wagner, Jim Wilson and Janet Yang.

Amid the escalating hostilities of today's world, F. G. Bailey returns to the state of Orissa in the eastern India of the 1950s to consider what held a diverse collection of people together and what drove them apart. The last of Bailey's books about Orissa, The Need for Enemies, offers a ground-level view of regional politics in South Asia in the years following independence. In doing so, the book analyzes political problems that are of universal concern: incivility in public life, the inescapable dilemma of duty always in tension with interests, public consensus on what is right and good giving way to a babel of inconsistent moralities, and, not least, true believers contesting realists who see virtue in compromise. A portrait of Orissa and its leaders in 1959, the book is also a treatise on political morale. As Bailey tells the story of political and social turmoil in postcolonial India, a tale rich in ethnographic detail, he follows Orissa's politicians through a maze of inconsistencies, and makes clear the dangers that beset political cultures in a complex world of multiple competing alternatives. There is a need to simplify, Bailey suggests, and an ever present risk of making the image too simple.