Published in 1976, Perspectives on Cognitive Dissonance is a valuable contribution to the field of Social Psychology.

In Why the South Lost the Civil War, four historians considered the dominant explanations of southern defeat. At end, the authors found that states' rights disputes, the Union blockade, and inadequate southern forces did not fully account for the surrender. Rather, they concluded, the South lacked the will to win. Its strength sapped by a faltering Confederate nationalism and weakened by a peculiar brand of evangelical Protestantism, the South withdrew from a war not yet lost on the field of battle. Roughly one-half the size of its parent study, The Elements of Confederate Defeat retains all the essential arguments of the earlier edition, forming for the student a book that at once follows the events of the war and presents the major interpretations of its outcome in the South.

In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

Public Policymaking Reexamined is now recognized as a fundamental treatise for public policy studies. Although it caused much controversy when it was first published for its systematic approach to policy studies, the book is acknowledged as a modern classic of continuing importance for the teaching and research of public policy, planning and policy analysis, and public administration. The paperback includes a new introduction updating and supplementing many of the author's original ideas.Professor Dror combines the approaches of policy analysis, behavioral science, and systems analysis in his examination of the reality of public policymaking and his suggestions for its reform. Actual policymaking is carefully evaluated with the help of explicit criteria and standards based on an optimal model approach, resulting in detailed proposals for improvement. He applies a scientific orientation to the study of social facts and theory.

A Brookings Institution Press and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation publication This is a hopeful account of the potential for organizational change and improvement within government. Despite the mantra that "people resist change," it is possible to effect meaningful reform in a large bureaucracy. In Unleashing Change, public management expert Steven Kelman presents a blueprint for accomplishing such improvements, based on his experience orchestrating procurement reform in the 1990s. Kelman's focuses on making change happen on the front lines, not just getting it announced by senior policymakers. He argues that frequently there will be a constituency for change within government organizations. The role for leaders is not to force change on the unwilling but to unleash the willing, and to persist long enough for the change to become institutionalized. Drawing on the author's own personal experience and extensive research among frontline civil servants, as well as literature in organization theory and psychology, Unleashing Change presents an approach for improving agency performance from soup to nuts—mixing theory with practice. Its analysis is innovative and empirically rich. Kelman's conclusions challenge conventional notions about achieving reform in large organizations and mark a major advance in theories of organizational change. His lessons will be of interest not only to scholars interested in improving the performance of the public sector, but for anyone struggling to manage a large organization. "Steve Kelman's creative research, augmented by his own considerable experience as a reform-minded federal official, gives this book unusual depth and authenticity."—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School, author of Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End