The artificial intelligence (AI) landscape has evolved significantly from 1950 when Alan Turing first posed the question of whether machines can think. Today, AI is transforming societies and economies. It promises to generate productivity gains, improve well-being and help address global challenges, such as climate change, resource scarcity and health crises.

This volume compares and analyses the national civil services and the most important reform trends in the 27 Member States of the European Union. The authors first examine the reform processes concerning civil servants' legal status, organisational changes, recruitment policies, remuneration, decentralisation of human resource responsibilities, job security and ethics. They consider in what ways similarities and differences can be detected amongst the 27 Member States and whether and to what extent the national civil services move away from traditional bureaucratic structures. Finally, the authors discuss the main outcomes of the reform processes and the future of the classical civil service. This publication contrasts with the many popular and speculative statements that too often capture the headlines on the future of the civil service and the different human resource management reforms. Instead, it is a measured conclusion about emerging trends and developments in this important policy area. The authors argue that the reform of the public sector will not, as many have predicted, be characterised by clear changes and progress in the area. Instead, the outcomes of the reform reveal a more complex picture of piecemeal and paradoxical patterns of change.

These essays demonstrate how the 'historical institutional' approach to the study of politics reveals the nature of institutional change and its effect on policy making.

Medical Dominance, now in a revised edition, provides a fascinating account of the medical profession's successful domination of a wide range of health care services. Evan Willis delves into the past to explain the existing division of labour and health care, the rise of the medical profession to a position of economic power within the health system, and their defence of that dominant position. Now completely revised and updated, this edition also considers the related question of the policy implications of medical dominance. The defence by doctors of their position of power is highlighted by the author's exhaustive and original research into demarcation struggles between medicine and other health occupations, in particular midwifery, optometry and chiropractic. Conventional explanations of medical dominance are challenged by the argument that the role of developments in medical knowledge and in technology itself have been overstated. As well, greater account must be taken of the social relations and struggles which developed for control of that knowledge and technology.

From the 1850s to the 1920s, laws regulating the industrial labor process, pensions for the elderly, unemployment insurance, and measures to educate and ensure the welfare of children were enacted in many industrializing capitalist nations. This same period saw the development of modern social sciences. The eight essays collected here examine the reciprocal influence of social policy and academic research in comparative context, ranging across policy areas and encompassing developments in Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Canada, Scandinavia, and Japan. Introduced by the editors, the essays include Part I on the emergence of modern social knowledge by Ira Katznelson, Anson Rabinbach, and Björn Wittrock and Peter Wagner; Part II on reformist social scientists and public policymaking by Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Ronan Van Rossem, Libby Schweber, and John R. Sutton; Part III on state managers and the uses of social knowledge by Stein Kuhnle and Sheldon Garon, and a conclusion by Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This vivid book of 'continuity and change' in policy and management by Pollitt and Bouckaert follows in the footsteps of Pollitt's previous book on the issue of time, a vital but often neglected issue.