Boasting more than five hundred thousand contributing members and five hundred chapters nationwide, the National Organization for Women has been politically active for more than thirty-five years. In a book that offers tools for predicting the long-term viability of a range of organizations, Maryann Barakso traces the political development of NOW. According to Barakso, NOW's activities and the stances it has taken throughout its history have been shaped primarily by the organization's internal political system. Established during the group's founding period, NOW's governance structure consists of a set of principles and institutional rules that continue to guide the group's internal political dynamics and its decision-making. Focusing on interactions between NOW leaders and rank-and-file members, Barakso reveals how the organization's internal structure affects its development and its participation in the wider political arena. The author also reveals why strategic change has always been such a contentious issue for the organization, the ways in which NOW enhances civic and political engagement, and the limits on NOW's future mobilizing capacity. Governing NOW contributes to a deeper understanding of membership-based voluntary associations: why they choose some goals and tactics over others, why they invest resources as they do, and why they join or abstain from coalition politics.

Since the UN's creation in 1945 a vast nexus of global and regional institutions has evolved, surrounded by a proliferation of non-governmental agencies and advocacy networks seeking to influence the agenda and direction of international public policy. Although world government remains a fanciful idea, there does exist an evolving global governance complex - embracing states, international institutions, transnational networks and agencies (both public and private) - which functions, with variable effect, to promote, regulate or intervene in the common affairs of humanity. This book provides an accessible introduction to the current debate about the changing form and political significance of global governance. It brings together original contributions from many of the best-known theorists and analysts of global politics to explore the relevance of the concept of global governance to understanding how global activity is currently regulated. Furthermore, it combines an elucidation of substantive theories with a systematic analysis of the politics and limits of governance in key issue areas - from humanitarian intervention to the regulation of global finance. Thus, the volume provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical assessment of the shift from national government to multilayered global governance. Governing Globalization is the third book in the internationally acclaimed series on global transformations. The other two volumes are Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture and The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate.

A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly ngo workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both. West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

Charles Prow has brought together an impressive lineup of businessmen and women, reporters, and experts to show how the United States can be more competitive in the global economy. This book shows not only what is wrong with the current federal spending plan, but ways to fix it. Business professionals and anyone interested in the government's response the recession will find this an important book.

Familiar narratives and simplistic stereotypes frame the representation of women in U.S. politics. Pervasive containment rhetorics, such as the distinction between women as mothers and caregivers and men as rational thinkers, create unique hurdles for any woman seeking public office. While these 'governing codes' generally act to constrain female political power, they can also be harnessed as a resource depending on the particular circumstances (e.g., party affiliation, geographic location and personal style). One of these governing codes, the metaphor, is an especially powerful tool in politics today, particularly for women. By examining the political careers of four of the most prominent and influential women in contemporary U.S. politics_Democrats Ann Richards and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republicans Christine Todd Whitman and Elizabeth Dole_Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler illustrate how metaphors in public discourse may be both familiar narratives to embrace and boundaries to overturn.

Public concern over sharp increases in undergraduate tuition has led many to question why colleges and universities cannot behave more like businesses and cut their costs to hold tuition down. Ronald G. Ehrenberg and his coauthors assert that understanding how academic institutions are governed provides part of the answer. Factors that influence the governance of academic institutions include how states regulate higher education and govern their public institutions; the size and method of selection of boards of trustees; the roles of trustees, administrators, and faculty in shared governance at campuses; how universities are organized for fiscal and academic purposes; the presence or absence of collective bargaining for faculty, staff, and graduate student assistants; pressures from government regulations, donors, insurance carriers, athletic conferences, and accreditation agencies; and competition from for-profit providers. Governing Academia, which covers all these aspects of governance, is enlightening and accessible for anyone interested in higher education. The authors are leading academic administrators and scholars from a wide range of fields including economics, education, law, political science, and public policy.

Americans are generally apprehensive about what they perceive as big government—especially when it comes to measures that target their bodies. Soda taxes, trans fat bans, and calorie counts on menus have all proven deeply controversial. Such interventions, Rachel Louise Moran argues, are merely the latest in a long, albeit often quiet, history of policy motivated by economic, military, and familial concerns. In Governing Bodies, Moran traces the tension between the intimate terrain of the individual citizen's body and the public ways in which the federal government has sought to shape the American physique over the course of the twentieth century. Distinguishing her subject from more explicit and aggressive government intrusion into the areas of sexuality and reproduction, Moran offers the concept of the "advisory state"—the use of government research, publicity, and advocacy aimed at achieving citizen support and voluntary participation to realize social goals. Instituted through outside agencies and glossy pamphlets as well as legislation, the advisory state is government out of sight yet intimately present in the lives of citizens. The activities of such groups as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Children's Bureau, the President's Council on Physical Fitness, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) implement federal body projects in subtle ways that serve to mask governmental interference in personal decisions about diet and exercise. From advice-giving to height-weight standards to mandatory nutrition education, these tactics not only empower and conceal the advisory state but also maintain the illusion of public and private boundaries, even as they become blurred in practice. Weaving together histories of the body, public policy, and social welfare, Moran analyzes a series of discrete episodes to chronicle the federal government's efforts to shape the physique of its citizenry. Governing Bodies sheds light on our present anxieties over the proper boundaries of state power.