An exploration of how states address the often conflicting challenges of development, order, and inclusion.

In recent years, debate on the state's economic role has too often devolved into diatribes against intervention. Peter Evans questions such simplistic views, offering a new vision of why state involvement works in some cases and produces disasters in others. To illustrate, he looks at how state agencies, local entrepreneurs, and transnational corporations shaped the emergence of computer industries in Brazil, India, and Korea during the seventies and eighties. Evans starts with the idea that states vary in the way they are organized and tied to society. In some nations, like Zaire, the state is predatory, ruthlessly extracting and providing nothing of value in return. In others, like Korea, it is developmental, promoting industrial transformation. In still others, like Brazil and India, it is in between, sometimes helping, sometimes hindering. Evans's years of comparative research on the successes and failures of state involvement in the process of industrialization have here been crafted into a persuasive and entertaining work, which demonstrates that successful state action requires an understanding of its own limits, a realistic relationship to the global economy, and the combination of coherent internal organization and close links to society that Evans called "embedded autonomy."

Explores ways to make democracy work better, with particular focus on the integral role of local institutions.

In his new book G. William Domhoff provides the most thorough critique to date of state autonomy theory as it has been applied to the American federal government. The view under attack holds that the federal government, rather than the banks and corporations, wields greater power in the United States. Utilizing new arguments and new archival findings, this book challenges every case study that state autonomy theorists have done on the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and World War II. Domhoff then concludes with an analysis of why the theory received so much attention. In addition to demonstrating the weaknesses of state autonomy theory in the case of the U.S., the book presents a step-by-step statement of the author's non-Marxian class dominance theory, defining each concept clearly and suggesting the kind of evidence necessary to support it. The chapters on the origins of the Social Security Act 1935 and on the role of corporations in the industrial mobilization for World War II lead to general statements on the factors that limit the effectiveness of liberal and labor political forces in America; the chapter on the Progressive Era contains an analysis of why the corporate community has been more powerful in the United States than in Europe. Although it is part of a continuing debate with other experts, the author has marshaled his argument in a style that is always accessible. As a result, the book is ideal for use in courses in which the instructor wants to compare and contrast original presentations of rival viewpoints by major proponents of the debated theories.

This book offers an overview of the legal, political, and broad intergovernmental environment in which relations between local and state units of government take place, the historical roots of the conflict among them, and an analysis of contemporary problems concerning local authority, local revenues, state interventions and takeovers, and the restructuring of local governments. The author pays special attention to local governmental autonomy and the goals and activities of local officials as they seek to secure resources, fend off regulations and interventions, and fight for survival as independent units. He looks at the intergovernmental struggle from the bottom up, but in the process examines a variety of political activities at the state level and the development and effects of several state policies. Berman finds considerable reason to be concerned about the viability and future of meaningful local government.