Crisis and Change Today

Crisis and Change Today PDF Author: Peter Knapp
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442208236
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Book Description
Crisis and Change Today provides a solid introduction to Marxist social theory. The work's unique voice is expressed in its Socratic-dialogic approach, structured around forty questions that students have about society and social change. Topics range from theories of history, economics, unemployment, racial oppression, the state, fascism, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and points of convergence and difference between the dialectical approach and other approaches to social science. The content and tone of the work invites students to evaluate various traditional and current explanations of social institutions and social processes and encourages them to weigh the debates and investigate further. The first edition was very well received (Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on Marxist Sociology of the ASA), and the second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to be relevant for students today. Though the first edition was written during the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the growing gap between the rich and the poor and the economic crisis have generated more interest in using Marxist analysis both as a tool to analyze and understand capitalism and the weaknesses of past Marxist praxis.

Global Crisis

Global Crisis PDF Author: Geoffrey Parker
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300189192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 944

Book Description
The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis. Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

Crisis and Change Today

Crisis and Change Today PDF Author: Peter Knapp
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0742520447
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Crisis and Change Today explains the basic principles of Marxist social theory, shaped around forty key questions about society and social change. Topics include history, economics, class structure, the dialectical method, racial oppression, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and problems of "late capitalism" and globalization. Thoroughly updated, the second edition of Crisis and Change Today explores how Marxist analysis not only serves as a useful tool to explore the roots of recent crises in capitalism, but also provides a powerful framework to help understand weaknesses in Marxist praxis. Book jacket.

You're It

You're It PDF Author: Leonard J. Marcus
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541768051
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
Become a better crisis leader while equipping yourself with the tools for every day transformative leadership Today, in an instant, leaders can find themselves face-to-face with crisis. An active shooter. A media controversy. A data breach. In You're It, the faculty of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard University takes you to the front lines of some of the toughest decisions facing our nation's leaders-from how to mobilize during a hurricane or in the aftermath of a bombing to halting a raging pandemic. They also take readers through the tough decision-making inside the world's largest companies, hottest startups, and leading nonprofits. The authors introduce readers to the pragmatic model and methods of Meta-Leadership. They show you how to understand what is happening during a moment of crisis and change, what to do about it, and how to hone these skills to lead high-performing teams. Then, when crisis hits, you can pivot to be the leader people follow when it matters most. A book for turbulent times, You're It is essential reading for anyone preparing to lead an adaptive team through crisis and change.

Crisis & Renewal

Crisis & Renewal PDF Author: David K. Hurst
Publisher: Management of Innovation and C
ISBN: 9781578518708
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Crisis & Renewalpresents a radical view of how all successful organizations evolve and renew themselves and of what managers must do to lead the revival. Contrary to traditional organizational theory, which emphasizes rationality and control in the management of change, this book argues that there are times when managers must deliberately create crises by committing acts of "ethical anarchy" in order to break the constraints of success and renew their organizations.Hurst develops a model of change -- the organizational ecocycle -- to explain how even successful organizations become systematically vulnerable to catastrophe. He brings the model to life with stories of crisis and renewal from both his own management and consulting experiences and a cross-section of enterprises -- from the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari and the Quakers of the Industrial Revolution to contemporary organizations such as 3M and Nike.Born when people come together to capitalize on an opportunity, young organizations are usually dedicated to innovation and learning. As they grow and age, they become preoccupied with performance. Sooner or later they become constrained by their own success. For, in the pursuit of performance, what were once self-selected roles become designated tasks, flexible teams become rigid structures, open networks give way to closed systems, and control supplants commitment as people change. The risk, says Hurst, is that this single-minded, performance orientation may render organizations dangerously insensitive to subtle changes in the environment, seriously damaging their ability to learn.Renewal-changing a performance organization back into a learning organization-demands the restoration of the excitement, emotional commitment, and values often missing from large enterprises. It involves returning to the founding principles of the firm to reconnect the past with the present. In the aftermath of crisis, only shared values can hold a renewing organization together.Crisis & Renewalgives managers the theoretical grounding and the practical tools for leading their organizations to new life. The Management of Innovation and Change Series.

Ten Years to Midnight

Ten Years to Midnight PDF Author: Blair H. Sheppard
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1523088761
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
“Shows how humans have brought us to the brink and how humanity can find solutions. I urge people to read with humility and the daring to act.” —Harpal Singh, former Chair, Save the Children, India, and former Vice Chair, Save the Children International In conversations with people all over the world, from government officials and business leaders to taxi drivers and schoolteachers, Blair Sheppard, global leader for strategy and leadership at PwC, discovered they all had surprisingly similar concerns. In this prescient and pragmatic book, he and his team sum up these concerns in what they call the ADAPT framework: Asymmetry of wealth; Disruption wrought by the unexpected and often problematic consequences of technology; Age disparities--stresses caused by very young or very old populations in developed and emerging countries; Polarization as a symptom of the breakdown in global and national consensus; and loss of Trust in the institutions that underpin and stabilize society. These concerns are in turn precipitating four crises: a crisis of prosperity, a crisis of technology, a crisis of institutional legitimacy, and a crisis of leadership. Sheppard and his team analyze the complex roots of these crises--but they also offer solutions, albeit often seemingly counterintuitive ones. For example, in an era of globalization, we need to place a much greater emphasis on developing self-sustaining local economies. And as technology permeates our lives, we need computer scientists and engineers conversant with sociology and psychology and poets who can code. The authors argue persuasively that we have only a decade to make headway on these problems. But if we tackle them now, thoughtfully, imaginatively, creatively, and energetically, in ten years we could be looking at a dawn instead of darkness.

Rescue

Rescue PDF Author: Ian Goldin
Publisher: Sceptre
ISBN: 1529366887
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
An optimistic vision of the future after Covid-19 by a leading professor of globalisation at the University of Oxford. We are at a crossroads. The wrecking-ball of Covid-19 has destroyed global norms. Many think that after the devastation there will be a bounce back. To Ian Goldin, Professor of Development and Globalisation at the University of Oxford, this is a retrograde notion. He believes that this crisis can create opportunities for change, just as the Second World War forged the ideas behind the Beveridge Report. Published in 1942, it was revolutionary and laid the foundations for the welfare state alongside a host of other social and economic reforms, changing the world for the better. Ian Goldin tackles the challenges and opportunities posed by the pandemic, ranging from globalisation to the future of jobs, income inequality and geopolitics, the climate crisis and the modern city. It is a fresh, bold call for an optimistic future and one we all have the power to create.

The Changing Face of Higher Education

The Changing Face of Higher Education PDF Author: Dennis A. Ahlburg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351996851
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Over the last decade, a heated debate has raged in the US and the UK over whether the humanities are in crisis, and, if there is one, what form this crisis takes and what the response should be. Questioning how there can be such disagreement over a fundamental point, The Changing Face of Higher Education explores this debate, asking whether the humanities are in crisis after all by objectively evaluating the evidence at hand, and opening the debate up to a global scale by applying the questions to twelve countries from different continents. Each carefully chosen contributor considers the debate from the perspective of a different country. The chapters present data on funding, student enrolment in the humanities, whether the share of total enrolment in this area is falling, and answer the following questions: What does each country mean by the ‘humanities’? Is there a ‘crisis’ in the humanities in this country? What are the causes for the crisis? What are the implications for the humanities disciplines? Uniquely offering an objective evaluation of whether this crisis exists, the book will appeal to international humanities and higher education communities and policy-makers, including postgraduate students and academics.

Upheaval

Upheaval PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316409154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Book Description
A "riveting and illuminating" Bill Gates Summer Reading pick about how and why some nations recover from trauma and others don't (Yuval Noah Harari), by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the landmark bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel. In his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crises while adopting selective changes -- a coping mechanism more commonly associated with individuals recovering from personal crises. Diamond compares how six countries have survived recent upheavals -- ranging from the forced opening of Japan by U.S. Commodore Perry's fleet, to the Soviet Union's attack on Finland, to a murderous coup or countercoup in Chile and Indonesia, to the transformations of Germany and Austria after World War Two. Because Diamond has lived and spoken the language in five of these six countries, he can present gut-wrenching histories experienced firsthand. These nations coped, to varying degrees, through mechanisms such as acknowledgment of responsibility, painfully honest self-appraisal, and learning from models of other nations. Looking to the future, Diamond examines whether the United States, Japan, and the whole world are successfully coping with the grave crises they currently face. Can we learn from lessons of the past? Adding a psychological dimension to the in-depth history, geography, biology, and anthropology that mark all of Diamond's books, Upheaval reveals factors influencing how both whole nations and individual people can respond to big challenges. The result is a book epic in scope, but also his most personal yet.

Crisis Management

Crisis Management PDF Author: Sarah Kovoor-Misra
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1506328709
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Modern organizational crises are complex, diverse, and frequent. Ineffective crisis management can result in catastrophic loss. Crisis Management: Resilience and Change introduces students to best practices for preventing, containing, and learning from crises in our global, media-driven society. While covering the strengths of existing works on crisis management, such as systems, leadership, communication, and stakeholder perspective, this innovative new text goes beyond to include global, ethical, change, and emotional aspects of crisis communication. Using her proven transformative crisis management framework, Sarah Kovoor-Misra illustrates how organizations of all sizes can be adaptable, proactive, resilient, and ethical in the face of calamity.