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There is continual concern about the ability of governments to perform the duties and responsibilities that their citizens have come to expect from them. Many citizens view government as inept, arthritic, and dedicated to the preservation of the bureaucratic status quo. As we close the twentieth century, the challenge for democratic governments is to become adaptive, flexible, innovative, and creative. In short, they need to become learning organizations. This book explores what it will take for governments to break out of their traditional ways of approaching problems and learn new approaches to finding solutions.

Can Governments Learn? examines organizational learning in the public sector. It seeks to understand the role policy and program evaluation information can play in helping governments learn. Among the democratic societies studied are Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. Significantly, the studies documented here show that the concept of organizational learning has vitality and applicability cross-nationally.

Can Governments Learn? evaluates preconditions for governmental learning as well as the institutional and human resource factors that contribute to the process. This volume in the Comparative Policy Analysis Series is essential for policymakers, government officials, and scholars interested in improving the performance of governments. ... Read more

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The quality and nature of local government varies widely between countries. This introductory text looks at the workings of local government in England and Wales, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Canada and the USA. The chapters have a similar format so the student has a framework for systematic comparisons of the different case studies and a comprehensive conclusion summarises major differences and relationships between the structures studied. ... Read more

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The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.
Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary.
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The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification:
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British Library

T102123

J. L. DL. LLD. = Jean Louis de Lolme.

London : sold by [J] Almon, 1772. [2],63,[1]p. ; 8° ... Read more

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For a hundred years, Sweden was the international military power of Northern Europe, in control of the entire Baltic region and among the first to colonize in Africa and America. But the history of Sweden, Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, and Prussia is largely neglected in American classrooms and scholarship. This book fills a large void in European history as it is generally presented to the American student and reader.

This narrative covers Sweden'sAge of Greatness (1632-1718) and the warrior-kings who governed that age. It chronologically describes the political and religious events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reveals how these events produced the climate for European global expansion, including the exploration and colonization of the New World. The story traces history through the reigns of Sweden's ambitious rulers, beginning with the presumably Swedish Goths who ravaged the Roman Empire in the 2nd century CE and continuing through the end of the empire in the early eighteenth century. A thorough epilogue documents the cultural flowering in the arts and sciences that commenced in the Age of Greatness and continued to blossom in the centuries that followed. This final section of the book pays special attention to the personalities that drove Sweden's far-reaching cultural progress. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Study of Scandinavian systems
Excellent coverage of a very interesting topic.Well worth spending time with and studying it more. ... Read more

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The Evolution of Modern States is a significant contribution to the literatures on political economy, globalization, historical institutionalism, and social science methodology. The book begins with a simple question: Why do rich capitalist democracies respond so differently to the common pressures they face in the early twenty-first century? Drawing on insights from evolutionary theory, Sven Steinmo challenges the common equilibrium view of politics and economics and argues that modern political economies are best understood as complex adaptive systems. The book examines the political, social, and economic history of three different nations - Sweden, Japan, and the United States - and explains how and why these countries have evolved along such different trajectories over the past century. Bringing together social and economic history, institutionalism, and evolutionary theory, Steinmo thus provides a comprehensive explanation for differing responses to globalization as well as a new way of analyzing institutional and social change. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Important and timely
This is an ambitious and important book.To begin with, Steinmo does
something that few scholars attempt today - he writes a careful and detailed
comparison of three quite different countries (Sweden, Japan and the United
States).I can think of no book written in the past many years that even
attempts such a broad comparative overview of important countries in three
different continents.Sadly, political science has increasingly turned
toward more and more narrow and static analyses - even while we complain
about this trend. In a real sense, "The Evolution ofModern States" is
written in the grand tradition of comparative politics.

At the same time that it is ambitious, Steinmo's book is very well written
and remarkably easy to follow.

The book starts out with a simple puzzle:What happened to the 'Race to the
Bottom?' Drawing a fascinating comparison to the way different species are
adapting to Global Warming, Steinmo contends modern nation states are also
adapting in quite different ways to the pressures they face in the early
21st century.One of the first and most interesting points Steinmo makes is
that (contrary to many people's expectations), the most heavily taxed
country in the world, Sweden, is doing remarkably well in an increasingly
competitive e and 'globalizing' world.His analysis also helps us
understand why the US and Japan are struggling, despite their low taxes and
small (inequitable) welfare states. He shows how these once optimistic and
growing nations have turned away from their egalitarian traditions and how
this growing inequality breeds growing distrust.Though he does not discuss
the Tea Party movement in the US, it is obvious how his analysis can be used
to explain its rise.The analysis of Japan's political turmoil is as sad as
it is illuminating.

Steinmo's introduction to and use of evolutionary theory is fascinating and
controversial. He demonstrates convincingly that political economies can be
understood as 'complex adaptive systems' that evolve in the context of a
changing international political economy. The analysis thusbrings together
the latest advances in evolutionary theories from psychology, anthropology
and political science and offers a new way of understanding political
evolution.

This book makes an important contribution not only to political science
and comparative politics, but to our basic understanding of historical
change.
... Read more

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How do citizens and leaders in democratic nations communicate about their problems and prospects for the future?What can be learned from other nations about how to communicate in more effective and satisfying ways? This book explores the institutional links between society and government that shape political communication.These regulators of national communication include parties and electoral representation systems, interest group processes, campaign finance mechanisms, and the media.The authors show how these core elements of political systems affect the ways in which people communicate, and how effective that communication is at defining public problems and identifying workable solutions. ... Read more

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The Social Democratic Party of Sweden has played a crucial and, by international comparisons, unique role in the political, social, and economic development of one of Europe's most interesting societies.The contributions to this volume provide an excellent introduction, by authors sympathetic to the Social Democrats and to the role of social democracy in Swedish history.-Steven Kelman, Harvard UniversityThe Swedish Social Democratic Labor Party (SAP) was founded more than one hundred years ago, in April 1889.During this "century of social democracy" Sweden has been transformed from an agrarian to an industrial society, from a poor country to a welfare state; and the SAP has evolved from being a lower-class movement to the nation's leading party for more than half a century.Is Sweden's development so special and is the Swedish labor movement unique when viewed from an international perspective?When were the critical decisions taken, what did the Social Democrats want to achieve, and what have they actually succeeded in doing-especiallyin light of the Social Democrats' loss of governmental power in 1991?These questions are discussed in thirteen essays addressing economic policy, social and welfare policy, international policy, and the party's inner structure and ideology.Two additional chapters on historical background and the latest developments in Sweden and some tables make this volume valuable for readers wanting competent information about Sweden, about the development of Swedish society, and about the most successful Social Democratic Labor party in Europe. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An excellent historical portrait of a unique political phenomenon
This study of Swedish social-democracy, unique in the unparalelled length of time in government for any socialist party outside the former communist bloc, provides an excellent portrait of the forces that shaped Sweden's unique social model.
Social democracy, despite attempts to re-theorise it in the current period, may perhaps best be described as a moment in history rather than a coherent political ideology and this book provides a very useful insight into the factors that came to make Sweden the mekka of social democrats until the late 1980's.A pragmatic mix of socialism, trade-unionism and, later, corporatist functionalism created one of the most effective industrial democracies in the world (although not without embarrassing and shameful cul-de-sacs along the way such as eugenics and sterilisation programs). It also provides a sobering picture of the dangers and auto-destructiveness posed to democratic socialist movements by the "Third Way" trojan horse that weakened the SDAP to the point that it lost government for only the second time in its history in the last general election.
Translated from the Swedish original, the book is a product of self-reflection and analysis from within the Swedish social-democratic context and I would recommend it to anyone studying social-democracy, labour history or political economy- or, of course, Swedish or Scandinavian history.
... Read more