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Recent years have seen a growing role for private military contractors in national and international security. To understand the reasons for this, Elke Krahmann examines changing models of the state, the citizen and the soldier in the UK, the US and Germany. She focuses on both the national differences with regard to the outsourcing of military services to private companies and their specific consequences for the democratic control over the legitimate use of armed force. Tracing developments and debates from the late eighteenth century to the present, she explains the transition from the centralized warfare state of the Cold War era to the privatized and fragmented security governance, and the different national attitudes to the privatization of force.

\"City-Regions in Prospect? Exploring the Meeting Points Between Place and Practice is a collection of essays and case studies that explore the \"city-region\" as both an evolving concept and a growing area of experiential knowledge. At the book's most basic level, it explores the \"city-region\" as a concept that captures the growing relevance and importance of cities in a rapidly urbanizing world. Looking more specifically at cities in Canada, the US, and England (Ottawa, Calgary, Manchester, Sheffield, for example), Jones et al outline how the city constructs and governs itself to respond to global needs, the logic behind this development, and the consequences involved in such aspirations. It sketches out new pathways for thinking about and acting upon municipal growth and governmental expansion to the effect of providing a better understanding of both the relationship between concepts and practice, and the actual interplay between the \"city-region\" and the global arena.\"-- Provided by publisher.

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, \"this time is different\"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned.

Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to break the silence.

\"Competitive authoritarian regimes - in which autocrats submit to meaningful multiparty elections but engage in serious democratic abuse - proliferated in the post-Cold War era. Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized\"-- Provided by publisher.

The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online. Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created. Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? \"Lindens\"-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions. InMaking Virtual Worlds, Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.

\"This book provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the community tourism for professionals who want to improve their understanding of the innovation in the community tourism network and its contribution to the development of the territory. The relevance of the theme revolves around the dynamic capacities related to small tourism entrepreneurs in the coastal space\"-- Provided by publisher.

The labor movement sees coalitions as a key tool for union revitalization and social change, but there is little analysis of what makes them successful or the factors that make them fail. Amanda Tattersall-an organizer and labor scholar-addresses this gap in the first internationally comparative study of coalitions between unions and community organizations. She argues that coalition success must be measured by two criteria: whether campaigns produce social change and whether they sustain organizational strength over time. The book contributes new, practical frameworks and insights that will help guide union and community organizers across the globe. The book throws down the gauntlet to industrial relations scholars and labor organizers, making a compelling case for unions to build coalitions that wield \"power with\" community organizations. Tattersall presents three detailed case studies: the public education coalition in Sydney, the Ontario Health Coalition in Toronto, and the living wage campaign run by the Grassroots Collaborative in Chicago. Together they enable Tattersall to explore when and how coalition unionism is the best and most appropriate strategy for social change, organizational development, and union renewal.Power in Coalition presents clear lessons. She suggests that \"less is more,\" because it is often easier to build stronger coalitions with fewer organizations making decisions and sharing resources. The role of the individual, she finds, is traditionally underestimated, even though a coalition's success depends on a leader's ability to broker relationships between organizations while developing the campaign's strategy. The crafting of goals that combine organizational interest and the public interest and take into account electoral politics are crucial elements of coalition success. The labor movement sees coalitions as a key tool for union revitalization and social change, but there is little analysis of what makes them successful or the factors that make them fail. Amanda Tattersall-an organizer and labor scholar-addresses this gap in the first internationally comparative study of coalitions between unions and community organizations. Tattersall argues that coalition success must be measured by two criteria: whether campaigns produce social change and whether they sustain organizational strength over time. The book contributes new, practical frameworks and insights that will help guide union and community organizers across the globe. The book throws down the gauntlet to industrial relations scholars and labor organizers, making a compelling case for unions to build coalitions that wield \"power with\" community organizations. The book centers on three detailed case studies: the public education coalition in Sydney, the Ontario Health Coalition in Toronto, and the living wage campaign run by the Grassroots Collaborative in Chicago. Together they enable Tattersall to explore when and how coalition unionism is the best and most appropriate strategy for social change, organizational development, and union renewal. Power in Coalition presents clear lessons. Tattersall suggests that \"less is more,\" because it is often easier to build stronger coalitions with fewer organizations making decisions and sharing resources. She finds the role of the individual is traditionally underestimated, even though a coalition's success depends on a leader's ability to broker relationships between organizations while developing the campaign's strategy. The crafting of goals that combine organizational interest and the public interest and take into account electoral politics are crucial elements of coalition success. For more about Power in Coalition, visit the author's wesbite: http://powerincoalition.com.