This groundbreaking work provides a new and more accurate guide to the interactions of bureaucracies with other political institutions and the public at large."--Jacket.

The authors explore the many ways that gender and communication intersect and affect each other. Every chapter encourages a consideration of how gender attitudes and practices, past and current, influence personal notions of what it means not only to be female and male, but feminine and masculine. The second edition of this student friendly and accessible text is filled with contemporary examples, activities, and exercises to help students put theoretical concepts into practice.

How the US Environmental Protection Agency designed the governance of risk and forged its legitimacy over the course of four decades. The US Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 to protect the public health and environment, administering and enforcing a range of statutes and programs. Over four decades, the EPA has been a risk bureaucracy, formalizing many of the methods of the scientific governance of risk, from quantitative risk assessment to risk ranking. Demortain traces the creation of these methods for the governance of risk, the controversies to which they responded, and the controversies that they aroused in turn. He discusses the professional networks in which they were conceived; how they were used; and how they served to legitimize the EPA. Demortain argues that the EPA is structurally embedded in controversy, resulting in constant reevaluation of its credibility and fueling the evolution of the knowledge and technologies it uses to produce decisions and to create a legitimate image of how and why it acts on the environment. He describes the emergence and institutionalization of the risk assessment–risk management framework codified in the National Research Council's Red Book, and its subsequent unraveling as the agency's mission evolved toward environmental justice, ecological restoration, and sustainability, and as controversies over determining risk gained vigor in the 1990s. Through its rise and fall at the EPA, risk decision-making enshrines the science of a bureaucracy that learns how to make credible decisions and to reform itself, amid constant conflicts about the environment, risk, and its own legitimacy.

By examining what these personnel think about politics, the environment, their budgets, and the other institutions and agencies with which they interact, this work illuminates the actions of the bureaucracy and gives it a human face."--Jacket.

Bureaucracy and Public Choice gives a theoretical and empirical appraisal of modern bureaucracy. It argues that bureaucracies and bureaucrats are indispensable in the making and implementation of public choice. Explanations of bureaucracy range from the Weberian model - with bureaucracy maximising rationality - to the interpretation of the garbage-can' scholars - presenting bureaucracy as organized chaos. The book first considers approaches to understanding bureaucratic behaviour in organizational sociology, economics, and decision-making theory. The concepts of bureaucratic efficiency and accountability are discussed at length. The political culture of a country is shown to influence the relationship between bureaucrats, politicians and the electorate, affecting both their efficiency and accountability. The status of bureaucracies is shown to depend on whether they deliver the goods according to normative criteria. The book makes these criteria explicit and assesses the extent to which bureaucracies are capable of meeting them.

Although a powerful, independent bureaucracy poses a threat to democracy, it is indispensable to its proper functioning. This book provides an overview of the complex relationship between bureaucracy and the politics of democracy and is essential reading for students of sociology, political science and public administration. It is designed to guide students through the maze of classical and modern theories on the topic, to give them basic information on the historical developments in this area and the present them with case histories of the actual relationship between bureaucrats and politicians in democratic societies.

Public choice approaches have revolutionized contemporary political science, particularly in the United States, where a "new right" political movement has developed. This book develops a critique of new right views through its coverage of aspects of the public choice/new right literature