Reworking Authority: Leading and Following in the Post-Modern Organization
Author: Larry Hirschhorn
For many companies, the past decade has been marked by a sense of turbulence and redefinition. The growing role of information technologies and service businesses has prompted companies to reconsider how they are structured and even what business they are in. These changes have also affected how people work, what skills they need, and what kind of careers they expect. One critical change in how people work, argues Larry Hirschhorn, is that they are expected to bring more of themselves psychologically to the job. To facilitate this change, it is necessary to create a new culture of authority--one in which superiors acknowledge their dependence on subordinates, subordinates can challenge superiors, and both are able to show their vulnerability.
The first chapters of this book examine the covert processes by which people caught between the old and new culture of authority neither suppress nor express their feelings. Feelings are activated but not directed toward useful work. The case studies of this process are instructive and moving. The book then explores how organizations can create a culture of openness in which people become more psychologically present. In part, the process entails an understanding of the changes taking place in how we experience our own identity at work and that of "others" in society at large. To do this, the book suggests, we need a social policy of forgiveness and second chances.
New interesting book: The Prince of Darkness or American Education
The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace
Author: Morton H Halperin
For decades, policies pursued by the U.S. and other industrialized nations towards the developing world have has been based on a dirty little secret among policy experts: democracy and development don't mix. Turning this long-held view on its head, The Democracy Advantage makes a bold case that they do.
In this timely, penetrating analysis, the authors of this path breaking book dismantle the conventional wisdom that democratic reforms are destabilizing and that the U.S. must first promote development - often relying on authoritarian regimes - in order to create a middle class that will support democracy.
Reviewing 40 years of hard, empirical data, from China and India to Chile and Iraq, the authors show that poor democracies beat poor autocracies in every economic measure. In addition, the authors offer dramatic evidence that democracies are less likely to fight each other and that terrorists more often find safe haven in authoritarian countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
Wide-ranging and grounded in solid research, The Democratic Advantage outlines a new vision of foreign policy that combines the best of America's democratic and economic values.
Foreign Affairs
This forceful case for a "democracy centered" foreign policy argues that fostering democracy in poor countries enhances their prospects for economic growth and social welfare. The experience of China and a formidable body of scholarship argue otherwise: authoritarian rule is often quite functional in the early phases of economic development, until rising incomes and the emergence of a middle class lay the groundwork for democratic transition. But Halperin and his co-authors sift through the vast academic literature and economic data to conclude that, thanks to their openness and shared structures of power, poor democracies "as a whole" have actually outperformed nondemocracies. They do not establish a direct causal relationship between democracy and development but show correlations that render suspect the notion of an authoritarian advantage. (The success of East Asian autocracies they call "highly exceptional.") In the end, however, there may be more common ground among development experts than the book admits: when old ideological debates are put aside, most experts agree that institutions matter"—stable, noncorrupt, rules-based governance is essential for sustained economic growth. The unresolved problem is how the outside world can help build such institutions in the poorest regions of the world. This book is most insightful in identifying the moments when outside states can have an impact on democratization by fostering support for reformers and creating incentives for more accountable government.
Table of Contents:
| 1 | Exposing a 50-year-old myth | 1 |
| 2 | Setting the record right | 25 |
| 3 | Sustaining new democracies | 65 |
| 4 | Democracy and security | 93 |
| 5 | Making development safe for democracy | 135 |
| 6 | Democracy as the default option | 175 |
| 7 | Bringing democracy to the center of development | 203 |
| 8 | The great race | 231 |
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