This book explores the nature of technology - participatory media in particular - and its effects on our friendships and our fundamental sense of togetherness.

Situating the notion of friendship in the modern era, the author examines the possibilities and challenges of technology on our friendships. Taking a media ecology approach to interpersonal communication, she looks at issues around phenomenology, recognition of friends as unique, hermeneutics in a digital world and mediated communication, social dimensions of time and space, and communication ethics.

Examining friendship as a communicative phenomenon and exploring the ways in which it is created, sustained, managed, produced, and reproduced, this book will be relevant to scholars and students of interpersonal communication, mediated communication, communication theory and philosophy, and media ecology.

This book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003188810/friendship-technology-tiffany-petricini

This book offers an in-depth look at developing effectiveness in the public sector and how to achieve the best possible outcomes for people rather than just good or efficient outputs.

In 15 comprehensive chapters, the authors present structured ideas and practical approaches for achieving a more effective public sector. The book sets out a framework for visualising success in complex situations with multiple stakeholders. Topics include how you stimulate change and influence people to adopt changes, how you manage politics, set targets and standards, and measure them, and how you create a culture of high performance with a focus on getting the right things done. Effectiveness does not arise from excellence in one area alone and the book weaves together ideas on leadership, managing expectations, and keeping focus on the longer term.

Creating an Effective Public Sector will be of interest to decision makers in the public sector, project managers working on central and local government projects, and senior civil servants. It will also be invaluable for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students studying in the fields of government, project management, and public-sector management.

In this book, Hannes Charen presents an alternative examination of kinship structures in political theory.

Employing a radically transdisciplinary approach, On the Politics of Kinship is structured in a series of six theoretical vignettes or frames. Each chapter frames a figure, aspect, or relational context of the family or kinship. Some chapters are focused on a critique of the family as a state-sanctioned institution, while others cautiously attempt to recast kinship in a way to reimagine mutual obligation through the generation of kinship practices understood as a perpetually evolving set of relational responses to finitude. In doing so, Charen considers the ways in which kinship is a plastic social response to embodied exposure, both concealed and made more evident in the bloated, feeble, and broken individualities and nationalities that seem to dominate our social and political landscape today.

On the Politics of Kinship will be of interest to political theorists, feminists, anthropologists, and social scientists in general.

This book examines the working procedures of parliamentary party groups within specialised committees - the backstage but primary means for MPs to influence policy.

It explains which MPs specialise in particular policy areas, how they make policy choices in committees, and, subsequently, how these individual decisions are aggregated and 'unified' within and via parliamentary party groups. In doing so, the book expertly reveals the internal working procedures of parliaments and the role of individual MPs vis-a-vis the parliamentary party group leadership. Based on an analysis of more than 3,000 committee assignments and over 100 in-depth interviews with MPs, it shows that individual experts in committees have a central role and decision-making power which is more varied and decentralised from the leadership than commonly assumed. It demonstrates that most policy decisions are prepared bottom-up rather than dictated top-down and that parliamentary party groups are not strictly hierarchical organisations dominated by elites.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of legislative and parliamentary studies, representative democracy, comparative politics, and journalists and practitioners within parliaments.

This volume explores the unity of logic, epistemology and ontology in Hegel's dialectic and the interrelation among the three, thereby revealing the internal features of Hegel's dialectic as well as the connection and divergence between Hegel's and Marx's philosophical thought.
As the final volume of a three-volume set that gives insights into Hegel's dialectic and his overall philosophical thought, the book analyzes Hegel's dialectic as "a unity of three." As logic, it transcends language and is therefore epistemology; as epistemology, it transcends theory and is therefore ontology; as ontology, it transcends existing things and is therefore logic. Hegel's dialectic thus demonstrates itself as the revolutionary development of each of these three fields in the history of Western philosophy. The principle of the agreement of logic with history thereby expressed immediately becomes one of the most important philosophical sources of inspiration for Marx's historical materialism. A more profound understanding of Hegel's philosophy will therefore deepen our understanding of the philosophy of Marxism.
The title will appeal to scholars and students interested in Hegel's and Marx's philosophy, German classical philosophy and Western philosophy.

In this book Pragati Rawat and John C. Morris identify and evaluate the impact of factors that can help explain the difference in e-participation, public participation using information and communication technology, in different countries.

While cross-sectional studies have been covered, few have taken an in-depth look at cross-national studies. This book attempts to fill the gap using quantitative panel data to explore the influence of technology and institutions, and the impact of their complex relationships in a mediation and moderation analysis, on e-participation. The current study reviews the scholarly work in the field of "offline" and "online participation" to identify a set of antecedents that influence e-participation. A conceptual framework is developed, supported by the theories from the public policy and socio-technical premise. The authors utilize secondary data, primarily from the UN and World Economic Forum, for 143 countries from three waves of surveys to measure the dependent and explanatory variables. The panel data is statistically analyzed and findings reveal the role of technology as a mediator as well as a moderator for institutions' impact on e-participation.

The Effects of Technology and Institutions on E-Participation provides a groundbreaking country-level analysis that will appeal to academics and students of e-government and Digital Government, Public Policy, Public Administration, Public Sector Innovation, and Public Participation.

Evidence shows that the increasing privatization of K-12 education siphons resources away from public schools, resulting in poorer learning conditions, underpaid teachers, and greater inequality. But, as Robert Asen reveals here, the damage that market-based education reform inflicts on society runs much deeper. At their core, these efforts are antidemocratic.

Arguing that democratic communities and public education need one another, Asen examines the theory driving privatization, popularized in the neoliberalism of Milton and Rose Friedman, as well as the case for school choice promoted by former secretary of education Betsy DeVos and the controversial voucher program of former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. What Asen finds is that a market-based approach holds not just a different view of distributing education but a different vision of society. When the values of the market-choice, competition, and self-interest-shape national education, that policy produces individuals, Asen contends, with no connections to community and no obligations to one another. The result is a society at odds with democracy.

Probing and thought-provoking, School Choice and the Betrayal of Democracy features interviews with local, on-the-ground advocates for public education and offers a countering vision of democratic education-one oriented toward civic relationships, community, and equality. This book is essential reading for policymakers, advocates of public education, citizens, and researchers.

Liberalism and Transformation is the first scholarly work that explores the historical, philosophical, and intellectual development of global liberalism since the nineteenth century in the context of the deployment of violence, force, and intervention. Using an approach that includes interpretive and contextual analysis of texts from writers, philosophers, and policy-makers across nearly two centuries, as well as historiographical and historical analysis of archival documents (some of which have been recently declassified) and other media, Liberalism and Transformation narrates the messy history of emancipatory liberalism and its engagement with issues of war and peace. The book contributes to both a rethinking of liberal democracy and its relationship to world politics, as well as the effects of liberal internationalism on global processes. Furthermore, Liberalism and Transformation invites readers to reflect on global ethics and transformation in world politics. In the first place, it shows how ethical imaginings of the world have direct effects on actions of transformative importance. In the second place, it suggests that discourses are fluid, changing, and complex.

How the WTO deals with regional trade agreements (RTAs) is conceptually and practically one of the most important questions in international trade law. This book clarifies that relationship focussing on one form of regional integration - customs unions - and one form of trade measures - anti-dumping measures. This book answers the question how anti-dumping measures and legislation change if a state is in a customs union as well. In doing so, this book provides a new reasoning why anti-dumping measures are modified in customs unions, as well as a comprehensive overview of how this has happened, a legal analysis on the legality of these changes, and an answer to the question how the different institutional settings have impacted questions of responsibility and attribution. Going beyond this, this book also considers the specific problems that arise in cases of economic integration and disintegration, and finally, the impact forming a customs union has on third parties that may impose anti-dumping measures on states that are members of a customs union.