Suchergebnisse

This article takes up two clashing traditions of how to view organizations and their possibilities. One tradition, exemplified by John Dewey, sees organizations as edifying forums, while the other, indicated by Michel Foucault, views organizations as controlled violence. Both views are indispensable to understanding organizational behavior, and they come together in questioning the power of theory as a tool of social transformation. Approaches to organizational and administrative structure have all been relatively sanguine about the possibility that theory can identify proper solutions for organizational failings. Whatever organizations are, whether we think of them as incubating new cultures or defined by the background society in which they exist or as machines needing highly formalized structural definition and control, they are artificial and contained and are therefore vulnerable to being made over completely in accordance with theory. Neither Dewey nor Foucault placed much faith in the transfigurative power of theory. The battleground of these two thinkers was not theory, but hope. Dewey allows room for hope in his treatment of organizations while Foucault does not. In the end we need both the fatalism of Foucault and the optimism of Dewey to inform our understanding of organizations.

Political scientists normally discuss sovereign immunity in the context of international law and prelations. The domestic effects of sovereign immunity are almost never examined, even though those effects are profound and implicate a range of issues of interest to political scientists. The Federal Tort Claims Act (FCTA) (1946) is a main waiver of federal sovereign immunity and is designed to allow people injured by government employees to sue for money damages. The FTCA has a number of exceptions, the most prominent of which is known as the "discretionary function exception". This exception retains sovereign immunity for the United States when a federal employee acts "based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty ... whether or not the discretion involved be abused". This simple exception expanded into a comprehensive tool of government that now confounds justice and federal governmental accountability. (American Political Science Review / FUB)

In public administration, as in many disciplines, "modernism" and the influence of the Enlightenment has been deplored. This criticism comes somewhat late to public administration, though is forcefully used to chastise modern governmental administration for its failure to take on innovations yielding more just and responsive behavior on the part of administrators and their institutions. Particularly, modernism's infatuation with individualism and scientific progress has left a landscape littered with institutionalized racism, misogyny, injustice, and an incredible resistance to change. In recent years, many public administration scholars have turned to postmodernism as a means to undercut the hegemony of the modernist position in the administrative world. While we admire the goals of these authors we must deplore the way in which they have gone about their work. Insufficient appreciation for the origins of postmodernist epistemology has led many of these authors to become just as deplorably modernist as their predecessors. This mistake is to reinvent modernism in a new form, not to use postmodernism as a liberating, transformative device, as they claim to do.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Secret Presidency -- 1 The Secret Presidency in Historical-Theoretical Perspective -- 2 The Classified President -- 3 State Secrets and Executive Power -- 4 The Shadow President: The Attorney General, Executive Power, and the New Anti-Terror Laws -- 5 The President and National Security Surveillance -- 6 The New Executive Privilege -- Conclusion: A Secret Presidency for the New Millennium? -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

The administration of George W. Bush engages in the use of "extraordinary rendition," the kidnapping of foreign citizens and the delivery of those citizens to third‐party jurisdictions. In at least one such rendition, a foreign national was kidnapped from U.S. soil and delivered to a foreign jurisdiction where he was tortured. These renditions are accomplished outside of treaties and courts and are solely the result of presidential fiat. The claims to executive power to undertake these actions are of recent origin, and the great balance of U.S. history and law weighs against these claims. The actions of the Bush administration have been aided by judicial deference, a deference that challenges historical assumptions and law concerning executive power.