Diversity Regimes

In Diversity Regimes, James M. Thomas uncovers a complex combination of meanings, practices, and actions that work to institutionalize universities' commitments to diversity, but in doing so obscure, entrench, and even magnify existing racial inequalities. Drawing on two years of ethnographic field work at so-called "Diversity University," Thomas provides new insights into the social organization of multicultural principles and practices.

America is a nation that celebrates diversity and freedom of conscience. Yet, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, democratic times often demand conformity. Nowadays, conformity might be enforced in the name of diversity itself, and go so far as to infringe on the rights of conscience, expression, association, and religious freedom. Americans have recently been confronted by this paradox in various ways, from federal health care mandates, to campus speech codes, to consumer boycotts, to public intimidation, to vexatious litigation, to private corporations dismissing employees for expressing certain political views. In this book, Bradley C. S. Watson brings together leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines to examine the manner and extent to which conformity is demanded by contemporary American law and social practice. Contributors also consider the long-term results of such demands for conformity for the health—and even survival—of a constitutional republic.

Building on existing analytical frameworks, this book provides a new methodology allowing different language policies in international multilingual organisations (or “language regimes”) to be compared and evaluated on the basis of criteria such as efficiency and fairness. It explains step-by-step how to organise the evaluation of language regimes and how to design and interpret indicators for such evaluation. The second part of this book applies the theoretical framework to the evaluation of the language policy of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) division of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO). Results show that an increase in linguistic diversity of the language regimes of patent organisations can both improve the efficiency of the patent system and lead to a more balanced distribution of costs among countries. This book is a resource for scholars in language policy and planning and for policy-makers in the international and European patent system.

Transitions of energy regimes are phenomena that have profoundly affected economies and civilisations over the last 600 years. The shifts from wood to coal, from coal to oil and the potential change to another resource that might be pending now have influenced the ways in which we work, produce, and live. Though they are fundamentally influenced and steered by economic forces these changes have seen little analysis from the viewpoint of economic theory. This book seeks to contribute to filling this gap. To this avail, it firstly provides insight into the historical and present transitions that have taken place. It then gives an overview of the existing economic approaches to energy regime transitions and develops a new interpretation based on evolutionary economics. For this, an approach based on complexity theory and complex adaptive systems is created and applied and the mechanisms behind regime changes are interpreted according to this framework. The analysis is supported by further research into certain aspects of transitions: Historical and present research on resource depletion is compared, the working of path dependence in the constitution and decline of the oil regime is analysed, and the role of entrepreneurship in a regime change from the oil regime towards a potential renewable energy regime is investigated. The book closes with an appraisal of energy regime transitions as a future field of research for evolutionary economics.

This groundbreaking book deals with problems encountered by the United States in complying with international treaty obligations. It examines the ways in which the American constitutional system sometimes adapts to and sometimes erects barriers against the new system of global solutions to global problems and investigates the resulting challenges on a treaty-by-treaty basis with special attention to such areas as human rights and disarmament. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

In an original, and highly interdisciplinary, mixed method approach, Green and Janmaat identify four major traditions of social cohesion in developed societies, analyzing how these various mechanisms are withstanding the strains of the current global financial crisis.

Over the past thirty years the comparative study of policy agendas under the aegis of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) has become one of the fastest growing sub-field in policy research. Yet, similarly to policy studies in general, most of the agenda-setting literature focuses on well-established democracies. This edited volume offers a ground-breaking analysis of a hitherto less examined topic in comparative politics: the dynamics of policy agendas in Socialist autocracy and in hybrid regimes. We propose that policymaking in authoritarian and illiberal regimes is different from the practices of democracies which we analyse based on a unique historical policy agendas database built by the Hungarian CAP team at the Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. We find that punctuated equilibrium theory offers a good description of policy dynamics regardless of policy regimes, yet punctuations are more pronounced in autocratic and illiberal settings. These regime types also share a tendency towards centralization, a less efficient use of public information and a suppression of democratic participation in the policy process. This book may be of interest to scholars and students of policy studies, agenda-setting and the politics of authoritarianism.

The discipline of international relations offers much insight into why violent power transitions occur, yet there have been few substantive examinations of why and how peaceful changes happen in world politics. This work is the first comprehensive treatment of that subject. The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations provides a thorough examination of research on the problem of change in the international arena and the reasons why change happens peacefully at times, and at others, violently. It contains over forty chapters, which examine the historical, theoretical, global, regional, and national foreign-policy dimensions of peaceful change. As the world enters a new round of power transition conflict, involving a rapidly rising China and a relatively declining United States, this Handbook provides a necessary resource for decisionmakers and scholars engaged in this vital area of research.