Patchwork Leviathan
"Winner of the EGOS Book Award, European Group for Organizational Studies"
Corruption and ineffectiveness are often expected of public servants in developing countries. However, some groups within these states are distinctly more effective and public oriented than the rest. Why? Patchwork Leviathan explains how a few spectacularly effective state organizations manage to thrive amid general institutional weakness and succeed against impressive odds. Les mer
McDonnell demonstrates that when the human, cognitive, and material resources of bureaucracy are rare, it is critically important how they are distributed. Too often, scarce bureaucratic resources are scattered throughout the state, yielding little effect. McDonnell reveals how a sufficient concentration of resources clustered within particular pockets of a state can be transformative, enabling distinctively effective organizations to emerge from a sea of ineffectiveness.
Patchwork Leviathan offers a comprehensive analysis of successful statecraft in institutionally challenging environments, drawing on cases from contemporary Ghana and Nigeria, mid-twentieth-century Kenya and Brazil, and China in the early twentieth century. Based on nearly two years of pioneering fieldwork in West Africa, this incisive book explains how these highly effective pockets differ from the Western bureaucracies on which so much state and organizational theory is based, providing a fresh answer to why well-funded global capacity-building reforms fail-and how they can do better.
Detaljer
- Forlag
- Princeton University Press
- Innbinding
- Innbundet
- Språk
- Engelsk
- Sider
- 304
- ISBN
- 9780691197357
- Utgivelsesår
- 2020
- Format
- 24 x 16 cm
Anmeldelser
"Winner of the EGOS Book Award, European Group for Organizational Studies"
"
An excellent and refreshingly new look at state capacity that should be a must read for scholars
"---Peter Ward, American Journal of Sociology
of political sociology, development sociology, comparative politics, public policy, and good governance in less developed countries.
"A rich interdisciplinary study of bureaucratic effectiveness in developing states. This interdisciplinarity distinguishes [Patchwork Leviathan] from earlier studies of effective pockets and makes it a fascinating read for a wide range of scholars and organizational leaders.—Martha C. Johnson, Political Science Quarterly"
"Patchwork Leviathan belongs on the bookshelf of every sociologically inclined student of non-Western states. . . . From empirical depth to theoretical breadth, [it] showcases best practices in comparative sociology, moving the disciplinary discussion of state capacity multiple steps ahead.—Marina Zaloznaya, Social Forces"