Despite global shifts in world power, racial conflict remains one of the major problems of contemporary social life. This concise and engaging book demonstrates the interplay between identity, power and conflict in the creation, persistence and transformation of patterns of race and ethnic relations across the globe. Stone and Rizova employ a neo-Weberian comparative approach to explore how evolving systems of group conflict have been - and continue to be - impacted by changes in the world system, global capitalism, multinational corporations, and transnational alliances and institutions. The authors analyse critical debates about ‘post-racialism’, ‘exceptionalism’, ethnic warfare and diversity management in global organizations, drawing on cases from South Africa to Darfur, and from global migration to the Arab Spring uprisings. In conclusion, the search for effective strategies of conflict resolution and the quest for racial justice are evaluated from multiple perspectives. Racial Conflict in Global Society provides stimulating insights into the basic factors underlying racial conflict and consensus in the early decades of the twenty-first century. It is essential reading for scholars and students across the social and political sciences, management and international relations.

The Secret of Success explores the unique strategies and processes that a Fortune 500 R&D laboratory employs to create a perpetually learning organization.

In this essay, we review the contributions economists, political scientists, and business scientists have made to an understanding of how local school districts, boards of education, school superintendents, and district offices affect student learning and other achievement outcomes of interest, where and how their work differs from that done by students of educational administration, and the implications of their findings for future research.

This paper employs inductive qualitative and social network analyses to investigate the combined effect of the formal and informal structures on the outcomes of six R&D projects. The results suggest that success is enhanced through a unique project design¿one that interweaves the social advice networks into the projects' formal structures.

This article shows how Charles Ragin's method of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) can be used to explore and untangle complex organizational relationships and outcomes in small-N data sets and to generate hypotheses about conjectural causal mechanisms. These can then be fruitfully tested statistically for large-N sets and applied to solve public-management design problems, thereby aiding existing states to be transformed into preferred ones. The QCA method has particular relevance to public management as a tool for comparative analysis and research.

The aim of this article is to demonstrate how Ragin's (2000) method of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) can be effectively employed to meet some of the current challenges in the study of innovation and project management. Chief among those are the need for holistic and multi-level investigations and the examination of sets of factors that explain outcomes in interaction terms. The paper analyzes the conjoint and simultaneous effect of ten formal and informal structural factors on the high and low success of six technologically innovative projects in a Research and Development (R&D) laboratory of a Fortune 500 company. To this end, I employ Ragin's methodology and social network analyses. The findings from the QCA minimization procedure identify a set of four critical project success factors.

Building on Giddens' (1979) structuration theory, this article analyzes the interactive effect of the formal and informal structures and the agents' centrality in each on the outcomes of six technologically innovative projects in a R&D laboratory of a Fortune 500 company. To this end, it employs qualitative and social network analyses. The findings not only identify four critical project success factors but also specify how they operate. Success of technical projects is enhanced through a unique project design; one that converts positions of centrality in two task-related advice networks, technical and organizational, constructed to reflect the content of knowledge and information exchange critical to an R&D environment, into positions of centrality on the projects' formal structure.

How does social network position affect project managers' perceptions of success or failure? We analyze the networks of project managers in an R&D lab of a Fortune 500 company to investigate how the extent and type of centrality shape the narratives they tell about the outcomes of six technologically innovative projects. Interpretive flexibility in the meaning of success occurs more often among managers who are more central, and have access to a greater variety of information through their network ties. There is a lack of symmetry in discussion of project outcomes; managers more often discuss success than failure, and use a greater variety of narratives to talk about success. The results confirm the innovation management literature that emphasizes the multidimensionality of R&D success, and extends the embeddedness perspective on the social context of organizational behavior. Not only do social ties affect the information to which managers have access, but networks also shape their perspectives on the outcomes of innovative projects.

In this essay, we define the meaning and content of public value, show how government and business create public value, and briefly explain why their governance arrangements work the way they do. We deal first with business and then government. We conclude that government manages risks and that governmental value creation is distinctively concerned with stability. Hence, to make government work better, risk management ought to be central to the practice of public finance, public policy, and public administration. Understanding the importance of stability is potentially of even greater importance to those who research and teach public policy and administration. Indeed, we propose that the elaboration of a general risk assessment model explaining, among other things, government's systemic inclination to stability, would take our field a long towards integration with mainstream positive social science and, therefore, holds out the prospect of considerable interdisciplinary consilience, although at this time we can do no more than suggest the contours of such a model.