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Shared leadership entails a dynamic, interactive influence process among groups and teams. Whereas traditional models of leadership emphasize the importance of vertical leadership as a role occupied by an individual in a designated position, shared leadership emphasizes the importance of leadership as an unfolding social process, shifting the influence to the person with the most relevant knowledge, skills and abilities, juxtaposed against the emerging task related requirements. Research shows that shared leadership is a robust predictor of group, team and organizational outcomes across a variety of organizations, industries and cultural contexts. In fact, shared leadership is a better predictor of outcomes than vertical leadership. This Element provides a comprehensive review of the research on shared leadership, and points to promising directions for the future, in terms of both research and the practical application of shared leadership in action. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Microsystems are the building blocks of the healthcare system. They are the small functional frontline units that provide most healthcare to most people, be it a clinic or a ward. The microsystem improvement approach engages teams at the frontline of care with patients and families in a structured process to improve the quality of care and outcomes. This Element offers an overview of the theory of the microsystems, mesosystems, and team coaching improvement approaches, using case studies to demonstrate how the approaches have been used in practice. A critique of the emerging evidence base and the strengths and limitations of the approach is given. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This Element delves into the relationship between logic and the sciences, a topic brought to prominence by Quine, who regarded logic as methodologically and epistemologically akin to the sciences. For this reason, Quine is seen as the forefather of anti-exceptionalism about logic (AEL), a stance that has become prevalent in the philosophy of logic today. Despite its popularity and the volume of research it inspires, some core issues still lack clarity. For one thing, most works in the debate remain vague on what should count as logic and what should count as a science. Furthermore, the terms of the comparison are rarely specified and discussed in a systematic way. This Element purports to advance the debate on these crucial issues with the hope of fostering our understanding of the fundamentals of AEL. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element studies how career support from romantic partners affects career patterns and costs in politics. It argues that a lower level of career support from romantic partners leads to a lower likelihood for political promotion among women politicians (the partner support hypothesis), as well as greater stress on women politicians' relationships when they advance (the career stress hypothesis). Both predictions find support in Swedish data for more than 80,000 political careers over a fifty-year period. Women politicians are in relationships that prioritize their male partner's career and where that partner does less unpaid work in the household. This is important in explaining women's career disadvantage. It also explains why promotions double the divorce rate for women but leave men's relationships intact. The analysis sheds light on the role played by romantic partners in gender inequality in politics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Policy studies assume the existence of baseline parameters – such as honest governments doing their best to create public value, publics responding in good faith, and both parties relying on a policy-making process which aligns with the public interest. In such circumstances, policy goals are expected to be produced through mechanisms in which the public can articulate its preferences and policy-makers are expected to listen to what has been said in determining their governments' courses of action. While these conditions are found in some governments, there is evidence from around the world that much policy-making occurs without these pre-conditions and processes. Unlike situations which produce what can be thought of as 'good' public policy, 'bad' public policy is a more common outcome. How this happens and what makes for bad public policy are the subjects of this Element. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Social ontology is the study of the nature of the social world. This Element aims to provide an overview of this burgeoning field, and also to map the questions that theories in social ontology address. When we encounter a theory of some social thing – groups, law, gender, and so on –how are we to read it? What classes of theories have been explored and abandoned, and what classes are new and promising? The Element distinguishes theories of social construction from theories that characterize the products of social construction. For each, the Element works through a 'toy' theory and then discusses features that more realistic theories ought to include. Three running examples are discussed throughout the Element: (1) property, or ownership; (2) race, or racialized kinds; (3) collective attitudes (i.e., beliefs, desires, knowledge, intentions, etc., of groups and organizations). This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Homelessness abounds today in various forms of displacement and as a pervasive condition of unbelonging. It ruins health, lives, communities, habitats, creativity, and hope. This Element argues that for theology to play its part in ending homelessness, it must better understand its own concept of 'home'. The Element proposes a vision of home capable of resisting the tacit, mistaken theology of home that undergirds the various iterations of modern homelessness. Weaving biblical and ritual sources, the argument constructs theological responses to the twin forces of consumerism and nationalism which, alloyed with sexism and racism, constitute the time of homelessness in which we live. It asks the reader to imagine home as 'participating instead of possessing' in every sphere of life, in pursuit of a theology of home capable of preventing homelessness and not merely ministering to people experiencing it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Debate over how to recognize and understand change and continuity has long animated the field of International Relations. This Element brings norm-oriented and practice-oriented approaches into conversation to advance a wide-ranging account of change and continuity in global politics. It elaborates four scenarios in which norm and practice interactions produce change and continuity: relative continuity and a tight coupling of practices and norms; change through accidental incompetence; new competencies that create disjunctures; and change through deliberate contestation. It demonstrates the utility of the approach using empirical illustrations from the fields of global health and development. The Element also shows the wider applicability of the scenarios for major contemporary debates about change in global governance and security. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Knowledge-first epistemology places knowledge at the normative core of epistemological affairs: on this approach, central epistemic phenomena are to be analyzed in terms of knowledge. This Element offers a defence of an integrated, naturalistic knowledge-first account of justified belief, reasons, evidence and defeat, permissible assertion and action, and the epistemic normativity of practical and theoretical reasoning. On this account, the epistemic is an independent normative domain organized around one central etiological epistemic function: generating knowledge. In turn, this epistemic function generates epistemic norms of proper functioning that constitute the epistemic domain, and govern moves in our epistemic practice, such as forming beliefs, asserting, and reasoning. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
English Play Development under Neoliberalism, 2000–2022 is the first study of the institutionalising of English play development practices in the twenty-first century. It identifies the ways in which support for playwrights and text development increased beneficially during the 1990s and 2000s. It assesses bureaucratic institutional dynamics in key English producing houses as they were surveyed by two reports in 2009, and how these were experienced and transformed in the 2010s. The Element identifies in new play development innovations in the commodification and marketisation of new writing, the bureaucratisation of literary management, the structuring and restructuring of dramaturgy according to Fordist, then post-Fordist, conditions, and the necessity for commissioned artists to operate as neoliberal subjects. It concludes with attention to a liberatory horizon for play development in the English context. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine came on the heels of a series of crises that tested the resilience of the EU as a compound polity and arguably reshaped European policymaking at all levels. This Element investigates the effects of the invasion on public support for European polity building across four key policy domains: refugee policy, energy policy, foreign policy, and defence. It shows how support varies across four polity types (centralized, decentralized, pooled, reinsurance) stemming from a distinction between policy and polity support. In terms of the drivers of support and its evolution over time, performance evaluations and ideational factors appear as strong predictors, while perceived threat and economic vulnerability appear to matter less. Results show strong support for further resource pooling at the EU level in all domains that can lead to novel and differentiated forms of polity-building. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This case study examines the implementation of Namibia's first Productivity Task Force focused on the high-value fruit sector from 2021 to 2024. Productivity task forces, modeled after Peru's Mesas Ejecutivas, facilitate public-private dialogues to resolve sector-specific productivity issues. The Namibian Investment Promotion and Development Board, the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform, and the Ministry of Finance led the Namibian task force. The study highlights critical stages, including the task force's management and organization, political authorization, and the identification and resolution of productivity problems. While some challenges remain unsolved, the PTF has laid the groundwork for long-term improvements in government capacity, better public-public coordination, public-private collaboration, and a more business-friendly environment. The study offers valuable insights for implementing similar public-private initiatives in other developing countries. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element offers an opinionated and selective introduction to philosophical issues concerning the metaphysics of color. The opinion defended is that colors are objective features of our world; objects are colored, and they have those colors independent of how they are experienced. It is a minority opinion. Many philosophers thinking about color experience argue that perceptual variation, the fact that color experiences vary from observer to observer and from viewing condition to viewing condition, makes objectivism untenable. Many philosophers thinking about colors and science argue that colors are ontologically unnecessary; nothing to be explained requires an appeal to colors. A careful look at arguments from perceptual variation shows that those arguments are not compelling, and especially once it is clear how to individuate colors. Moreover, a careful look at scientific explanations shows that colors are explanatorily essential. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Known as a place, a people, and a kingdom at various points in the second and first millennia BCE, Moab has long sustained the attention of archaeologists, philologists, and historians, in part because of its adjacent location to ancient Israel. The past 150 years of research in what is today west-central Jordan has proffered a significant corpus of evidence from the region's archaeological sites. However, a critical analysis of this evidence reveals significant gaps in knowledge that challenge attempts to narrate Moab's political, economic, and social history. This Element examines the evidence as well as the debates surrounding Moab's development and decline. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This Element considers recent changes to the long-standing pattern in US politics that women are less politically active than men. On one hand, the gender gap in political activity beyond voting has disappeared. On the other, the disparity remains when it comes to political money. What is the explanation? The Element begins with politics – both the long-term increase in women occupying political positions and the way that trends/events like MeToo, the defeat of Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump's performative masculinity made gender salient. It then turns to social structural changes, examining in particular women's relative gains in income and, especially, education. Paying consistent attention to intersectional differences among men and among women, whether based on political party, race, or ethnicity, the authors find the explanation of these trends to be rooted not in politics, but rather in social structure. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The reform of the international financial and tax systems has been at the center of global debates in recent years –in the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD and the G20. The fourth United Nations Conference on Financing for Development that will take place in Spain in 2025 also represents a great opportunity to enhance global cooperation in this area. This Element analyzes six elements of the global financing for development agenda, which are dealt with in individual sections: the role and evolution of development financing; the international monetary system; sovereign debt restructuring; international tax cooperation; international trade; and critical institutional issues. Although focusing on the international agenda, many of these issues have domestic implications for developing countries. The analysis covers both the nature of cooperation and recommendations on how to improve it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element focuses on the frequent staging of the most precarious fraction of the working class in the context of a theatre industry, academy and audiences that are dominated by the cultural fraction of the middle class. It interrogates the staging of an abjectified figure as a means of challenging the stigmatisation of the poor in political discourse, defined here as an ideological imaginary of moral and cultural deficit. The Element argues that in seeking to subvert such an imaginary, theatre that stages the abjectified subject may risk consolidating two further imaginaries of working class deficit that have been confected in political discourse from the 1990s to the 2020s. In conclusion, the Element reflects on the political potential of theatre that rather seeks to eradicate class descriptors, conflicts and hierarchies altogether. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
There is now a Happiness Revolution to go along with the earlier Industrial and Demographic Revolutions. The Happiness Revolution is captured using people's happiness scores, as reported in public surveys, whereas the earlier revolutions are reflected by economic production (such as GDP) and life expectancy. Increases in happiness are chiefly due to social-science welfare policies that alleviate people's foremost concerns – those centering on family life, health, and jobs. This Element traces the course of the Happiness Revolution throughout Europe since the 1980s when comprehensive and comparable data on people's happiness first become available. Which countries lead and which lag? How is happiness distributed – are the rich happier than the poor, men than women, old than young, native than foreign born, city than countryfolk? How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted happiness? These are among the questions addressed in this Element. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Despite enormous efforts at healthcare improvement, major challenges remain in achieving optimal outcomes, safety, cost, and value. This Element introduces the concept of learning health systems, which have been proposed as a possible solution. Though many different variants of the concept exist, they share a learning cycle of capturing data from practice, turning it into knowledge, and putting knowledge back into practice. How learning systems are implemented is highly variable. This Element emphasises that they are sociotechnical systems and offers a structured framework to consider their design and operation. It offers a critique of the learning health system approach, recognising that more has been said about the aspiration than perhaps has been delivered. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This Element advances a theory of social cues to explain how international institutions legitimize foreign policy. It reframes legitimization as a type of identity politics. Institutions confer legitimacy by sending social cues that exert pressures to conform and alleviate social–relational concerns regarding norm abidance, group participation, and status and image. Applied to the domain of humanitarian wars, the argument implies that liberal democracies vis-à-vis NATO can influence citizens and policymakers within their community, the primary participants of these military operations. Case studies, news media, a survey of policymakers, and survey experiments conducted in multiple countries validate the social cue theory while refuting alternative arguments relating to legality, material burden sharing, Western regionalism, and rational information transmission. The Element provides an understanding of institutional legitimacy that challenges existing perspectives and contributes to debates about multilateralism, humanitarian intervention, and identity. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.