The past two decades have seen a worldwide shift to markets. Globalization has opened domestic markets to international competition. The ex-communist countries have converted themselves, to varying degrees, into market economies. In the low-income countries, privatization has shrunk state production. The results of this expansion of markets have been mixed. What lessons does the experience with reform, in both ex-communist and developing countries, hold for future developing-country reformers?

The basic argument of this article is that the globalization perspective in all of its variations (and there are many) exaggerates the amount of change in the contemporary global system. States are for the most part exactly what they have always been, the most important actors in the modern international system -- which is not to argue that they are now, or have ever been, immune to influence from other actors or that they have ever been able to fully control economic or other kinds of transactions. The hyperglobalist argument -- which sees states as fundamentally outmoded, incapable of carrying on the basic functions of governance -- is wrong. Transformationist arguments are also for the most part incorrect, but here it is necessary to distinguish among different kinds of claims, which are obfuscated by the emphasis on complexity, interconnectedness and multiple actors.

Synthesizing decades of sociological work at Stanford University on the development of the modern nation-state system since World War II, contributors argue that striking similarities increasingly characterize nation-state structures and policies, suggesting that countries across different domains are following the same models or scripts of what a nation-state ought to be.

Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion of management education and practice. At the same time, the formalization of management practice has allowed for a widespread diffusion of management ideas across sectors and continents. This book provides an up-to-date summary of the development, refinement, and diffusion of managerial ideas, adding detail and explanation to commonly held conceptions about the explosion of management knowledge.

The contributors contend that management ideas do not flow automatically but are actively shaped and transformed by knowledge carriersbusiness schools, consultancies, and the media. Drawing on data from worldwide empirical studies, the chapters analyze how such carriers are organized, how they act and react, and how they shape and reshape knowledge. The book places the development and diffusion of management knowledge in a wider environmental and historical context and offers stimulating comparisons of European and American management traditions.

The combination of theory and practice will make this book a valuable resource for courses dealing with management, organizational and institutional theory, and globalization.

This book compares sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, two regions beset by the breakdown of states suffering from extreme official corruption, organized crime extending into warlordism, and the disintegration of economic institutions and public institutions for human services. The contributors not only study state breakdown but also compare the consequences of post-communism with those of post-colonialism.

This chapter looks at the processes of state formation in postcolonial Africa and the former Soviet Union and asks whether those processes make African and Eurasian states especially vulnerable to civil war. In particular, we ask whether the experience of Africa's postcolonial states suggests a similar historical trajectory for the new states that emerged in Eurasia at the beginning of the 1990s. We argue that, despite important differences between the two historical experiences, conditions surrounding state formation in Africa and post-Soviet Eurasia have inhibited the formation of stable and legitimate states and have made war more likely.

The chapter beings by outlining three broad explanatory factors that scholars have used in trying to explain civil wars since 1945: ethnicity, nationalism, and globalization. We argue that these explanations neglect what Klaus Gantzel referred to as "the historicity of war," by which he means "the structural dynamics which condition the emergence and behaviour of actors" in any given period (Gantzel 1997, 139). We then suggest that a focus on state formation is helpful in providing the historical context for understanding civil wars. After surveying the experience of state-building in postcolonial Africa and in Eurasia, we conclude with comparisons and contrasts between the regions.

Over the several hundred years during which the rules of sovereignty including non-intervention and the exclusion of external authority have been widely understood, state control could never be taken for granted. States could never isolate themselves from the external environment. Globalization and intrusive international norms are old, not new, phenomena. Some aspects of the contemporary environment are uniquethe number of transnational nongovernmental organizations has grown dramatically, international organizations are more prominent; cyber crime could not exist without cyber space. These developments challenge state control. A loss of control can precipitate a crisis of authority, but even a crisis of authority is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for developing new authority structures. New rules could emerge in an evolutionary way as a result of trial and error by rational but myopic actors. But these arrangements, for instance international policing, are likely to coexist with rather than to supplant conventional sovereign structures. Sovereigntys resilience is, if nothing else, a reflection of its tolerance for alternatives.

The world polity and cultural system are relatively stateless, but they legitimate strong nation-state identities as the dominant actors. This produces very strong tendencies for the adoption of common models of modernity, despite extraordinary differences in resources and local culture. Local distinctiveness is also legitimated, so long as it is not inconsistent with homogeneity on the main dimensions of stratification and identity.