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.

For almost two centuries, Americans expected that their public schools would cultivate the personal, moral, and social development of individual students, create citizens, and bind diverse groups into one nation. Since the 1980s, however, a new generation of school reformers has been intent on using schools to solve the nations economic problems. An economic justification for public schoolsequipping students with marketable skills to help the nation compete in a global, information-based workplaceoverwhelmed other historically accepted purposes for tax-supported public schools.

Private sector management has become the model for public school systems as schools and districts are downsized, restructured, and outsourced. Recent reform proposals have called for government-funded vouchers to send children to private schools, the creation of self-governing charter schools, the contracting of schools to private entrepreneurs, and the partnerships with the business community in promoting new information technologies. But if there is a shared national purpose for education, should it be oriented only toward enhancing the countrys economic success? Is everything public for sale? Are the interests of individuals or selected groups overwhelming the common good that the founders of tax-supported public schools so fervently sought?

This volume explores the ongoing debates about what constitutes the common good in American public education, assessing the long-standing tensions between shared purposes and individual interests in schooling. It shows how recent school reform efforts, driven by economic concerns, have worsened the conflict between the legitimate interests of individuals and society as a whole, and demonstrates that reconstructing the common good envisioned by the founders of public education in the United States remains essential and unfinished work.

New theories and theory-based methodological approaches have found their way into Comparative Education - just as into Comparative Social Science more generally - in increasing number in the recent past. The essays of this volume express and critically discuss quite a range of these positions such as, inter alia, the theory of self-organizing social systems and the morphogenetic approach; the theory of long waves in economic development and world-systems analysis; historical sociology and the sociology of knowledge; as well as critical hermeneutics and post-modernist theorizing. With reference to such theories and approaches, the chapters - written by scholars from Europe, the U.S.A., Australia and New Zealand - outline alternative research agendas for the comparative study of the social and educational fabric of the modern world. In so doing, they also expound frames of reference for re-considering the intellectual shaping, or Discourse Formation, of Comparative Education as a field of study.

This book brings together emerging perspectives from organization theory and management, environmental sociology, international regime studies, and the social studies of science and technology to provide a starting point for discipline-based studies of environmental policy and corporate environmental behavior. Reflecting the book's theoretical and empirical focus, the audience is two-fold: organizational scholars working within the institutional tradition, and environmental scholars interested in management and policy. Together this mix forms a creative synthesis for both sets of readers, analyzing how environmental policy and organizational practices are shaped, spread and contested.

Stock market liberalizations lead private investment booms. In a sample of 11 developing countries that liberalized their stock markets, 9 experience growth rates of private investment above their non-liberalization median in the first year after liberalizing. In the second and third years after liberalization, this number is 10 of 11 and 8 of 11, respectively. The mean growth rate of private investment in the three years immediately following stock market liberalization exceeds the sample mean by 22 percentage points. The evidence stands in sharp contrast to recent work that suggests capital account liberalization has no effect on investment.

This timely study is the first to examine the relationship between competition for energy resources and the propensity for conflict in the Caspian region. Taking the discussion well beyond issues of pipeline politics and the significance of Caspian oil and gas to the global market, the book offers significant new findings concerning the impact of energy wealth on the political life and economies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. The contributors, a leading group of scholars and policymakers, explore the differing interests of ruling elites, the political opposition, and minority ethnic and religious groups region-wide.

Placing Caspian development in the broader international relations context, the book assesses the ways in which Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey are fighting to protect their interests in the newly independent states and how competition for production contracts and pipeline routes influences regional security. Specific chapters also link regional issues to central questions of international politics and to theoretical debates over the role of energy wealth in political and economic development worldwide. Woven throughout the implications for U.S. policy, giving the book wide appeal to policymakers, corporate executives, energy analysts, and scholars alike.

Alexander Wendt has drawn on an exceptional range of theoretical literature in his effort to reconceptualize the nature of the international system. His discussion of scientific realism ought to be required reading for any student of international relations, or political science for that matter. He puts to rest the notion that constructivism is necessarily postmodern, devoid of an objective referent. In John Searle's felicitous formulation it is possible to have a subjective ontology but an objective epistemology. In emphasizing that all knowledge is theory laden, Wendt underscores the point that facts never simply speak for themselves. In both the social and natural sciences brute empiricism is never an adequate research strategy. Our theories shape the way we see the world but they cannot remake the world in their own image.