Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood’s Surveillance Studies is a broad-ranging reader that provides a comprehensive overview of the dynamic field. In fifteen sections, the book features selections from key historical and theoretical texts, samples of the best empirical research done on surveillance, introductions to debates about privacy and power, and cutting-edge treatments of art, film, and literature. While the disciplinary perspectives and foci of scholars in surveillance studies may be diverse, there is coherence and agreement about core concepts, ideas, and texts. This reader outlines these core dimensions and highlights various differences and tensions. In addition to a thorough introduction that maps the development of the field, the volume offers helpful editorial remarks for each section and brief prologues that frame the included excerpts. …(More)”.
Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good,
Book by Ann Mei Chang: “As we know all too well, the pace of progress is falling far short of both the desperate needs in the world and the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals. Today, it’s hard to find anyone who disputes the need for innovation for global development.
So, why does innovation still seem to be largely relegated to scrappy social enterprises and special labs at larger NGOs and funders while the bulk of the development industry churns on with business as usual?
We need to move more quickly to bring best practices such as the G7 Principles to Accelerate Innovation and Impact and the Principles for Digital Development into the mainstream. We know we can drive greater impact at scale by taking measured risks, designing with users, building for scale and sustainability, and using data to drive faster feedback loops.
In Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good, I detail practical tips for how to put innovation principles into practice…(More)”.
Governance Indicators Approaches, Progress, Promise
Book by Helmut K. Anheier, Matthias Haber and Mark A. Kayser: “As difficult as it might seem to define governance, it appears to be that much more difficult to measure it. Since the World Bank Institute launched the Worldwide Governance Indicators in the late 1990s, the governance indicators field has flourished and experienced significant advances in terms of methodology, data coverage and quality, and policy relevance. Other major initiatives have added to a momentum that propelled research on governance indicators seen in few other academic fields in the economic and social sciences. Given these developments and the prominence and policy relevance the field of governance indicator research has achieved, the time is ripe to take stock and ask what has been accomplished, what the shortcomings and potentials might be, and what steps present themselves as a way forward.
This volume– the fifth edition in an annual series tackling different aspects of governance around the world– assesses what has been achieved, identifies strengths and weaknesses of current work, and points to issues that need to be tackled in order to advance the field, both in its academic importance as well as in its policy relevance. In short, the contributions to this volume explore the scope of existing governance indices and indicator frameworks, elaborate on current challenges in measuring and analysing governance, and consider how to overcome them….(More)”.
The Administrative State
Interview with Paul Tucker by Benedict King: “In your book, you place what you call the “administrative state” at the heart of the political dilemmas facing the liberal political order. Could you tell us what you mean by ‘the administrative state’ and the dilemmas it poses for democratic societies?
This is about the legitimacy of the structure of government that has developed in Western democracies. The ‘administrative state’ is simply the machinery for implementing policy and law. What matters is that much of it—including many regulators and central banks—is no longer under direct ministerial control. They are not part of a ministerial department. They are not answerable day-to-day, minute-by-minute to the prime minister or, in other countries, the president.
When I was young, in Europe at least, these arm’s-length agencies were a small part of government, but now they are a very big part. Over here, that transformation has come about over the past thirty-odd years, since the 1990s, whereas in America it goes back to the 1880s, and especially the 1930s New Deal reforms of President Roosevelt.
“The ‘administrative state’ is simply the machinery for implementing policy and law. ”
In the United Kingdom we used to call these agencies ‘quangos’, but that acronym trivialises the issue. Today, many—in the US, probably most—of the laws to which businesses and even individuals are subject are written and enforced by regulatory agencies, part of the administrative state, rather than passed by Parliament or Congress and enforced by the elected executive. That would surprise John Locke, Montesquieu and James Madison, who developed the principles associated with the separation of powers and constitutionalism.
To some extent, these changes were driven by a perceived need to turn to ‘expertise’. But the effect has been to shift more of our government away from our elected representatives and to unelected technocrats. An underlying premise at the heart of my book (although not something that I can prove) is that, since any and every part of government eventually fails—and may fail very badly, as we saw with the collapse of the financial system in 2008—there is a risk that people will get fed up with this shift to governance by unelected experts. The people will get fed up with their lives being affected so much by people who they didn’t have a chance to vote for and can’t vote out. If that happened, it would be dangerous as the genius of representative democracy is that it separates how we as citizens feel about the system of government from how we feel about the government of the day. So how can we avoid that without losing the benefits of delegation? That is what the debate about the administrative state is ultimately about: its dryness belies its importance to how we govern ourselves.
“The genius of representative democracy is that it separates how we as citizens feel about the system of government from how we feel about the government of the day”
It matters, therefore, that the array of agencies in the administrative state varies enormously in the degree to which they are formally insulated from politics. My book Unelected Power is about ‘independent agencies’, by which I mean an agency that is insulated day-to-day from both the legislative branch (Parliament or Congress) and also from the executive branch of government (the prime minister or president). Central banks are the most important example of such independent agencies in modern times, wielding a wide range of monetary and regulatory powers….(More + selection of five books to read)”.
Internet of Things for Smart Cities: Technologies, Big Data and Security
This book introduces the concept of smart city as the potential solution to the challenges created by urbanization. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers novel features with minimum human intervention in smart cities. This book describes different components of Internet of Things (IoT) for smart cities including sensor technologies, communication technologies, big data analytics and security….(More)”.
Innovation Spaces: New Places for Collective Intelligence?
Chapter by Laure Morel, Laurent Dupont and Marie‐Reine Boudarel in Collective Innovation Processes: Principles and Practices: “Innovation is a complex and multifaceted notion, sometimes difficult to explain. The category of innovation spaces includes co‐working spaces, third places, Living Labs, open labs, incubators, accelerators, hothouses, canteens, FabLabs, MakerSpaces, Tech Shops, hackerspaces, design factories, and so on. Working based on the communities’ needs and motivations is a key stage in order to overcome the obstacles of collective innovation and lay favorable foundations for the emergence of shared actions that can be converted into collective innovation projects. Organizations are multiplying the opportunities of creating collective intelligence at the service of innovation. Consequently, an innovation space must favor creativity and sharing. It must also promote individual and collective learning. Collective intelligence involves the networking of multiple types of intelligence, the combination of knowledge and competences, as well as cooperation and collaboration between them….(More)”.
When the Rule of Law Is Not Working
A conversation with Karl Sigmund at Edge: “…Now, I’m getting back to evolutionary game theory, the theory of evolution of cooperation and the social contract, and how the social contract can be subverted by corruption. That’s what interests me most currently. Of course, that is not a new story. I believe it explains a lot of what I see happening in my field and in related fields. The ideas that survive are the ideas that are fruitful in the sense of quickly producing a lot of publications, and that’s not necessarily correlated with these ideas being important to advancing science.
Corruption is a wicked problem, wicked in the technical sense of sociology, and it’s not something that will go away. You can reduce it, but as soon as you stop your efforts, it comes back again. Of course, there are many sides to corruption, but everybody seems now to agree that it is a very important problem. In fact, there was a Gallop Poll recently in which people were asked what the number one problem in today’s world is. You would think it would be climate change or overpopulation, but it turned out the majority said “corruption.” So, it’s a problem that is affecting us deeply.
There are so many different types of corruption, but the official definition is “a misuse of public trust for private means.” And this need not be by state officials; it could be also by CEOs, or by managers of non-governmental organizations, or by a soccer referee for that matter. It is always the misuse of public trust for private means, which of course takes many different forms; for instance, you have something called pork barreling, which is a wonderful expression in the United States, or embezzlement of funds, and so on.
I am mostly interested in the effect of bribery upon the judiciary system. If the trust in contracts breaks down, then the economy breaks down, because trust is at the root of the economy. There are staggering statistics which illustrate that the economic welfare of a state is closely related to the corruption perception index. Every year there are statistics about corruption published by organizations such as Transparency International or other such non-governmental organizations. It is truly astonishing how close this gradient between the different countries on the corruption level aligns with the gradient in welfare, in household income and things like this.
The paralyzing effect of this type of corruption upon the economy is something that is extremely interesting. Lots of economists are now turning their interest to that, which is new. In the 1970s, there was a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Gunnar Myrdal, who said that corruption is practically taboo as a research topic among economists. This has well changed in the decades since. It has become a very interesting topic for law students, for students of economy, sociology, and historians, of course, because corruption has always been with us. This is now a booming field, and I would like to approach this with evolutionary game theory.
Evolutionary game theory has a long tradition, and I have witnessed its development practically from the beginning. Some of the most important pioneers were Robert Axelrod and John Maynard Smith. In particular, Axelrod who in the late ‘70s wrote a truly seminal book called The Evolution of Cooperation, which iterated the prisoner’s dilemma. He showed that there is a way out of the social dilemma, which is based on reciprocity. This surprised economists, particularly, game theoreticians. He showed that by viewing social dilemmas in the context of a population where people learn from each other, where the social learning imitates whatever type of behavior is currently the best, you can place it into a context where cooperative strategies, like tit for tat, based on reciprocation can evolve….(More)”.
Democracy Disconnected: Participation and Governance in a City of the South
Book by Fiona Anciano and Laurence Piper: “Why is dissatisfaction with local democracy endemic, despite the spread of new participatory institutions? This book argues that a key reason is the limited power of elected local officials, especially to produce the City. City Hall lacks control over key aspects of city decision-making, especially under conditions of economic globalisation and rapid urbanisation in the urban South.
Demonstrated through case studies of daily politics in Hout Bay, Democracy Disconnected shows how Cape Town residents engage local rule. In the absence of democratic control, urban rule in the Global South becomes a complex and contingent framework of multiple and multilevel forms of urban governance (FUG) that involve City Hall, but are not directed by it. Bureaucratic governance coexists alongside market, developmental and informal forms of governance. This disconnect of democracy from urban governance segregates people spatially, socially, but also politically. Thus, while the residents of Hout Bay may live next to each other, they do not live with each other…(More)”.
Nervous States
Book by William Davies: “Why do we no longer trust experts, facts and statistics? Why has politics become so fractious and warlike? What caused the populist political upheavals of recent years?How can the history of ideas help us understand our present?
In this bold and far-reaching exploration of our new political landscape, William Davies reveals how feelings have come to reshape our world. Drawing deep on history, philosophy, psychology and economics, he shows how some of the fundamental assumptions that defined the modern world have dissolved. With advances in science and medicine, the division between mind and body is no longer so clear-cut. The spread of digital and military technology has left us not quite at war nor exactly at peace. In the murky new space between mind and body, between war and peace, lie nervous states: with all of us relying increasingly on feeling rather than fact.
In a book of profound insight and astonishing breadth, William Davies reveals the origins of this new political reality. Nervous States is a compelling and essential guide to the turbulent times we are living through….(More)”.
Ctrl Alt Delete: How Politics and the Media Crashed Our Democracy
Book by Tom Baldwin: We all know something has gone wrong: people hate politics, loathe the media and are now scared of each other too. Journalist and one-time senior political advisor Tom Baldwin tells the riveting–often terrifying–story of how a tidal wave of information overwhelmed democracy’s sandcastle defenses against extremism and falsehood.
Ctrl Alt Delete exposes the struggle for control between a rapacious 24-hour media and terrified politicians that has loosened those leaders’ grip on truth as the internet rips the ground out from under them. It explains how dependency on data, algorithms and digital technology brought about the rise of the Alt Right, the Alt Left and a triumphant army of trolls driving people apart. And it warns of the rise of those threatening to delete what remains of democracy: resurgent populists in Westminster, the White House and the Kremlin, but also–just as often–liberals fearful of mob rule.
This is an explosive, brutally honest and sometimes funny account of what we all got wrong, and how to put it right again. It will change the way you look at the world–and especially the everyday technology that crashed our democracy….(More)”.