Mark R. Beissinger's Books

Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State

By: Mark R. Beissinger

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Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State

By: Mark R. Beissinger

This 2002 study examines the process of the disintegration of the Soviet state.

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Page Count

524

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

052100148X

ISBN 13

9780521001489

The Revolutionary City

Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion

By: Mark R. Beissinger

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The Revolutionary City

Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion

By: Mark R. Beissinger

How and why cities have become the predominant sites for revolutionary upheavals in the contemporary world Examining the changing character of revolution around the world, The Revolutionary City focuses on the impact that the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities exercises on revolutionary processes and outcomes. Once predominantly an urban and armed affair, revolutions in the twentieth century migrated to the countryside, as revolutionaries searched for safety from government repression and discovered the peasantry as a revolutionary force. But at the end of the twentieth century, as urban centers grew, revolution returned to the city—accompanied by a new urban civic repertoire espousing the containment of predatory government and relying on visibility and the power of numbers rather than arms. Using original data on revolutionary episodes since 1900, public opinion surveys, and engaging examples from around the world, Mark Beissinger explores the causes and consequences of the urbanization of revolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beissinger examines the compact nature of urban revolutions, as well as their rampant information problems and heightened uncertainty. He investigates the struggle for control over public space, why revolutionary contention has grown more pacified over time, and how revolutions involving the rapid assembly of hundreds of thousands in central urban spaces lead to diverse, ad hoc coalitions that have difficulty producing substantive change. The Revolutionary City provides a new understanding of how revolutions happen and what they might look like in the future.

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Page Count

592

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691224757

ISBN 13

9780691224756

The Political Power of Bad Ideas

Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave

By: Mark Lawrence Schrad

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The Political Power of Bad Ideas

Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave

By: Mark Lawrence Schrad

In The Political Power of Bad Ideas, Mark Schrad uses one of the greatest oddities of modern history--the broad diffusion throughout the Western world of alcohol-control legislation in the early twentieth century--to make a powerful argument about how bad policy ideas achieve international success. His could an idea that was widely recognized by experts as bad before adoption, and which ultimately failed everywhere, come to be adopted throughout the world? To answer the question, Schrad utilizes an institutionalist approach and focuses in particular on the United States, Sweden, and Russia/the USSR. Conventional wisdom, based largely on the U.S. experience, blames evangelical zealots for the success of the temperance movement. Yet as Schrad shows, ten countries, along with numerous colonial possessions, enacted prohibition laws. In virtually every case, the consequences were disastrous, and in every country the law was ultimately repealed. Schrad concentrates on the dynamic interaction of ideas and political institutions, tracing the process through which concepts of dubious merit gain momentum and achieve credibility as they wend their way through institutional structures. He also shows that national policy and institutional environments count: the policy may have been broadly adopted, but countries dealt with the issue in different ways. While The Political Power of Bad Ideas focuses on one legendary episode, its argument about how and why bad policies achieve legitimacy applies far more broadly. It also extends beyond the simplistic notion that "ideas matter" to show how they influence institutional contexts and interact with a nation's political actors, institutions, and policy dynamics.

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Page Count

315

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199742359

ISBN 13

9780199742356

Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power

By: Mark R. Beissinger

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Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power

By: Mark R. Beissinger

How does the excessive bureaucratization of central planning affect politics in communist countries? Mark Beissinger suggests an answer through this history of the Soviet Scientific Management movement and its contemporary descendants, raising at the same time broader questions about the political consequences of economic systems. Beissinger traces the rise and decline of administrative strategies throughout Soviet history, focusing on the roles of managerial technique and disciplinary coercion. He argues that over-bureaucratization leads to a succession of national crises of effectiveness, which political leaders use to challenge the power of entrenched elites and to consolidate their rule. It also encourages leaders to resort to radical administrative strategies--technocratic utopias, mass mobilization, and discipline campaigns--and gives rise to a cycling syndrome, as similar problems and solutions reappear over time. Beissinger gives a new perspective and interpretation of Soviet history through the prism of organizational theory. He also provides a comprehensive history of the Soviet rationalization movement from Lenin to Gorbachev that describes the recurring attractions and tensions between politicians and management experts, as well as the reception accorded Western management techniques in the Soviet factory and management-training classroom. Beissinger uses a number of unusual sources: the personal archive of Aleksei Gastev, the foremost Soviet Taylorist of the 1920s; published Soviet archival documents; unpublished Soviet government documents and dissertations on management science and executive training; interviews with Soviet management scientists; and the author's personal observations of managers attending a three-month executive training program in the Soviet Union. Beissinger's skillful handling of this singular material will attract the attention of political scientists, historians, and economists, especially those working in Soviet studies.

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Page Count

388

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674794907

ISBN 13

9780674794900

Risks and Decisions for Conservation and Environmental Management

By: Mark Burgman

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Risks and Decisions for Conservation and Environmental Management

By: Mark Burgman

This book outlines how to conduct a complete environmental risk assessment. The first part documents the psychology and philosophy of risk perception and assessment, introducing a taxonomy of uncertainty and the importance of context. It provides a critical examination of the use and abuse of expert judgement and goes on to outline approaches to hazard identification and subjective ranking that account for uncertainty and context. The second part of the book describes technical tools that can assist risk assessments to be transparent and internally consistent. These include interval arithmetic, ecotoxicological methods, logic trees and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods have an established place in risk assessments in many disciplines and their strengths and weaknesses are explored. The last part of the book outlines some new approaches, including p-bounds and information-gap theory, and describes how quantitative and subjective assessments can be used to make transparent decisions.

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Page Count

516

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521543010

ISBN 13

9780521543019

The Revolutionary City

Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion

By: Mark R. Beissinger

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The Revolutionary City

Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion

By: Mark R. Beissinger

List of illustrations -- List of tables -- Preface -- Introduction: revolution and the city -- A spatial theory of revolution -- The growth and urbanization of revolution -- The urban civic revolutionary moment -- The repression-disruption trade-off and the shifting odds of success -- Revolutionary contingency and the city -- Public space and urban revolution -- The individual and collective action in urban civic revolution -- The pacification of revolution -- The evolving impact of revolution -- The city and the future of revolution -- Appendix 1. construction of cross-national data on revolutionary episodes -- Appendix 2. revolutionary episodes, 1900-2014 -- Appendix 3. data sources used in statistical analyses -- Appendix 4. choices of statistical models.

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Page Count

592

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691224765

ISBN 13

9780691224763

Book's by Mark R. Beissinger

Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State

Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State

The Revolutionary City

The Revolutionary City

The Political Power of Bad Ideas

The Political Power of Bad Ideas

Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power

Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power

Risks and Decisions for Conservation and Environmental Management

Risks and Decisions for Conservation and Environmental Management

The Revolutionary City

The Revolutionary City

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