How social media is giving rise to a chaotic new form of politics As people spend increasing proportions of their daily lives using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, they are being invited to support myriad political causes by sharing, liking, endorsing, or downloading. Chain reactions caused by these tiny acts of participation form a growing part of collective action today, from neighborhood campaigns to global political movements. Political Turbulence reveals that, in fact, most attempts at collective action online do not succeed, but some give rise to huge mobilizations—even revolutions. Drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events, this book shows how mobilizations that succeed are unpredictable, unstable, and often unsustainable. To better understand this unruly new force in the political world, the authors use experiments that test how social media influence citizens deciding whether or not to participate. They show how different personality types react to social influences and identify which types of people are willing to participate at an early stage in a mobilization when there are few supporters or signals of viability. The authors argue that pluralism is the model of democracy that is emerging in the social media age—not the ordered, organized vision of early pluralists, but a chaotic, turbulent form of politics. This book demonstrates how data science and experimentation with social data can provide a methodological toolkit for understanding, shaping, and perhaps even predicting the outcomes of this democratic turbulence.

In this ambitious work a leading scholar undertakes a full-scale reconceptualization of international relations. Turbulence in World Politics is an entirely new formulation that accounts for the persistent turmoil of today's world, even as it also probes the impact of the microelectronic revolution, the postindustrial order, and the many other fundamental political, economic, and social changes under way since World War II. To develop this formulation, James N. Rosenau digs deep into the workings of communities and the orientations of individuals that culminate in collective action on the world stage. His concern is less with questions of epistemology and methodology and more with the development of a comprehensive theoryone that is different from other paradigms in the field by virtue of its focus on the tumult in contemporary international relations. The book depicts a bifurcation of global politics in which an autonomous multi-centric world has emerged as a competitor of the long established state-centric world. A central theme is that the analytic skills of people everywhere are expanding and thereby altering the context in which international processes unfold. Rosenau shows how the macro structures of global politics have undergone transformations linked to those at the micro level: long-standing structures of authority weaken, collectivities fragment, subgroups become more powerful at the expense of states and governments, national loyalties are redirected, and new issues crowd onto the global agenda. These turbulent dynamics foster the simultaneous centralizing and decentralizing tendencies that are now bifurcating global structures. "Rosenau's new work is an imaginative leap into world politics in the twenty-first century. There is much here to challenge traditional thought of every persuasion." --Michael Brecher, McGill University

This timely book investigates the experiences of employees at all levels of Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) during a ten-year period of dramatic organizational change. As Boeing transformed itself, workers and managers contended with repeated downsizing, shifting corporate culture, new roles for women, outsourcing, mergers, lean production, and rampant technological change. Drawing on a unique blend of quantitative and qualitative research, the authors consider how management strategies affected the well-being of Boeing employees, as well as their attitudes toward their jobs and their company. Boeing employees’ experience holds vital lessons for other employees, the leaders of other firms determined to thrive in today’s era of inescapable and growing global competition, as well as public officials concerned about the well-being of American workers and companies.

This edited collection features state-of-the art scholarship by diverse contributors on a contemporary array of compelling and contentious gender and politics concerns.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Electoral Shocks: The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World offers a novel perspective on British elections, focusing on the role of electoral shocks in the context of increasing electoral volatility. It demonstrates and explains the long-term trend in volatility, how shocks have contributed to the level of electoral volatility, and also which parties have benefited from the ensuing volatility. It follows in the tradition of British Election Study books, providing a comprehensive account of specific election outcomes- the General Elections of 2015 and 2017-and a more general and novel approach to understanding electoral change. The authors examine five electoral shocks that affected the elections of 2015 and 2017: the rise in immigration after 2004, particularly from Eastern Europe; the Global Financial Crisis prior to 2010; the coalition government of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats between 2010 and 2015; the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014; and the European Union Referendum in 2016. The focus on electoral shocks offers an overarching explanation for the volatility in British elections, alongside the long-term trends that have led to this point. It offers a way to understand the rise and fall of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Labour's disappointing 2015 performance and its later unexpected gains, the collapse in support for the Liberal Democrats, the dramatic gains of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in 2015, and the continuing period of tumultuous politics that has followed the EU referendum and the General Election of 2017. It provides a new way of understanding electoral choice in Britain, and also beyond, and a better understanding of the outcomes of recent elections.

In the third volume of his series on Franklin Roosevelt, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian focuses on the turbulent final years of FDR’s first term. A measure of economic recovery revived political conflict and emboldened Roosevelt’s critics to denounce “that man in the White house.” To his left were demagogues—Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Dr. Townsend. To his right were the champions of the old order—ex-president Herbert Hoover, the American Liberty League, and the august Supreme Court. For a time, the New Deal seemed to lose its momentum. But in 1935 FDR rallied and produced a legislative record even more impressive than the Hundred Days of 1933—a set of statutes that transformed the social and economic landscape of American life. In 1936 FDR coasted to reelection on a landslide. Schlesinger has his usual touch with colorful personalities and draws a warmly sympathetic portrait of Alf M. Landon, the Republican candidate of 1936. “One of the most important historical enterprises of our time.”—Saturday Review “Vividly portrays…the concluding years of Roosevelt’s first term…[and] the sweep and excitement of an era more historically dramatic than most.”—Time

This book by a leading scholar of international relations examines the origins of the new world disorder – the resurgence of Russia, the rise of populism in the West, deep tensions in the Atlantic alliance, and the new strategic partnership between China and Russia – and asks why so many assumptions about how the world might look after the Cold War – liberal, democratic and increasingly global – have proven to be so wrong. To explain this, Michael Cox goes back to the moment of disintegration and examines what the Cold War was about, why the Cold War ended, why the experts failed to predict it, and how different writers and policy-makers (and not just western ones) have viewed the tumultuous period between 1989 when the liberal order seemed on top of the world through to the current period when confidence in the western project seems to have disappeared almost completely.