Rejecting the notion that policy analysis and planning are value-free technical endeavors, an argumentative approach takes into account the ways that policy is affected by other factors, including culture, discourse, and emotion. The contributors to this new collection consider how far argumentative policy analysis has come during the past two decades and how its theories continue to be refined through engagement with current thinking in social theory and with the real-life challenges faci...

In recent years, a number of large population-based biobanks – genetic databases that combine genetic information derived from blood samples with personal data about environment, medical history, lifestyle or genealogy – have been set up in order to study the interface between disease, and genetic and environmental factors. Unsurprisingly, these studies have sparked a good deal of controversy and the ethical and social implications have been widely debated.Biobanks: Governance ...

This book is a comprehensive introduction to media ethics and an exploration of how it must change to adapt to today's media revolution. Using an ethical framework for the new 'mixed media' ethics – taking in the global, interactive media produced by both citizens and professionals – Stephen J. A. Ward discusses the ethical issues which occur in both mainstream and non-mainstream media, from newspapers and broadcast to social media users and bloggers. He re-defines traditional conceptions ...

Health Care in Canada examines the challenges faced by the Canadian health care system, a subject of much public debate. In this book Katherine Fierlbeck provides an in-depth discussion of how health care decisions are shaped by politics and why there is so much disagreement over how to fix the system.Many Canadians point to health care as a source of national pride; others are highly critical of the system's shortcomings and call for major reform. Yet meaningful debate ca...

Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure is a revised second edition of the volume that guided students and scholars through the intellectual demands of comparative politics. Retaining a focus on the field's research schools, it now pays parallel attention to the pragmatics of causal research. Mark Lichbach begins with a review of discovery, explanation and evidence and Alan Zuckerman argues for explanations with social mechanisms. Ira Katznelson, writing on structuralist ...

The fully revised and updated new edition of this textbook continues to provide the most accessible overview of the main approaches in the study of public policy. It seeks to review the most common and widely used frameworks in the study of policy analysis:institutionsgroups and networkssociety and the economyindividual interestsideas.The book explains each one, offers constructive criticisms and explores their ...

Biology and politics have converged today across much of the industrialized world. Debates about genetically modified organisms, cloning, stem cells, animal patenting, and new reproductive technologies crowd media headlines and policy agendas. Less noticed, but no less important, are the rifts that have appeared among leading Western nations about the right way to govern innovation in genetics and biotechnology. These significant differences in law and policy, and in ethical analysis, may ...

Is Habermas’s concept of the public sphere still relevant in an age of globalization, when the transnational flows of people and information have become increasingly intensive and when the nation-state can no longer be taken granted as the natural frame for social and political debate? This is the question posed with characteristic acuity by Nancy Fraser in her influential article ‘Transnationalizing the Public Sphere?’ Challenging careless uses of the term ‘global public sphere’, Fraser r...

Online technologies excite the public imagination with narratives of democratization. The Internet is a political medium, borne of democracy, but is it democratizing?Late modern democracies are characterized by civic apathy, public skepticism, disillusionment with politics, and general disinterest in conventional political process. And yet, public interest in blogging, online news, net-based activism, collaborative news filtering, and online networking reveal an el...

The phenomenal growth of global pharmaceutical sales and the quest for innovation are driving an unprecedented search for human test subjects, particularly in middle- and low-income countries. Our hope for medical progress increasingly depends on the willingness of the world's poor to participate in clinical drug trials. While these experiments often provide those in need with vital and previously unattainable medical resources, the outsourcing and offshoring of trials also create new prob...

'Deliberative democracy' is often dismissed as a set of small-scale, academic experiments. This volume seeks to demonstrate how the deliberative ideal can work as a theory of democracy on a larger scale. It provides a new way of thinking about democratic engagement across the spectrum of political action, from towns and villages to nation states, and from local networks to transnational, even global systems. Written by a team of the world's leading deliberative theorists, Deliberative Syst...

An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned...