Christopher K. Ansell – författare

What are the conditions for political development and decay, and the likelihood of sustained political order? What are the limits of established rule as we know it? How much stress can systems tackle before they reach some kind of limit? How do governments tackle enduring ambiguity and uncertainty in their systems and environments? These are some of the big questions of our time. Governance in turbulent times may serve as a stress-test of well-known ways of governing in the 21st century. Governance in Turbulent Times discusses this pertinent challenge and suggests how governments and organizations cope with and live with turbulence. The book explores how organizations and institutions respond to precipitous, conflicting, and novel-in short, turbulent-governance challenges. This book is a comprehensive and ground-breaking endeavor to understand how governance systems respond to turbulent challenges, and how turbulent times provide excellent opportunities to investigate the sustainability of governance systems. The book illustrates how politics, administrative scale and complexity, uncertainty, and time constraints can collide to produce turbulence. Building on prior work in organization theory and political science, we argue that turbulence refers to four properties related to the interaction of demands for action: variability, consistency, expectation, and unpredictability. Turbulence occurs where the interaction of demands is experienced as highly variable, inconsistent, unexpected, and/or unpredictable.

Like many organizations and social movements, the Third Republic French labour movement exhibited a marked tendency to schism into competing sectarian organizations. During the roughly 50-year period from the fall of the Paris Commune to the creation of the powerful French Communist Party, the French labour movement shifted from schism to broad-based solidarity and back to schism. In this 2001 book, Ansell analyses the dynamic interplay between political mobilization, organization-building, and ideological articulation that produced these shifts between schism and solidarity. The aim is not only to shed light on the evolution of the Third Republic French labour movement, but also to develop a more generic understanding of schism and solidarity in organizations and social movements. To develop this broader understanding, the book builds on insights drawn from sociological analyses of Protestant sects and anthropological studies of segmentary societies, as well as from organization and social movement theory.

The bundling of political authority into mutually exclusive territorial boundaries - territoriality - is a fundamental principle of modern political organization. Indeed, it provides the foundation for other cherished institutions - national sovereignty, citizenship, the modern welfare state, and democracy. Are globalization, internationalization, and Europeanization conspiring to unbundle territoriality? If so, are sovereignty, citizenship, the welfare state, and democracy unravelling as well? Is a new post-national, non-territorial form of political organization, heralded by the European Union, being born? With a focus on Europe, this volume explores these issues from various substantive and theoretical perspectives. The authors find evidence of the diffusion of authority both within and beyond the state, producing novel institutional arrangements and new modes of governance. But the United States may provide more useful insights into the new dispensation than the idea of a post-national, non-territorial politics. Interest in contemporary challenges to democracy run throughout this volume.

Like many organizations and social movements, the Third Republic French labour movement exhibited a marked tendency to schism into competing sectarian organizations. During the roughly 50-year period from the fall of the Paris Commune to the creation of the powerful French Communist Party, the French labour movement shifted from schism to broad-based solidarity and back to schism. In this 2001 book, Ansell analyses the dynamic interplay between political mobilization, organization-building, and ideological articulation that produced these shifts between schism and solidarity. The aim is not only to shed light on the evolution of the Third Republic French labour movement, but also to develop a more generic understanding of schism and solidarity in organizations and social movements. To develop this broader understanding, the book builds on insights drawn from sociological analyses of Protestant sects and anthropological studies of segmentary societies, as well as from organization and social movement theory.