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The mid-1990s saw the rise of an important movement: a recognition that organizational knowledge, in its various forms and attributes, could be an important source of competitive advantage in the marketplace. Knowledge management has become one of the core competencies in today's competitive environment, where so much value in companies resides in their people, systems, and processes. This book examines a variety of important knowledge-related topics, some of which has been previously published in such journals as the Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, and the Sloan Management Review, such as the use of informal networks, communities of practice, the impact of knowledge on successful alliances, social capital and trust, narrative and storytelling and the use of human intermediaries in the knowledge management process. The book includes contributions from such leading thinkers as Lawrence Prusak, Dorothy Leonard, Eric Lesser, Rob Cross, and David Snowden. This book synthesizes some of the best thinking by the IBM Institute for Knowledge-Based Organizations, a think tank whose research agenda focuses on the management methods for deriving tangible business value from knowledge management and their real-world application.

Conventional understandings of U.S. foreign policy see Congress as an obstacle to multilateral cooperation. Kathryn Lavelle challenges the traditional view by considering Congress within the three branches of American government, as well as within networks of global politics. Using the notion of “Congressional advocacy” to refer to the process wherein American legislators use the institutional mechanisms of Congress to influence public policy and resource allocation decisions in international organizations, Legislating International Organization shows how members of Congress attach policy prescriptions to legislation to build support for measures related to the IMF and World Bank. It demonstrates that despite delays and unwelcome demands, Congress has always provided requisite funding. Each chapter asks how this result has been possible in the face of considerable apathy and opposition? Based on direct experience, observations, interviews, and extensive archival research, the book argues that in each historical stage, exogenous changes in the international political economy combined with endogenous procedural change in the legislature to create and erode constituencies for the work of the IMF and World Bank. As a result of the Cold War, financial crises, and related developments in international lending, the efforts of members of Congress and interest groups have gradually intermingled with that of transnational groups. The relationship between Congress and the IMF and World Bank is particularly important today where the collapse of the traditional constituencies in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis poses a serious challenge to the future of multilateralism in American politics.

This book is the fruit of twenty years’ reflection on Islamic charities, both in practical terms and as a key to understand the crisis in contemporary Islam. On the one hand Islam is undervalued as a global moral and political force whose admirable qualities are exemplified in its strong tradition of charitable giving. On the other hand, it suffers from a crisis of authority that cannot be blamed entirely on the history of colonialism and stigmatization to which Muslims have undoubtedly been subjected – most recently, as a result of the “war on terror”. The book consists of seventeen previously published chapters, with a general Introduction and new prefatory material for each chapter. The first nine chapters review the current situation of Islamic charities from many different viewpoints – theological, historical, diplomatic, legal, sociological and ethnographic – with first-hand data from the United States, Britain, Israel–Palestine, Mali and Indonesia. Chapters 10 to 17 expand the coverage to explore the potential for a twenty-first century “Islamic humanism” that would be devised by Muslims in the light of the human sciences and institutionalized throughout the Muslim world. This means addressing contentious topics such as religious toleration and the meaning of jihad. The intended readership includes academics and students at all levels, professionals concerned with aid and development, and all who have an interest in the future of Islam.

Arab New York is an ethnographic exploration of how everyday life and politics intersect in the diverse and complex Arab communities of New York City. The book argues that politics and contention move into everyday social spaces in order to circumvent many of the most challenging barriers to Arab American political participation. To show this, it studies Arab communities in practice, places where Arab Americans identify together as Arab and engage in collective work: in particular, community organizations providing services to newly immigrated Arabs and social movement organizations advocating on behalf of freedom and justice in their countries of origin. The book covers issues of forming community in diaspora, young women’s political engagement, differences between different approaches to pro-Palestine activism, and the challenges and possibilities of organizing on behalf of the Arab spring revolutions. Through detailed portraits of community organizations and activist groups, Arab New York helps explain why politics is everywhere for Arab Americans, and how their experiences of contestation, exclusion and acceptance shape their lives.

Communist Upbringing under Stalin: Young Communists and War in a Socialist Society, 1929-1945 examines Stalinist mass youth culture in the period of the Great Terror and World War II. For the Bolsheviks, youth were the “new people” who would someday build communism. Despite Stalinist assertions that the country was marching inexorably toward communism, though, there was no blueprint for raising a socialist generation. “Communist upbringing”—the program of moral socialization of the Young Communist League (Komsomol)—absorbed the violent atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s. Even as it surrounded them with violence, Stalin’s regime provided young people with opportunities, shaping socialist youth culture and socialism more broadly through the threat and experience of war.

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. This book explores the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The book's nuanced look at working-class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the book shows, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, the book provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

From the Reagan years to the present, the labor movement has faced a profoundly hostile climate. As America’s largest labor federation, the AFL-CIO was forced to reckon with severe political and economic headwinds. Yet the AFL-CIO survived, consistently fighting for programs that benefited millions of Americans, including social security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, and universal health care. With a membership of more than 13 million, it was also able to launch the largest labor march in American history--1981’s Solidarity Day--and to play an important role in politics. In a history that spans from 1979 to the present, Timothy J. Minchin tells a sweeping, national story of how the AFL-CIO sustained itself and remained a significant voice in spite of its powerful enemies and internal constraints. Full of details, characters, and never-before-told stories drawn from unexamined, restricted, and untapped archives, as well as interviews with crucial figures involved with the organization, this book tells the definitive history of the modern AFL-CIO.

International organizations (IOs) matter. Based on extensive interviews and exchanges with key players in IOs in the past decade, this book uncovers the regular working world of IOs, to challenge the orthodox view that member states alone decide what IOs do and how they operate. This book provides a realistic and provocative account of the way IOs really work, a picture that would be recognized by those who work there. The Working World of International Organizations specifically examines three groups of players in IOs—state representatives, as proxy for states and often with schizophrenic demands, the head of IOs as diplomat, manager, and politician, and the staff of the permanent secretariat with their competing solutions. It explores their actions and interactions by asking who or what shapes their decisions; how and when decisions are made; how players interact within an IO; and how the interactions vary across six IOs. It argues that each and all of them must contribute if any progress is to be achieved in managing global problems. It shows why this is the case by examining how decisions are made in three key areas: agenda-setting, financing, and decentralization.

Principles of Social Change offers a comprehensive guide to the development of community interventions and provides the tools and resources to initiate and sustain progress. I examine various strategies developed by community activists, coalitions, and social scientists to break down what motivates people. What worked and why? What can be applied to other scenarios? I also discuss practical solutions to complicated issues, such as protecting children’s well-being, combating abuses of power, providing affordable housing, and cleaning up the environment. These ideas are designed to bring about enduring systemic changes at all levels of community life. Although activists such as Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Saul Alinsky, Jane Addams, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. have effected transformational change, everyday citizens and social entrepreneurs have also made tremendously important and sustainable contributions. The five principles reviewed in this book can be used by anyone who wants to bring comprehensive, structural solutions to some of our most vexing social issues. These principles and strategies demonstrate that there is, in fact, a tangible way to achieve change—ordinary people throughout history have done it. This guide is intended for anyone with a desire to improve his or her community. It is expressly for activists with a wide range of causes, from changing environmental regulations to helping disadvantaged children, or other complicated social problems. The five principles described in this book are essential to solving these problems, and they carry the potential to influence new generations of engaged citizens, community activists, and students of psychology and related social sciences. By understanding these principles, community leaders and activists will be poised to bring about a more just and humane society.