front cover of The Anonymous Renaissance
The Anonymous Renaissance
Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England
Marcy L. North
University of Chicago Press, 2003
"The Anonymous Renaissance offers a paradigm-shifting look at print culture in early modern England. North demonstrates through sound historical discussions and readings that anonymity was one of the defining practices of Renaissance authorship. It is difficult to overstate the originality and importance of this new study."-Jennifer Summit, Stanford University

The Renaissance was in many ways the beginning of modern and self-conscious authorship, a time when individual genius was celebrated and an author's name could become a book trade commodity. Why, then, did anonymous authorship flourish during the Renaissance rather than disappear? In addressing this puzzle, Marcy L. North reveals the rich history and popularity of anonymity during this period.

The book trade, she argues, created many intriguing and paradoxical uses for anonymity, even as the authorial name became more marketable. Among ecclesiastical debaters, for instance, anonymity worked to conceal identity, but it could also be used to identify the moral character of the author being concealed. In court and coterie circles, meanwhile, authors turned name suppression into a tool for the preservation of social boundaries. Finally, in both print and manuscript, anonymity promised to liberate an authentic female voice, and yet made it impossible to authenticate the gender of an author. In sum, the writers and book producers who helped to create England's literary culture viewed anonymity as a meaningful and useful practice.

Written with clarity and grace, The Anonymous Renaissance will fill a prominent gap in the study of authorship and English literary history.
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The Conditions of Discretion
Joel Handler
Russell Sage Foundation, 1986
This timely book is concerned with interactions between ordinary people and large public bureaucracies—interactions that typically are characterized by mutual frustration and antagonism. In fact, as Joel Handler points out, the procedural guidelines intended to ensure fairness and due process fail to take account of an initial imbalance of power and tend to create adversarial rather than cooperative relationships. When the special education needs of a handicapped child must be determined, parents and school administrators often face an especially painful confrontation. The Conditions of Discretion focuses on one successful approach to educational decision making (developed by the school district of Madison, Wisconsin) in order to illustrate how such interactions can be restructured and enhanced. Madison's creative plan regards parents as part of the solution, not the problem, and uses "lay advocates" to turn conflict into an opportunity for communication. Arrangements such as these, in Handler's analysis, exemplify the theoretical conditions under which discretionary decisions can be made fairly and with the informed participation of all concerned. The Conditions of Discretion offers not only a detailed case study, sympathetically described, but also persuasive assessments of major themes in contemporary legal and social policy—informed consent, bureaucratic change, social movement activity, the relationship of the individual to the state. From these strands, Handler weaves a significant new theory of cooperative decision making that integrates the public and the private, recognizes the importance of values, and preserves autonomy within community.   "A masterful blend of social criticism, social sciences, and humane, constructive thought about the future of the welfare state." —Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School
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Institutional Change, Discretion, and the Making of Modern Congress
An Economic Interpretation
Glenn R. Parker
University of Michigan Press, 1992
Controversial new interpretation of legislators' behavior
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Regulating Infrastructure
Monopoly, Contracts, and Discretion
José A. Gómez-Ibáñez
Harvard University Press, 2006

In the 1980s and ’90s many countries turned to the private sector to provide infrastructure and utilities, such as gas, telephones, and highways—with the idea that market-based incentives would control costs and improve the quality of essential services. But subsequent debacles including the collapse of California’s wholesale electricity market and the bankruptcy of Britain’s largest railroad company have raised troubling questions about privatization. This book addresses one of the most vexing of these: how can government fairly and effectively regulate “natural monopolies”—those infrastructure and utility services whose technologies make competition impractical?

Rather than sticking to economics, José Gómez-Ibáñez draws on history, politics, and a wealth of examples to provide a road map for various approaches to regulation. He makes a strong case for favoring market-oriented and contractual approaches—including private contracts between infrastructure providers and customers as well as concession contracts with the government acting as an intermediary—over those that grant government regulators substantial discretion. Contracts can provide stronger protection for infrastructure customers and suppliers—and greater opportunities to tailor services to their mutual advantage. In some cases, however, the requirements of the firms and their customers are too unpredictable for contracts to work, and alternative schemes may be needed.

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Street-Level Leadership
Discretion and Legitimacy in Front-Line Public Service
Janet Coble Vinzant and Lane Crothers
Georgetown University Press, 1998

Examining public service from the perspective of the worker, this book provides a new framework for understanding the roles and responsibilities of front-line public servants and assessing the appropriateness of their actions.

Public employees who work at street level face some of the most intractable, pervasive, and complex problems in contemporary society. Drawing on more than 1500 hours of observation of police officers and social service workers in four states, this book explores the types of situations they confront, the factors they consider, and the hard choices they make. Presenting numerous cases of how these individuals acted in various situations, the authors show how public servants translate the expectations of administrators and others into legitimate street-level action.

Vinzant and Crothers propose the concept of leadership as a positive and realistic framework for understanding what these public servants do and how they can successfully meet the daily challenges of their very difficult and complex jobs. They show how changing the theory and language we use to describe street-level work can encourage decisions that are responsive both to the needs of the clients being served and to the broader community's need for accountability. They also examine how street-level leadership can change the way agencies recruit, train, and manage these employees and how society defines their role in governance.

This book offers valuable insights for those working in or studying public administration, policy analysis, criminal justice, and social work.

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