BiblioVault - Books about Relationship

Archival Virtue

Relationship, Obligation, and the Just Archives

Scott Cline

Society of American Archivists, 2021

Archival literature is full of what we do and how we do it. In Archival Virtue, Scott Cline raises questions that grapple with the meaning of what we do and, perhaps more important, who we are. A book about archivists as individuals and as community, Archival Virtue explores ideas of moral commitment, truth, difference, and just behavior in the pursuit of archival ideals.

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Lester J. Cappon and the Relationship of History, Archives, and Scholarship

Richard J. Cox

Society of American Archivists, 2004

The relationship of history, archival studies, and the emergent information disciplines continues to be a topic of debate in the modern archival profession. Lester J. Cappon (1900-1981) is the quintessential proponent of archival knowledge based on historical scholarship, and his writings remain prescient decades after his death, writes Richard J. Cox in his excellent introduction. The 12 essays collected for the first time in a single volume cover the range of Cappon's primary interests: archival theory, archival collecting and appraisal, the relationship between archivists and historians or archives and history, and documentary editing. These essays, which reflect Cappon's considerable soul searching about the knowledge and identity of the archivist, and his own strong sense of history and archives, continue to be relevant today and make an important contribution to the professional discourse.

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Relationship

The Heart of Helping People

Helen Harris Perlman

University of Chicago Press, 1979

"Like the subject about which she writes, Perlman engages the reader immediately, permitting a view into the author's rich and varied experiences, threaded throughout with profound compassion for all those who seek, suffer, and strive. . . . [This is] a welcome and wise effort, written with grace, sense and deep humanism. Were it in my power I would make it mandatory reading for all those who seek to offer others help."—Shirley Cooper, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry

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Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World

The Relationship to Youth Employment

Edited by Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Many countries have social security systems that are currently financially unsustainable. Economists and policy makers have long studied this problem and identified two key causes. First, as declining birth rates raise the share of older persons in the population, the ratio of retirees to benefits-paying employees increases. Second, as falling mortality rates increase lifespans, retirees receive benefits for longer than in the past. Further exacerbating the situation, the provisions of social security programs often provide strong incentives to leave the labor force.

Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World offers comparative analysis from twelve countries and examines the issue of age in the labor force. A notable group of contributors analyzes the relationship between incentives to retire and the proportion of older persons in the workforce, the effects that reforming social security would have on the employment rates of older workers, and how extending labor force participation will affect program costs. Dispelling the myth that employing older workers takes jobs away from the young, this timely volume challenges a raft of existing assumptions about the relationship between old and young people in the workforce.

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United States–Latin American Relations, 1850–1903

Establishing a Relationship

Edited by Thomas M. Leonard

University of Alabama Press, 1999

During the second half of the 19th century several forces in the United States, Latin America, and Europe converged to set the stage for the establishment of a more permanent relationship between the United States and Latin America. The key factors--security, economics, and modernization--created both commonalities and conflicts between and among regions. In this volume, scholars examine not only the domestic but also the geopolitical forces that encouraged and guided development of diplomatic relations in this rapidly changing period.

As the contributors note, by the end of the century, economic interests dominated the relationship that eventually developed. This period saw the building of a string of U.S. naval bases in Latin America and the Caribbean, the rapid industrialization of the United States and the development of a substantial export market, the entrance of many U.S. entrepreneurs into Latin American countries, and the first two inter-American conferences. By the century's end, the United States appeared as the dominant partner in the relationship, a perception that earned it the "imperialist" label.

This volume untangles this complex relationship by examining U.S. relations with Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Central America, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay from the perspective of both the United States and the individual Latin American countries.

A companion volume to United States-Latin American Relations, 1800-1850: The Formative Generations, edited by T. Ray Shurbutt, this book establishes a historical perspective crucial to understanding contemporary diplomatic relations.

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Whenever Two or More Are Gathered

Relationship as the Heart of Ethical Discourse

Michael M. Harmon and O. C. McSwite

University of Alabama Press, 2011

Makes the case for human relationship as the proper foundation of administrative ethics

This study of the critical role of ethics and moral responsibility in the field of public administration, Michael M. Harmon and O. C. McSwite posit that administrative ethics, as presently conceived and practiced, is largely a failure, incapable of delivering on its original promise of effectively regulating official conduct in order to promote the public interest. They argue that administrative ethics is compromised at its very foundations by two core assumptions: that human beings act rationally and that language is capable of conveying clear, stable, and unambiguous principles of ethical conduct.

The result is the illusion that values, principles, and rules of ethical conduct can be specified in workably clear ways, in particular, through their formalization in official codes of ethics; that people are capable of comprehending and responding to them as they are intended; and that the rewards and punishments attached to them will be effective in structuring daily behavior.

In a series of essays that draw on both fiction and film, as well as the disciplines of pragmatism, organizational theory, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and economics, Harmon and McSwite make their case for human relationship as the proper foundation of administrative ethics. “Exercising responsible ethical practice requires attaining a special kind of relationship with other people. Relationship is how the pure freedom that resides in the human psyche—for ethical choice, creativity, or original action of any type—can be brought into the structured world of human social relations without damaging or destroying it.” Furthermore, they make the case for dropping the term “ethics” in favor of the term “responsibility,” as “responsibility accentuates the social [relational] nature of moral action.”

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