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52 books match the query 'Public administration' and 3 start with d

cover of Demos Rising: Democracy and the Popular Construction of Public Power in France, 1800–1850

Demos Rising

Democracy and the Popular Construction of Public Power in France, 1800–1850

Stephen W. Sawyer

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A political history exploring the concept of demos in the French government during the period of 1800 to 1850.
 
In his previous book, Demos Assembled, historian Stephen W. Sawyer offered a transatlantic account of the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. In Demos Rising, he presents readers of political history with a prequel whose ambitious claim is that a genuine demos became possible in France only with the development of government regulation and administration. Focusing on democracy as a form of administration rather than as a form of sovereignty allows Sawyer to explore urban planning, work and private enterprise, health administration, and much more as cornerstones of a self-governing society of equals.
 
Examining the period between 1800 and 1850, Sawyer studies a set of thinkers who debated at length over the material problems of everyday life, sparking calls for political action and social reform in the face of conflict wreaked by deforestation, urbanization, health crises, labor relations, industrial capitalism, religious tensions, and imperial expansion. The solutions to these problems, Sawyer argues, were sought—and sometimes found—not through elections, as one might assume, but rather through the “care for all” promised by modern administrative power, regulatory intervention, and social welfare programs. By studying this profound transformation in governance, the book wagers, we can better understand the origin and meaning of democracy—even when events in our own time have thrown the concept into doubt.
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cover of Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City

Design, Control, Predict

Logistical Governance in the Smart City

Aaron Shapiro

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

An in-depth look at life in the “smart” city

Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today’s “smart” cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today’s smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies—logistical governance—to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization.

Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city’s facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities’ ongoing crises of criminal justice. 

Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on “10,000-foot views.” Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn’t just help us comprehend urbanism today—it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable.

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cover of Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India

Document Raj

Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India

Bhavani Raman

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created.
 
In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company’s reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.
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