J Alexander
Biographic Data
| ID | 3652 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Alexander |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Alexander |
| SIGNATURE | ALEXANDER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4627-6665 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 109 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Authoritarianism in US State Policy and its Impact on Nonprofit Civil Liberties
Across the globe, there has been a selective closure of civic space and a corresponding increase in scholarly research exploring the impact of authoritarianism on civil society organizations. This article examines the rollback of nonprofit First Amendment rights in U.S. states, an area overlooked to date by civil society scholars. A framework for categorizing authoritarian strategies used against nonprofits outside the U.S. is applied to current …
Attorney General Edward W. Brooke, the Politics of Gradualism and Immediacy, and the Struggle for Civil Rights
In the second half of the twentieth century, Edward W. Brooke became one of the best known and most highly respected African American political leaders in the nation. He believed that he could achieve more for civil rights within the Republican Party than without. For Brooke, Republican Party membership was more than a tool to ensure reelection in Massachusetts, where African Americans comprised only 2 percent of the population. As a Republican, …
CSO Advocacy and Managing Risk in Hybrid Regimes
The following study examined advocacy strategies of human rights CSOs in Colombia; how they defended and expanded civic space for vulnerable populations, managed risk and characterized their relationships with INGOs. Twenty-six organizational leaders were interviewed. Results indicate that when under pressure, CSOs mitigate their mission, focus on culturally expressive activities, and avoid regions or topics. Proactive strategies used to advance …
Technology in World Civilization
Reviewed by: Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History by Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray Jennifer Karns Alexander (bio) Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History Revised and expanded edition. By Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Pp. 338. Arnold Pacey collaborates with Francesca Bray in a new edition of his classic survey, Technology in World Civilization (TWC). What a delight it is! …
How a Nonprofitness Orientation Influences Collective Civic Action
This research addresses the question of how the institutional frame of “nonprofitness” shapes the civic activities pursued by community-based nonprofit organizations (CBOs). Specifically, we study how an organizational commitment and orientation to traditional nonprofit values affect activities that foster collective civic action. We draw on the theoretical frame of institutionalism to examine the role of CBOs as organizational actors that foster…
An engineering career as industrial mission
British mechanical engineer Jack Keiser’s postwar career in industrial education was simultaneously a career in justice work and Christian industrial mission. This paper examines the Christian critique of industry Keiser developed early in his career, as he transitioned in 1949–1950 into his life’s work in firm-based industrial education, and asks how historians of technology might interpret a critique that characterized industry in hyperbolic te…
Introduction
Four vignettes, a preview of coming attractions. Note holy things, visions of God and community, and scaffolding, counterweights, and shoe leather: Wardiman Djojonegoro, trained engineer and Minist
The Impact of Neoliberalism on Civil Society and Nonprofit Advocacy
The following manuscript employs critical inquiry to analyze the effects of neoliberalism on nonprofits in the U.S. and their capacity to engage in political advocacy and the production of meaning, a pivotal role for civil society institutions. Three false narratives of how nonprofits support democracy are presented followed by a discussion of how neoliberalism and the economization of the sector has delimited their capacity to fulfill their role…
Racial Bias
Historians of American public administration have largely perpetuated its self-image of neutrality and scientific detachment. Yet public agencies are shaped by their political and cultural environments. Long-standing myths and historical narratives about the meaning of America reveal not neutrality but racial bias dating back centuries, a pattern sustained, in part, by failure to recognize its existence. This article explores how historical under…
Fostering Civic Health
Civic engagement in U.S. political life has declined since the 1950s resulting in a deluge of studies that explore its causes and implications. Research to date has directed little attention to the institutional role of associations as the foundation for civic engagement in all of its forms. This article utilizes institutional theory as a lens to examine the ways in which community-based organizations (CBOs), in tandem with local government, fost…
Forum 36
this edition of 'Forum' addresses the issues raised when anthropologists attempt to transform their preliminary records into an academic analysis. participants of the 'Forum' answer the following questions: What are the processes by which encounters and conversations with informants become a 'written source'? Is it acceptable to edit field notes? By what processes do these 'written sources' turn into the text of a publication? Is it acceptable to…
The indirect evidence for domestication
Botanists, zoologists and archaeologists interested in the problems of domestication have naturally been concerned with the "direct" evidence, which may be "cultural" or "non-cultural". Some archaeologists have accepted a number of other cultural traits associated with early farming communities in Europe, Western Asia and Northern Africa as diagnostic of the beginnings of domestication only "indirect" evidence and of very limited value. The indir…
The origins of yam cultivation Introduction
The origins and the beginnings of the cultivation of food crops are generally obscure, although in most cases, clear botanical evidence exists as to the continent of origin. The botanical by the presence of wild and cultivated varieties through almost the whole of the humid and sub-humid tropics; and the archaeological by the inability, at present, of field-workers to recover direct evidence of yam cultivation. The yams present one of the most di…
Capabilities and Social Justice
The capability approach to social justice construes a person's well-being in terms of the substantive freedoms people value. John Alexander engages with the rapidly growing body of literature on the capability approach in economics, inequality, poverty measurement and development studies. Critically assessing Sen and Nussbaum's work in normative economics, social ethics and political philosophy, Alexander develops a unified vision of the capabili…
Capabilities, Gender, Equality
Questions of gender, injustice and equality pervade all our lives, and as such, the capabilities or 'human development' approach to understanding well-being and basic political entitlements continues to be debated. In this thought-provoking book, a range of authors provide unique reflections on the capabilities approach and, specifically, Martha C. Nussbaum's contributions to issues of gender, equality and political liberalism. Moreover, the auth…
Iconic Power
A collection of original articles that explore social aspects of the phenomenon of icon. Having experienced the benefits and realized the limitations of so called 'linguistic turn', sociology has rece
The power to give credit and blame
Thinking Again about Science in Technology
How to characterize the relationship between science and technology has been a sensitive issue for historians of technology. This essay uses a recent and controversial piece by Paul Forman as a springboard for reexamining the concept of applied science and asks whether "applied science" remains a useful term. Scholars have often taken "applied science" to mean the subordination of technological knowledge to scientific knowledge-and thus the subor…
An Ethic of Race for Public Administration
Remarkably little public administration scholarship has explored the dynamic of race as manifest in patterns of policy interpretation and discretionary judgments of individual administrators. We raise the issue of race in public administration despite the widespread view that the lens of race is obsolete or counterproductive. We argue that scholarship in the field has failed to come to terms with how this neglect has contributed to maintaining lo…
Ending the liberal hegemony
Fostering implementation of health services research findings into practice
BACKGROUND: Many interventions found to be effective in health services research studies fail to translate into meaningful patient care outcomes across multiple contexts. Health services researchers recognize the need to evaluate not only summative outcomes but also formative outcomes to assess the extent to which implementation is effective in a specific setting, prolongs sustainability, and promotes dissemination into other settings. Many imple…
Theorizing from the Margin for the Center
Efficiencies of Balance
Arbitrary measures of efficiency unsettle the dichotomy between engineering efficiency and efficiency in more popular forms: this dichotomy runs through the literature on the progressive era USA. Arbitrary efficiency standards were developed late in the progressive era for use in cases where ideal or theoretical efficiency could not be calculated. Arbitrary standards mediated between technical efficiency and efficiency's other forms, and illustra…
Administrative Discretion
The authors use a novel, The Cider House Rules, as a framework to examine legitimate administrative action when execution of a law will result in harm. Four political values that have informed administrative dissent are reviewed: publicity, utility, democracy, and liberty. The authors identify questions to serve as guidelines for front-line administrators when deciding to exercise discretion in opposition to a political mandate. The questions off…
'Of a Fair Uniforme Making'
"'Of a Fair Uniforme Making': The Building History of Beverley Minster 1188-1736." Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 172(1), pp. 179–180
An Ethic of Race for Public Administration
Remarkably little public administration scholarship has explored the dynamic of race as manifest in patterns of policy interpretation and discretionary judgments of individual administrators. We raise the issue of race in public administration despite the widespread view that the lens of race is obsolete or counterproductive. We argue that scholarship in the field has failed to come to terms with how this neglect has contributed to maintaining lo…
Avoiding the Issue
This article explicates the meaning of race and its institutionalization within public administration theory and practice. An argument is presented that conceptualizations of administrative responsibility in public administration have oversimplified or ignored what Gunnar Myrdal described more than 50 years ago as "the American dilemma. " Racism is an integral and often invisible component of the customary morality—a historically constructed syst…
Racial Bias
Historians of American public administration have largely perpetuated its self-image of neutrality and scientific detachment. Yet public agencies are shaped by their political and cultural environments. Long-standing myths and historical narratives about the meaning of America reveal not neutrality but racial bias dating back centuries, a pattern sustained, in part, by failure to recognize its existence. This article explores how historical under…
The Impact of Neoliberalism on Civil Society and Nonprofit Advocacy
The following manuscript employs critical inquiry to analyze the effects of neoliberalism on nonprofits in the U.S. and their capacity to engage in political advocacy and the production of meaning, a pivotal role for civil society institutions. Three false narratives of how nonprofits support democracy are presented followed by a discussion of how neoliberalism and the economization of the sector has delimited their capacity to fulfill their role…
Capabilities, human rights and moral pluralism
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, the pioneers of the capability approach, have divergent views on human rights. Sen considers human rights to be a set of goals towards which every society could progress. In contrast, Nussbaum thinks of human rights as side constraints and as non-negotiable fundamental entitlements for international standard-setting and national public policy debates. The article critically examines the difference between these tw…
Efficiencies of Balance
Arbitrary measures of efficiency unsettle the dichotomy between engineering efficiency and efficiency in more popular forms: this dichotomy runs through the literature on the progressive era USA. Arbitrary efficiency standards were developed late in the progressive era for use in cases where ideal or theoretical efficiency could not be calculated. Arbitrary standards mediated between technical efficiency and efficiency's other forms, and illustra…
CSO Advocacy and Managing Risk in Hybrid Regimes
The following study examined advocacy strategies of human rights CSOs in Colombia; how they defended and expanded civic space for vulnerable populations, managed risk and characterized their relationships with INGOs. Twenty-six organizational leaders were interviewed. Results indicate that when under pressure, CSOs mitigate their mission, focus on culturally expressive activities, and avoid regions or topics. Proactive strategies used to advance …
Thinking Again about Science in Technology
How to characterize the relationship between science and technology has been a sensitive issue for historians of technology. This essay uses a recent and controversial piece by Paul Forman as a springboard for reexamining the concept of applied science and asks whether "applied science" remains a useful term. Scholars have often taken "applied science" to mean the subordination of technological knowledge to scientific knowledge-and thus the subor…
Ending the liberal hegemony
How a Nonprofitness Orientation Influences Collective Civic Action
This research addresses the question of how the institutional frame of “nonprofitness” shapes the civic activities pursued by community-based nonprofit organizations (CBOs). Specifically, we study how an organizational commitment and orientation to traditional nonprofit values affect activities that foster collective civic action. We draw on the theoretical frame of institutionalism to examine the role of CBOs as organizational actors that foster…
Fostering Civic Health
Civic engagement in U.S. political life has declined since the 1950s resulting in a deluge of studies that explore its causes and implications. Research to date has directed little attention to the institutional role of associations as the foundation for civic engagement in all of its forms. This article utilizes institutional theory as a lens to examine the ways in which community-based organizations (CBOs), in tandem with local government, fost…
Administrative Discretion
The authors use a novel, The Cider House Rules, as a framework to examine legitimate administrative action when execution of a law will result in harm. Four political values that have informed administrative dissent are reviewed: publicity, utility, democracy, and liberty. The authors identify questions to serve as guidelines for front-line administrators when deciding to exercise discretion in opposition to a political mandate. The questions off…
The treasury grants, 1833–1839
(1974). The treasury grants, 1833–1839. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 78-92
Theorizing from the Margin for the Center
Evaluating Democratic Progress Inside Russia
This article compares and contrasts the political transitions in the two Russian Republics of Komi and Bashkortostan. It is argued that these republics are among many in Russia's weak federation whose behaviour is akin to nation-states. Two critical junctures occurring in the early 1990s profoundly affected the transition paths. Democratic transitions of the political regime had been completed in both republics by early 1995. Since then both have…
The Impatient Muse
Calendar of Meetings
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The treasury grants, 1833–1839
(1974). The treasury grants, 1833–1839. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 78-92
The Treasury Grants, 1833-1839
Bookshelf
UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS (INTERNATIONAL) The Inequality of Nations. R. W. Tucker. Robertson. SEARCH FOR A NEW ORDER The Politics of International Economic Relations. Joan Edelman Spiro. George Allen and Unwin. £8.50. The New International Economic Order: The North‐South Debate. Jagdish N. Bhagwati (Ed.). MIT Press. £7. Commodity Conflict. L. N. Rangarajan. Croom Helm. £12.95. Raw Materials and Pacific Economic Integration. Sir John Crawford and Sabur…
The Invisible Economy
Javanese economic history is conventionally represented as an involutionary process in which rural Javanese, protected from the deleterious effects of capitalism by the colonial State, intensified subsistence agriculture to provide each household with a meagre living. This study challenges the conventional interpretation in two respects. Firstly it demonstrates that before the Dutch established economic control and again around 1900, trade and pe…
The Impatient Muse
Avoiding the Issue
This article explicates the meaning of race and its institutionalization within public administration theory and practice. An argument is presented that conceptualizations of administrative responsibility in public administration have oversimplified or ignored what Gunnar Myrdal described more than 50 years ago as "the American dilemma. " Racism is an integral and often invisible component of the customary morality—a historically constructed syst…
The line between potential and working machines
This paper examines mechanical drawings made between 1811 and 1835 by Cesar Nicolas Leblanc, draftsman and engraver for the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, for publication by the French patent ministry. It compares Leblanc's engravings with the original drawings of the same machines, drawings which mechanics and inventors had submitted with their patent applications and upon which Leblanc based his published copies. The paper further compares …
Planet Dora
Reviewed by: Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age * Jennifer Karns Alexander (bio) Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age. By Yves Béon. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1997. Pp. xxxviii+250; illustrations, map, glossary. $30. From late August 1943 until early April 1945, some sixty thousand prisoners labored in the Nazi missile production program. At least one in three died. Many of …
Physician-System Relationships
OBJECTIVES: To identify the barriers, facilitators, and potential better practices to achieving physician-system alignment. METHODS: Interviews using a semi-structured, open-ended protocol were conducted during a total of 18 site visits, each usually 2 days in length, covering multiple topics of physician group-system alignment. Interviews were conducted with members of the target physician group, key leaders of the health care system, and repres…
Implementing Evidence-Based Medicine
OBJECTIVES: To assess the extent to which market pressures, compensation incentives, and physician medical group culture are associated with the use of evidence-based medicine practices in physician organizations. METHODS: Cross-sectional exploratory study of 56 medical groups affiliated with 15 integrated health systems from across the United States, involving 1,797 physician respondents. Larger medical groups and multispecialty groups were over…
Physician-System Alignment
The papers in this Special Supplement are based on research funded by the participating members of the joint Center for Health Management Research (CHMR) and Center for Organized Delivery Systems (CODS), and supported by the National Science Foundation under its Industry-University Cooperative Research Center Program. This 3-year research initiative from 1996 through 1999 involved 69 physician organizations (primarily organized medical groups as …
Evaluating Democratic Progress Inside Russia
This article compares and contrasts the political transitions in the two Russian Republics of Komi and Bashkortostan. It is argued that these republics are among many in Russia's weak federation whose behaviour is akin to nation-states. Two critical junctures occurring in the early 1990s profoundly affected the transition paths. Democratic transitions of the political regime had been completed in both republics by early 1995. Since then both have…
Capability Egalitarianism and Moral Selfhood
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum advocate that a person’s quality of life and equal standing in society should be evaluated in terms of capabilities rather than utility, income or resources. In this article, I critically examine the concept of the person that underpins the capability approach. I argue that the ideal of equality of capability articulates a ‘nonutilitarian’ and ‘non-liberal’ view of the self.
Philadelphia's Enlightenment, 1740-1800
Philadelphia's Enlightenment, 1740-1800: Kingdom of Christ, Empire of Reason. By Nina Reid-Maroney. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Pp. xv+199. $62.50
Capabilities, human rights and moral pluralism
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, the pioneers of the capability approach, have divergent views on human rights. Sen considers human rights to be a set of goals towards which every society could progress. In contrast, Nussbaum thinks of human rights as side constraints and as non-negotiable fundamental entitlements for international standard-setting and national public policy debates. The article critically examines the difference between these tw…
Non-Reductionist Naturalism
An Efficiency of Scarcity
During World War II, Heinrich Kraut, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Labor Physiology, studied the effect of diet on work productivity in Soviet prisoners of war under heavy forced labor in the coalmines of the Ruhr. Kraut’s work illustrates an efficiency of scarcity, in which the elements of control and intervention often associated with efficiency efforts were not available. His efforts to improve productivity left unaddressed the violence …
Efficiency and Pathology
At first glance, the Elmo-workstool seems unremarkable: it is just a chair (fig. 1). Developed between the world wars in the Elmowerk, the small electrical motors division of Siemens-Schuckertwerke, the Elmo-workstool has several features that are now standard in chairs marketed as "ergonomic," including its broad, scooped seat and its adjustable, curved backrest. The potential of the Elmo-workstool to increase worker efficiency and lessen fatigu…
Administrative Discretion
The authors use a novel, The Cider House Rules, as a framework to examine legitimate administrative action when execution of a law will result in harm. Four political values that have informed administrative dissent are reviewed: publicity, utility, democracy, and liberty. The authors identify questions to serve as guidelines for front-line administrators when deciding to exercise discretion in opposition to a political mandate. The questions off…
Efficiencies of Balance
Arbitrary measures of efficiency unsettle the dichotomy between engineering efficiency and efficiency in more popular forms: this dichotomy runs through the literature on the progressive era USA. Arbitrary efficiency standards were developed late in the progressive era for use in cases where ideal or theoretical efficiency could not be calculated. Arbitrary standards mediated between technical efficiency and efficiency's other forms, and illustra…
Fostering implementation of health services research findings into practice
BACKGROUND: Many interventions found to be effective in health services research studies fail to translate into meaningful patient care outcomes across multiple contexts. Health services researchers recognize the need to evaluate not only summative outcomes but also formative outcomes to assess the extent to which implementation is effective in a specific setting, prolongs sustainability, and promotes dissemination into other settings. Many imple…
Theorizing from the Margin for the Center
An Ethic of Race for Public Administration
Remarkably little public administration scholarship has explored the dynamic of race as manifest in patterns of policy interpretation and discretionary judgments of individual administrators. We raise the issue of race in public administration despite the widespread view that the lens of race is obsolete or counterproductive. We argue that scholarship in the field has failed to come to terms with how this neglect has contributed to maintaining lo…
Ending the liberal hegemony
Political science (29 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Engineering (8 works) · History (8 works) · Public Administration (8 works)