Search results for ""author wayne parsons""

This major textbook presents for the first time a thoroughly modern introduction to policy studies - one of the fastest growing areas in the academic curriculum.Public Policy provides a lively, clear and highly accessible introduction to the theory and practice of public policy. Interdisciplinary and comparative in scope, this text covers agenda setting, and problem definition, policy making, implementation and evaluation. The book has been designed to be used with a wide range of policy oriented courses. Wayne Parsons surveys the development of the policy sciences over the past fifty years and focuses on the key ideas, thinkers and concepts which have shaped the field. His authoritative narrative draws on a wide range of policy disciplines - including political science, psychology, sociology, economics, and management. A central theme of the book is its emphasis on taking a multi-framed approach to analysing the increasingly complex policy problems and processes of industrial societies. Unique features include case studies, guides to further reading, background notes and numerous graphics to support and illustrate the main text. Public Policy will be welcomed as a comprehensive examination of the models and methods needed to understand policy making in the modern state. Comprehensive, critical and up-to-date, this textbook promises to define the field for a new generation of students and teachers.

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In this innovative highly readable contribution to the study of Keynes, Wayne Parsons makes a radical departure from the conventional approaches to Keynesian economies.As a political scientist Parsons believes that, if we are to grasp the revolutionary nature of Keynes's way of thinking about policy problems, we need to place his theories in a wider intellectual and inter-disciplinary setting. Keynes, he suggests, was a social scientist, philosopher and opinion-former with one foot in the age of science and another in the age of sorcery. Like Newton, about whom Keynes wrote with considerable knowledge and insight, he was a thinker whose method was rooted in an alchemical fascination with the art of transmutation and the quest for the philosophers' stone. Parsons maintains that unless we appreciate this alchemical quality of Keynes's economics we fail to comprehend his particular genius as a philosopher of possibility. The author paints a portrait of a Bloomsbury Faust, a Mephistopheles in Whitehall: an image which is a long way removed from the modernist discourse which has largely framed our reading of his economics. Free from the mechanistic and positivistic language which has come to obscure his work Wayne Parsons concludes that Keynes can once again become a source of inspiration and illumination for the theory and practice of public policy.Keynes and the Quest for a Moral Science is an accessible, highly readable account which will appeal to scholars and students in the field of economics, history of economics, public policy and history of ideas.

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