This book offers a practical guide for policy advisors and their managers, grounded in the author's extensive experience as a senior policy practitioner in New Zealand's Westminster-style system of government. A key message is that effective policy advising is less about cycles, stages and steps, and more about relationships, integrity and communication. Policy making is incremental social problem solving.

Policy advising is mostly learned on the job, like an apprenticeship. It starts with ca...

Many students have difficulties writing well-structured and readable texts. Academic Writing Skills breaks down the writing process into various skills that students can use to practice independently.

On on the corresponding website these skills are discussed using rules of thumb, several short exercises and examples of the right answer. By combining a clear explanation of the various skills and exercises with feedback, the training course has proven to be very effective.

The following subjec...

Kissinger's six leaders are Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher. All of them were formed in a period when established institutions collapsed all over Europe, colonial structures gave way to independent states in Asia and Africa, and a new international order had to be created from the vestiges of the old. Kissinger penetratingly analyses each of these leaders' careers through the highly individual strategies of statecraft which h...

How Mediation Works will introduce management and law students as well as businesses to this art of conflict resolution from the behavioral perspective, while also providing a valuable resource to continuing education programs, mediation training, and lawyers to familiarize clients with the mediation process.

There have been two main traditions of writing on ethics in the Islamic tradition, one philosophical and related to the works of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, represented by thinkers such as Avicenna, and one theological, represented by such figures as the famous theologian al-Qadi Abd al-Jabbar. Some later scholars attempted to combine those two traditions. For the most part, however, the views of the jurists have been ignored.

Abdulaziz Sachedina herecalls attention to this third ...