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Are you overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork that SEN generates in your school? Would you like to spend more time actually improving the quality of teaching and learning for pupils with SEN or disabilities? If so, this is an essential book for you.

Containing practical strategies for reducing the number of individual education plans and review meetings, ‘Beating Bureaucracy’ will help you to use existing systems for target setting, recording and planning – personalised systems that are used for all children as part of everyday teaching practices. The book showcases the work of four schools that have successfully developed ways of planning provision, working with parents, and supporting staff development. Ready-to-use proforma in the book are also available online, and include:

• a model policy to give to Ofsted to explain why the school does not use IEPs
• an information sheet for parents
• curriculum planning formats
• strategy sheets that can be highlighted and given to class and subject teachers
• proformas for commonly used interventions that describe the intervention, its target group, its entry and exit criteria, and monitoring and evaluation arrangements.

This invaluable resource will help you (in the words of one SENCO) ‘get your life back’. Adopting the new and more effective ways of working presented here will reduce the bureaucratic burden on your school – whilst at the same time improving the impact of your SEN provision on children’s learning and well-being.

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There has already been much discussion and critique of the New Public Management, and the impact of auditing and inspection on professional work in schools, hospitals, local government and the police. This study, by a qualitative sociologist, uses interpretive methods to examine this new form of regulation from the inside. Based on interviews with inspectors, quality assurance managers, and auditors, as well as with professionals struggling with red tape, it offers a critical and insightful account of organisational change. The author includes vivid accounts of how quality assurance procedures and systems work in practice, conveying a sense of what is practically involved in the work of counting, measuring and managing quality, and the everyday frustrations of professionals dealing with ever-increasing amounts of paper work and red tape. This book should be essential reading for anyone concerned about the rise of this new bureaucracy and the contemporary state of the professions. It is intended to support courses on quality assurance and the New Public Management in public administration and management.It also provides an accessible introduction for students in socio-legal studies, sociology and social policy about the effects of neo-liberalism on public sector work. ... Read more

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This monograph examines the Soviet state's attempt to rebuild and repopulate following World War II by offering to support families while encouraging women to enter the full-time work force. However, combined with the realities of postwar life and broken promises, this program was lacking and forced women to adopt their own survival strategies. The conflict between economic reality and the state's demands dictated the shape of women's lives as they attempted to balance both domestic concerns and professional advancement. This study scrutinizes a society that loudly proclaimed sexual equality and support for women workers, but these goals were never feasible because of the failure of the state to provide the structures necessary for equality.

Customer Reviews (1)

The Family and Late Stalinism
Dr. Bucher has developed a thorough study of the effects of late Stalinist social policy at the family and individual level.Focusing on Moscow and the experiences of women in the postwar era, Dr. Bucher highlights several key areas of intersection between state policies and individual lives -such as work, housing, child care, health care, and sexual relationships. Based on a series of interviews conducted in the early 1990s, archival research, and critical examination of articles and cartoons about daily life, this book contains many valuable insights about how Soviet citizens in Moscow survived in the late 1940s and early 1950s.Particular attention is paid to the paradoxical situation of mothers in the late Stalinist period:required to work, yet not provided with adequate means to provide for a family, such as child care.How did Soviet women balance the competing needs of the workplace and the home?How could a young Soviet mother care for her children and take care of her household?Seemingly mundane topics become critical issues of survival when the state interferes at the family level, particularly when such state involvement is both highly inefficient, underresourced, and run by men with little understanding of the issues involved.A must read for students of Russian/Soviet history, social history, or gender history.
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A cultural history of the modern school. Unlike Marxian and liberal theories of education, this book does not see the school as a failed expression of principles of equality, rational choice and personal development; instead, using Foucault's genealogical method, it argues that the school is a result of improvization by a series of obscure officials who were responding to problems of state building and social discipline. In particular, it focuses on the role of Christian pastoral guidance in forming the pedagogical techniques and relationships of the modern school. ... Read more

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Reid, Kerr, and Miller provide the first book-length, systematic national analysis of female representational patterns in state and municipal bureaucracies. They find that despite three decades of affirmative legislation, women remain underrepresented in the highest and best-paying positions in administrative and professional posts. These findings are critical to the democratic legitimacy of public agencies at a time when trust in public institutions is low. ... Read more

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Jurgen Kocka is one of the foremost historians of Germany whose work has been devoted to the integration of different genres of the social and economic history of Europe during the period of industrialization. This collection of essays gives a representative sample of his effort to develop, by reference to Marx and Weber, new and powerful analytical tools for understanding the dynamics of modern industrial societies. ... Read more

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This book is a personal saga of woe and intrigue.Itrecounts a seemingly endless succession of false starts, missteps,detours, dead ends, and disappointments, endured over five years, inthe ultimately successful pursuit of a sponsoring unit in the People'sRepublic of China, for a research project on the rural industrial andartisanal enterprises of Dongyang county, Zhejiang Province.Wefollow the author in his veritable Confucian perambulation fromministry to ministry, bureau to bureau, institute to institute,academy to academy, office to office, university to university, untilhe finally manages to teach a quid pro quo with Zhejiang University.Under that agreement, the project would be carried out incollaboration with Professor Jiang Yinhuo of the department ofeconomics.The trials, tribulations and humiliations Cooper and Jiangsuffered under the close supervision of the county foreign Affairs andPublic Security Offices while they gathered their "data" over twofield seasons, are described in detail.One comes away with a clearsense of what it is like to live according to the "regulationsgoverning foreigners" in China.Anyone contemplating travel to China,or business dealings with China might find this book a humorous ifpoignant object lesson in the maniacal persistence required to getthings done in People's China. ... Read more

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Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot confront head-on the key organizational issues that are threatening the very existence of today's corporations. They assert that "bureaucracy is no more appropriate to the information age than serfdom was to the industrial era. Only freedom and community will work."

This book shows how to replace bureaucracy with more humane and effective systems for organizing and coordinating work. Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot show how, by developing and engaging the intelligence, business judgment, and wide-system responsibility of all its members, an organization can respond more effectively to customers, partners, and competitors. They support the sweeping changes they propose with numerous examples of how these changes are already being implemented in such diverse organizations as AT&T, the Canadian National Railroad, DuPont, Russian entrepreneurial firms, Hewlett-Packard, and the U.S. Forest Service. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Insightful!
How can citizens of a society that exalts freedom consent to spend the majority of their lives laboring within organizations that are hierarchical, slow-moving and dictatorial? Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot raised that question in their heralded 1993 book and provided the following answer: Not willingly and not for long. The Pinchots were among the first management scholars to predict the demise of the military-style command structure, along with its inherent secrecy and Machiavellian political sniping. Although a slew of books devoted to the same theme have been published since, none have done a better job at explaining the potential of informed and engaged employees who don't fear their bosses too much to take decisive action. We [...] strongly recommend this book, which brims with meticulous case histories showing how teams, employee-owned companies and internal free-market competition have transformed organizations. (In fact, the Pinchots coined the term "intraprenuership" to describe this process.)While you might not be convinced that a company run by consensus can ever compete with one run by The Prince, this book gives you hope that it can.

Manifesto for Good People Trapped in Bad Organizations
The seven essentials of organizational intelligence include widespread truth and rights; freedom of enterprise, liberated teams, equality and diversity, voluntary learning networks, democratic self-rule, and limitedcorporate government.It was this book, and the very strong applause thatthe author received from all those attending OSS '96, that caused me torealize that the U.S. Intelligence Community is just chock full of verygood people that want to change, but are not being allowed to change by theorganizational circumstances within which they are trapped-frozen in timeand budget. ... Read more

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For this important selection from Weber, sections of text from Weber's major works (Gesammelte, Aufsatze Zur Religionssoziologie, including The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; General Economic History; and The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilisations) have been carefully edited and substantially translated to form a coherent and integrated volume.

Customer Reviews (1)

Perfect Short Anthology of Weber
Max Weber is a thinker for whom the anthology is particularly well-suited. His work is essential, and understanding his most profound insights I consider to be foundational to a sound perspective on the contemporary human situation. Yet, the often unwieldy bulk and discursiveness of his work and awkward nature of his prose make accessing his ideas difficult and time-consuming.
The prospective reader would be hard-pressed to find a better conceived, more accurately translated Weber anthology. Andreski, known in the 1960's as "the bad boy of British sociology", was yet another of the towering figures of academia to be branded "New Left" and banished to relative obscurity by the Anglo/American political right in the 1980's and 1990's. As a Pole, perhaps of at least partially Jewish descent (his original name was Andrejewski), who fought the Nazis as a guerilla and escaped Poland - where virtually the entire Polish intelligentsia (including millions of non-Jews) was wiped out in the Holocaust - he was fluent in German. He was also a meticulous and devout student of Weber.He understood and revered his project and his work - and like Weber, was broadly read in the Classical Humanities. Thus, the selections in this easily digested and representative volume demonstrate the interdisciplinary impact Weber sought. The translations may also be the most accurate rendering of Weber's difficult German in English. The diverse selections bring the student well beyond the benchmark "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" (of which crucial segments are of course included). I was especially grateful for "The Failure of Capitalism in the Ancient World". Weber's assertion here is that the earliest forms of capitalism were based on slave ownership, slave trade, and slave labor - and that boom and bust cycles paralleled the cycles of war due to the availability of slave labor that was thus made available. Reading The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, one might get the idea that Calvin invented it - but, as the entries in this volume, drawn from the broad compass of his work, demonstrate, hardly does that presumption accurately assess Weber's view or the historical reality. Capitalism is as old as war and slavery, and the all too refractory roots of their interrelations. All in all, this book thoroughly and deftly covers Weber's research in the area for which we most value him, Capitalism, relieving one of the necessity to plow through an enormous amount of, often incorrectly translated, irrelevant material. ... Read more

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Bureaus are among the most important institutions in everypart of the world. Not only do they provide employment for a very significantfraction of the world's population, but they also make critical decisions thatshape the economic, educational, political, social, moral, and even religiouslives of nearly everyone on earth. This book develops a useful theory ofbureaucratic decision making. The theory will enable analysts to predict atleast some aspects of bureau behavior accurately, and to incorporate bureausinto a more generalized theory of social decision making--particularly onerelevant to democracies. It would be impossible to solve all the problemsinvolved in this immense and complex field; however, this book will solvemany, and create a framework upon which solutions to still more may be builtby other theorists. ... Read more

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SS 12, 127 pages ... Read more

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Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Bureaucracies," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Bureaucracies in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Bureaucracies when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Bureaucracies, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more

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Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Bureaucracy," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Bureaucracy in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Bureaucracy when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Bureaucracy, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more