Macat.com has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 1 narrator, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is A Macat Analysis of Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation.
A Macat Analysis of Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation
Summary
Politics as a Vocation examines what makes good political leaders and explores the effects of political action on modern societies. On one level it summarizes the political scholarship of one of the founding fathers of social science. On another it reflects a leading German academic and political activist's practical concerns about the future at a time of great volatility following defeat in World War I. Weber investigates the bases of modern politics, touching on the role of bureaucracy in government and the rise of organized political parties. He advocates strong, ethical leadership, although some have claimed this inadvertently laid the intellectual groundwork for the rise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Originally delivered as a lecture before being published as an essay, Politics as a Vocation is still an important work for understanding political processes. And over a century after its publication, Max Weber remains a seminal figure in the social sciences.
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A Macat Analysis of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War
Summary
Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is generally acknowledged as the first great work in the fields of both history and political theory. It uses a combination of narrative, debate, and analysis to document the war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BC). But the importance of the work lies less in the story than in the way Thucydides tells it. History was the first major work of political inquiry that did not relate events to divine influences. It introduced instead a critical method of looking to the facts of human actions as the basis of our understanding - a method that continues to be used today, more than two millennia later. Many of the most important political thinkers in the Western tradition cite Thucydides as an influence, and major figures including Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Friedrich Nietzsche have praised his writing.
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A Macat Analysis of James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho
Summary
Published in 1990, The Anti-Politics Machine is American anthropologist James Ferguson's first book. It discusses international development projects: how they are conceived, researched, and put into practice. Importantly, it also looks at what these projects actually achieve. Ferguson is critical of the idea of development and argues that the process does not take enough account of the daily realities of the communities it is intended to benefit. The projects put too much emphasis on providing technical solutions for addressing poverty, such as better resources or improved infrastructure. But these solutions often ignore the fact that there are social and political dimensions to poverty. So the structures that development projects put in place can often have unintended consequences for their target community, such as strengthening the state power that allowed the projects to get underway in the first place. Ferguson argues that these problems start in the planning stages of a development project as a result of the information gathered and the very language used to discuss it. Ferguson's work suggests that until the process becomes less formulaic and more reflective, development projects will continue to fail.
©2016 Macat Inc (P)2016 Macat Inc
A Macat Analysis of Geert Hofstede's Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations
Summary
Anthropologist Geert Hofstede's 1980 work, Culture's Consequences, was the first study to look at cultural differences using data. The Dutchman took advantage of the enormous global span of his employer, the technology company IBM, to gather survey data in 20 languages and across 70 countries, and to produce a unique study of national values. Besides collecting an extraordinary volume of material, Hofstede introduced an innovative framework for analyzing data; identifying patterns he called "dimensions". This allowed him to plot the values of different cultures accurately - a far cry from earlier, highly subjective studies of "national character". But Hofstede went further. He identified dimensions in the cultures of organizations that were not based on values, but rather on practices - practices that those organizations could change to fit the values of the employees. Hofstede's methodology is still enormously relevant today, not just in management and anthropology, but also in all areas where cross-cultural studies intersect with human life.
©2016 Macat Inc (P)2016 Macat Inc