Governance amid Bigger, Better Markets

by Joseph S. Nye Jr., John D. Donahue (Editor)

"A Brookings Institution Press and Visions of Governance for the 21st Century publication

Changing markets are challenging governance. The growing scale, reach, complexity, and popular legitimacy of market institutions and market players are re-opening old questions about the role of the public sector and redefining what it means to govern well. This volume—the latest publication from the Visions of Governance in the 21st Century program at the Kennedy School of Government—explores the way evolving markets alter the pursuit of cherished public goals.

John D. Donahue and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. frame the inquiry with an essay on governing well in an age of ascendant markets. Other contributors (all from Harvard's Kennedy School unless otherwise indicated) address specific areas of market governance in individual Joseph P. Newhouse on the medical marketplace, Jose Gomez-Ibañez and John R. Meyer on transportation, William Hogan on electric power, Paul E. Peterson on K–12 education, L. Jean Camp on information networks, Akash Deep and Guido Schaefer (Vienna University of Economics & Business Administration) on federal deposit insurance, Frederick Schauer on ""the marketplace of ideas,"" Anna Greenberg on the ""marketization"" of politics, David M. Hart on the politics of high-tech industry, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger on information law, John D. Donahue and Richard J. Zeckhauser on the challenges posed by fast-changing markets, and Mark Moore on the spread of market ideology."

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. was an American political scientist. He and Robert Keohane co-founded the international relations theory of neoliberalism, which they developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. They also explored transnational relations and world politics in an edited volume in the 1970s. More recently, he pioneered the theory of soft power. His notion of "smart power" ("the ability to combine hard and soft power into a successful strategy") became popular with the use of this phrase by members of the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration. These theories from Nye are very commonly seen in courses across the U.S., such as I.B. D.P. Global Politics.
Nye was the Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he later held the position of University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus. In October 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Nye to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He was also a member of the Defense Policy Board. He was a Harvard faculty member since 1964. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a foreign fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.
The 2011 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey of over 1,700 international relations scholars ranked Nye as the sixth most influential scholar in the field of international relations in the past 20 years. He was also ranked as one of the most influential figures in American foreign policy. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine included him on its list of top global thinkers. In September 2014, Foreign Policy reported that international relations scholars and policymakers ranked Nye as one of the field's most influential scholars.