Author: James Martin, James E. Samels & Associates As the chief academic officer, the provost plays the central role in the contemporary university or college. He or she leads the faculty and serves as their key representative to the administration while simultaneously acting as the administrations spokesperson to the academic faculty. How has this essential leadership position evolved over the past few decades, and what are the best practices to adopt for succeeding in specific operational areas? In seventeen essays written by some of the most successful chief academic officers in the United States, The Provosts Handbook outlines key topics related to the changing environment of higher education while explaining what constitutes effective leadership at the college and university level. How, for example, does the provost lead in a time of disruption and shifting needs? What skills should he or she nurture in new faculty? What role should data and institutional research play in decision making? How can a provost navigate the often stormy situations of shared governance? These questionsand many more challenges presented by this roleare addressed in this essential volume. Assembled by James Martin and James E. Samels, accomplished authors and scholars of leadership in higher education, The Provosts Handbook is destined to become the go-to resource for deans, presidents, trustees, and chief academic officers everywhere.

Author: Nigel Dodd Questions about the nature of money have gained a new urgency in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Even as many people have less of it, there are more forms and systems of money, from local currencies and social lending to mobile money and Bitcoin. Yet our understanding of what money isand what it might behasnt kept pace. In The Social Life of Money, Nigel Dodd, one of todays leading sociologists of money, reformulates the theory of the subject for a postcrisis world in which new kinds of money are proliferating. What counts as legitimate action by central banks that issue currency and set policy? What underpins the right of nongovernmental actors to create new currencies? And how might new forms of money surpass or subvert government-sanctioned currencies? To answer such questions, The Social Life of Money takes a fresh and wide-ranging look at modern theories of money. One of the books central concerns is how money can be wrested from the domination and mismanagement of banks and governments and restored to its fundamental position as the claim upon society described by Georg Simmel. But rather than advancing yet another critique of the state-based monetary system, The Social Life of Money draws out the utopian aspects of money and the ways in which its transformation could in turn transform society, politics, and economics. The book also identifies the contributions of thinkers who have not previously been thought of as monetary theoristsincluding Nietzsche, Benjamin, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Hardt and Negri. The result provides new ways of thinking about money that seek not only to understand it but to change it.