Critical Alliances

This study argues that feminist collaboration was vital to women's successful infiltration of the marketplace at the end of the nineteenth century and Edwardian period.

Critical Alliances argues that late-Victorian and modernist feminist authors saw in literary representations of female collaboration an opportunity to produce new gender and economic roles for women. It is not often that one thinks of female allegiances – such as kinship networks, cultural inheritance, or lesbian marriage – as influencing the marketplace; nor does one often think of economic models when theorizing feminist cooperation. S. Brooke Cameron suggest that, through their representations of female partnership, feminist authors such as Virginia Woolf, Olive Schreiner, George Egerton, Amy Levy, and Michael Field redefined the gendered marketplace and, with it, women’s professional opportunities. Interdisciplinary at its core and using a contextual approach, Critical Alliances selects cultural texts and theories relevant to each writer’s particular intervention in the marketplace. Chapters look at how different forms of feminist collaboration enabled women to stake their claim to one of the many, emergent professions at the turn of the century.

This book provides approachable and insightful chapters that summarize state-of-the-art thinking and research on alliances and networks. Contributions by leading scholars cover foundations or fundamentals as well as frontier areas through a diverse range of perspectives.

As a top executive, you've almost certainly forged strategic alliances with other companies. Some of these deals have worked--but many others have likely failed. In fact, companies worldwide launch more than two thousand strategic alliances every year, and more than half never deliver as promised. In Strategic Alliances, Steve Steinhilber proves that, despite the odds, alliances are critical to the business strategy for companies competing globally: customers want integrated solutions to their problems, and that's pushing companies to work together to create differentiated offerings. Equally crucial, well-managed alliances generate important forms of business value, including new products and accelerated growth. Drawing on his experience as the head of Cisco's Strategic Alliances group, Steinhilber has created tools and guidelines that will help you forge alliances that work. He describes the three essential building blocks of successful alliances and explains how to establish: The right framework--by articulating how an alliance will help you achieve your company's strategic business goals and identifying potential partners The right organization--by staffing your alliance organization with the right people and constantly honing their skills The right relationships--by cultivating trust among the many key internal contacts in your organization and your alliance partners Engaging and authoritative, Strategic Alliances shows you how to manage strategic partnerships more effectively and maximize their value in a complex and changing business environment. From our new Memo to the CEO series--solutions-focused advice from today's leading practitioners.

Born from necessity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has always seemed on the verge of collapse. Even now, some seventy years after its inception, some consider its foundation uncertain and its structure weak. At this moment of incipient strategic crisis, Timothy A. Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post-World War II era. In Enduring Alliance, Sayle recounts how the western European powers, along with the United States and Canada, developed a treaty to prevent encroachments by the Soviet Union and to serve as a first defense in any future military conflict. As the growing and unruly hodgepodge of countries, councils, commands, and committees inflated NATO during the Cold War, Sayle shows that the work of executive leaders, high-level diplomats, and institutional functionaries within NATO kept the alliance alive and strong in the face of changing administrations, various crises, and the flux of geopolitical maneuverings. Resilience and flexibility have been the true hallmarks of NATO. As Enduring Alliance deftly shows, the history of NATO is organized around the balance of power, preponderant military forces, and plans for nuclear war. But it is also the history riven by generational change, the introduction of new approaches to conceiving international affairs, and the difficulty of diplomacy for democracies. As NATO celebrates its seventieth anniversary, the alliance once again faces challenges to its very existence even as it maintains its place firmly at the center of western hemisphere and global affairs.

America’s Entangling Alliances challenges the belief that the US resists international alliances. By documenting thirty-four alliances—categorized as defense pacts, military coalitions, or security partnerships—Davidson finds that the US demand for allies is best explained by looking at variance in its relative power and the threats it has faced.

Strategic Alliance Management presents an academically grounded alliance development framework, detailing eight stages of alliance development with consideration for specific management challenges. For each stage, readers are presented with theoretical insights, evidence-based managerial guidelines and a business case illustration. Other chapters consider alliance attributes, alliance competences, and alliance challenges, and cover topics such as innovation, co-branding, co-opetition, business ecosystems, alliance professionals, alliance capabilities, societal alliances and a tension-based alliance mindset. This fully revised 3rd edition leverages the book’s strengths in marrying theory with practical insight. All the chapters have been updated to reflect the current academic literature, whilst new international case studies are incorporated throughout. Two new chapters feature in this edition, considering the importance of the mindset required to successfully navigate alliance arrangements, and emerging alliance practices, exploring how new technologies, sustainability and the external environment have disrupted alliance management. In-chapter text boxes discussing emerging themes provide opportunity for discussion and analysis. The textbook remains highly valuable core and recommended reading for postgraduate students of Strategic Management and Corporate Strategy, MBA and Executive MBA, as well as reflective practitioners in the field. Online resources include chapter-by-chapter lecture slides, two long case studies and short interviews with alliance executives.

From Governor and White House cabinet member Mike Leavitt: how to find collaborative solutions to the greatest challenges Your business challenges extend far beyond you and your firm, to the competitors within your industry and the regulators outside it. Finding solutions to larger issues requires cooperation between diverse stakeholders, and in this rapidly changing world, only those able to adapt and network successfully will produce fast, competitive solutions. How can leaders successfully bridge divides and turn competitors into collaborators? Leavitt and McKeown explain how a well-chosen network can become a powerful alliance. Whether you're launching a new partnership, or rehabilitating one already in progress, Finding Allies, Building Alliances will help you find workable solutions to the most complex problems. Written by Mike Leavitt, former Governor of Utah who brought the 2002 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City, former US Secretary of Health and human services, and former head of the EPA; with his former Chief of Staff and business partner Rich McKeown, co-founder of Leavitt Partners Includes a framework of 8 elements that will help any leader foster and maintain an effective, productive collaborative venture Shows how better collaboration can not only solve problems, but boost the competitiveness and resilience in all sectors Finding Allies, Building Alliances is essential reading for any business leader looking for transformative solutions and a sustainable future.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2013! Educating Activist Allies offers a fresh take on critical education studies through an analysis of social justice pedagogy in schools serving communities privileged by race and class. By documenting the practices of socially committed teachers at an urban private academy and a suburban public school, Katy Swalwell helps educators and educational theorists better understand the challenges and opportunities inherent in this work. She also examines how students responded to their teachers’ efforts in ways that both undermined and realized the goals of social justice pedagogy. This analysis serves as the foundation for the development of a curricular framework helping students to foster an "Activist Ally" identity: the skills, knowledge, and dispositions necessary to negotiate privilege in ways that promote justice. Educating Activist Allies provides a powerful introduction to the ways in which social justice curricula can and should be enacted in communities of privilege.

Is America’s alliance system so quietly effective that politicians and voters fail to appreciate its importance in delivering the security they take for granted? For the first century and a half of its existence, the United States had just one alliance—a valuable but highly controversial military arrangement with France. Largely out of deference to George Washington’s warnings against the dangers of “entangling alliances,” subsequent American presidents did not consider entering another until the Second World War. Then everything suddenly changed. Between 1948 and 1955, US leaders extended defensive security guarantees to twenty-three countries in Europe and Asia. Seventy years later, the United States had allied with thirty-seven. In Shields of the Republic, Mira Rapp-Hooper reveals the remarkable success of America’s unprecedented system of alliances. During the Cold War, a grand strategy focused on allied defense, deterrence, and assurance helped to keep the peace at far lower material and political costs than its critics allege. When the Soviet Union collapsed, however, the United States lost the adversary the system was designed to combat. Its alliances remained without a core strategic logic, leaving them newly vulnerable. Today the alliance system is threatened from without and within. China and Russia seek to break America’s alliances through conflict and non-military erosion. Meanwhile, US politicians and voters are increasingly skeptical of alliances’ costs and benefits and believe we may be better off without them. But what if the alliance system is a victim of its own quiet success? Rapp-Hooper argues that America’s national security requires alliances that deter and defend against military and non-military conflict alike. The alliance system is past due for a post–Cold War overhaul, but it remains critical to the country’s safety and prosperity in the 21st century.