Founded in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles as part of the League of Nations’ system, the ILO is still today the main organization responsible for the international organization of work and the improvement of working conditions in the world. Widely recognized for its efforts in building international labour standards, the ILO remains little studied by development specialists and historians. This book intends to fill this gap and traces the history of international development and its early pioneers, through an analysis of the activities of the International Labour Office, the Secretariat of the International Labour Organization, between 1930 and 1946. In this book, development is used as a key to questioning the ILO's place and function in the expanding inter-war world. The development practices and discourses that emerged in the 1930s were mainly intended to support the ILO's universalization strategy, which was made necessary by the events that shook Europe at the time. Development discourses and practices were also part of the "esprit du temps", as they were closely linked to the affirmation of the planist and rationalist ideas of the 1930s. However, development for the ILO was not reduced to a project of economic modernization, but was seen as a tool for social engineering, as evidenced by the ILO's missions of technical assistance, organized since 1930. The analysis of the expertise work makes it possible to highlight the logics that prevailed in technical assistance, which was more in line with institutional objectives, than with the dissemination of a genuine expertise. This book therefore hopes to bring new insight on the history of internationalism, and international organizations during the inter-war period and the Second World War, as well as on the role of the ILO in the history of international development thinking and practices.

Providing new insight on the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the Cold War, Michael Latham reveals how social science theory helped shape American foreign policy during the Kennedy administration. He shows how, in the midst of America's protracted struggle to contain communism in the developing world, the concept of global modernization moved beyond its beginnings in academia to become a motivating ideology behind policy decisions. After tracing the rise of modernization theory in American social science, Latham analyzes the way its core assumptions influenced the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress with Latin America, the creation of the Peace Corps, and the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam. But as he demonstrates, modernizers went beyond insisting on the relevance of America's experience to the dilemmas faced by impoverished countries. Seeking to accelerate the movement of foreign societies toward a liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity, Kennedy and his advisers also reiterated a much deeper sense of their own nation's vital strengths and essential benevolence. At the height of the Cold War, Latham argues, modernization recast older ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism.

The post–World War II period is typically seen as a time of stark division, an epochal global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. But beneath the surface, the postwar era witnessed a striking degree of international cooperation. The United Nations and its agencies, as well as regional organizations, international nongovernmental organizations, and private foundations brought together actors from conflicting worlds, fostering international collaboration across the geopolitical and ideological divisions of the Cold War. Diving into the archives of these organizations and associations, Sandrine Kott provides a new account of the Cold War that foregrounds the rise of internationalism as both an ideology and a practice. She examines cooperation across boundaries in international spaces, emphasizing the role of midsized powers, including Eastern European and neutral countries. Kott highlights how the need to address global inequities became a central concern, as officials and experts argued that economic inequality imperiled the creation of a lasting peace. International organizations gave newly decolonized and “Third World” countries a platform to challenge the global distribution of power and wealth, and they encouraged transnational cooperation in causes such as human rights and women’s rights. Assessing the failure to achieve a new international economic order in the 1970s, Kott adds new perspective on the rise of neoliberalism. A truly global study of the Cold War through the lens of international organizations, A World More Equal also shows why the internationalism of this era offers resources for addressing social and global inequalities today.

Many countries are still struggling to adapt to the broad and unexpected effects of modernization initiatives. As changes take shape, governments are challenged to explore new reforms. The public sector is now characterized by profound transformation across the globe, with ramifications that are yet to be interpreted. To convert this transformation into an ongoing state of improvement, policymakers and civil service leaders must learn to implement and evaluate change. This book is an important contribution to that end. Reforming the Public Sector presents comparative perspectives of government reform and innovation, discussing three decades of reform in public sector strategic management across nations. The contributors examine specific reform-related issues including the uses and abuses of public sector transparency, the "Audit Explosion," and the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction in Europe. This volume will greatly aid practitioners and policymakers to better understand the principles underpinning ongoing reforms in the public sector. Giovanni Tria, Giovanni Valotti, and their cohorts offer a scientific understanding of the main issues at stake in this arduous process. They place the approach to public administration reform in a broad international context and identify a road map for public management. Contributors include: Michael Barzelay, Nicola Bellé, Andrea Bonomi Savignon, Geert Bouckaert, Luca Brusati, Paola Cantarelli, Denita Cepiku, Francesco Cerase, Luigi Corvo, Maria Cucciniello, Isabell Egger-Peitler, Paolo Fedele, Gerhard Hammerschmid, Mario Ianniello, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, Irvine Lapsley, Peter Leisink, Mariannunziata Liguori, Renate Meyer, Greta Nasi, James L. Perry, Christopher Pollitt, Adrian Ritz, Raffaella Saporito, MariaFrancesca Sicilia, Ileana Steccolini, Bram Steijn, Wouter Vandenabeele, and Montgomery Van Wart.

Increasingly, academics are finding that engaging with external stakeholders can be both fruitful in undertaking research and an effective way to impact policy. With insightful and practical advice from a diverse range of contributors, including academics, policy makers, civil servants and knowledge exchange professionals, this accessible book explores How to Engage Policy Makers with Your Research.

This book brings together a selection of texts from the first three editions of the “ILO Chair”, established by a protocol signed in 2017 between the University of Coimbra, through its Faculty of Economics (FEUC), and the International Labour Organization (ILO). The book is organised into four parts, each of which consists of two chapters and refers to a relevant thematic grouping on the future of work: i) The ILO between the historical legacy and the future of decent work; ii) Labour standards, jobs and climate challenges; iii) Inequalities, work and gender gaps; iv) Work, digital economy and the right to disconnect. Each of the 8 chapters is matched with a commentary co-authored by FEUC professors and/or researchers from its main research centres – the Centre for Social Studies (CES) and the Centre for Business and Economics Research (CeBER). A plurality of dialogues with the ILO on the future of work is thus produced, reflecting the wealth of disciplinary visions that make up the FEUC community.

This completely revised and rewritten handbook gives an overview of international organization (IO) as a dynamic field of research that adds to our understanding of global and regional relations and related domestic politics. Bringing together international scholars from a range of disciplines, it considers both IO as a process and multilateral organizations as institutions. This handbook is divided into five parts: I. Documentation, sources and perspectives II. International secretariats as bureaucracies III. Actors within and beyond international bureaucracies IV. Processes within and beyond international bureaucracies V. Challenges to international organizations Containing new chapters on topics such as the anthropological perspective, IO secretariats in several continents outside of Europe, feminization, the digital turn and challenges to IO legitimacy, the contributors reflect on the progression of IO studies from a burgeoning field to a well‐established subfield of international relations and the move away from scholarship based mainly in North‐Western Europe and the United States. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of IOs, global governance, diplomacy and foreign policy, as well as practitioners of multilateral cooperation.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the International Labour Organization’s 100-year history. At its heart is the concept of global social policy, which encompasses not only social policy in its national and international dimensions, but also development policy, world trade, international migration and human rights. The book focuses on the ILO’s roles as a key player in debates on poverty, social justice, wealth distribution and social mobility subjects and as a global forum for addressing these issues. The study puts in perspective the manifold ways in which the ILO has helped structure these debates and has made – through its standard-setting, technical cooperation and myriad other activities – practical contributions to the world of work and to global social policy.

Ever since W.E.B. du Bois conceptualized slaves’ self-emancipation during the U.S. Civil War as a "general strike," the language of labor history has informed scholarly understandings of slavery. While the analogy of the plantation to the factory has its obvious limitations, historians have understood slaves and slaveholders as engaged in recognizable struggles over the speed of work, the ownership of time and expertise, and the informal rights and privileges that governed the labor process. However, an older materialist history rooted in marxist categories has not always succeeded in capturing the dynamics of racial dominance and human commodification at the heart of the American slave system. A "new history of capitalism" has offered one remedy, namely to embed slavery firmly within a capitalist mode of production whose investment in "free" labor was always more rhetorical than real. A different response may now be emerging through what scholars call "the new materialism"—an approach organized around human/non-human entanglements and drawing on recent theoretical work on things, networks, and assemblages. This talk considers the implications of this "new materialism" for the history of slavery, and by extension, for the field of labor history more generally.