The Competition Paradigm: America's Romance with Conflict, Contest, and Commerce - Hardcover

Rosenau, Pauline Vaillancourt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0742520374 ISBN 13: 9780742520370

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003

Synopsis

Competition has long been a hallmark of patriotism and the American way of life. Could there be better models of competition that lead to a more productive society? This intriguing question is taken up in The Competition Paradigm, the first book in more than a decade to scrutinize America's enchantment with competition. Rosenau's engaging inquiry finds surprisingly little evidence of competition's benefits and much on its harmful effects. Research from biology to psychology to international relations shows that unbridled competition compromises individual health, threatens the quality of community life, lowers commercial productivity, increases inequality, and jeopardizes globalization. Yet Rosenau does not condemn all competition. Instead she judiciously distinguishes between its constructive and destructive forms, pointing to new workplace and national policies that can enhance life and American productivity.

About this title

About the Author:

Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau is professor of management and policy science at the University of Texas, Houston.

Review:

One cannot but be impressed by the breadth of the author's reading, from medical journals to physiology texts to management tomes to time and motion studies. The review of this research is as painstaking as it is powerful. (Robert Lineberry, editor, Social Science Quarterly)

Professor Rosenau's new and engaging book punctures one of the giant balloons of American culture―our love of competition. Her chapters logically and systematically unmask the vast gap between the popular rhetoric of perfect competition and the reality of tilted playing fields. This book shows how bad competition drives out good competition, ultimately to the detriment of our economy and our nation's health. The book should be required reading for all students of social sciences―especially in economics and business studies―as a timely antidote to the myth of the benefits of laissez-faire. (Ichiro Kawachi, Harvard School of Public Health)

At a moment when in the Knowledge Economy, the logic of competition is rebuilding around innovation, trust, knowledge-sharing and alliances, The Competition Paradigm arrives just in time. This book is truly excellent and it should be an even greater success than Professor Rosenau's Post-Modernism in the Social Sciences. It will undoubtedly be considered controversial but, the argument is so solidly supported by research evidence that this book will become a main reference on the subject. (Arnaud Sales, University of Montreal)

A scorching critique of a key tenet of our economy, polity, and society, written with conviction; a true tour de force. (Amitai Etzioni, professor, George Washington University; founder of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics)

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0742520374
• ISBN 13: 9780742520370
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256