American Government is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the single-semester American government course. This title includes innovative features designed to enhance student learning, including Insider Perspective features and a Get Connected Module that shows students how they can get engaged in the political process. The book provides an important opportunity for students to learn the core concepts of American government and understand how those concepts apply to their lives and the world around them. American Government includes updated information on the 2016 presidential election.Senior Contributing AuthorsGlen Krutz (Content Lead), University of OklahomaSylvie Waskiewicz, PhD (Lead Editor)

This course introduces the ethnographic study of politics, i.e., what anthropologists understand to be “political” in various social and economic systems, from small-scale societies to liberal democratic states. It examines politics across three contemporary contexts: electoral politics, public spheres, bureaucracies and humanitarian governance. Students consider and analyze how questions of authority, coercion, and violence have been theorized to relate to the political, and how some aspects of social life are regimented in explicitly non-political ways.

Using film as a lens to explore and interpret various aspects of the urban experience in both the U.S. and abroad, this course presents a survey of important developments in urbanism from 1900 to the present day, including changes in technology, bureaucracy, and industrialization; immigration and national identity; race, class, gender, and economic inequality; politics, conformity, and urban anomie; and planning, development, private property, displacement, sprawl, environmental degradation, and suburbanization.

The materials presented in this book were developed for an advanced-level content-based Russian language course at Portland State University entitled “Russian Literature of the Twentieth Century: The 1920s.” Literature of this period is a major part of the Russian canon, but is notoriously difficult for learners of Russian to read in the original, due both to its stylistic complexity and the relative obscurity of its historical, political, and cultural references. And yet, this decade is crucial for understanding Russia – not only in the Soviet period, but also today. This was the period, when Mikhail Zoshchenko, Isaak Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrei Platonov meticulously documented the birth of the “New Soviet Man,” his “newspeak” and Soviet bureaucratese; when Alexandra Kollontai, a Marxist revolutionary and a diplomat, wrote essays and fiction on the “New Soviet Woman”; when numerous satirical works were created; when Babel experimented with a literary representation of dialects (e.g.,Odessa Russian or Jewish Russian). These varieties of language have not disappeared. Bureaucrats still use some form of bureaucratese. Numerous contemporary TV shows imitate the dialects that Babel described. Moreover, Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog” gave rise, due largely to its film adaptation, to catch-phrases that still appear throughout contemporary Russian media, satirical contexts, and everyday conversation. Thus, the Russian literature of the 1920s does not belong exclusively to the past, but has relevance and interpretive power for the present, and language learners who wish to pursue a career in humanities, media analysis, analytical translation, journalism, or international relations must understand this period and the linguistic patterns it established.

The textbook is intended for adult learners, and contains language assignments that would, on the one hand, help students transition to ACTFL’s Advanced proficiency level (i.e., be able to create "narratives, descriptions, and summaries … using paraphrasing and elaboration” (ACTFL 2012: 12).), but at the same time promote meaningful engagement with literary texts. The assignments in this textbook are multilevel ones, and thus offer a solution for multilevel classes that include literate heritage Russian speakers, Intermediate High, Advanced, or even Superior-level readers.

This course is designed for students particularly concerned with the practical problems of operating in large formal organizations, either from an operational or a research perspective. It will focus, as the title suggests, upon different forms of economic organizations and institutions in advanced and developing industrial societies and the theories (and theoretical perspectives) which might help us to understand them.

This is the second in a sequence of two field seminars in American politics intended for graduate students in political science, in preparation for taking the general examination in American politics. The material covered in this semester focuses on American political institutions. The readings covered here are not comprehensive, but it is sufficiently broad to give students an introduction to major empirical questions and theoretical approaches that guide the study of American political institutions these days.

This course provides a substantive overview of U.S. politics and an introduction to the discipline of political science. It surveys the institutional foundations of U.S. politics as well as the activities of political elites, organizations, and ordinary citizens. It also explores the application of general political science concepts and analytic frameworks to specific episodes and phenomena in U.S. politics.

Comparative politics is the systematic study and comparison of the world's political systems. The course begins by discussing the factors and categories of analysis that political scientists and important international institutions like the World Bank, NATO, and the United Nations use regularly; it ends by comparing and contrasting governments from five different regions of the world: the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: Define the chief characteristics of a nation state; Identify and explain various comparative methodologies used to compare various political systems; Distinguish between unitary, federal, and confederal governmental models; Compare and contrast political cultures in selected countries; Compare and contrast political socialization in selected countries; Describe and explain patterns of representation and participation in selected countries; Compare and contrast the roles and functions of political parties in selected countries; Compare and contrast the role of interest groups in selected countries; Identify and explain governance and policy-making in selected countries; Compare and contrast the role of the executive in selected countries; Compare and contrast the role of the judicial branch in selected countries; Compare and contrast the role of the bureaucracy and the policy process in selected countries; Describe and explain the political economy and development in selected countries; Identify and explain political challenges and changing agendas in selected countries. (Political Science 221)

This course is intended as an introduction to the field of political economy. It is the first part of a two-part sequence in political economy, along with 14.773 Political Economy: Institutions and Development. Combined, the purpose of the two classes is to give you both a sense of the frontier research topics and a good command of the tools in the area.

Textbook, slides, and class activities related to groups and formal organizations, and deviance and social control. Primary text: OpenStax Introduction to Sociology 2e

Organizational Processes enhances students’ ability to take effective action in complex organizational settings by providing the analytic tools needed to analyze, manage, and lead the organizations of the future. Emphasis is placed on the importance of the organizational context in influencing which individual styles and skills are effective. The subject centers on three complementary perspectives, or “lenses”, on an organization: political, cultural, and strategic design. Students enrolled in this class are also jointly enrolled in 15.328, Team Project, in order to complete a field study of an organizational change initiative. Organizational Processes also operates in conjunction with 15.280, Communication for Managers, by sharing certain assignments and holding some joint classes.

The course covers British literature and culture during Queen Victoria’s long reign, 1837-1901. This was the brilliant age of Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson – and many others. It was also the age of urbanization, steam power, class conflict, Darwin, religious crisis, imperial expansion, information explosion, bureaucratization – and much more.