Think Tanks in America
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Think Tanks in America
Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policy makers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists. But what are think tanks? Who funds them? What kind of “research” do they produce? Where does their authority come from? And how influential have they become?
In Think Tanks in America, Thomas Medvetz argues that the unsettling ambiguity of the think tank is less an accidental feature of its existence than the very key to its impact. By combining elements of more established sources of public knowledge—universities, government agencies, businesses, and the media—think tanks exert a tremendous amount of influence on the way citizens and lawmakers perceive the world, unbound by the more clearly defined roles of those other institutions. In the process, they transform the government of this country, the press, and the political role of intellectuals. Timely, succinct, and instructive, this provocative book will force us to rethink our understanding of the drivers of political debate in the United States.
344 pages | 1 map, 12 line drawings, 7 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2012
History: American History
Political Science: American Government and Politics
Sociology: Theory and Sociology of Knowledge
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Prologue: Gaining Ground: The Rise of the Policy Expert
Chapter 1. Indistinction: Rethinking the Think Tank
Chapter 2. Experts in the Making: On the Birth of Technoscientific Reason
Chapter 3. The Crystallization of the Space of Think Tanks
Chapter 4. The Rules of Policy Research
Chapter 5. From Deprivation to Dependency: Expert Discourse and the American Welfare Debate
Chapter 6. Conclusion: Anti-intellectualism, Public Intellectualism, and Public Sociology Revisited
Appendix A: Note on Data Sources
Appendix B: Supplementary Graphs and Tables
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Prologue: Gaining Ground: The Rise of the Policy Expert
Chapter 1. Indistinction: Rethinking the Think Tank
Chapter 2. Experts in the Making: On the Birth of Technoscientific Reason
Chapter 3. The Crystallization of the Space of Think Tanks
Chapter 4. The Rules of Policy Research
Chapter 5. From Deprivation to Dependency: Expert Discourse and the American Welfare Debate
Chapter 6. Conclusion: Anti-intellectualism, Public Intellectualism, and Public Sociology Revisited
Appendix A: Note on Data Sources
Appendix B: Supplementary Graphs and Tables
Notes
References
Index
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