Archive for the 'Book' Category

Call for Book Reviewers

Published on October 28, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

Common Ground Publishing is seeking distinguished peer reviewers to evaluate book manuscripts submitted to The Social Sciences Book Series.

As part of our commitment to intellectual excellence and a rigorous review process, Common Ground sends book manuscripts that have received initial editorial approval to peer reviewers to further evaluate and provide constructive feedback. The comments and guidance that these reviewers supply is invaluable to our authors and an essential part of the publication process.

Common Ground recognizes the important role of referees by acknowledging book reviewers as members of The Social Sciences Book Series Editorial Review Board for a period of at least one year. The list of members of the Editorial Review Board will be posted on our website. In addition, Common Ground also offers a US$200 voucher for each completed review which meets the standards set out by the Commissioning Editor at the commencement of assignment. Vouchers may be used in the Common Ground Bookstore or for registration at one of our international conferences.

If you would like to referee book manuscripts submitted to The Social Sciences please email. Please make sure to include:

  1. a brief description of your professional credentials
  2. a list of your areas of interest and expertise
  3. a copy of your CV with current contact details

If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for manuscripts within your purview, we will contact you.

Working with Communities: Critical Perspectives

Published on October 8, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Working with Communities: Critical Perspectives by Margot Rawsthorneand Amanda Howard is available as part of The Social Sciences series.

This book responds to an urgent need to reinvigorate collective community action for just change in Australia. At a crucial point in its evolution this book gives a critical perspective to working with communities. It argues that working collectively with communities is vital in this time of rampant individualism and rapid social change.

This book explores many ongoing debates about work with communities:

  • How should we think about the concept ‘community’?
  • How should we relate to governments?
  • How do we know we make a difference?
  • How do we learn from our practice?

The book offers promising ideas for practice and growth in this field for the future. It provides critical questions for practice useful for those involved in community action including: community members, paid community workers and policy makers.

Dr. Margot Rawsthorne, Senior Lecturer, Community Development, Social Work & Policy Studies, University of Sydney.

Dr. Amanda Howard, Associate Lecturer, Social Work, University of Newcastle.

Working with Communities: Critical Perspectives

Published on September 8, 2011 in Book, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Working with Communities: Critical Perspectives by Margot Rawsthorne and Amanda Howard is available as part of The Social Sciences series.

This book responds to an urgent need to reinvigorate collective community action for just change in Australia. At a crucial point in its evolution this book gives a critical perspective to working with communities. It argues that working collectively with communities is vital in this time of rampant individualism and rapid social change.

This book explores many ongoing debates about work with communities:

  • How should we think about the concept ‘community’?
  • How should we relate to governments?
  • How do we know we make a difference?
  • How do we learn from our practice?

The book offers promising ideas for practice and growth in this field for the future. It provides critical questions for practice useful for those involved in community action including: community members, paid community workers and policy makers.

Dr. Margot Rawsthorne, Senior Lecturer, Community Development, Social Work & Policy Studies, University of Sydney.

Dr. Amanda Howard, Associate Lecturer, Social Work, University of Newcastle.

A Stretch for Practitioners and Scholars of International Negotiation

Published on December 12, 2010 in Book. 0 Comments

tug-of-war-perfect-low_frontDr Andrew Whitehead reviews Tug of War: The Tension Concept and the Art of International Negotiation

In this scholarly but accessible book, the author achieves four main feats that are rare in the academic literature on negotiation and many other areas of the social sciences (including my own – business economics). First, he does not use statistics or any other weapon to kill off his flesh-and-blood informants. The book is alive with real and sometimes quirky individuals. Second, he bounces theory and practice off one another in a way that enhances the reader’s grasp of their relationship. While he does respect mainstream theorists in negotiation, and gives them focused coverage, he builds on their work without tugging his forelock as he argues for analysts to pay more attention to the nuanced concept of tension that is fundamental to negotiation. Third, he does not see his own discipline or himself as a fortress. He draws on a wide range of fields to support his particular theoretical approach, which he presents as one way, not the only way, of seeing international negotiation. Fourth, his expression is never pretentious and is almost always simple and fluid. This can be a trap for the unwary reader who might expect complex ideas to be written only in complex ways. This is a smooth read but not an easy one. The author uses jargon from time to time but only if there seems to be no other way out. The writing, including the footnotes, is never superfluous and is often entertaining. For example, “Gregory was cremated with a fat reefer in his pocket.”

The book is well-structured and takes the reader on a highly original journey into the world of expert players. In an unconventional and therefore risky way, the author convincingly presents and analyses two quite different cases in fine detail in order to demonstrate his theory of context, tensions and tension management. The first case is in diplomacy and the second in hostage negotiation. As a business analyst and manager with a special interest in China, I was disappointed at first that there was no detailed case in international business. However, I soon realised that business negotiation in China and elsewhere gets a lot of coverage in other ways. Several informants are business managers, and two are senior diplomats who have transferred their experience and skills to the business world.

Read more…


Views from the Inside: Participant Perspectives on Community Leadership

Published on December 10, 2010 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Views from the Inside: Participant Perspectives on Community Leadership by Joy Murray,Jodi-Lee Rash, Rej Creaton, Peter Cooley and Donna McClelland is available from The Social Sciences imprint.

This book tells five stories of a three-year leadership capacity building program designed for residents of government housing estates in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. It tells its stories through the voices of the project leader and four participants. While the project leader explains the workings of the project each of the participants tells how it fitted into their life-story. They talk of their childhood and growing up and sometimes precarious survival at the poor end of town.

The four insider stories are set beside the program’s intentions as seen by government funding body and program managers, and the philosophical understanding that underpinned the program leader’s actions.

In so doing the book explores the relationship between: one person’s theory; a community development program in practice; and real life experience. It does this not through a voice of authority commenting on people’s lived experience and attempting to relate this to the theory, but by showing what the program meant to the project leader and what it meant to each of the four participants. It tries to demonstrate, but not explain, how these disparate meanings connected, or otherwise, with the theory that the project leader believed she was applying; and how in the end all knowledge is personal, built up over a life time and stitched together with the threads of our relationships in whatever environment we happen to inhabit.

Review of Tug of War – The Tension Concept and the Art of International Negotiation

Published on November 17, 2010 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

tug-of-war-perfect-low_front

From Paul Gibson, Update

Dr Paul Gibson says that this often deeply theoretical text by Tony English offers useful concepts and analytical ideas, including the metaphor of negotiators (and mediators) as ‘tension managers’.

This book focuses on international negotiation, and is applicable to the most general examples of  “negotiation”. Tony concedes that any negotiator manages tension and usually does so without being necessarily conscious of doing so.  To increase our consciousness of this, he explains more fully what he refers to as the “operational definition of tension management in negotiation”.


The book follows from Tony’s PhD studies in which he explored the ways in which international managers cope with unfamiliar contexts.  He acknowledges that while he coined the phrase ‘tension management’ for his PhD thesis, he did find earlier explicit uses of the tension concept in the literature, albeit within more limited constructs.


To make more sense of the term ‘tension concept’ the reader is encouraged to consider the existence of such tensions in everyday life generally by understanding the tension in simple polar opposites: day-night, male-female, life-death and yin-yang. Indeed in the worlds of management, the arts and philosophy tensions exist between competing forces and forms.  The application of dialectic thinking and debate in management is a practical application of exploring the value in competing ideas and strategies. Delightfully, Tony even weaves in a reference to Shakespeare with the often quoted phrase from Hamlet (Act III): “To be, or not to be: that is the question” to illustrate his point.  In Tony’s words “Hamlet muses on the human struggle with a tension that on one hand draws us to cling passively to life, with its familiar problems and torments, and on the other hand to retaliate by suicide, and so launch ourselves into the hidden and possibly worse realm of death”.


To Read More…

Series: The Social Sciences

Published on August 4, 2010 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

We are accepting book proposals for the imprint The Social Sciences.

Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.

Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.

If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.

Social Sciences Journal – Become an Associate Editor

Published on August 4, 2010 in Book, Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences all submissions are sent for peer refereeing, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.

In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.

If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, please email journals@thesocialsciences.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.