Opening the Government of Canada: The Federal Bureaucracy in the Digital Age. UBC Press, 2019. 312 pp.

In Opening the Government of Canada Clarke takes us beyond the rhetoric of digital, and provides a compelling discussion of the need for more openness, while also balancing open with accountability, equal treatment of citizens, and public service neutrality. The book adds much to the public administration literature, but also invites scholars in information management and information systems to think about how their theories and practices can add to the discussion. Her call to invest in digital talent, literacy and infrastructure advocates for a modern interdisciplinary approach to government transformation.

Aboriginal Peoples and the Law. A Critical Introduction. Vancouver: UBC Press/Purich Books. 2018

What is Aboriginal law? What is its purpose, sources, and justifications? How is it linked to the history of Aboriginal-state relations in Canada, to the trajectory of federal and provincial Aboriginal policy making, and to Canada’s constitutional structure? These are the core questions taken up in Jim Reynolds’ Aboriginal Peoples and the Law. Reynolds provides a clear and highly readable summary, and critical analysis, of Canadian law as it pertains to Aboriginal and treaty rights, self-government, Aboriginal title, the duty to consult, and to both Indigenous and international sources of law.

Negotiating Business Narratives: Fables of the Information Technology, Automobile Manufacturing, and Financial Trading Industries, Palgrave-Pivot, p. 60

How do you know how to behave when you have to do some kind of business in a place and with people you do not know, say, a military base, a manufacturing plant, a scientific laboratory, or a technologically sophisticated start-up? You go to the only references available: books, movies, TV shows. You draw upon the residues of popular culture portrayals of the environment in question. It may not be perfect, but it is all you have.

Constructing Policy Change: Early Childhood Education and Care in Liberal Welfare States. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. 334 pages.

In this scholarly work, White seeks to explain the reasons behind fundamental shifts occurring in early childhood education and care policy in Canada and the United States and why these two countries lag behind other advanced democracies; not just to Sweden or France, as might be expected, but kindred liberal welfare states such as Australia and the United Kingdom.

The Public Servant’s Guide to Government in Canada UTP. 2019.

This slim booklet sets out to achieve an ambitious goal, namely, the education of Canada’s public servants about how government works and what their role in it should be. Put another way, it aims to give them important information about their employer and their jobs. On the whole, it does this very well. The authors know their subject.