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

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

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)

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)

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)

A scorching critique of a key tenet of our economy, polity, and society, written with conviction; a true tour de force. (Etzioni, Amitai)