Urban growth and the unprecedented expansion of imperial Spain sparked a sense of constant fluctuation and anonymity that challenged early modern categories of belonging and space demarcation. The ...Spanish crown claimed a monopoly which sought to exclude tentatively defined foreigners, and in the peninsula, urban growth encouraged measures to identify and restrict the presence of the 'undeserving' poor. Nascent frameworks of legal identity exacerbated a public discourse of suspicion against constant motion and the 'undocumented', and this interaction between mobility and emerging techniques of identification has an intellectual history that has not received sufficient attention. The Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria controversially oscillated between the ethical defence of hospitable behaviour and a notion of 'openess' permeated by the language of the rights of 'nations'. His disciple Domingo de Soto more openly challenged current measures by insisting on the limits of any attempt to create fixed definitions of poverty and legitimate movement. This research explores how movement was both monitored and discussed in a highly mobile world of fragile categories of identity and fragmentary and porous boundaries. It inquires how different narratives of identity and belonging were articulated in regulations and legal cases, and examines their influence on intellectual debates about hospitality and kindness to strangers in both transatlantic and local frameworks. In this context, I intend to offer new insights on the means through which nebulous identities and mechanisms of identification were incorporated to an emerging bureaucracy of movement, and contribute to a better understanding of how these practices helped shape the terms in which freedom of movement was advocated or objected. This research claims that the discursive ambivalence of notions like the right to travel or the itinerant-undeserving poor, exposed a climate of resistance to an emerging bureaucracy of identification and increasing mobility regulations.
This essay addresses how the Norwegian government has handled the coronavirus pandemic. Compared with many other countries, Norway has performed well in handling the crisis. This must be understood ...in the context of competent politicians, a high‐trust society with a reliable and professional bureaucracy, a strong state, a good economic situation, a big welfare state, and low population density. The Norwegian government managed to control the pandemic rather quickly by adopting a suppression strategy, followed by a control strategy, based on a collaborative and pragmatic decision‐making style, successful communication with the public, a lot of resources, and a high level of citizen trust in government. The alleged success of the Norwegian case is about the relationship between crisis management capacity and legitimacy. Crisis management is most successful when it is able to combine democratic legitimacy with government capacity.
Within seemingly weak states, exceptionally effective subunits lie hidden. These highperforming niches exhibit organizational characteristics distinct from poor-performing peer organizations, but ...also distinct from high-functioning organizations in Western countries. This article develops the concept of interstitial bureaucracy to explain how and why unusually high-performing state organizations in developing countries invert canonical features of Weberian bureaucracy. Interstices are distinct-yet-embedded subsystems characterized by practices inconsistent with those of the dominant institution. This interstitial position poses particular challenges and requires unique solutions. Interstices cluster together scarce protobureaucratic resources to cultivate durable distinction from the status quo, while managing disruptions arising from interdependencies with the wider neopatrimonial field. I propose a framework for how bureaucratic interstices respond to those challenges, generalizing from organizational comparisons within the Ghanaian state and abbreviated historical comparison cases from the nineteenth-century United States, early-twentieth-century China, mid-twentieth-century Kenya, and early-twenty-first-century Nigeria.
Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro-level perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing on insights from psychology on the behavior ...of individuals and groups. The authors discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology and related fields and point to research in public administration that could benefit from further integration. An analysis of public administration topics through a psychological lens can be useful to confirm, add nuance to, or extend classical public administration theories. As such, behavioral public administration complements traditional public administration. Furthermore, it could be a two-way street for psychologists who want to test the external validity of their theories in a political-administrative setting. Finally, four principles are proposed to narrow the gap between public administration and psychology.
Brokers and Bribes in India Annavarapu, Sneha
Contexts (Berkeley, Calif.),
02/2021, Volume:
20, Issue:
1
Journal Article
In this essay, the author explores the culture of bribes in India. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over seventeen months (2017-2019) in Hyderabad, the author turns the spotlight away from ...corruption as a “problem” to glean insight into how corruption is perceived and interpreted by citizens who navigate the literal and metaphorical mazes of Indian bureaucracy.
This article argues that administrative burden—that is, an individual's experience of policy implementation as onerous—is an important consideration for administrators and influences their views on ...policy and governance options. The authors test this proposition in the policy area of election administration using a mixed-method assessment of local election officials They find that the perceived administrative burden of policies is associated with a preference to shift responsibilities to others, perceptions of greater flaws and lesser merit in policies that have created the burden (to the point that such judgments are demonstrably wrong), and opposition to related policy innovations.
This study focuses on how and why firms strategically respond to government signals on appropriate corporate activity. We integrate institutional theory with research on corporate political strategy ...to develop a political dependence model that explains (a) how different types of dependency on the government lead firms to issue corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and (b) how the risk of governmental monitoring affects the extent to which CSR reports are symbolic or substantive. First, we examine how firm characteristics reflecting dependence on the government—including private versus state ownership, executives serving on political councils, political legacy, and financial resources—affect the likelihood of firms issuing CSR reports. Second, we focus on the symbolic nature of CSR reporting and how variance in the risk of government monitoring through channels such as bureaucratic embeddedness and regional government institutional development influences the extent to which CSR communications are symbolically decoupled from substantive CSR activities. Our database includes all CSR reports issued by the approximately 1,600 publicly listed Chinese firms between 2006 and 2009. Our hypotheses are generally supported. The political perspective we develop contributes to organizational theory by showing that (a) government signaling is an important mechanism of political influence, (b) different types of dependency on the government expose firms to different types of legitimacy pressure, and (c) firms face a decoupling risk that makes them more likely to enact substantive CSR actions in situations in which they are likely to be monitored.
Historians and social scientists have long identified bureaucracy as the modern state's foundation and the reign of France's Louis XIV as a model for its development. A World of Paper offers a fresh ...interpretation of bureaucracy through a close examination of the department of the Sun King's last foreign secretary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy. Torcy, who served as foreign secretary from 1696-1715, is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant foreign ministers of the ancien regime. Building on the work of his predecessors, he fashioned a skilled team of collaborators as he managed the complex issues of war and peace during the turbulent final decades of Louis XIV's reign. John Rule and Ben Trotter examine Torcy's department to depict administrative structures as they emerged through the circulating stream of paper that connected his office with provincial administrators and diplomats abroad. They explore the collection and centralization of information during Torcy's tenure through the creation of a modern state archive, discreet intelligence gathering, and the surveillance and management of the French mails. They also study the postal carriers, couriers, household officers of the royal court, genealogists hired for research, and an informal "brain trust" of experts, and advisors who carried vital information in and out of the department every day. A remarkable reconstruction of the department of Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy, A World of Paper demystifies bureaucracy and explores the ways in which the modern information state developed from his labours.
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