The Bureaucratic Origins of Migrant Poverty: The Texas Cotton Industry, 1910–1930

Migrant poverty resulted from the bureaucratization of Mexicans as a cheap source of labor for the Texas cotton industry from 1910 to 1930. State and federal employment programs and policies designed to maintain an organized and efficient labor market bureaucratized the divisions of labor that segregated Mexicans in seasonal low-wage agricultural work. While the implementation of labor legislation solved the temporary labor needs of large-scale cotton farmers, it exacerbated the working and living conditions of Mexican migratory workers. The welfare of Mexican migrants worsened as state managers integrated the recruitment and distribution of this labor force into the organizational structure of the Texas cotton industry.     

Talking Law in Times of Reform: Paradoxes of Legal Entitlement in Cameroon

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2003 and 2005, this article examines how legality is constructed in present‐day Adamaoua Province, Cameroon. Focusing on an instance of a process locally referred to as la concertation, I analyze how state officials and cattle traders gather to discuss the practical fate of law. As a heightened moment of suspended enforcement, la concertation is productive for both officials, who work out the limits of their respective spheres of authority and imagine a trade based on business norms and practices that severely limit the scope of regulatory action, and traders, who manage to stave off the increased scrutiny that income tax law presupposes, while asserting their concern for the integrity and consistency of the law.     

Why PAR?

Is the Public Administration Review still necessary? Some think that PAR, which debuted in 1940 as America's first and only generalist scholarly public administration journal, belongs to a bygone era of two‐cent postage stamps—a time of coal furnaces, steam radiators, and wood‐burning stoves, when language was crafted longhand or by manual typewriter; when a slide rule calculated most math problems; when a long‐distance telephone call was rare and expensive; when the entire Army, Navy, and State departments were housed within a single building in Washington, DC, the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House; when President Franklin D. Roosevelt communicated to Americans through fireside chats; and when many in the United States still worried about keeping their jobs in the aftermath of the Great Depression, fiercely favoring isolationism over foreign entanglements and strict racial segregation throughout the South.