Inca, Sailor, Soldier, King: Gregor MacGregor and the Early Nineteenth‐Century Caribbean

This article examines the recruiting practices, political propositions and changing identities of the Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor in the early nineteenth‐century Caribbean. Based on original archival research and revision of the existing secondary literature, it seeks to understand why he has consistently been judged as a failure, and why neither Scotland nor any of the countries MacGregor worked in have wanted to claim him as their own hero. After an introduction providing biographical details and some historical context for the Caribbean in the period 1811–1830, the article looks in detail at what have been seen to be his successes and failures in the Caribbean region. It asks to what extent questions of ethnicity or masculinity have affected the way contemporaries and historians viewed MacGregor and his actions. In conclusion, it suggests that although he was a soldier and a sailor, and he was declared both an Inca and a King, his career was deemed a failure by both contemporaries and historians in Scotland, South America and the Caribbean. The main explanation for this negative assessment is that his ambitions continually fell foul of the interests of various Caribbean elites and of the distinctive historical circumstances of the region.¹     

Reproducing a Fit Citizenry: Dependency, Eugenics, and the Law of Marriage in the United States, 1860-1920

Between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, American state legislatures enacted a series of new laws that delineated a class of citizens who were deemed ineligible to participate in the institution of marriage. Scholars have characterized this development as evidence that lawmakers had lost faith in a laissez-faire approach to nuptial governance, and thus transformed marriage into an object of public regulation. This essay argues that behind the ostensible nuptial privatism of the mid-nineteenth century lay a self-conscious policy of judicial governance. Judges invoked the language of nuptial privacy and the common law of contract strategically to advance their vision of moral and economic discipline. The new marital prohibitions thus represented, the essay argues, not the expansion of the state's police power into the previously private realm of domestic relations, but rather a critical transformation in how nuptial reformers and lawmakers understood the relationship between marriage and the well-being of the polity.
Fueled by growing concerns about pauperism, the racial character of the urban proletariat, and the collapse of the economically independent single-male-breadwinner household, the changing form of nuptial governance signaled a thoroughgoing intellectual and strategic reorientation from an understanding of marriage as forming economically and morally viable households – the fundamental units of society – to an understanding of marriage as a largely procreative institution, as the literal source of the citizenry. This reconceptualization of marriage underwrote a strategy of nuptial governance that mobilized marriage as a strategy in the state's regulation of social reproduction.     

Operationalising bottom-up learning in international NGOs: Barriers and alternatives

This article proposes bottom-up learning as a normative framework for international NGOs. It explores the common but often unacknowledged disparity between organisational values and mission versus actual practice. The first section of the paper raises the question of organisational learning disorders followed by an exploration of learning organisations and bottom-up learning in particular. A section briefly summarising positive developments in the field is followed by discussions of organisational barriers and possible mitigation techniques. The paper closes with a challenge for international NGOs to take a closer look at their learning capabilities with a view to improving service to communities in need.     

Institutionalizing ambiguity: the management review group and the reshaping of the defence policy process in Canada

Abstract: The Department of National Defence (dnd) and the Canadian Armed Forces (CF) have been the subject of many studies intended to elicit a better return from defence efforts. None of these studies have been at all comprehensive. The 1971 white paper, Defence in the 70s, introduced a new study aimed at “ensuring maximum effectiveness” in DND. The 1972 Management Review Group (MRC) report changed the entire administrative structure of DND and the CF, introduced new concepts for management, and shifted the power structure of the central bureaucracy. By the end of 1972, DND and the CF had a new set of principal actors, a new administrative structure, and a new policy process. To some the changes were more significant than previous unification reforms. The mrc report stands in sharp contrast to other studies because it has not been available to officials, scholars, or the public. Yet an awareness of die concepts that underlie the recommendations of the MRG is fundamental to understanding why the National Defence Headquarters exists and functions as it does today and why some issues are advanced over others. Sommaire: Le ministére de la Défense nationale (MDN) et les Forces armées cana-diennes (FC) ont fait l'objet de nombreuses “études” visant à accroître le rendement des efforts faits dans le domaine de la défense. Aucune de ces études n'est exhaustive. Le livre blanc de 1971, s'intitulant La défense dans les années 70, présentait une nouvelle étude dont l'objectif était “d'assurer une efficacité maximale” au sein du MDN. Le rapport de 1972 du Management Review Group (MRG) a modifyé toute la structure administrative du MDN et des FC, a introduit de nouveaux concepts de gestion et a entraîné un déplacement des pouvoirs de la bureaucratie centrale. Vers la fin de 1972, le MDN et les FC étaient dotés de nouveaux acteurs principaux, d'une nouvelle structure administrative et de nouvelles méthodes d'établissement de politique. Pour certains, ces changements ont été plus importants que les précédentes réformes d'unification. Contrairement aux autres études, le rapport du MRG n'a pas été mis à la disposition des responsables, des intellectuels ou du public. II est pourtant essentiel de con-naître les concepts sur lesquels s'appuient les recommandations du MRG si Ton veut comprendre pourquoi le Quartier général de la Défense nationale est ce qu'il est aujourd'hui, son mode de fonctionnement et les raisons pour lesquelles certaines questions ont pris le pas sur d'autres.     

Connecting models of the individual and policy change processes: a research agenda

Policy Sciences - This article proposes that closer attention to models of the individual provides substantial theoretical and empirical leverage to policy studies scholars. Capturing the nuances...     

Human Values and Sophistication Interaction Theory

Political Behavior - Political sophistication systematically affects the structure, crystallization, and use of political values, but it remains unclear if sophistication manifests similar effects...