bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Platformization of Labor and Society
Authors: Casilli Antonio A. , Posada Julian
Published: September 2019

This chapter focuses on the role of digital intermediaries in shaping technology, society, and economy under what Casilli and Posada call “the paradigm of the platform.” They trace the historical relationship between platforms, markets, and enterprises to demonstrate the role of algorithms in matching users, pieces of software, goods, and services, and how platforms can create value from the content and data generated by users. Their primary argument is that platforms play a fundamental role in establishing a digital labor relationship with their users by allocating underpaid or unpaid tasks to them. In order to enable and coordinate users’ contributions, platforms need to standardize and fragment (“taskify”) labor processes. The authors conclude by highlighting the link between platformization and automation, with the tech giants employing their users’ data to produce artificial intelligence and machine-learning solutions to an expanding range of problems.
Three Phases in the Development of China’s Network Society
Authors: Qiu Jack Linchuan
Published: September 2019

While Raine and Wellman (Chapter 1, this volume) focus on contemporary uses and impacts of the Internet in the US, this chapter provides a more historical perspective on the evolution of China’s network society since the 1990s. Jack Linchuan Qiu argues that during a time of rapid industrialization and globalization, China’s network society went through three phases—which he characterizes as Asteroids, Bees, and Coliseums—with each phase having a unique pattern of institutional formation, class relationships, and sociopolitical dynamics. The chapter develops a typology of these three phases to capture and explain the formation of China’s network society. The overall trajectory of China’s network society, the author argues, has an important relationship with the growth of civil society in China from the 1990s into the twenty-first century. The turn of the millennium has seen consumerism and nationalism increase dramatically, thereby shaping life online.
The Decay of the International Rule of Law Project (1990–2015)
Authors: von Bernstorff Jochen
Published: September 2019

The chapter challenges the idea that the 1990s are the beginning of a golden era of the international rule of law. Rather they are interpreted as the climax of a phase of a US-dominated international institutional system and a phase of relatively uncontested Western hegemony which was often realized through transnational institutions but which was not necessarily created by international law. However, many institutional characteristics of this era conflicted or continued to conflict fundamentally with central elements of the original early twentieth-century rule of law project in international relations which subscribed to compulsory jurisdiction, rule-based collective security, sovereign equality of states, and codification. The United States and its Western partners missed out on the opportunity to use the ‘unipolar’ moment in modern world history to eventually realize and entrench such a fair rule of law system in international relations.
The Rise and Decline of the International Rule of Law and the Job of Scholars
Authors: Peters Anne
Published: September 2019

International law feeds on preconditions which it cannot guarantee itself. International scholarship, too, must come to grips with pre-conditions and existing parameters over which it has no control itself. But such scholarship must not ‘succumb’ to these factual and ideational realities by adapting its methods and findings to any given political, social, and economic climate. It is the job of international legal scholars to produce ideas in a spirit of realist utopianism (John Rawls). Depending on the existing parameters, these ideas are apt to shape attitudes and actions, or not. Such scholarship also needs to distance itself from its object of study in order not to lose its capacity to criticize the law and the practice. How far exactly scholarly writing should transcend or keep aloof from the prevailing political climate and from concerns of feasibility depends on the research questions under discussion and is a matter of judgment. The style of scholarship suggested here is illustrated by the work of three eminent scholars whose careers continued through different political eras more or less favourable to the international rule of law: Hersch Lauterpacht, Antonio Cassese, and Josef Kunz.
International Law within a Global International Society
Authors: Hurrell Andrew
Published: September 2019

This chapter is a comment on Felix Lange’s analysis of the universalization of international law from a historical-contextual perspective. Building on Lange’s arguments the comment underscores and develops further three specific themes, all of which are of ongoing relevance: the importance of mutual constitution in the relations between the West and the non-West; the need to look ‘beyond membership’; and the agency of the non-Western world. It concludes by returning to the idea of the international rule of law and the ways in which our understanding of the universalization of international law and the international rule of law may be related and brought together.
International Law and Its Others
Authors: Chesterman Simon
Published: September 2019

This chapter is a comment on Aniruddha Rajput’s discussion of how BRICS states influence various areas of international law. First, it questions the coherence of the approach towards international law of the BRICS states as a category. Second, it highlights that the respective states often defend traditional norms of sovereignty and non-intervention rather than promote an alternative new vision of international law. Third, it emphasizes that rising powers’ conservativism leads to increased difficulty of adopting new regimes.
Do Non-State Actors Strengthen or Weaken International Law?
Authors: d’Aspremont Jean
Published: September 2019

The chapter compares the liberal beliefs and sensibilities informing the question of the rise or decline of international law with the liberalism found in the way in which the concept of non-state actors has been conceptualized, theorized, and used in international legal thought and practice. It shows that the question of whether non-state actors strengthen or weaken international law prejudges its very answer and supports an image of international law on the rise. In doing so, the discussion simultaneously shows that liberal discourses are organized around liberal symbioses that are necessary to preserve international lawyers’ confidence in the ability of international law to intervene in the problems of the world.
From High Hopes to Scepticism? Human Rights Protection and Rule of Law in Europe in an Ever More Hostile Environment
Authors: Nußberger Angelika
Published: September 2019

The chapter argues that the dynamics inherent in the European Convention system can pose a problem to legal certainty. The first pillar of the analysis is the double link between the Strasbourg system of human rights protection and rule of law. On the one hand the Court contributes to developing the concept of rule of law by elaborating standards on the basis of concrete cases. On the other hand the Court is a major player in the international legal system and has to abide itself by the principles it develops. The second pillar of the analysis is what may be called ‘high hopes’ linked to the human rights protection system, in particular during the 1950s and the 1990s. The question arises why some member states have changed their attitude and look at European human rights protection with a critical attitude. Tensions between human rights and rule of law seem to be a relevant aspect in this respect.
Is Compliance an Indicator for the State of International Law?
Authors: Dunoff Jeffrey L
Published: September 2019

This chapter questions the utility of using compliance—understood as behaviour consistent with applicable rules of international law—as a direct indicator for the state of international law. Instead it develops a claim that, across many domains, contemporary international law faces a ‘compliance trilemma’. In many instances, the actors who wish to construct an international rule of law pursue the goals of (1) widespread participation, (2) ambitious legal norms, and (3) high rates of compliance. However, it is often possible to achieve, at most, two of these goals, giving rise to the Trilemma. Hence, compliance remains an important subject of study because efforts to construct an international rule of law confront inescapable trade-offs between pursuit of heightened compliance and other desirable outcomes, such as increased participation and increased depth of international legal norms.
The Relationship between Legality and Legitimacy: A Double-Edged Sword
Authors: Burchardt Dana
Published: September 2019

This comment on Thilo Marauhn’s chapter addresses the relationship between legality and legitimacy from a norm-related perspective. It inquires into the reasons for the two-dimensional relationship between legality and legitimacy through the lens of norm theory. It considers legal norms on the one hand and legitimacy norms on the other hand, interrogating how these different kinds of norms can coexist, interrelate, and influence each other and what functions they can fulfil in the international sphere. By doing so, it highlights to what extent legal norms and legitimacy norms compete and complement each other—where the double-edged sword in the relationship between legality and legitimacy can be used for undercutting or rather for defending each other.
The Contestation of Value-Based Norms: Confirmation or Erosion of International Law?
Authors: Maluwa Tiyanjana
Published: September 2019

The chapter discusses the concepts of shared values and value-based norms. It examines two areas of international law that provide illustrative examples of contestation of value-based norms: the fight against impunity under international criminal law and the debates about the responsibility to protect. It argues that the African Union’s (AU) difference of view with the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the indictment of Omar Al-Bashir is not a rejection of the non-impunity norm, but of the context and sequencing of its application. As regards the right of intervention codified in the Constitutive Act of the AU, Africans states responded to the failure of the Security Council to invoke its existing normative powers in the Rwanda situation by establishing a treaty-based norm of intervention, the first time that a regional international instrument had ever done so. Thus, in both cases one cannot speak of a decline of international law.
Global Justice, Global Governance, and International Law
Authors: Kamto Maurice
Published: September 2019

The chapter comments on Eyal Benvenisti’s discussion of international law’s contribution to global justice. It puts forward that global justice at the international level can only be the result of a permanent bargain and a compromise between the multiple and conflicting interests among states. It emphasizes that better governance at the global level involving the sharing of the policy-making and decision-making, accountability, the rule of law, and sanctions can help improve global justice. It concludes by suggesting that if international law could contribute to the advent of global justice in a move from ‘Responsibility to protect’ to ‘Responsibility to develop’, it would open a new era for its rise amongst nations and peoples.
The Legal Personhood of Artificial Intelligences
Authors: Kurki Visa A.J.
Published: September 2019

The chapter scrutinizes the legal personhood of artificial intelligences (AIs). It starts by distinguishing three relevant contexts. Most discussions of AI legal personhood focus either on the moral value of AIs (ultimate-value context); on whether AIs could or should be held responsible (responsibility context); or on whether they could acquire a more independent role in commercial transactions (commercial context). The chapter argues that so-called strong AIs—capable of performing similar tasks as human beings—can indeed function as legal persons regardless of whether such AIs are worthy of moral consideration. If an AI can function as a legal person, it can be granted legal personhood on somewhat similar grounds as a human collectivity. The majority of the chapter is focused on the role of AIs in commercial contexts, and new theoretical tools are proposed that would help distinguish different commercial AI legal personhood arrangements.
Electric News in Colonial Algeria
Authors: Asseraf Arthur
Published: September 2019

How do the things which connect us divide us at the same time? This book tells a different history of globalization by tracing how news circulated in a divided society: Algeria under French rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The years between 1881 and 1940 were those of maximum colonial power in North Africa, a period of intense technological revolution, global high imperialism, and the expansion of settler colonialism. Algerians became connected to international networks of news, and local people followed distant events with great interest. But once news reached Algeria, accounts of recent events often provoked conflict as they moved between different social groups. In a society split between its native majority and a substantial settler minority, distant wars led to riots. Circulation and polarization were two sides of the same coin. Looking at a range of sources in multiple languages across colonial society, this book offers a new understanding of what news is. News was a whole ecosystem in which new technologies such as the printing press, the telegraph, the cinema and the radio interacted with older media like songs, rumours, letters, and manuscripts. The French government watched anxiously over these developments, monitoring Algerians’ reactions to news through an extensive network of surveillance that often ended up spreading news rather than controlling its flow. By tracking what different people thought was new, this history of news helps us reconsider the relationship between time, media, and historical change.
Introduction
Authors: Asseraf Arthur
Published: September 2019

This introductory chapter defines ‘news’ and presents the context of colonial Algeria. Using the example of news of the Tunisian invasion of 1881 in Algiers, it shows how news circulated through a variety of media, forming a complex news ecosystem. This ecosystem challenges standard theories of media put forward by scholars from Marshall McLuhan to Benedict Anderson. The introduction then explains the formation of a deeply divided society within colonial Algeria, placing the history of information within the wider historiography on colonial Algeria. The chapter concludes with a consideration of sources for a history of news, explaining how the colonial surveillance archive can form a useful entry point because surveillance was part of the news circulation system.
Modernizing VATs in Africa
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: September 2019

Tax revenues in most African countries fall far short of what is feasible and necessary to finance basic human and economic development. Domestic tax revenue mobilization is called for, preferably in the form of a broad-based consumption tax, such as the VAT, which is less detrimental to economic growth than an income tax is. Most African VATs, however, are riddled with exemptions, exclusions, and zero rates on domestic goods and services. Hence, base-broadening rather than rate-increasing should be pursued if revenue is the goal. Base-broadening would also make the VATs less distortionary and complicated. The case for base-broadening is strengthened by the findings of incidence studies that show that the net result of fiscal systems can be equalizing if the revenue from broad-based VATs is used to finance in-kind transfers, such as healthcare and education. This highly informative and well-researched book makes the case for modernizing African VAT systems by posing the following questions. What is the role and design of a best-practice VAT? Do African VATs measure up to best practice and how productive are they of revenue? What is being done to mitigate the VAT’s regressive burden distribution? How should VAT be coordinated in regional economic communities? What are non-standard exemptions and how prevalent are they? What treatment is accorded public bodies, immovable property, financial services, and insurance? How are and should small businesses and farmers be treated? Answers to these questions are explored by reference to best practice elsewhere and on the basis of detailed analyses of country-specific VATs.
What is VAT?
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: September 2019

Chapter 2 dwells briefly on the workings and the legal and economic nature of the VAT, and enumerates the characteristics of a best-practice VAT against which existing regimes are evaluated. A best-practice VAT includes all goods and services in its base, unless specifically exempted on administrative grounds, and covers all stages of production and distribution, including the retail stage. It is levied at a single, uniform rate and eliminates cascading or cumulative tax effects by granting taxable firms a full and immediate tax credit or deduction for the tax paid in respect of purchases from other taxable firms. Furthermore, the VAT is destination-based by zero-rating exports and taxing imports. A best-practice VAT limits administrative and taxpayer discretion to a minimum and is based on self-assessment. The tax administration’s task should be confined mainly to providing taxpayer education, monitoring late filers and late payers, and, particularly, auditing taxable persons’ accounts.
Other Broad-Based Consumption Taxes
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: September 2019

Chapter 3 reviews broad-based consumption taxes with which the VAT can be compared, especially the retail sales tax (RST). The Profit & Loss (P&L) Account forms the basis for explaining how the tax liabilities under the various variants are computed. The accounting matrix is also used to note the similarities to and differences from a conventional business income tax whose profits are ascertained on the basis of the matching principle. Subsequently, the practical differences between the taxes are discussed, as well as their prevalence around the world. A brief section on the major lessons from worldwide experience with VAT concludes.
Countries without VAT
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: September 2019

Chapter 5 surveys the sales taxes of African countries that do not (yet) have a VAT and analyses the distortions, valuation problems, and definitional issues caused by these taxes. Although VAT is not without problems either—in design but particularly in administration—it appears to emerge as a superior consumption tax to the regimes currently in force in the non-VAT countries, such as Angola, Liberia, and Nigeria. But while a VAT can be potentially well designed and administered, by definition production taxes will always be plagued by distortions, valuation problems, and definitional complexities. In short, a VAT can, but other sales taxes cannot, be improved.
Revenue Performance
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: September 2019

Chapter 6 examines the revenue performance of African VATs by calculating their collection efficiencies defined as actual VAT revenue as a fraction of potential revenue. The VAT gap consists of the policy gap (exemptions and reduced rates) and the compliance gap (evasion and lack of enforcement). Possible explanatory factors, such as the level of economic development, the VAT structure, and the effectiveness of the VAT administration, are reviewed. The analysis appears to indicate that it is unlikely that African VATs in their current form are up to the task of generating much more revenue. Further, replacement of trade taxes by VATs is not easy if VAT bases are too narrow and enforcement too shallow to put much trust in VAT’s revenue-raising capacity.
VAT Incidence and Rate Structure
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: September 2019

Chapter 7 starts by reviewing the ways in which African countries mitigate the VAT’s regressivity, real or perceived, by providing concessionary treatment for foodstuffs. This is followed by a survey of the results of various VAT incidence studies, especially regarding South Africa. The results indicate that the incidence of most VATs is less regressive than is often thought. The discussion proceeds by highlighting the advantages and disadvantages in choosing the best instrument to mitigate the VAT’s regressivity, if desired: taxing basic foodstuffs at a zero rate, taxing them at a lower rate, or exempting them. In considering VAT’s regressive burden distribution, it is important to bear in mind that the issue should be viewed in the context of the entire tax and expenditure system. It has been shown that efficient regressive taxes (such as the VAT) when combined with generous well-targeted transfers can result in a net fiscal system that is equalizing.
Immovable Property
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: September 2019

Chapter 12 examines the VAT treatment of immovable property in Africa. In most African countries, housing services—in the form of rents and rental values of owner-occupied property—comprise a sizable part of consumption expenditures. Clearly, housing is too large a sector to ignore in the design and operation of a broad-based, properly functioning VAT. Since residential housing is often an income-elastic item of consumption, exemption of this sector would be regressive with respect to income; in other words, the rich would benefit more than the poor. The chapter starts by setting out how immovable property should be taxed under a pure and a best-practice VAT. This is followed by a review of the actual treatment of immovable property in Africa, including the VAT’s interaction with transfer taxes and stamp duties. Possible directions for reform are considered, before a recapitulation of policy proposals concludes.
Insurance
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: September 2019

Chapter 14 shows that insurance can be included in the VAT base by taxing premiums and imputing a VAT credit to indemnifications. Instead of taxing insurance, African countries, following EU practice, exempt insurance and impose various insurance (premium) taxes (francophone countries) or stamp duties (anglophone countries other than SACU countries). The chapter argues that exemption and separate taxation are administratively complex and distortionary elements in the tax systems of African countries. As shown by the South African experience, inclusion in the VAT base of property and casualty insurance is feasible, and is simpler and more efficient than the current systems. Full taxation would be more difficult for life and health insurance, which, if desired, can be taxed under the addition method. The last section summarizes the taxable status of insurance services under present arrangements and under the proposed approach.
Basic Administrative Processes
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: September 2019

Chapter 17 reviews various related but separable core administrative functions associated with the VAT: registration, filing, payment/collection, enforcement, and audit. It concludes with a brief note on fraud. How well these functions are performed will determine the VAT’s economic effects, its burden distribution, and its administrative efficacy (in terms of collection and compliance costs per unit of revenue). The discussion highlights the key issues and outlines some best practices. Last but not least, measures aimed at uncovering and prosecuting VAT fraud should be balanced by measures aimed at assisting honest taxpayers to meet their tax obligations and fast-tracking refunds to taxpayers with a good compliance record. Importantly, interest at commercial rates should be paid on late refunds.
Agenda for VAT Modernization
Authors: Cnossen Sijbren
Published: September 2019

Chapter 18 sums up the arguments for the widely shared belief that VAT’s role in the tax system primarily is to raise revenue, predictably and efficiently. Accordingly, African VATs would benefit from a thorough review of the standard and non-standard exemptions, exclusions and zero rates, which depress tax collections, distort consumer and producer choices, discriminate against exports, favour imports, greatly increase administrative complexity, and promote tax avoidance. The case for VAT base-broadening is greatly strengthened by the findings of incidence studies that show that the net result of fiscal systems can be equalizing if the revenue from broad-based VATs is used to finance in-kind transfers, such as healthcare and education. Importantly, the emphasis on VAT policy should not detract from the centrality of VAT administration in shaping desirable outcomes. But better VAT design should lay the groundwork for better VAT administration. Last but not least, modernizing VAT systems requires a change in mindsets.
Talking Dirty
Authors: Tullett William
Published: September 2019

In the late eighteenth century, a prize was offered for a new vocabulary to scientifically describe smells. The challenge of describing smells was one which vexed several eighteenth-century writers. This chapter offers a survey of the shifting languages used to describe smells, using close readings alongside some quantification of vocabularies using digital databases. The shifting meanings of smell, odour, odoriferous, odorous, effluvia, perfume, aromatic, agreeable, and disagreeable, all demonstrate some crucial changes in the way scents were described across the eighteenth century. A shift towards more emotive vocabularies of smell and an adjectival intensification in the description of odours were connected to new consumer practices, discourses of politeness, and changing understandings of sensory acuity.
Air and Odour
Authors: Tullett William
Published: September 2019

Starting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s experience of the Royal Institution lectures of 1802, this chapter sets out the relationship between smell, chemistry, and environmental medicine in the period from the 1660s to the 1820s. Putridity and putrefaction had long been associated with bad smell, but what the chemical investigations of the mid-eighteenth century succeeded in doing was separating the stink of putridity from its unhealthy qualities. Eudiometers, devices for measuring the quality of air that enjoyed a short vogue in the later eighteenth century, were one way of replacing the, now untrustworthy, sense of smell. Ultimately smell became a useful analogy for thinking about airborne disease or contagious particles, but by the early nineteenth century most physicians and chemists no longer believed that all smell was disease.
Metaphoric Odours
Authors: Tullett William
Published: September 2019

The association of smelling with intimate, instinctual, knowledge and the ascription of moral value meant that political and religious polemic made great use of attacks on bad odour or celebrations of the liberty to stink. Case studies of the Sacheverell affair and resistance to Walpolean corruption offer two examples of this. The smell of corruption could be found out by liberty-loving noses. But the liberty of citizens to make what smells they please and not have the government stick their noses in their business became a useful trope during the 1790s. Incense, on the other hand, became a handy metaphor for flattery, manners, and forms of gendered identity. Despite attacks on censing, sweet smells were still celebrated in the Protestant sensorium—as natural theological texts showed. Both political and religious invocations of scent testified to an increasing recognition of the subjectivity of smelling and worries about sensory privacy and publicity.
Tobacco’s Publics
Authors: Tullett William
Published: September 2019

In the coffee house the smell of tobacco created an intimate public, bound together by the common consumption of smoke, that excluded the nerves of women and sensitive fops who were said to abhor tobacco smoking’s scent. Yet the growth of new, mixed-sex, sociable spaces encouraged attacks on tobacco consumption as unmannered and unmanly. In its place rose snuff—a way of managing the idiosyncratic nerves without invading others’ atmospheres. Snuff had problems—it was dirty and noisy. But it worked well in a society in which increasing emphasis was based on managing the olfactory boundaries of the body and its circumambient space. The coffee house played witness to this shift: where once long tables covered in pipes had been surrounded by tobacco-smoking patrons, by the end of the eighteenth century men took snuff to protect their nerves against smells as they sat in their solitary, silent, boxes.
Introduction
Authors: Tullett William
Published: September 2019

After setting out the broader arguments and structure of the book, this introduction goes on to discuss the historiographical context and theoretical innovations on which the study builds. It uses two examples—sulphur and paint—to illustrate the importance of habituation, sensitization, and attention as conceptual categories for thinking about causation, change, and the archive in sensory history. These categories undergird the arguments of the book, but they also offer future historians a convincing way of confronting the problem of how to historicize ‘experience’. Language remains crucial to this project—naming, writing, and reading smells were experiences that framed and were framed by perceptual categories.
Worshiping Computers
Authors: Smith Gary , Cordes Jay
Published: September 2019

Computer software, particularly deep neural networks and Monte Carlo simulations, are extremely useful for the specific tasks that they have been designed to do, and they will get even better, much better. However, we should not assume that computers are smarter than us just because they can tell us the first 2000 digits of pi or show us a street map of every city in the world. One of the paradoxical things about computers is that they can excel at things that humans consider difficult (like calculating square roots) while failing at things that humans consider easy (like recognizing stop signs). They can’t pass simple tests like the Winograd Schema Challenge because they do not understand the world the way humans do. They have neither common sense nor wisdom. They are our tools, not our masters.
The Crown and Urban Corporations, c. 1413–35
Authors: Hartrich Eliza
Published: September 2019

This chapter is the first of four chronological chapters examining periodic shifts in the density, membership, and nature of the ‘urban sector’. During the reign of Henry V and minority of Henry VI, municipal governments (rather than individual merchants and lawyers) tended to be the most active protagonists within the urban sector. Moreover, relationships between towns within the urban sector were mediated through the organs of royal government rather than through horizontal ‘networked’ relationships. The first section of the chapter examines how the peculiarly bureaucratic and institutional character of the urban sector can be seen in the operation of naval defence, finance, parliament, and political communication in 1413–35. The second section goes on to explore the ways in which the urban sector of 1413–35 facilitated a shared political culture at urban and national levels, with particular emphasis on the use of councils and the public suppression of dissent.
Mercantile Politics and the Ascendancy of Networks, c. 1435–50
Authors: Hartrich Eliza
Published: September 2019

Over the 1430s and 1440s, a subtle but important shift occurred in the nature of urban political agency. In 1413–35, the dramatis personae in the theatre of the English urban political sector were civic governments, but in the years after 1435 collective political action was coordinated instead through informal networks of wealthy merchants. This chapter examines the causes and consequences of this shift in urban involvement in national politics, from public and corporation-based to private and mercantile. The first section examines why the Crown came to rely on mercantile resources in the years following the 1435–6 Burgundian assault on Calais and how merchants used their political leverage to influence royal policy. The second section goes on to investigate the effects that these lateral networks between members of the merchant elite had on the complexion of urban internal politics.
Edward IV, the Earl of Warwick, and a Changing Urban Sector, 1461–71
Authors: Hartrich Eliza
Published: September 2019

In the 1460s the urban political sector altered dramatically. The first three sections of this chapter explain how and why these changes occurred. Two of the features that had discouraged urban political engagement in the 1450s—the failure of royal institutions to facilitate inter-urban contact and the lack of a financial stake for townspeople in the success of royal government—no longer existed. The beginning of Edward IV’s reign also coincided with economic changes that brought artisans and gentlemen into municipal politics, many of whom were highly critical of civic governments. In these circumstances, urban and national politics frequently merged and conflict escalated easily. The final section of the chapter focuses on the significant role played by the urban sector in the civil wars of 1469–71, in which townspeople influenced the discourse employed by the earl of Warwick and dictated the course of events.
Economic Bubbles
Authors: Rouse William B.
Published: September 2019

Chapter 3 address the higher-education cost bubble, why it is unsustainable, and the ways it will likely burst, using a computational model of research universities to explore possible futures for these universities. It is not possible to predict what mix of the scenarios of interest will actually emerge, although the forces driving these changes are already evident. Universities need strategies and investments that enable robust responses to whatever mix of scenarios emerges. The higher-education cost bubble will inevitably burst, probably facilitated by increasingly powerful and sophisticated technology platforms. Universities need the right portfolio of investments in the hedges that will assure success despite the bursting of the bubble. Without such changes, many institutions of higher education will disappear amidst this “creative destruction.”
Intelligent Systems
Authors: Rouse William B.
Published: September 2019

This chapter addresses the ways in which human intelligence in routine and partly routine jobs can be augmented rather than replaced. The design of aids should begin with defining the user experience, proceed to designing the user interface to support this experience, and then focus on the enabling technologies. Intelligent aids should be considered for enhancing human performance; the extent of success will depend on the domain of application and the potential performance of the aid. Intelligent aids are inherently model based, drawing upon symbolic logic, mathematical paradigms, and/or statistical models; understanding the underlying modeling assumptions is key to establishing confidence in and trust of such aids. Intelligent systems technology has much promise but also many perils that warrant attention; its prospects depend on well-reasoned strategies for development and adoption.
Exploring Possible Futures
Authors: Rouse William B.
Published: September 2019

This chapter discusses the nature of exploring possible futures, not in terms of case studies, but with a higher-level view of the overall process. Six themes—investments, stakeholders, change, decisions, design, and prediction—are reflected in most of the key points in this book. Clearly, exploring possible futures concerns investments in pursuing these futures involving multiple stakeholders and significant change. Models are employed to frame decisions, assess alternative designs, and make predictions about what might happen. Typical explorations involve planning new generations of existing product lines and new application domains for existing technology capabilities, assessing technology options for enabling new offerings, and addressing major enterprise challenges. Explorations should begin by focusing on desirability in terms of the “preference space” of major stakeholders. At the same time, avoid consideration of feasibility in the sense of what is achievable in the “physical space” of the domain of interest.
The Editors of the Metaphysical Society, or Disseminating the Ideas of the Metaphysicians
Authors: Marshall Catherine
Published: September 2019

Twelve out of sixty-two members of the Metaphysical Society were active editors of well-known periodicals or weeklies throughout the eleven years of existence of the Society. Their editorial skills and choices all reveal the complex links between the Metaphysicians, the views they defended, and the periodicals in which they expressed their opinions. These editors published forty-four out of the ninety-five papers given by the members. In so doing, they contributed to some of the changes which were taking place in journalism by finding new ways of generating creative responses to main topics, and they enriched printed controversies, thereby targeting a wider middle-class audience throughout the 1870s. This chapter argues that the Society became—for its editors and other regular contributors—another kind of hub for cooperation that intersected with their editorial interests and that, in so doing, they were the great amplifiers of the debates of the Society in the 1870s.
Liberalism and the Metaphysical Society
Authors: Vincent Andrew
Published: September 2019

The initial scholarly and, in fact, only comprehensive study of the Metaphysical Society was by Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis 1869–1880 in 1947. For Brown, the central unifying theme of the Society was an underlying robust sense of liberalism. This chapter examines the diverse conceptions of liberalism within the membership of the Society in the 1870s through the lens of illustrative papers by members. These diverse conceptions encompass ideas of, for example, utilitarianism, evolutionary theory, intuitionism, rationalism, Whiggism, and idealism. Contra Brown’s reading, it is argued that there is no one singular accepted narrative on liberalism in the Society debates. Further, the decade of the 1870s—the heyday of the Metaphysical Society—is seen to coincide with a moment of cultural turbulence particularly over issues such as the rise of both natural science and democracy. In consequence, the diverse liberalisms and labyrinthine metaphysical debates of the Society are seen to both embody and reflect a broader sense of crisis in conceptual and social meanings in Victorian society.
Evolution, Ethics, and the Metaphysical Society, 1869–1875
Authors: Hesketh Ian
Published: September 2019

This chapter seeks to chart the lively debate about the evolutionary origins and development of morality as it occurred at the Metaphysical Society, a debate that began with the first paper delivered at the Society in 1869 and, after the intervention of several subsequent papers on the topic, came to an end in 1875. Proponents of an evolutionary ethics included the Darwinians John Lubbock and William Kingdon Clifford, while the critics included the journalist and editor Richard Holt Hutton, the classicist Alexander Grant, and the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Much of the debate focused on competing interpretations of the historical record and the nature of historical evidence itself. For the critic of an evolutionary morality, the evidence for the origins and development of morality had to be sought in written records; for the proponent, the evidence needed to be sought much further back in time, in the era known as ‘prehistory’. This important distinction brought to the fore a related area of contention, namely the relationship between civilized European and contemporary aboriginal societies, and what that relationship meant for understanding the deep history of human moral development. The debate largely came to an end when Sidgwick challenged the unjustifiable normative claims that were often embedded in evolutionary descriptions of the origins and development of morality. He showed that a supposedly naturalist account of ethical principles was just as fraught as was the intuitionist account it sought to critique.
Actions on the case for negligence
Authors: Baker John
Published: September 2019

This chapter shows how actions on the case were used to obtain compensation for various forms of harm caused by negligence even when there was no undertaking to use care. Early examples were those brought on ‘the custom of the realm’ against innkeepers and those who failed to control domestic fires. The arguments over what defences could be pleaded in such actions show that liability was generally strict. Although a later custom of the realm was invented for use against carriers, it was not necessary to formulate more customs, since a custom prevailing throughout the realm was common law. Miscellaneous examples are found of actions for negligence per se, for instance in respect of accidents arising from hazards in public places, and these were eventually seen as representing a general principle of common law that everyone should take reasonable care not to injure his neighbour.
Pensioners, Prisoners, and Pupils: Corpus Christi College’s Charity in Tudor Oxford
Authors: Kaufman Lucy M.
Published: September 2019

This chapter examines the impact of early Reformation on Corpus Christi College. If one takes the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses in the traditional way as the starting-gun for the Protestant Reformation, then Corpus Christi is as old as the Reformation itself. Of course, ‘the Reformation‘ did not begin as early as 1517. It would be another ten years before the Reformation made any recorded impact in Corpus itself, although Luther’s ideas reached Oxford pretty soon. With the exception of the Nicholas Udall affair, the impact of the early Reformation on Corpus Christi is evident largely by its absence during the lifetime of the first president, John Claymond. After Claymond’s death, the college’s peace was briefly disturbed by a new brand of Reformation, by the ideas arising from Henry VIII’s Break with Rome.
Closing Remarks II
Authors: MacCulloch Diarmaid
Published: September 2019

This chapter looks at the minds of the first two presidents of Corpus Christi College, John Claymond and Robert Morwent, speculating on what might have been their most worrying moments. For Claymond, it is the death of Richard Fox in 1528, which brought the greatest predator of the decade into an uncomfortably intimate relationship with the College, because Fox’s successor at Winchester was none other than Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Indeed, the two or three years after 1528 would have remained anxious for Claymond. The chapter next looks into the mind of President Morwent, and shows how another perilous moment would have arrived in 1538. By 1538, Cardinal Reginald Pole headed King’s Henry’s list of people who required murdering. It was amid the political turmoil of this debacle that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer let Thomas Cromwell know of dangerously papalist sentiments currently being expressed among the Corpus Fellowship. In the end, Corpus sneaked past this crisis too.
Corporate Reputation and Social Activism
Authors: Abito Jose Muguel , Besanko David , Diermeier Daniel
Published: September 2019

This book presents a theory of corporate campaigns in which activists use campaigns as a means of harming a firm’s reputation in hope of motivating it to increase its private regulation—corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities aimed at reducing negative externalities or other forms of social harm caused by the firm. The analysis is dynamic in nature because interactions between activists and firms unfold over time. This captures the idea that a firm’s reputation is an asset that can be built or harmed over time. As a firm’s reputation grows, the firm tends to coast on its reputation by reducing its private regulation. This explains why a pragmatic activist—one who cares about the outcome of private regulation and not about the firm’s reputation per se—would find it worthwhile to harm the firm’s reputation. Chapter 2 lays out a three-period model of corporate campaigns to build intuition about the interaction of the activist and the firm. Chapter 3 extends the model to an infinite horizon and allows the activist to use various tactics: criticism, which has a potentially mild impact on the firm’s reputation; confrontation, which can cause a reputational crisis in which the firm’s reputation can be dramatically impaired; and rewards, which increase a firm’s reputation. Chapter 4 analyzes whether the presence of the activist increases or diminishes social welfare. Chapter 5 explores how the activist would choose among potential target firms in the context of different forms of competition between firms. Chapter 6 summarizes and offers lessons for scholars and practitioners.
An Introduction to Corporate Campaigns
Authors: Abito Jose Miguel , Besanko David , Diermeier Daniel
Published: September 2019

In recent years, many activists have concluded that public processes, such as new legislation, regulatory enforcement, or lawsuits, respond too slowly and can be blocked too easily by special interests. In response they have turned to private politics instead. Private politics refers to actions by private interests, such as activists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), that target private agents, typically firms. This chapter describes two key elements of private politics: corporate campaigns and private regulation. It discusses the logic of corporate campaigns, how firms endeavor to respond to them, and empirical evidence on the consequences of campaigns. It then turns to private regulation, and its close counterpart, corporate social responsibility. The chapter raises a puzzle about corporate social responsibility that the models in later chapters will help resolve. The chapter concludes by providing an overview of the remainder of the book.
Conclusions: What Have We Learned?
Authors: Abito Jose Miguel , Besanko David , Diermeier Daniel
Published: September 2019

This chapter summarizes each preceding chapter and then offers lessons for scholars and practitioners. Scholars should note the value of dynamic modeling in understanding interactions between activists and firms in the realm of private politics. Activists and firms can use the insights of the model to approach corporate campaigns more strategically. For example, for activists, the framework suggests that efforts aimed at hurting the reputations of firms can do more than serve an ideological aim at making companies look bad, or as a device to threaten harm. Activists can play the role of private regulators when effective public regulation is missing. For leaders of firms, the analysis highlights that corporate social responsibility and other initiatives can serve to enhance a firm’s reputation, but they can also be viewed as a form of risk management in the face of activist pressures that can potentially harm reputation.
The Expansion of Politics as Control
Authors: Thomas Pradip Ninan
Published: September 2019

This chapter begins with an introduction to surveillance as both theory and practice, beginning in the era of the British Empire, followed by Foucauldian theory and the specific nature of digital surveillance in contemporary India. It explores the State’s many investments in the surveillance of its citizens against the reality of insufficient legal support for privacy. It highlights the complexities and compulsions of Aadhaar as well as the geopolitics of surveillance and India’s surveillance partnerships with the USA. It also explores the ambiguities of e-governance, the politics of transactional efficiencies against the creeping power of ‘code’, as well as the persistence of caste and other markers of identity that have made a comeback in the context of a resurgent nationalism in India.