The chapter delves into the inquiry regarding technology’s inherent goodness or badness for society, positing that its impact is contingent on human utilization. Three perspectives are presented: technophobes, technothusiasts, and those viewing technology as a neutral tool. Technothusiasts extol technology’s positive societal effects, citing medical breakthroughs, renewable energy, education accessibility, communication, and entertainment. They concede negative repercussions but advocate addressing issues individually rather than condemning technology outright. Technophobes, conversely, emphasize adverse impacts like weaponry, surveillance, social media problems, and concerns about alienation and job loss due to automation and AI. They raise ethical dilemmas, expressing apprehension about humanity losing control with technological advances. The neutral tool perspective contends that technology is neither inherently good nor bad but a tool whose impact hinges on usage. The chapter furnishes examples of positive and negative technology outcomes, underscoring the pivotal roles of context and intentions. It explores societal diversity in defining good or bad, emphasizing evaluating new technologies based on societal values. Additionally, it probes whether technology has an intrinsic trajectory, with some envisioning ceaseless progression fueled by human ambition while others foresee limits. The chapter underscores the importance of awareness to navigate technology’s potential risks and benefits judiciously.

Chapter 1 lays out the main features of my descriptive-explanatory theory of how the struggle between hierarchs and resisters drives the evolution of morality and institutions. It identifies several recurring patterns in the struggle, including the following: (1) efforts by a party to the struggle to recruit new members to their coalition can prompt them to appeal to the interests of groups that have hitherto been neglected, resulting in more inclusive moral ideas; (2) A group G’s efforts to employ moral concepts in their struggle against group B can result in those concepts being used against group A by a group C. This occurred, for example, when the concept of natural rights employed by the upper classes in their struggle against excessive monarchial power in England eventually provided a weapon for increasing the political power of the masses and diminishing the power of those when who originally invoked the concept of natural rights. (3) A G can make what they take to be a low-cost concession to their opponents, Group B, thereby unwittingly providing their opponents with resources that they can use to inflict great losses on Group A. This chapter also identifies several ways in which the struggle between hierarchs and resisters can help bring about morally progressive changes, while emphasizing that progressive changes, like changes in general, are usually the unintended consequences of self-interested strategic behavior.

In Chapter 7, we conclude our reconceptualization of organizational control by discussing new forms of control, novel combinations of existing controls, new challenges to fundamental assumptions, and new forms of organizing – all of which represent promising directions for future organizational control research and practice.

‘Language policy’ is a highly diverse term, encompassing all attempts to purposefully influence language use. Government language policy is broadly considered to have originated as a distinct field of research and policymaking in the 1970s, but we begin the chapter with a historical review of its precursors dating back several centuries. We trace the roots of contemporary language policy to two broad historical developments: Bible translation and universal education. These laid the foundations for what would become language policy. In the contemporary language policy period, we divide our discussion across three fields: modern foreign languages (MFL), indigenous languages and community languages. These categorisations come from policy, not linguistics or sociology. These groups of languages are treated differently in policy, so we divide them accordingly and trace their origins and developments in three political eras from the 1970s onwards: neoliberalism (1970s–80s), New Public Management (1990s–2000s), and austerity (2008 onwards). We show how each field of language policy has been indelibly shaped and contoured by changing political conditions and priorities. Lastly, we consider forms of language that tend to fall outside the scope of government policy, and what extra this reveals about language policy.

Despite the fact that the Vienna Convention prescribes a holistic approach to treaty interpretation, it is widely believed that the dominant interpretive approach in international law is textualism. Textualism is premised on the distinction between what is inside and what is outside the text of a treaty and assumes that it is possible to interpret a text without reference to factors that are extraneous to it. This chapter situates the preference for textualism in the intellectual history of the discipline. Building on philosopher John Searle’s work, it argues, however, that no treaty interpreter is or can be a textualist. It also introduces the concept of intertextuality and discusses the tension between the official functions of textualism and the practice of treaty interpretation.

This chapter examines the perceptions of communities and participants where Fambul Tok works. The program was designed to provide people with ritual spaces to discuss war-related experiences, but I suggest that the vast majority of participants neither desired nor enjoyed hearing about wartime experiences. The confessions at these organization-sponsored ceremonies were performances that sought to stimulate further development opportunities. The space did, however, provide an opportunity to address other, more contemporary issues. This is exemplified through the story of a heated chieftaincy conflict. The organization’s presence and the ceremony provided a forum through which this conflict played out, exemplifying how existing social structures play a critical role in shaping local transitional justice programs. I explore how pre-existing hierarchies, social status and individual agency influenced how different people engaged with the program. This exemplifies the diversity of needs and priorities in communities and how people engage with these mechanisms for different reasons. It provides a comprehensive analysis of how local transitional justice programs shape and are shaped by the various actors at play (both staff and participants), which has implications not only for TJ mechanisms but development programs more broadly.

Here we grasp the tool in this side of our box with the most promise to exert a material cooling impact on the planet in the foreseeable future. It also however comes with the greatest likelihood of problematical unintended consequences. Volcanoes provide a helpful analog for how SAI might operate and demonstrate that aerosols suspended in the atmosphere can and do immediately and substantially cool the earth. The mechanics of recreating such a volcano effect in a deliberate fashion are explained and situated in both space and time. It is also noted that relative to any other climate intervention or solution, SAI would be stunningly cheap, giving rise to the prospect of the “free driver” hypothesis. In addition to exerting force upon the climate variable (temperature), it may well interfere with ones we do not, such as rainfall. The problematical dynamics of stopping such a program (“termination shock”) are explored, as are difficulties that would arise in seeking to attribute observed climate impacts in an engineered climate to their causes. SAI is presented as an enigma to be explored rather than a remedy to be implemented.

This final chapter considers Burke’s relationship to what may loosely be termed ‘enlightenment thought’ with an emphasis on Scotland. The Scottish thinkers particularly relevant for Burke were the usual suspects, including Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and William Robertson. Following the work of Isaiah Berlin, Burke is often read as a counter-Enlightenment thinker. But Burke was not the only ‘enlightenment’ luminary to be confounded by the French Revolution. Edward Gibbon was equally appalled, and it eventually disappointed even the likes of Paine and Sieyès as well. This chapter demonstrates that the differences between Burke and Hume were diminished when Burke was freed from partisanship. He now advanced a sceptical defence of party: it was not exclusively the Whigs, but the old Whig and Tory parties alike, which had sustained the British mixed and balanced constitution ‘by their collision and mutual resistance’. This chapter also considers Adam Smith’s thought on party and faction.

This chapter considers the national reforms that all the European governments have continuously designed and implemented. These reforms have been inspired by the same common template — the Anglo-American university governance model, actively promoted by the European Union — but national strategies have clearly interpreted this template according to their inherited legacies, and national reforms have subsequently been elaborated and implemented by the universities’ internal actors — with their power resources, culture, learning abilities — which have acted as ‘filters’ vis-à-vis the planned reforms. Even more importantly, as shown in this chapter, this has meant that the consequences of national reforms of university governance have largely differed from the expected results.

Can enforcement of India’s gender equal property inheritance reform advance equality by bringing about meaningful reorganization of familial responsibilities? Quotas increasing women’s political representation strengthen enforcement of gender-equalizing land inheritance reform (as Chapter 5 shows). Such enforcement may increase conflict within the family. This chapter finds families are more likely to block equal distribution of inheritance to daughters, conditional on the anticipated cost of losing ancestral property rights. This “cost” can be transformed into a benefit for the entire family when female gatekeepers spur integrative bargaining solutions, striking agreements about the distribution of rights and responsibilities across multiple domains simultaneously. This chapter identifies the causal effect on behavior of as-if randomly applied reservations for female elected heads of local government on the willingness of children to support aging parents. It finds that when daughters leverage female gatekeepers to exercise symbolic land rights, conflict is unlikely, and women are more able to care for aging parents, choosing closer marriages and planning to financially support parents. However, when a daughter gains gender-equal property inheritance after exiting marriage negotiations, all children revoke support for parents.

This chapter explores the global reach of “gatekeeper theory.” It studies how the institutional structure of electoral quotas and economic reforms for greater gender equality interact, comparing parental leave in the former Soviet Union and Sweden, and land tenure reforms in Tanzania and Rwanda. Where women’s quotas are effective, reforms are enforced (everywhere but Tanzania). However, the welfare impact of such enforcement depends on whether reform enables integrative bargaining. If so, we see empowerment; otherwise, backlash follows. The chapter next explains how the book’s findings build theory in three domains: how quotas change the relationship between citizens and families, communities, and the state, through the prism of bargaining power; which mechanisms push the impact of reform toward increasing either social equality or resistance; and the necessity of studying how evolving social norms, political institutions, and economic rights can converge to achieve greater equality. It concludes that local political institutions can productively engage with social norms to bring about progressive, egalitarian change. To do so, reform must exploit critical junctures, where multiple paths are possible. By identifying and paying close attention to these pivotal intersections, we foster mutually beneficial agreements within families in the service of incremental social progress.

Operating against anarchy rather than hierarchy, international constitutionalization is a highly contested but unintended political process. It is a by–product of international treaty making, which is intended to create fairly specialized rules within issue–specific domains. Approximating the evolutionary pathway, this process nonetheless generates a less unified international constitutional framework than in the national setting. An examination of international constitutional developments (along the five core constitutional elements) reveals that formalization of international rules through treaties has become standard in the post–1945 period. Sovereignty has developed into the fundamental international principle, extending the circle of members to include newly emerging states. Relations among states have deepened to enhance inter–state cooperation, and rights and duties have further reproduced inequalities among states. The chapter concludes by stressing the inadvertent constitutional consequences of international treaty making, which leads to the constitutionalization trap.

This chapter offers a new overview of the Scottish Enlightenment political theory, deploying both classic and recent scholarship to delineate its canon, scope, major concerns, inner tensions and European contexts. Emphasis is placed on the major Scottish thinkers David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and others – who developed a profoundly novel vision of political thought itself as a vital political and moral act, and hence of their own historical agency. The chapter juxtaposes Scotland s historical uniqueness, its rich sources of inspiration, and its pioneering vantage points on modern society, economy and human autonomy. It traces the tensions between statehood and citizenship, law and civic alertness, commerce and virtue, unintended consequences and affective human volition. It is argued that, while mostly moderate in political temperament, the Scottish Enlightenment thus helped revolutionize political theory as well as practice.