The Conclusion examines the publication, reviewing, and prizing of poetry in the last decade. What are the institutional mechanisms through which poets of color have increasingly been shortlisted for, won, and served as judges for the Forward Prizes and the T. S. Eliot Prize, especially since 2015? Looking to Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant, the Conclusion spotlights how a critically acclaimed and award-winning collection anticipates, questions, and challenges its own racial tokenization in the awards circuit. In the process, however, Allen-Paisant self-fashions Othello through the writings of Aimé Césaire, thereby inventing a radical racial politics premised in impenetrability and bewilderment as his strategy for animating ways of being with difference in struggle and community.

Building on the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework, this chapter examines how processes of knowledge production, transmission, and utilization give rise to various collective action problems and how firms address these problems. Drawing on stakeholder theory in management studies, the chapter distinguishes three governance models – the hub-and-spoke model, the lead role governance model, and the shared governance model – each offering different solutions to these challenges. A case study of the famous Czech firm Bat’a Enterprises in the early twentieth century demonstrates the practical application of the lead role governance model, which grants employees high autonomy while maintaining management’s central role in strategic decisions. Through profit-sharing schemes, decentralized workshops, and internal education, Bat’a effectively aligned individual incentives with the firm’s goals, mitigating collective action problems and fostering innovation. By analyzing Bat’a’s success, this chapter contributes to the understanding of knowledge governance in firms and underscores the connections with the GKC framework and Ostrom’s design principles.

The development of commerce and integrated market exchange is perhaps one of the most dramatic factors determining the nature and evolution of human economies. Among other things, these developments become closely linked to urban communities and other central places as points to assemble and distribute labor and goods. These places, when they developed as part of the broader process of commercialization, were transformative, increasing the ease of day-by-day interactions, specialization, and freedom of movement.

If we take commons to be a kind of institutional arrangement enabling community governance of shared resources, the challenge involved in taking the corporation-as-commons idea forward is to specify what we mean by corporation in this context. We also need to determine who shares the corporation and identify the rules and practices that enable its provision, production, and reproduction in relevant action arenas. This chapter is an attempt to chart this course. Drawing on insights from the literature on the firm, it argues that the firm’s most critical resource is its "corporate mask," a special kind of institutional resource provided by the legal system that enables the firm’s members to operate as a singular actor in the legal and commercial spheres. But the corporate mask is not merely a legal construct – the social recognition of the firm as a corporate actor, a reliable business partner, a reputable producer of goods or services, and so on matter a great deal as well. The corporate mask is a legal and epistemic focal point shared by insiders and third parties with whom the firm contracts and more generally interacts in a network of adjacent action situations.

Similarly to the experience in Kosovo, the United Nations presence in Timor-Leste also took the form of an international administration. This chapter reviews the three years of governance displayed by the UN over the territory, and notably the growing resistance by the Timorese elite to the governance arrangement. One specific set of practices will be carefully analysed: the international negotiations carried by the UN on behalf of Timor-Leste with Australia over the Timor Gap.

This chapter introduces key concepts and methods in Bayesian statistical modelling. The posterior predictive distribution captures both epistemic uncertainty in model parameters and aleatory uncertainty in future outcomes. A Bayesian p-value gives the probability that a statistic computed from data output by a given model will be more extreme than the value of the same statistic computed from observed data. Bayesian p-values close to 0 or 1 suggest the model may be inadequate. Markov chain Monte Carlo is a general-purpose tool for sampling from complex, unnormalised distributions. It produces dependent samples, so the effective sample size is usually smaller than the number of iterations. Informative priors are useful when data leave large uncertainties in parameter values. Empirical Bayes combines information across related datasets by estimating a distribution over parameters using frequentist methods. Hierarchical modelling provides a unified Bayesian framework for handling multiple related datasets, capturing group structure via a hierarchical graph.

Specialization characterizes all economies to some degree, but its variation is profound, and an objective of economic theory has been to explain its development. Since Adam Smith, economic specialization has been a focus of social scientific inquiry into the evolution of sociopolitical-economic complexity. In the words of Henrich and Boyd (2008:715), “Anthropologists and sociologists … have defended a wide variety of theories that link economic specialization, a division of labor, and the emergence of socially stratified inequality since the birth of their discipline at the end of the 19th century.” Archaeological inquiry, however, compels us to rethink this simple correlation. As the flip-side to self-sufficiency (Chapter 3), we examine variation in economic specialization found in thirteen ancient, premodern, or small-scale economies across Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. Our analysis looks at the nature, type, and scale of specialization found in societies of different sizes and internal complexity. This is followed by a discussion of production, distribution, and infrastructural/service specializations, and where they occur within the thirteen societies examined. Although specialization apparently has different causes related to efficiency, it links strongly to developing markets with their expanded access to demand.

This chapter examines the relationship between human rights and Chile’s 1990-1991 National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, and the way this relationship continues to shape state-society relations in the aftermath of Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990). The argument is two-fold. First, the Truth Commission draws on the language of human rights to authorize its account as the ‘major’ truth. Second, in doing so, the Truth Commission displaces from public life ‘minor’ truths, specifically the experiences of state-violence by Indigenous communities (Mapuche people) and women (Arpilleristas). The argument is based on an analysis of the representation of truth and authority embodied in Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights. The chapter shows how the Museum gives continuity to the work of the Truth Commission by giving it a material (spatial and experiential) form. While the Truth Commission and the Museum remain two distinct institutions, in visiting the Museo/Truth Commission it becomes apparent how human rights authorizes the Truth Commission’s account, and how the Museo gives it continuity in public life.

Chapter 4 examines twenty-first-century debates over canons, canon formations, and publishing in the writing of Bernardine Evaristo, Lemn Sissay, and Daljit Nagra. In particular, I pursue the aesthetic strategies they adopt to assert the centrality of Black British culture as a renewable canon in the making and remaking of Britishness. Conversely, the poets considered here also recognize how they operate within – and often seek to challenge – cultural institutions advancing precepts of diversity and inclusion even as their writing self-consciously acknowledges systemic oppression in contemporary Britain and the highly unequal domain of the publishing scene in particular. Whether in Evaristo’s novel in verse The Emperor’s Babe, Lemn Sissay’s public “landmark poems,” or Daljit Nagra’s British Museum, these authors lend to their work a progressive politics by excavating, revising, and transforming forgotten histories and counter-memories of violence for the sake of intervening in public discourses over race and national belonging.

The Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework draws attention to the content, quality, and consequences of the production, the institutionalized (community) governance, and the sharing of knowledge. In the domain of corporate governance, the key knowledge in question concerns the rules, mechanisms, and infrastructures that enable corporations to be governed. But how do actors understand what is going on and what is at stake in the field of corporate governance? Drawing on the sociological theory of Strategic Action Fields (SAF), this chapter provides an account of how different imaginaries of corporate status, architecture, governance, and purpose are actively created and promoted by different kinds of disciplinary specialists, standard setters, and practitioners. The chapter shows how the knowledge claims made by these epistemic communities up the 1960s and from the 1970s onwards underpin two competing social norms of corporate governance, which were expressed in different configurations of position, boundary, choice, aggregation, information, payoff, and scope rules.

This chapter reflects on the institutional form of the Presidency College, as it emerged out of that of the Hindu College, and continued to be shaped in the twentieth century, amidst and by a range of disciplinary, pedagogic, and governmental developments in the field of higher education in British India. An analytical reconstruction of the institutional form of this earliest and most illustrious site of Western education in South Asia, I argue, offers uncharted avenues into the history of the codification of higher learning in India, and its constituent categories like “college,” “university,” “teaching,” and “research.” The Presidency College, as this chapter will demonstrate, remained an exemplary (yet also anomalous) subject of this history, both driving this codification and, in a sense, being superseded by it. Its privileged origin enabled its peculiar design, which in turn stamped, in the making of its institutional form, the history of higher education in colonial India as a range of contradictions, differentiations, and divisions of other institutional forms—ones that the Presidency College harbored, folded out, forgot, rejected, embraced, remained suspicious of, or played around with experimentally. Such formations of the institutional, I argue, open up ways of thinking about education beyond empire and nation, in the history of modern India. This chapter begins such an inquiry: it attempts to understand the institutional both in terms of its specific role in a bigger history of an abstract category— in this case the modern university—and as an autonomous analytic, one that exceeds given abstractions to gesture toward new ones.

The Presidency College Magazine was born on the platform of the Howrah station. The story was recounted by Pramatha Nath Banerjee in the golden jubilee edition of the magazine in 1964. Banerjee, the first editor of the magazine, and Jogeshchandra Chakraborty, its first secretary, were sixthyear students when they persuaded the then principal of the college, Mr H. R. James, to start a college magazine while he was boarding a train to Bombay on his way to England. With theatrical flair, Banerjee writes, “Mr. James agreed as the train steamed off.” The birth of the college magazine on a bustling railway platform is a dramatic instantiation, albeit metaphorical, of its life. Just as a platform is a place where people from afar reach, interact, and leave, the magazine became a robust space for discussion of world events, ideas, and political incidents that occurred in distant lands. I specifically focus on these writings to demonstrate the overwhelming interest of a section of the Bengali youth on contemporary global politics and political thought, intellectually situating themselves in the broader networks of the empire and subsequently forming solidarities against it, and staking a claim in the ongoing political debates of the twentieth century on forms of governance, diplomatic alliances, and revolutionary activities. The study is bookended by two hyperbolic moments—from a declaration of loyalty for the empire from its first volume in 1914 to a thorough anti-state call for action in the writings from the banned volume of 1968–69.

Globality, Limits, and Difference

A ceremony was organized at the Presidency College in December 1916 to observe Jagadish Chandra Bose's retirement. Bose stood at the end of an exceptional career at the Presidency College, having become a worldrenowned personality—as a pathbreaking experimentalist and philosophermetaphysician of science. The college recognized his contributions by creating the post of Professor Emeritus for him. What stood out in the retirement celebrations was the college's keen awareness of Bose's global footprints, and the college's specific contributions to them. Thus, Principal Henry Rosher James noted during the ceremony that of the many “homes” that Bose has in India, Bengal, and Calcutta, the college is the most “intimate,” as it “has been the home of J.C. Bose's work” (emphasis added). James further noted that Bose shared this sense about the location of the college in his global-intellectual ventures: