Jack Corbett
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 178265 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jack Corbett |
| PRENOMES | Jack |
| SOBRENOME | Corbett |
| ASSINATURA | CORBETT J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Southampton |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2005-7162 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 83 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 501 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 82 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1976 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Institutional Amnesia and Public Administration
Existing research suggests that a lack of institutional memory causes history to repeat in problematic ways within public administration agencies. However, this claim has not been well supported by theory or data that illuminates the process and effects of history repeating. To remedy this, the nascent concept of institutional amnesia is presented here as a means of theorizing repetitions of public administrative history. A sequential explanatory…
Worldmaking the Global Climate Order
Small island developing states (SIDS) are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis yet have been marginalized within the global climate regime. Often overlooked in this story are their purposeful efforts to reform global climate governance in ways that increase the self-determination of all states over their climate futures. Drawing on interviews with senior civil servants in Antigua and Barbuda, alongside recent scholarship in political…
Scale and access to the Green climate Fund
Small island developing States (SIDS) are especially vulnerable to climate impacts. • SIDS access proportionally less climate finance than other vulnerable groups. • Allocations reflect inherent assumptions about the value of largeness. • Financialization of climate finance exacerbates allocation preferences against SIDS. • Revised approaches to funding SIDS will be required to progress climate justice. Small island developing States (SIDS) are a…
Learning to govern
A quirk of the Westminster system is that Ministers invariably have to “learn on the job”. Yet “learning” has been surprisingly understudied in work on executive government in Britain especially. In this paper, we offer a systematic account of Ministerial learning based on a comprehensive analysis of the Ministers Reflect archive—the largest dataset of research interviews with former Westminster ministers ever assembled. We identify six distinct …
A Political History of the Subject
Brij V. Lal was the most prolific writer on post-colonial politics in Fiji. Many of these writings concerned political leaders and the nature of political leadership. Biographies of A.D. Patel and Jai Ram Reddy stand out, but Lal's other writings on politics nevertheless foregrounded people, and the way their personalities shaped, and were shaped by, the times in which they lived. In this article I consider how this biographer’s sensibility impli…
Gender and Political Leadership in Samoa
How does government feel? Toward a theory of institutional pathos in public administration
In the study of policy and administration, emotions are largely conceived as an exogenous factor that impacts on institutions and processes. Still ignored are the emotions felt and performed not just individually by civil servants, but collectively within government organizations. This article turns to insights on emotions from organizational studies to offer a conceptual framework through which to understand the lifeworld of government, or “inst…
The (un)lucky country
Single-case studies, though once the foundation of political science, have become a high-risk strategy in the discipline. The risk is especially acute for scholars who do rich qualitative work about New Zealand and Australia. There is a double bind. On the one hand, the community studying Antipodean politics is not large enough or sufficiently well-defined to ignore trends and mores overseas. On the other hand, Antipodean politics is not exotic o…
How does population size influence administrative performance? Evidence from Malta, Samoa, and Suriname
Public administration scholars pay increasing attention to the role of context as a pathway to genuinely comparative analysis. Specifically, they focus on the economic, institutional and socio-cultural conditions in which administration takes place. Population size is an overlooked contextual factor despite the fact that existing studies often make implicit, positive assumptions about the effects of smallness on administrative performance. We inv…
Gender and Opposition Leadership in the Pacific Islands
Parliaments in the Pacific Islands are among the most male-dominated in the world. Yet despite the odds, there is a cohort of women who have been elected and won senior roles. This article adds to an emerging literature that examines the gendered pathways to political influence in the region by focusing on the hitherto overlooked role of the opposition leader. It uses a biographical approach to consider the pathways in and through this role by fo…
Secessionism in Nevis
Existing studies of secessionism focus predominantly on why these movements gain momentum and persist. A subset of work focuses on why secessionist tensions cease. We contribute to these latter studies by adapting the main theories developed to explain why secessionist agitation occurs, to account for abatement. We focus specifically on the island of Nevis in St Kitts and Nevis, a country that should be a “least likely” case for secession, given …
"Understanding "Islandness
Islandness is a contested concept, not just between disciplines but also cultures, entangled with what islands, \nisland studies, and island identity are understood to be. The purpose of this article is to explore some of these \ndifferent meanings, without necessarily unifying or reconciling them, with the aim of keeping multiple \nunderstandings of islandness in creative tension. We begin by considering islandness as smallness, recognizing \nth…
Tomorrow’s Woman
The election of Fiamē Naomi Mata‘afa as the first female prime minister of Sāmoa has been widely heralded as a critical juncture, especially for women, that will change the nature of Sāmoan politics. In this Comment piece we endorse the observation that Fiamē’s success is remarkable and her election as prime minister significant. But we also caution against the somewhat idealistic and naïve assumption that her prime ministership will be a radical…
International Organizations and Small States
International Organizations (IOs) are vital institutions in world politics in which cross-border issues can be discussed and global problems managed. This path-breaking book shows the efforts that small states have made to participate more fully in IO activities. It draws attention to the challenges created by widened participation in IOs and develops an original model of the dilemmas that both IOs and small states face as the norms of sovereign …
International Organizations and Small States
International Organizations and Small States
Multilateralism and the institutions of global governance are premised on two norms: the sovereignty equality of states and the right to development. This book considers how actors interpret these norms when practicing diplomacy by examining the interaction between international organisations (IO) and the proportion of their membership who should benefit the most from a rules-based order: small states. The IO’s dilemma is that while their foundin…
International Organizations and Small States
Secession, Territorial Integrity and (Non)-Sovereignty
Secessionist movements are ubiquitous in the Caribbean, with virtually every multi-island state and territory experiencing centrifugal tendencies. The region thus offers a unique opportunity to examine why some succeed and others fail. By and large, the propensity for secession has not attracted the attention of scholars beyond the region, with small states and territories largely excluded from supposedly ‘global’ analysis on the subject. The art…
African exceptions
The comparative ‘court politics’ of Covid-19
What has shaped the different responses to COVID-19? The orthodoxy in the crisis management literature holds that the response to events like COVID-19 is primarily shaped by a decentralized group of actors on the ground. In this paper, we argue that a top-down explanation, focused on the actions and intentions of the core executive, is an essential complement to this bottom-up emphasis on a distributed network. Specifically, we advance a ‘court p…
International Organizations and Small States
This path-breaking book shows the efforts that small states have made to participate more fully in International Organizations (IOs). It highlights the challenges created by widened participation in IOs and develops a model of the dilemmas that both IOs and small states face as the norms of sovereign equality and the right to develop coincide
Democracy, Interpretation, and the “Problem” of Conceptual Ambiguity
Democracy is a notoriously ambiguous concept. Political scientists typically see this ambiguity as a problem that restricts measurement and causal explanation, especially for the comparative study of democratization. Increasingly ambitious data collection efforts and sophisticated methodological approaches attempt to resolve this problem - nowhere more so than in the recent, award-winning, and highly prominent Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) datas…
The New Port Moresby
The New Port Moresby: Gender, Space, and Belonging in Urban Papua New Guinea explores the ways in which educated, professional women experience living in Port Moresby, the burgeoning capital of Papua New Guinea. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship, the book adds to an emerging literature on cities in the “Global South” as sites of oppression, but also resistance, aspiration, and activism. Taking an intersectional feminist approach, t…
Climate Change, Sea Level Rise, and Maritime Baselines
Predicted sea level rise caused by anthropogenic climate change threatens to drastically alter coastlines around the world. In the case of low-lying atoll states, it threatens to expunge them from the map. This potential scenario has engendered considerable discussion concerning the fate of climate refugees. Relatively little attention, however, has been given to the impact of sea level rise on existing maritime zones and how these zones, and the…
The New Port Moresby
Why Small States Offer Important Answers to Large Questions
Small states are conspicuously absent from mainstream comparative political science. There are a variety of reasons that underpin their marginal position in the established cannon, including their tiny populations, the fact that they are not considered "real" states, their supposedly insignificant role in international politics, and the absence of data. In this article, we argue that the discipline is much poorer for not seriously utilizing small…
Just like us
In a supposedly ‘anti-political’ age, the scholarly literature on celebrity politicians argues that politicians gain popularity by adopting strategies from within the world of entertainment. This article offers the findings of a research project that has detected a marked shift in the interplay between celebrity culture and the presentational strategies adopted by politicians. At the heart of this shift is an increased focus on the concept of ‘no…
Everybody knows everybody
In contrast to the disadvantage that economists and international donors often see as stemming from smallness, political scientists have a relatively equivocal view of the normative implications of size on democratic performance. Largely, studies interested in the correlation between size and democratization focus on the persistence and quality (or depth) of democratic norms and claim either that small is beautiful or that it is despotic. In this…
"Understanding "Islandness
Islandness is a contested concept, not just between disciplines but also cultures, entangled with what islands, \nisland studies, and island identity are understood to be. The purpose of this article is to explore some of these \ndifferent meanings, without necessarily unifying or reconciling them, with the aim of keeping multiple \nunderstandings of islandness in creative tension. We begin by considering islandness as smallness, recognizing \nth…
Profiling Politicians in Solomon Islands
This article examines the key attributes of members of parliament from Solomon Islands. Drawing on bio-data on MPs, interviews and election results, the authors’ findings show that politicians are getting older, have atypical education levels and are from an increasingly diverse range of occupational backgrounds. The authors also find that, while Solomon Islands MPs are a political elite of sorts, they remain tightly tied to their communities. Th…
State of the field
This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). It is argued here that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply…
Stoic Democrats? Anti-politics, élite cynicism and the policy process
Disenchantment with politics appears to be proliferating throughout contemporary liberal democracies, as outlined in the growing literature on anti-politics. Overwhelmingly, this literature has focused on the disaffection citizens express towards the policy process. Here, using policy-making on the issue of obesity in Australia and Britain as a case study, we show that disenchantment is not limited to citizen outsiders; the élite policy actors at…
Clientelism in small states
Studies of clientelism increasingly focus on the brokers, networks and party machines that make clientelism work in mass democracies. This article highlights the different forms clientelistic politics can take by looking at small, rather than large, democracies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Countries in both regions experience considerable clientelistic politics, but without the same dependence on brokers, networks and party machines. Based o…
Intersecting Identities, Divergent Views
Anecdotally, it is assumed that the factors that constrain women from entering parliament spill over into the way they experience holding public office, thus limiting their influence. Drawing on in-depth biographical interviews and other publically available materials we test this supposition by investigating the experiences of women who have served in parliament in the Pacific Islands, a region famous for its low levels of women's representation…
Why and how to compare deliberative systems
The systemic turn in deliberative democratic theory presents empirical researchers in this field with a problem. Deliberative systems are complex, porous and shifting in nature. These features cannot be adequately assessed by existing tools for measuring deliberative and democratic qualities. Such qualities only become apparent when set against practices in other systems. Meaningful analysis rests on comparison. However, in turning to the compara…
The comparative ‘court politics’ of Covid-19
What has shaped the different responses to COVID-19? The orthodoxy in the crisis management literature holds that the response to events like COVID-19 is primarily shaped by a decentralized group of actors on the ground. In this paper, we argue that a top-down explanation, focused on the actions and intentions of the core executive, is an essential complement to this bottom-up emphasis on a distributed network. Specifically, we advance a ‘court p…
Democracy, Interpretation, and the “Problem” of Conceptual Ambiguity
Democracy is a notoriously ambiguous concept. Political scientists typically see this ambiguity as a problem that restricts measurement and causal explanation, especially for the comparative study of democratization. Increasingly ambitious data collection efforts and sophisticated methodological approaches attempt to resolve this problem - nowhere more so than in the recent, award-winning, and highly prominent Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) datas…
Why monarchy persists in small states
Monarchical rule is said to have become anachronistic in a modern age of legal rational orders and representative institutions. And yet, despite successive waves of democratization having usurped their authority across much of the globe, a select few monarchs remain defiant, especially in small states. This stubborn persistence raises questions about the application of Huntington’s “King’s Dilemma” in which modern monarchs are apparently trapped …
Why Perceived Size Matters for Agency Termination
Agency size is generally assumed to be positively correlated with survival: the bigger an agency, the less likely it is to be terminated. Yet, recent research finds a very small effect of size on survival. The reason, we argue, is that it only addresses size in terms of overall operating budget – what this article calls objective size. By contrast, we use an interpretive historicist approach to show how perceived size – the meanings and beliefs o…
Two Worlds
The phrase 'two worlds' is often used to describe the way in which political leaders in the Pacific Islands navigate and define their lives, and the different sets of societal norms to which they are subject. The capacity to move between 'worlds' is often central to their claims to leadership legitimacy and can be one of the reasons why they are ultimately chosen to lead. Through a comparative analysis of their published life histories, this pape…
Deliberative Bureaucracy
Deliberative democrats have long considered the trade-off between norms of inclusion and efficiency. The latest attempt at reconciliation is the deliberative systems model, which situates and links individual sites of deliberation in their macro context. Yet, critics argue that this move to scale up leaves inclusive practices of citizen deliberation vulnerable. Here, we seek to mitigate these concerns via an unlikely source: bureaucracy. Drawing …
All the world is a stage
The involvement of small island states (SISs) in a growing number of international organisations (IOs) has placed increased pressure on domestic bureaucracies and political systems. Rapid turnover among SIS leaders, combined with generational change and decreased local support, has amplified disadvantages. Growing complexity has therefore further exposed the long-standing vulnerabilities of SISs. They can play a creative role at the margins, and …
Embracing impressionism
For its most prominent proponents, interpretive research is emphatically a ‘systematic’ craft; though iterative and creative, if practiced expertly it enables the researcher to progress towards a more coherent, comprehensive and convincing interpretation of both the political phenomenon under investigation and its scholarly significance. We argue that this process is neither as systematic in nature nor as satisfying in execution as such a charact…
A calling from God
Despite its relative absence from much of the literature on politics in the Pacific region, religiosity is an assumed and often unchallenged component of political life. Drawing from more than 100 in-depth biographical interviews with politicians, around 40 published life histories and other publicly available material, this article uses Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' to explore how politicians see the role of faith and religious associat…
Territory, islandness, and the secessionist imaginary
Small communities should have the most to gain from integration, but the average size of the state is shrinking as island nationalism creates new, and very small, states out of former colonies, and federalised or autonomous territories. “Islandness,” as a proxy for territory, is employed as a resource to justify secession, but mainstream studies subordinate this factor in accounts that privilege ethnic, religious, linguistic, or economic drivers …
Politicians, professionalization and anti-politics
Singular memory or institutional memories? Toward a dynamic approach
The ability of the civil service to act as a reservoir of institutional memory is central to the pragmatic task of governing. But there is a growing body of scholarship that suggests the bureaucracy is failing at this core task. In this article, we distinguish between two different ways of thinking about institutional memory: one “static” and one “dynamic.” In the former, memory is singular and held in document form, especially by files and proce…
Examining recent shifts in Australia's foreign aid policy
On taking office in late 2013, the incoming Abbott government proclaimed the advent of a new aid paradigm. This article asks whether or not this is the case. It does so by situating the new coalition policy in the context of more than two decades of development thinking. Focusing on the way Australian aid policy reflects trends in both global development and geopolitical discourses, the article parses out continuity and change. It finds that Aust…
The Deconsolidation of Democracy
Democracy in the United States and Europe is said to be at the crossroads. I review five recent books that seek to diagnose and cure this ‘crisis’. Explanations range from institutional dysfunction and elite maleficence to technological change and rising economic inequality. Remedies include everything from institutional engineering to moral persuasion. Collectively, the books raise two important questions: is this really a crisis and if it is, c…
An Antipodean History of Interpretation
In this paper, we explore the connections between intepretivism's core and its peripheries in both geographical and epistemological terms, by tracing the relationship between interpretivism and Australian political scholarship. In this task, we draw on some of the most celebrated and influential work on Australian politics—by political scientists but before them historians and anthropologists—to show how the approach typically undertaken by these…
Aspects of Recruitment to Civil Office in a Mexican Community
Mesoamerican community studies frequently identify the traditional civil-religious hierarchy or the power of a political boss as a central factor in the recruitment of political authorities. However, some villages in the Oaxaca Valley of southern Mexico recruit to office via open elections. Formal criteria established by the state are of minor importance, but family resources, competence, and character weigh heavily in the minds of voters. Effort…
Coleccion de documentos del archivo general de la nacion para la etnohistoria de la Mixteca de Oaxaca en el siglo XVI
Educational Strategies for the Conservation of the Heritage at Monte Albán, Mexico
The emergence of public archaeology over the past three decades reflects a growing interest in more explicit attention to the relationship between archaeology as a discipline and profession and the numerous stakeholders constituting the 'public'. In Mexico the practice of archaeology continues to be highly centralized, but notable opportunities for a more participatory style are beginning to appear. The World Heritage Site of Monte Albán, threate…
In the Eye of the Storm
Two Worlds
The phrase 'two worlds' is often used to describe the way in which political leaders in the Pacific Islands navigate and define their lives, and the different sets of societal norms to which they are subject. The capacity to move between 'worlds' is often central to their claims to leadership legitimacy and can be one of the reasons why they are ultimately chosen to lead. Through a comparative analysis of their published life histories, this pape…
Politicians and Professionalization in the P acific I slands
In this article, I examine the nature of political practice in the P acific I slands against two dominant measures of professionalization: incentive and institutionalist. Drawing from a range of qualitative data—interviews with politicians, published life histories, and observation—from across the region, I find that professionalization is largely unapparent against these measures. However, despite the likelihood that this absence will continue, …
Practising Reflection
Attempts to unravel the relationship between scholar and subject are common in life writing and underpin the emphasis on reflexivity in interpretive research. However, while the conceptual basis for reflexive practice is well established, there is less written on how it is actually done. In this article I reflect on how I created a collective portrait of politicians in the Pacific Islands. My rationale for describing how I produced knowledge in t…
Shifting Sands
The capacity for leadership, including political leadership, to improve development outcomes has attracted recent interest within development studies and associated donor agencies. This new approach is a welcome critique of the broadly institutionalist outlook of the good governance agenda; however, there is a mismatch between the desire to ‘bring the agency back in’ and the commitment of the Developmental Leadership Programme's (DLP's) to positi…
Ebia Olewale
Ebia Olewale: a life of service. By Jonathan Ritchie. Port Moresby, University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2012. x + 292 pp., photos, map, endnotes, index. ISBN 978-9980-86-954-8 (pbk). PGK80. This
Profiling Politicians in Solomon Islands
This article examines the key attributes of members of parliament from Solomon Islands. Drawing on bio-data on MPs, interviews and election results, the authors’ findings show that politicians are getting older, have atypical education levels and are from an increasingly diverse range of occupational backgrounds. The authors also find that, while Solomon Islands MPs are a political elite of sorts, they remain tightly tied to their communities. Th…
A calling from God
Despite its relative absence from much of the literature on politics in the Pacific region, religiosity is an assumed and often unchallenged component of political life. Drawing from more than 100 in-depth biographical interviews with politicians, around 40 published life histories and other publicly available material, this article uses Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' to explore how politicians see the role of faith and religious associat…
Between crisis and persistence
In this article, I highlight how crisis and persistence are narratives employed to describe democracy in the Pacific Islands. I outline six explanatory variables and illustrate how they interact temporally and spatially. By exploring the tensions within and between narratives, I provide a deeper reading of how the meanings we attach to democracy are negotiated and co-produced by theorists and policymakers. I conclude by arguing that this type of …
But why do we need politicians? A critical review
In response to growing popular dissatisfaction with politics and politicians there has been a marked increase in academic work about anti-politics and depoliticization with numerous scholars seeking to defend politics by restating why it matters. However, these efforts have largely glossed over the related question of why politicians also matter. To fill this gap I propose a typology that captures how the different intellectual perspectives in th…
Introduction
Amid the clamour of recent calls for evidence-based policymaking, citizen-centred governance, open government, and any number of other international trends in the business of public administration, another, less-heralded one has quietly taken root in Australia: a call to put interpretation at the centre of our analysis. This is not to advance the notion of a new post-modern orthodoxy in thinking about Australian politics and policy—as fairly obvi…
An Antipodean History of Interpretation
In this paper, we explore the connections between intepretivism's core and its peripheries in both geographical and epistemological terms, by tracing the relationship between interpretivism and Australian political scholarship. In this task, we draw on some of the most celebrated and influential work on Australian politics—by political scientists but before them historians and anthropologists—to show how the approach typically undertaken by these…
The ‘Promise’ of the 1970s
The present era of global governance presents enormous possibilities for small island states owing to their sovereign status in international organisations. Despite these apparent advantages asymmetries prevail as human resource constraints pose major obstacles for countries seeking to maximise their influence in global forums. This, however, was not the case in the late 1970s when Pacific leaders were far more assertive in regional and internati…
Making Micronesia
Why Small States Offer Important Answers to Large Questions
Small states are conspicuously absent from mainstream comparative political science. There are a variety of reasons that underpin their marginal position in the established cannon, including their tiny populations, the fact that they are not considered "real" states, their supposedly insignificant role in international politics, and the absence of data. In this article, we argue that the discipline is much poorer for not seriously utilizing small…
Leadership Succession and the High Drama of Political Conduct
Politicians in the Pacific Islands are regularly accused of corruption and yet, paradoxically, they also tend to be the most vocal public commentators when incidents of misconduct arise, with accusation and counter-accusation all part of the political theatre. Given their central role in these debates, we ask how politicians interpret political conduct. Based on interviews and public comments, we explore the meanings and beliefs that politicians …
On making an impression
Embracing impressionism
For its most prominent proponents, interpretive research is emphatically a ‘systematic’ craft; though iterative and creative, if practiced expertly it enables the researcher to progress towards a more coherent, comprehensive and convincing interpretation of both the political phenomenon under investigation and its scholarly significance. We argue that this process is neither as systematic in nature nor as satisfying in execution as such a charact…
Examining recent shifts in Australia's foreign aid policy
On taking office in late 2013, the incoming Abbott government proclaimed the advent of a new aid paradigm. This article asks whether or not this is the case. It does so by situating the new coalition policy in the context of more than two decades of development thinking. Focusing on the way Australian aid policy reflects trends in both global development and geopolitical discourses, the article parses out continuity and change. It finds that Aust…
All the world is a stage
The involvement of small island states (SISs) in a growing number of international organisations (IOs) has placed increased pressure on domestic bureaucracies and political systems. Rapid turnover among SIS leaders, combined with generational change and decreased local support, has amplified disadvantages. Growing complexity has therefore further exposed the long-standing vulnerabilities of SISs. They can play a creative role at the margins, and …
Democratic Gaps, Traps and Tricks. Comment on
Few scholars have done more over recent years to engage with and raise public awareness about the issue of ‘anti-politics’ or ‘democratic disaffection’ than Matthew Flinders. In the spirit of this ongoing conversation, it is a pleasure to respond to this latest iteration of his thinking that both deepens and extends his previous work, and Defending Politics (2012) in particular. His latest article advances the debate in a number of ways not the l…
Intersecting Identities, Divergent Views
Anecdotally, it is assumed that the factors that constrain women from entering parliament spill over into the way they experience holding public office, thus limiting their influence. Drawing on in-depth biographical interviews and other publically available materials we test this supposition by investigating the experiences of women who have served in parliament in the Pacific Islands, a region famous for its low levels of women's representation…
Political science (66 obras) · Sociology (60 obras) · Law (57 obras) · Politics (52 obras) · Law (48 obras) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (42 obras) · Political economy (29 obras) · Economics (26 obras) · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration (18 obras) · Democracy (16 obras)