Suchergebnisse

Abstract In this homage to David Graeber, I turn to Americans' experiences working in person during the pandemic as an ethnographic lens for understanding how workers respond when implicit social contracts are violated and when ideas about the common good are being contested. Because the United States federal government and many state governments refused to mandate appropriate pandemic protocols, businesses became the source of pandemic regulation in the United States. During the pandemic, Americans have been made vividly aware of the tacit social contracts shaping their workplace commitments. Building upon Graeber's insight that at the heart of work is a complex theory of contract and exchange, I explore how contractual sociality shapes Americans' understandings of the political possibilities available to them at work. I focus in particular on the icon of the Trumpian Republican and how other Americans are responding by turning to historically grounded visions of the common good. In general, this article explores what the pandemic has revealed about Americans' political imagination, about how to govern and be governed in the workplace, with a Graeberian focus on the role that contractual sociality plays in structuring this imagination.

This article examines the complex policy problem of space debris and elaborates a proposal for a bottom-up cooperative regime for its mitigation. While debris proliferation generates costs and threatens the safety of personnel and equipment, this policy problem is compounded by the realization that debris constitutes a by-product of desirable space activities which facilitate national progress and domestic increases in values. It is further complicated by increased private participation, conflicting interests of participants, and a global order susceptible to outlier behavior. Scholars attempting to tackle this policy problem have failed to appreciate the complex legislative process through which international rules develop, proposing to apply other regimes of global governance, mutatis mutandis, to facilitate debris mitigation. This article offers a more realistic approach which evaluates substance, process, and metrics of success. Utilizing the policy-oriented lens of the New Haven School of International Law, this Article applies the novel "regime evolution approach" to propose an optimum global order for space debris mitigation which promotes the highest gain in values for all participants. The article outlines the international values which the regime must optimize and the interactions between the participants which will shape its development. The proposed cooperation regime follows the realization that the international community must prioritize the protection and promotion of benefits from space activities for participants, rather than be fixated solely on mitigating externalities. This regime will successfully sway policy choices towards debris mitigation because it is feasible for adoption, effective at optimizing values, and manageable vis-à-vis outliers.