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Traditional archival praxis oftentimes depicts thearchival donor as an observer and recipient of services or benefits. One that can either comply with the rules andexpectations set forth by the archivist and archival institution when donating their materials or walk away from the process and opportunity. Despite the historic role of donor contributions in the form of archival donations, donors and their needsremain overlooked in much of the archival literature. Instead, current archival paradigms tend tofocus more on the archival materials more so than the people behind them. But what if donorsand archivists could reimagine their relationship and the ethical obligations associated with this bond? This article applies Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor's archival theory of radical empathycombined with the theoretical framework of political consciousness as set forth by Blackfeminism. Using these frameworks, the research study uses a mixed method approach thatincludes a literature review of relationships in the archival field and a qualitative conventionalcontent analysis of collected interview data from the donor case study of living music artistdonors. As archivists seek to improve collection development and acquisition practices more attention must be placed on the care, affirmation, and wellbeing of the archival donor.Through collaboration with donors, archivists can strengthen archival practices by centeringpeople and not just the things. By combining an ethics of care which introduces "a web ofmutual affective responsibility" alongside the construction of a donor political consciousness,this article shows how donor participation contributes and strengthen archival practices thatcenter people and not just things. The article and findings offer a distinct pathway to better understand the challenges, limitations, and possibilities of donor relationships and the benefitsof donors recognizing the importance of active participation and understanding of their role inthe archival process. Pre-print first published ...

This paper presents Constructed Past Theory, an epistemological theory about how we come to know things that happened or existed in the past. The theory is expounded both in text and in a formal model comprising UML class diagrams. The ideas presented here have been developed in a half century of experience as a practitioner in the management of information and automated systems in the US government and as a researcher in several collaborations, notably the four international and multidisciplinary InterPARES projects. This work is part of a broader initiative, providing a conceptual framework for reformulating the concepts and theories of archival science in order to enable a new discipline whose assertions are empirically and, wherever possible, quantitatively testable. The new discipline, called archival engineering, is intended to provide an appropriate, coherent foundation for the development of systems and applications for managing, preserving and providing access to digital information, development which is necessitated by the exponential growth and explosive diversification of data recorded in digital form and the use of digital data in an ever increasing variety of domains. Both the text and model are an initial exposition of the theory that both requires and invites further development.

This article contributes to debates over the 'land–family bond' in Early Modern England, in which social historians have engaged periodically during the past decade. It examines the work of Jane Whittle, Govind Sreenivasen and Alan Macfarlane and adds new archival evidence from my own study of three East Sussex villages, circa 1580–1770. Its focus is on the factors that influenced the land–family bond over time. It argues that a more nuanced understanding of individual tenant behaviour during this period cannot be reached without also charting the social, economic and demographic context in which such behaviour operated.

How does sovereign debt emerge? In the early nineteenth century, intermediaries' market power and prestige served to overcome information asymmetries. Relying on insights from finance theory, we argue that capitalists turned to intermediaries' reputations to guide their investment strategies. Intermediaries could in turn commit or else they would lose market share. This sustained the development of sovereign debt. This new perspective is backed by archival evidence and empirical data, and it suggests why strong but undemocratic states could borrow."A good name is worth more than a gem."Yiddish proverb

This work is a path-breaking study of the changing attitudes of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to Britain and the Commonwealth in the 1940s and the effect of those changes on their individual and collective standing in international affairs. The focus is imperial preference, the largest discriminatory tariff system in the world and a potent symbol of Commonwealth unity. It is based on archival research in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

More than a tool for global networking and intellectual exchange, digital technology has transformed the most basic terms of feminist scholarship: reading, writing, archival research, and publication itself. This article addresses how the Internet and the emerging field of digital humanities has fulfilled some of the larger aspirations of feminist scholarship as they were articulated at the dawn of the twenty-first century. When we move online, however, scholars engaged with history and new media identify new questions that require feminist attention. Among them are the digital divide between universities and their publics; transnational linguistic barriers; the uncertain future of journals within an altered reading and publishing environment; and the gendered history of digital technology itself.

Taiwan recently adopted a series of administrative reform laws designed to make the bureaucracy more transparent and allow public participation in regulatory policies. Because administrative reform limits the executive's power, it is clear why legislatures would favor strict administrative procedures. But it is less clear why presidents would support them. The passage of these laws begs the question why presidents support administrative procedural reforms designed to restrict their abilities to act freely. I argue that in Taiwan, President Lee Teng-hui's control of his party deteriorated as factional disputes within his own party increased over time. Lee ultimately concluded that the Kuomintang's political survival depended on major reforms. Consequently, the status quo-oriented bureaucracy—hitherto an important source of support for Lee and his key constituencies—became an impediment. Lee supported Taiwan's Administrative Procedure Act in order to reduce the bureaucracy's capacity to impede reform. More generally, I argue that administrative procedures designed to open up the bureaucracy to the public, including previously excluded groups, can serve politicians' goal of redirecting the bureaucracy. Archival data, secondary sources, and interviews with key presidential advisers, senior career bureaucrats, and politicians support my argument.

This dissertation examines women's autobiographical texts as key sites for understanding the variety of intimate, everyday practices through which the transatlantic slave system was constituted and challenged. I analyze journals, letters, slave narratives, and religious writings by women of different social and racial backgrounds who traveled or lived in the Anglophone Caribbean during the long eighteenth century. I focus on the writings of Janet Schaw, Maria Nugent, Eliza Fenwick, Elizabeth Hart Thwaites, Anne Hart Gilbert, and Mary Prince. These women's writings demonstrate that colonial control was exercised not only through formal state institutions, but also through the intimate interactions, alliances, and social norms produced by individuals in everyday life. At the same time, they show that colonial power was not only challenged through organized, collective action, but also by individuals who rejected or reinterpreted social norms regarding race, class, gender, and sexuality. Arguing against traditions of scholarship that minimize the centrality of intimate spheres in the constitution of the political, the complex positions of female colonists, and the theoretical and material contributions of slaves to the overthrow of the colonial slave system, I argue that intimacies produced within and across lines of social difference in the Caribbean were both productive of colonial power and the basis for unique forms of everyday resistance to the ideologies and material structures of the slave plantation economy. By reading women's narratives in relation to unpublished archival sources, historical records, and other literary texts, I trace the ways that everyday practices within spaces such as homes, plantations, schools, and churches were implicated in transatlantic circulations of power, violence, and ideas concerning the form and future of the slave system. My project demonstrates that an appraisal of the intimate in colonial relations helps redefine politics by critiquing the binary logic that understands power primarily in terms of public, rather than private, acts

Organizing work around specialized professionals leverages their deep expertise and mastery of particular skills. However, as work becomes more flexible, organizations often require specialists to perform some work outside their specialization. These tasks, which distance specialists from the area of their greatest contribution, could diminish their performance by being distracting or tiring or by creating negative comparisons with others who are more proficient in that work. Contrary to these perspectives, we find robust evidence that specialists' performance can be enhanced, rather than diminished, after work outside their specialization. Using archival data from 22 years of Major League Baseball (MLB) games and interviews with former MLB players and coaches, we find that specialized players perform better in their specialty after obligatory tasks outside of their specialization. We argue that this occurs through a process we call forced task inferiority, in which underperformance in tasks outside their specialty frustrates specialists, generating heightened arousal and drive that they can channel into better performance in their specialty work. The results are robust to alternative mechanisms, such as tasks outside a specialist's area of specialization leading to learning, breaking monotony, or threatening the specialist's professional identity. This research advances knowledge about managing specialists and flexible work arrangements by showing that when tasks are particularly sequenced, specialists' performance can be enhanced, rather than diminished, by doing work outside their specialty. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1680 .

"Today, anyone with an internet connection can access hundreds of millions of digitized cultural artifacts from the comfort of their desk. And every day cultural institutions and private bodies add thousands of new cultural works to the digital sphere. Mass digitization is forming new central nexuses of knowledge and new ways of engaging with that knowledge. What at first glance appears to be a simple act of digitization (a transformation of singular books from boundary objects to open sets of data), at closer examination reveals a complex process teeming with diverse political, legal, and cultural investments. This book argues that mass digitization has become a global cultural political project. It offers an in-depth examination of mass digitization of cultural memory in the West and beyond. It suggests a new approach to the study of digital cultural memory archives, proposing to understand mass digitization not as neutral technical processes, but rather as distinct subpolitical processes that build new kinds of archives and new ways of interacting with these archives. And it seeks to develop a critical theoretical framework for understanding the new archival apparatuses and the politics and memory dynamics they give rise to"--

"Today, anyone with an internet connection can access hundreds of millions of digitized cultural artifacts from the comfort of their desk. And every day cultural institutions and private bodies add thousands of new cultural works to the digital sphere. Mass digitization is forming new central nexuses of knowledge and new ways of engaging with that knowledge. What at first glance appears to be a simple act of digitization (a transformation of singular books from boundary objects to open sets of data), at closer examination reveals a complex process teeming with diverse political, legal, and cultural investments. This book argues that mass digitization has become a global cultural political project. It offers an in-depth examination of mass digitization of cultural memory in the West and beyond. It suggests a new approach to the study of digital cultural memory archives, proposing to understand mass digitization not as neutral technical processes, but rather as distinct subpolitical processes that build new kinds of archives and new ways of interacting with these archives. And it seeks to develop a critical theoretical framework for understanding the new archival apparatuses and the politics and memory dynamics they give rise to"--

Both using and contributing to power structure research, this article presents evidence that corporate and military elites form networks and mobilize resources to influence the development of environmental policy. This influence may be achieved when elites form and utilize knowledge-shaping processes, which involve four principle exercises of power. First, elites suppress information that may threaten their interests. Second, elites organize and fund institutions to produce and promote research that may be useful in efforts to secure their goals. Third, elites fund experts willing to attack and discredit potentially damaging research. Finally, they attempt to exert influence in knowledge administration, or in selecting what information counts as knowledge and what does not. Archival evidence is used to construct a case study of a knowledge-shaping process created to influence the national policy debate over ammonium perchlorate, the primary constituent of solid rocket fuel and a widespread water contaminant in the USA.

Despite widespread beliefs that the United States has not used chemical weapons since the distant past of World War I, this study suggests a more complicated history by examining U.S. use of herbicides and incapacitating gases in the Vietnam War and its use of herbicides in the "War on Drugs." This article places such use of toxic violence within a context of U.S. hegemony, by which U.S. officials have used contested forms of violence to secure geopolitical goals, but have also been pressured to comply with humanitarian norms or-when there is a gap between norms and state policy-to do legitimating work in order to maintain domestic and international consent. Based on case study analysis of archival and secondary sources, this article identifies three main techniques U.S. officials use to legitimate contested forms of violence. These techniques are defensive categorization, humanitizing discourse, and surrogacy.