Portraits, Power, and Patronage in the Late Roman Republic

Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequence

Cultures of caste and rural development in the social network of a south Indian village

Cultures of caste in much of rural India have become entangled with institutions of rural development. In community-driven development, emphasis on “local resource persons” and “community spokespersons” has created new opportunities for brokerage and patronage within some villages, which interact with existing forms of authority and community afforded by caste identity and intra-caste headmanship. In this article, we study how these entangled cultures of caste and development translate into social network structures using data on friendship ties from a south Indian village. We find that although caste continues to be important in shaping community structures and leadership in the village’s network, its influence varies across different communities. This fluidity of caste’s influence on community network structures is argued to be the result of multiple distinct yet partially overlapping cultural-political forces, which include sharedness afforded by caste identity and new forms of difference and inequality effected through rural development

Neopatrimonialism revisited : beyond a catch-all concept

The article provides a critical discussion of the literature on “patrimonialism” and "neopatrimonialism” as far as the use in Development Studies in general or African Studies in particular is concerned. To overcome the catch-all use of the concept the authors present their own definition of “neopatrimonialism” based on Max Weber’s concept of patrimonialism and legal-rational bureaucracy. However, in order to make the concept more useful for comparative empirical research, they argue, it needs a thorough operationalisation (qualitatively and quantitatively) and the creation of possible subtypes which, in combination, might contribute to a theory of neopatrimonial action.Der Artikel unterzieht die beiden Konzepte „Patrimonialismus“ und „Neopatrimonialismus“, wie sie in der entwicklungstheoretischen Literatur und in Afrikastudien Verwendung finden, einer kritischen Analyse. Damit dem Konzept des Neopatrimonialismus mehr als nur eine heuristische Bedeutung zukommen kann, präsentieren die Autoren eine eigene Definition des Begriffs, die sich eng an die Weber’schen Konzepte des Patrimonialismus und der legal-rationalen Bürokratie anlehnt. Darüber hinaus ist auf dieser Grundlage (1) eine sorgfältige (qualitative und/oder quantitative) Operationalisierung des Konzeptes und (2) die Bildung von möglichen Subtypen notwendig. Erst dann kann das Konzept sinnvoll für die vergleichende empirische Forschung eingesetzt und möglicherweise etwas wie eine neopatrimoniale Handlungstheorie entwickelt werden

Trends of Radicalization among the Ranks of the Afghan National Police

This study examines and compares trends of radicalization among the ranks of Afghan National Police (ANP) force across eleven provinces in Afghanistan. This is the first part of an ongoing series of papers dedicated to examining the evolving trends in radicalization among the Afghan National Defense and Security Force (ANDSF). Since the formation of the defense and security in 2002, various potential manifestations of radicalization, including insider attacks, dereliction of duty, and desertion have plagued its ranks. Radicalization is broadly defined as constraints on both the perspective of individuals and their tolerance to ideology and practices which diverge and differentiate from their own political, religious and social beliefs. Making the distinction between political deviance (PD), religious extremism (RE), and social intolerance (SI), 1498 uniformed rank and file personnel, 151 commissioned officers, and 8 uniformed religious leaders from among the ANP were surveyed on their views toward the political system in Afghanistan, anti-government elements including the Taliban, democracy in light of Islamic values, and women and human rights

The heart of political steering: the EU's areana of power as template for a governance typology

The literature on the so-called new modes of governance in the European Union focuses on steering instruments beyond hierarchy and coercion. While it has repeatedly been put into question how ‘new’ these instruments are, no systematic attention has been paid to the mutual dependency between policy types marked by the specific conflict lines and choice of governance tools. On the contrary, some attempts to classify modes of governance explicitly disregard policy typologies. The paper argues conversely that in order to arrive at a comprehensive mapping of modes of governance – ‘old’ and ‘new’ – the most promising doorway is indeed to start from the actor constellations characteristic for the different policy types. A review of the European Union’s policies and modes of governance illustrates how modes of governance are pre-defined by the structures between policy-makers and –takers innate to the policy types that dominate supranational policy-making

Patronage, Reputation and Common Agency Contracting in the Scientific Revolution: From Keeping 'Nature's Secrets' to the Institutionalization of 'Open Science'

This essay examines the economics of patronage in the production of knowledge and its influence upon the historical formation of key elements in the ethos and organizational structure of publicly funded open science. The emergence during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries of the idea and practice of “open science" was a distinctive and vital organizational aspect of the Scientific Revolution. It represented a break from the previously dominant ethos of secrecy in the pursuit of Nature’s Secrets, to a new set of norms, incentives, and organizational structures that reinforced scientific researchers' commitments to rapid disclosure of new knowledge. The rise of “cooperative rivalries” in the revelation of new knowledge, is seen as a functional response to heightened asymmetric information problems posed for the Renaissance system of court-patronage of the arts and sciences; pre-existing informational asymmetries had been exacerbated by the claims of mathematicians and the increasing practical reliance upon new mathematical techniques in a variety of “contexts of application.” Reputational competition among Europe’s noble patrons motivated much of their efforts to attract to their courts the most prestigious natural philosophers, was no less crucial in the workings of that system than was the concern among their would-be clients to raise their peer-based reputational status. In late Renaissance Europe, the feudal legacy of fragmented political authority had resulted in relations between noble patrons and their savant-clients that resembled the situation modern economists describe as "common agency contracting in substitutes" -- competition among incompletely informed principals for the dedicated services of multiple agents. These conditions tended to result in more favorable contract terms (especially with regard to autonomy and financial support) for the agent-client members of the nascent scientific communities. This left the new scientists better positioned to retain larger information rents on their specialized knowledge, which in turn tended to encourage entry into the emerging disciplines. They also were thereby enabled collectively to develop a stronger degree of professional autonomy for their programs of inquiry within increasingly specialized and formal scientific academies which, during the latter seventeenth century, attracted the patronage of rival absolutist States in Western Europe.open science, new economics of science, economics of institutions, patronage, asymmetric information, principal-agent problems, common agency contracting, social networks, 'invisible colleges', scientific academies

Theorising state-narco relations in Bolivia's nascent democracy (1982-1993): governance order and political transition

Conventional policy and academic discourses have generally held illicit drug economies in Latin America to be synergistic with violence and instability. The case of post-transition Bolivia (1982–1993) confounds such assumptions. Applying a political economy approach, this article moves beyond mainstream analyses to examine how the Bolivian drug trade became interwoven with informal forms of governance, order and political transition. I argue that state–narco networks – a hangover from Bolivia’s authoritarian era – played an important role in these complex processes. In tracing the evolution of these interactions, the article advances a more nuanced theorisation of the relationship between the state and the drug trade in an understudied case

Development, Policy and Agriculture in India in the 1990s

Policy tends to be depoliticised in development discourse. In this paper Bernard Schaffer's framework for the political analysis of policy is recalled and developed. Repoliticising policy involves the analysis of four overlapping political fields: those of agenda, procedure, resources and access. The framework is applied to the politics of the agricultural policy agenda over the recent past in India, and with special reference to Tamil Nadu state.

Perspectives Note: The Enabling Environment for Capacity Development

The context matters for capacity development (CD). It sets the stage on which actors pursue their interests and agendas -- both of which are affected by change processes. And CD is change, in most cases producing winners and losers and reconfiguring the balance of influence and power in and between individuals, organizations and groups of organizations.This perspective paper -- one of five in a series prepared by the OECD/DAC as an input to preparation of the High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan in 2011 -- collects evidence about how the environment can be more or less enabling for CD, how actors can adapt to or influence the context they operate in, and what the implications are when country and development partners promote CD