The Structural Creation of Virtual Power in a Large Network

Our conventional wisdom indicates that because of their spread-out nature, performance networks for large projects are bound to experience perfect power diffusion where no one player is likely to gain hegemony over others. We might be wrong about that. It is possible that oligarchic network positioning and influence may emerge (Ansell, Bicher, Zhou, 2016) as political considerations and dominate the more traditional bureaucratic ones. These are applicable for decisions that involve an allocation of resources, adoption of technology, design of control systems, and methods of project appraisal (among others). While considerations for these seem to be dedicated to the limited set, there is a large shortage of work on the application of power in the larger context of networks and very large initiatives (VLI) that may be found in customs, trade, economic, and political unions. This can also be found in any political integration or economic integration projects, for example in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The contention is that exchanges of power in formal regulated structures may be predictable, it is the informal and unregulated condition that influence performance of integration. This paper focuses on the structures for minority control and suggests these strategies to influence a network come from the influence of nodes and edges of the network, and not from top down control.

An Intolerance of Idleness

Despite the fact that disasters, usually induced by hurricanes, were a near-annual experience in the nineteenth-century British-controlled Caribbean, the immediate response of white elites (plantation owners and colonial officers) to these events has remained largely underexamined. This article fills that lacuna by examining the concerns that, across the long nineteenth century, informed British responses to some of the most devastating nature-induced disasters in this period. Though the damages wrought by these events always necessitated some form of humanitarian relief, across the period 1831–1907 the survival of labor regimes and the plantation economy always remained the paramount concern of British officials. White elites viewed their minority control over colonies in the region as contingent on their ability to make African-Caribbean people labor for them. Consequently, because disasters so often destroyed plantations and other sites of labor, colonial responses to disaster were primarily informed by a desire to coerce the African-Caribbean population back to work. Reflecting a preoccupation with “idleness” that was mirrored in domestic poor relief and disaster relief throughout the British Empire, white elites often attempted to withhold needed foodstuffs and materials for rebuilding from the African-Caribbean population until they re-engaged in labor for the colonial state. This article, through showing that a preoccupation with idleness remained central to colonial disaster response, reveals an underexamined continuity between the eras of slavery and emancipation.

Minority Control of Court Decisions in Ohio

The experience of Ohio with the requirement of concurrence of an extraordinary majority of the Supreme Court to declare a statute invalid is an illuminating commentary on the desirability of such a restriction. Much has been spoken and written on both sides of the question. Those who have seen laws embodying worth-while reforms invalidated by the courts, many times by bare majority decisions, have campaigned for a curtailment of the judicial prerogative. Publicists have expatiated on the evils of the situation. Textbook writers have embodied the arguments in their discussions. Teachers, it is to be feared, have quite glibly enlarged upon the necessity of unseating our “judicial obligarchy.”The late President Theodore Roosevelt, addressing the Ohio constitutional convention in 1912, urged that body to propose an amendment providing for the recall of judicial decisions. He failed to convince the convention of the desirability of his remedy, but he succeeded in creating a feeling that something must be done; and an amendment to the judiciary article was adopted, reading as follows: “No law shall be held unconstitutional and void by the Supreme Court without the concurrence of at least all but one of the judges, except in the affirmance of a judgment of the court of appeals declaring the law unconstitutional and void.” Since the Supreme Court is composed of a chief justice and six associate justices, the restriction amounts to a requirement of the concurrence of six justices in decisions of this kind.