Jack Corbett’s research while affiliated with Monash University (Australia) and other places

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 “institutional pathos.” It then applies this framework to an extreme case: Whitehall's response to the Brexit vote. Drawing on rich interview material from the Brexit Witness Archive, this article illustrates how the experience of individual and collective emotions deeply colored the work of British Government in delivering Brexit. The article concludes with a research agenda for public administration that foregrounds emotions.

The success of the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) agenda rests on effective policy implementation. We look to the literatures in public administration and development studies for key insights on implementation. Translating these insights for the socio-political geography of small island contexts, we identify the trade-offs that SIDS encounter in managing coordination and capacity for implementation. We study examples of success and failure in navigating these trade-offs in practice to draw lessons for policy-makers in SIDS. We advocate 'working with the grain' to improve implementation by: leveraging social networks; collaborating with external actors; and working with existing institutional structures.

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 investigate these assumptions by focusing on small, rather than large states across three dimensions: representativeness, transparency and service delivery. Drawing on unique qualitative data from three small states from different continents, Malta, Samoa and Suriname, we find that contra implicit assumptions, small population size does not have the overwhelmingly positive effects that much of the literature assumes. Rather, smallness tends to undermine legal-rational decision making and to facilitate patronage-based service delivery. These findings indicate that the contextual turn in public administration needs to pay more attention to the way population size shapes bureaucratic practice in all states, large and small.

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 learning styles—incremental, risk‐averse, managerial, creative, instrumental and instinctive—and assess the implications for how Ministers adjust to the challenges of high political office. We conclude by showing what an appreciation for this variety of Ministerial learning styles can offer the study and practice of executive government in Britain and beyond.

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 its small population, territory, and economy, yet has experienced secessionist agitation for much of the second half of the 20 th century. Since the late 1990s, momentum for secession has subsided. We explain why by reference to rationalist, culturalist and institutionalist arguments. We use an in-depth case study method, drawing on a range of sources, that foregrounds equifinality and concatenation across more than a century of inter-island politics. The findings suggest that all three types of arguments have some explanatory value but each fall short of fully accounting for the ebb and flow of secessionist dynamics. The findings may be of particular interest to multi-island states and territories in the Caribbean. They also offer practical lessons about the importance of policies that promote sectoral integration, encourage sociological linkages, and provide scope for dynamic political settlements.

Islandness is a contested concept, not just between disciplines but also cultures, entangled with what islands, island studies, and island identity are understood to be. The purpose of this article is to explore some of these different meanings, without necessarily unifying or reconciling them, with the aim of keeping multiple understandings of islandness in creative tension. We begin by considering islandness as smallness, recognizing that though many entry points into island studies relate to size in some way, what constitutes small is dependent on both context and worldview. Next, we consider islandness as culture, and the concept of island identity, which is expressed in varied forms. Finally, we consider framings of islands as others, and the extent to which contemporary narratives linked to islands are really inherent to islands or not. Ultimately, we conclude that although there is much to be gained from appreciating differing understandings of islandness, these multiple meanings make it critical to reflect on context wherever the term is used, and exercise care in assigning attributes and outcomes to islandness. Key Words: identity, islandness, islands, island studies, narratives.