In contemporary Thai politics, the rhetoric of “superwoman” (ผู้หญิงเก่ง) has gained prominence. This paper theorises the intersection of gender, politics, and neoliberalism within the Thai context. While neoliberalism reinforces precarity, it also fosters flexibility, empowerment, and autonomy for some. To understand the origins of the “superwoman” rhetoric, I employ a qualitative method that involves interviewing Thai women MPs who are in the Committee that oversees activities including children, young adults, women, elderly, persons with disabilities, ethnic groups, and gender diverse individuals (คณะกรรมาธิการกิจการเด็ก เยาวชน สตรี ผู้สูงอายุ ผู้พิการ กลุ่มชาติพันธุ์ และผู้ที่มีความหลากหลายทางเพศ). It emerges that some women politicians embody neoliberal selves (Chen 2013), where the central neoliberal principle involves treating homo economicus as the model of personhood. Their bodily dispositions align with the pursuit of individual choices, led by entrepreneurial activity in a capitalist commodifying culture. I examine the interplay between neoliberalism and Thai women politicians as immanent neoliberal subjects who epitomise hegemonic femininity (Baer 2016; Chen 2013) while simultaneously working toward political changes. While literature on neoliberalism and gender focuses on how women distance themselves from the politics of the collective and unchanged structural inequalities, Thai women politicians embody and manoeuvre normative femininity (where opulence symbolises their agency) while also working toward mobilising political change.

This article theorizes China’s Charity Law as a staged legal architecture that institutionalizes symbolic governance through sequenced design: from normative logic, to operational mechanism, to statutory codification. Based on comparative ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai and Chongqing (2021–2023), this article develops a three-part model of interface legality. First, it conceptualizes legality as a symbolic infrastructure of legitimacy budgeting—the institutional logic through which symbolic control is organized without procedural closure. Second, it analyzes triadic discretion as the operational logic of this system, where codified law, bureaucratic modulation, and organizational alignment interact as a choreography of relational governance. Third, it traces how this discretionary system, developed in practice after the 2016 enactment, was codified into law as structured unfulfillability—embedding impossibility into legal form to sustain reputational suspense. These mechanisms are not pathologies of implementation but institutional features of symbolic governance. By connecting the Charity Law’s expressive design to its affective operations and strategic incompletion, this article contributes to sociolegal scholarship on staged legality by revealing how institutional logic, operational rhythm, and statutory design interlock to codify symbolic governance in contemporary lawmaking.

This essay discusses the contours of what I call a new instrumental turn in Nigerian historical scholarship. It argues that the historical discipline in Nigeria is experiencing a new instrumental turn, which finds expression in several new features of academic history writing, teaching, and programming. Some aspects of this trend hearken back to the original instrumental history of the pioneers of Nigerian and African nationalist history; others represent something new, being responses to novel twenty-first-century anxieties and imperatives of nation-building, development, and the place of humanities knowledge in those aspirations. Unlike old conceptions of instrumentality, this new turn signals a more explicit agenda of problem-solving through historical research. It also entails a rather formulaic embrace of proposals for solutions to problems identified in or through historical research.

Targeted policy and governance instruments are essential for developing a carbon dioxide removal (CDR) sector aligned with climate change mitigation scenarios. As a result, a large share of the scientific literature on CDR concentrates on these aspects. However, current CDR deployment and development are mainly driven by private organisations. While their role in CDR governance is generally acknowledged, important context regarding their perspectives, motivations and decision-making processes is lacking. This study addresses this gap by conducting seventy-nine interviews with senior representatives from organisations engaged in the early CDR market, including technology suppliers, credit purchasers, and financiers. We explore their views on key components of fair and equitable CDR systems. Our analysis reveals varying priorities across interviewed actors, including strong regulatory frameworks, market transparency, accountability, funding mechanisms and (climate) justice, emphasising historical responsibility, revenue distribution and community engagement. Additionally, we identify conflicting perspectives on the involvement of oil and gas sectors and the balance between rapid scale-up and thorough, inclusive processes. This research offers critical insights into the role of private organisations in shaping the governance of the emerging CDR sector, highlighting the complex interplay of market dynamics and ethical considerations.

The institutional logics perspective provides a powerful theoretical lens that emphasizes how meanings and practices are intertwined in relatively enduring configurations that can profoundly shape organizational behavior across space and time. In this article, we propose the need for a broader research agenda on the dynamics of institutional logics in the Chinese context, particularly in three aspects. We begin by elaborating on the distinct configuration of logics in China, where state logic is more dominant and often directs other logics, thus shaping organizational behavior differently than its Western counterpart. We then argue for the need to examine (1) the change of logics per se, leveraging China’ market transition, which provides a unique opportunity to observe how existing configurations of logics undergo transformational change and regain coherence; (2) the governance of logics, focusing on the influence of social evaluators and command posts; and (3) the diffusion of the China Model, a distinct configuration of logics and orders, to other countries through the Chinese state’s political and economic campaigns.

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning technique that distributes model training to multiple clients while allowing clients to keep their data local. Although the technique allows one to break free from data silos keeping data local, to coordinate such distributed training, it requires an orchestrator, usually a central server. Consequently, organisational issues of governance might arise and hinder its adoption in both competitive and collaborative markets for data. In particular, the question of how to govern FL applications is recurring for practitioners. This research commentary addresses this important issue by inductively proposing a layered decision framework to derive organisational archetypes for FL’s governance. The inductive approach is based on an expert workshop and post-workshop interviews with specialists and practitioners, as well as the consideration of real-world applications. Our proposed framework assumes decision-making occurs within a black box that contains three formal layers: data market, infrastructure, and ownership. Our framework allows us to map organisational archetypes ex-ante. We identify two key archetypes: consortia for collaborative markets and in-house deployment for competitive settings. We conclude by providing managerial implications and proposing research directions that are especially relevant to interdisciplinary and cross-sectional disciplines, including organisational and administrative science, information systems research, and engineering.

Social scientists are paying attention to the role that knowledge plays in economic phenomena. This focus on knowledge has led to exploring two challenges: first, its governance to reap positive externalities and solve social dilemmas, and second, how we can craft institutions to match the intangible nature of ideas with adequate property rules. This article contributes by elaborating on the different knowledge property regimes and the elements contributing to their classification. This paper first taxonomises knowledge governance regimes based on Ostrom’s work on institutional analysis. Second, it examines why governance structures for managing knowledge production vary across industries, according to (1) the characteristics of knowledge, (2) the attributes of the organisations, and (3) the different rules-in-use to enforce property rights. This is the first study at the intersection of institutional analysis and political economy that highlights the knowledge features, incentive structures, and mechanisms undergirding knowledge governance in different property regimes.

Global discussions around the risks, benefits and governance of solar radiation modification (SRM) in the climate change response portfolio are accelerating, but the topic remains nascent in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). In 2023, a US start-up (Make Sunsets) performed a small-scale, non-research deployment of SRM in Baja California, Mexico, without prior permission or community engagement. Their actions prompted Mexico to announce its intention to ban SRM experimentation, underscoring the need for governance to prevent irresponsible practices that could discredit legitimate research. We perform an empirical and ethical analysis of the landscape of academic discussions and media coverage on SRM in the LAC region, focusing on the Make Sunset case. Our analysis leads us to three conclusions: first, a lack of regulations in LAC that fosters mistrust, fuels perceptions of neo-colonialism and restricts potentially valuable and responsible research; second, we argue that the theatrical Make Sunsets case is not ethically justified in light of the diversity of risks associated with it; third, we offer foundational, participatory recommendations to promote effective, transparent and sustainable governance of SRM, including LAC in global conversations.