Traveling with the GDP Through Early Development Economics' History
In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge one element has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of a Gross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity. This paper suggests approaching the history of development thinking by travelling with the GDP through this discourse. The GDP has been contested as an indicator of economic development ever since it was first put to use in the 1940s. However, the specific mode of knowledge which is expressed in this abstraction has opened up a quite universally shared frame of reference in which a North-South-Divide became operational. The paper argues that GDP figures have become facts that travel easily across the globe because constant work is being undertaken to uphold the conditions for their mobility. Based on this observation the development endeavour can be located historically in a manifold constellation of the statistical acquisition of economic insight, political utopia, state intervention, the emerging prospect of economic planning in capitalist and noncapitalist systems and the quest for the international standardization of economic knowledge production.
Corrective Critiques and Measuring Social Life: Social Capital in Political Communitarianism and Academia
Over the past quarter of a century social capital has grown from a relatively obscure concept to one routinely applied in a variety of literatures ranging from academic disciplines to international development programmes. Whilst the concept has been the subject of several critiques, these have largely been from a political economic perspective and have primarily discredited the concept by constructing it as having a basis and origins in economics. This thesis aims to offer an alternative analysis of social capital. By drawing on the work of French pragmatism, I treat social capital as a complex, heterogeneous object whose meaning and basis shifts as it has been employed in the enactment of different realities.  Whilst retaining this sensibility, I argue that insight can be gained into political uses of social capital by conceptualising it as part of various corrective critiques of economic liberalism. From a communitarian perspective, liberal policy is deficient because of its individualistic, and economic, foci. The incorporation of these, and other critiques, has resulted in the recent emergence of a ‘holistic’ approach that identifies human ‘wellbeing’ as the goal of policy. Social capital, with its promise to make the benefits of social life measurable and calculable, has helped to incorporate the communitarian critique into policy and political discourse both in New Zealand and internationally. However, social capital’s relationship to critique within policy and politics has varied. Some authors have constructed it as existing in a reciprocal relationship with existing liberal economic policies, from this perspective both economic growth and social capital are required to improve human wellbeing. For others, however, social capital and wellbeing are damaged by economic growth, and so economic policy requires modification in order to prevent damage to social capital. When the former construction is used, social capital is part of an expansionary critique of policy. From the latter perspective, social capital forms part of a reformist critique of policy.  These arguments are built on an analysis of social capital in texts from a variety of political and scholarly fields. My exploration of social capital in two academic fields, public health and management studies demonstrates that social capital often lacks an evident economic basis, and highlights the variability in the concept’s construction. I also explore the history of the concept in New Zealand political and policy texts, discussing its use in the New Zealand Institute of Policy Studies and by Prime Minister Jim Bolger in the 1990s, and how this changed as the concept was more thoroughly incorporated into policy during the Fifth Labour Government in the early 2000s. Furthermore, I offer an explanation of social capital’s current and central role in national accounting frameworks published by international and national government organisations, which provide the most clearly articulated attempts to measure social life via social capital.  As well as building on the existing critical and analytical literature around social capital, and offering an analysis of the concept within New Zealand, my approach demonstrates the advantages offered by adopting the sensibility of French pragmatic sociology. My analysis supports the argument that texts are a suitable topic of interest from a French pragmatic perspective, and shows the critical insight that can be gained from a more empirically-orientated and less dismissive approach to the concept of social capital.
The development of biological systematics : Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, nature, and the natural system
A reevaluation of the history of biological systematics that discusses the formative years of the so-called natural system of classification in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shows how classifications came to be treated as conventions; systematic practice was not linked to clearly articulated theory; there was general confusion over the "shape" of nature; botany, elements of natural history, and systematics were conflated; and systematics took a position near the bottom of the hierarchy of sciences.