<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Can emotions be observed throughout the years at the regional scale of continents and countries? Does variation in their intensity correlate with historical events and with the evolution of diplomatic and administrative practices? If so, who is the subject of emotion? We seek answers by a remote reading analysis of the reports of Swiss ambassadors in the first half of the 20th century. We examine the conditions under which super-individual subjects of emotion can be aggregated from large textual datasets, and propose a theoretical framework for their interpretation. In specific examples, we show how algorithmic sentiment analysis let us identify the exceptionally expressive language of the Swiss ambassador in Tokyo during World War 2, or the posture of the Swiss administration with regard to the social movements in Scandinavia. Our findings yield both methodological recommendations and theoretical bridges between various disciplines concerned with emotions and their expression in written documents.</abstract>

Feeling like a State. The Sentiments Tide of Swiss Diplomacy through the Eye of the Algorithm

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Using the example of so-called port state control, the article examines the phenomenon of multidimensional legal norms and the challenges they pose for public administration. It shows how the gradual introduction of port state control has enabled public authorities to gain access to foreign-flagged ships and how this has subsequently differentiated their decision-making program. The illustrative material for this historicizing study comes primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Mehrdimensionale Rechtsmaßstäbe als Herausforderung für die Verwaltung: das Beispiel der Hafenstaatkontrolle

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>From the very beginning, Habsburgian literature was closely tied to the Empire’s »bureaucracy« – both to the administrative apparatus and to the class of officials who claimed this title as their own. The fact that numerous authors were recruited from this class may well have helped to create the »Habsburg myth«: the literary romanticisation of bureaucrats as loyal to the Emperor and as cultural pillars of a variegated empire that never accomplished to be a state in the modern sense. However, a real tie-up between the citizens and the bureaucracy, for which proof can be found still today and which is referred to as the »Habsburg effect«, is likely to have arisen due to the welfare state set up in the latter years of the Danube monarchy. Franz Kafka played a part in this. In addition to his articles and talks for the »Workmen’s Accident Insurance Bureau«, his literary texts also showed Kafka to be an analyst and reformer of both the old and new bureaucracy. Far from being mutually exclusive, his official duties and his writing constituted two aspects of one and the same enterprise: Kafka sought to free bureaucracy from the old Habsburg mythology; to repurpose it informally into an arbitrator in the class war and the conflict of nations; to give those it served a greater involvement in its workings; and to test the scope of a future bureaucracy that would be permanently reformed and ultimately indistinguishable from the social life. Kafka’s tales thus contain unique accounts of the Habsburg bureaucracy and of the myths and effects peculiar to it, for they keep the minutes of Habsburgian administration, while oscillating between the perspective of officialdom and that of an increasingly »colonised environment«.</abstract>

Kafka in Habsburg

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Research on emotions in the 20th century has shown that in the period after WWI there has been a general tendency to control and suppress the display (if not the experience) of emotions. Based on various sources such as conduct books, autobiographical prose, and disciplinary files this article highlights the role emotions played in civil service in interwar Austria. Emotions could be a disturbance of administrative procedure and everyday office life, but they clearly served to regulate power and gender relations between colleagues, and to define personal boundaries. Specific focus is placed on the interrelation of emotions and political affiliations of government employees, on the particularities of greeting in the office, and on „Beamtengefühl“ – a special feature of this socio-professional group.</abstract>

»Beamtengefühl«: Soziale Funktionen von Emotionen im österreichischen Staatsdienst der Zwischenkriegszeit

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The advantages of the railway were recognized not only in Vienna. In the Habsburg Empire's provinces, too, people banked on this new type of transportation as a bringer of progress. Using the example of Galicia, this article shows how the initiative and the involvement of local actors promoted the building of a railway network in the north-eastern crownland. It focuses on the main motives for the implementation of the railway in Vienna versus those in Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv). The article is divided into three parts. While the first part deals with the expectations raised by the railway, the second part concentrates on the political circumstances which accompanied the construction of the Galician railway network. The third part focuses on the Galician capital as a traffic junction in a polycentric railway network.</abstract>

Staat, Raum und Infrastruktur: Wie die Eisenbahn nach Galizien kam

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This Relektüre revisits Cornelia Vismann’s book Files: Law and Media Technology almost 20 years after its initial publication. Situating the book in the media historical and intellectual constellations in which it originally appeared, this article provides an overview of Vismann’s approach to legal and administrative history and sheds light on the book’s reception.</abstract>

Wieder gelesen: Cornelia Vismann, »Akten« (2000)

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Until the late nineteenth century the British Civil Service relied on handwritten documents which were hand copied by armies of clerks and filed. The next stage was that handwritten documents were copied by armies of typists and then filed. The third stage was that documents were, largely, typed by their authors and distributed via email or other means, at which point the system of filing seems to have broken down. The two major inflection points were roughly 100 years apart, and both the move to the typewriter and the move to email were motivated by a wish to save money.
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The Motives for and Consequences of the Introduction of Typewriters and Word Processing in the British Civil Service

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Antonio Serra is one of the first authors to write that society and economy will benefit from a diversified economy, an physical infrastructure for better connectivity between people (for trade), investing in an educated citizenry, and good government. To him government is the prime institutional arrangement that has the ability to lift people up. In this article his ideas are discussed and shown how they foreshadowed the thoughts of colleagues in France, Germany, and Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries. His thoughts also envisions what is called a welfare state.
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Antonio Serra, Early Modern Political Economist: From Good Government as Individual Behavior to Good Government as Practical Policy

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This paper examines the use of management consultants in the German Ministry of Defence in 1981 and 1982. After an affair concerning the procurement of the Tornado fighter aircraft, the Minister of Defence, Hans Apel, hired a team from the consulting firm McKinsey to develop a new organisational concept. This paper examines the special features of the German procurement and defence administration as well as the reasons for the failure of projects of administrative innovation. Focus is placed on the role of management consultants in the implementation of organisational innovations and their relationship to the actors within the ministerial administration.
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McKinsey auf der Hardthöhe: Unternehmensberater im Bundesministerium der Verteidigung 1981/82

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In nineteenth century France, an administrative practice underwent a spectacular expansion: the assessment of all civil servants, regardless of their ministry of affiliation. This article analyzes this innovation. In the first section, the political and administrative context of this assessment is presented. The second section describes the chronology of the expansion of performance appraisals and the content of the forms used: the competencies of the agents were dissected on all levels (attendance at work, technical abilities, and personal and family life). Finally, the last section will attempt to analyze the modalities, drivers, and effects of the expansion of this practice.
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Assessment as innovation: The case of the French administration in the nineteenth century

»A stupid dread of innovation«: Wandel, Zeitlichkeit und das Problem der Innovation in frühneuzeitlichen Verwaltungen

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This paper deals with the role of pneumatic tube systems in public administration in the twentieth century. Based on archival sources and considering examples as different as ministries in Zagreb and Bucharest, the British military administration in the 1940s, the customs and train stations on the Swiss-Italian border as well as governmental buildings in Bonn and Bern around 1970, this article shows in what ways pneumatic mail tubes were interpreted as fostering (or not) innovation in public administration and how clerks were actually dealing with this (not always effective) communication system.
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Innovation durch Technik? Rohrpostsysteme als Medientechnologien der Verwaltung im 20. Jahrhundert

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Much has been said on the role of judges, legal officials, and courts in the making of colonial regimes. Nevertheless, historiography lacks specific methodological reflections on lawsuits in the Iberian Empires. In order to raise some methodological issues concerning lawsuits as primary sources, I argue that historians could also engage with legal files by looking at instead of just looking through them. In this sense, I seek to establish a dialogue with discussions that anthropologists and social scientists put forward concerning the role of documents as constitutive of bureaucracies and administrative institutions. In order to do so, I will focus on specific aspects of the Benguela District Court collection of legal files.</abstract>

Administory

Journal for the History of Public Administration / Zeitschrift für Verwaltungsgeschichte