Defiant Innovation: The Adoption of Medical Marijuana Laws in the American States

Diffusion research often characterizes the role of the federal government in innovation adoption as a supportive one, either increasing the likelihood of adoption or its speed. We examine the adoption of medical marijuana laws (MMLs) from 1996 to 2014 to shed light on what motivates states to adopt innovations that are in explicit defiance of federal law. Furthermore, we examine whether federal signals have any influence on the likelihood of adoption. In doing so, we utilize implementation theory to expand our understanding of how the federal government's position impacts state policy innovation adoption. We find mixed evidence for the influence of federal signals on the adoption of MMLs. The results suggest that medical marijuana policies are much more likely to be adopted in states when proponents have the political or institutional capital, rather than a medical or fiscal need. Moreover, this political capital is sufficient independent of the federal government's real or perceived position.     

Calculable territory and the West German census boycott movements of the 1980s

This paper argues that recent signs of a hesitant convergence between discourses on sovereignty and territory and discourses on power/knowledge point to ways in which both discourse of power are linked to calculable territory. Both sovereignty and power/knowledge are based upon intervention, and intervention in turn presupposes these two general forms of power. But intervention is also inherently territorial. The historical context for these claims is set through a brief account of the general sciences of order emerging in the early modern period. The theoretical argument is then given a platform by means of a heuristic model of calculable territory, which, while incomplete and partly counter-factual, provides an overarching framework for understanding a range of recent studies of spatial power relations as contributions to a collective genealogy of calculable territory. An important recent change in the genealogy of calculable territory was brought on by the widespread adoption of electronic information and communications technologies in state institutions and other large organizations over the past quarter century. Both the continued relevance of calculable territory and recent changes in its composition and significance for power relations are illustrated by chronicling one important early set of controversies in the emergence of the ‘information age’: the mass boycott movements in West Germany in 1983 and 1987 aimed at blocking the federal census in that country. These boycotts clearly show the links between sovereignty, power/knowledge, intervention and calculable territory.     

Space and social control in the administration of the Oglala Lakota ("Sioux"), 1871-1879

The "panoptic" logic of social control analyzed by Michel Foucault plays an important part in regulating "normal" citizens of the modern world as well as institutionalized populations. However, control of the unconfined presupposes certain conditions not paid adequate attention by Foucault, especially the requirement that people be individually identifiable in most activities, and that private property be located at fixed addresses. In order to explore the importance and the implications of these and other preconditions, this paper examines the strategies with which the U.S. government attempted to bring the Oglala Lakota under administrative control during the first decade of their settlement around the Red Cloud Agency on the northern Great Plains. Oglala society exhibited none of the hypothesized prerequisites for social control by the U.S. government at the beginning of the decade, but by 1879, the rudiments of a working system were in place. This story of the struggles surrounding its imposition robs modern social control of its seeming naturalness and immutability, brings into a critical light many of the spatial conditions we take for granted in today's world, and suggests the importance of a new, relatively unexplored dimension of the historical geography of American Indians and their dealings with White society.To the men of my time was appointed the task of taking the raw and bleeding material which made the hostile strength of the plains Indians, of bringing that material to the mills of the white man, and of transmuting it into a manufactured product that might be absorbed by the nation without interfering with the national digestion…In the language of the bounding West in which he made his habitat, it may be said that, in 1871, the Indian was "halter-broke but he had not yet been bitted".James McLaughlin,Former Agent to the Standing Rock Sioux