Recent years have been characterised by the increasing encroachment into policy and academic debates of discourses describing knowledge and weightless economies and an associated ‘war for talent’. In this paper we argue that these current discourses and their description of ‘talent’ and...

Before the middle of the nineteenth century most laws enacted in the United States were special bills that granted favors to specific individuals, groups, or localities. This fundamentally inegalitarian system provided political elites with important tools that they could use to reward...