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A review of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America focuses on the implications of her historiographic method in reading Jim Buchanan’s work and the resulting failure to take seriously the underlying framework of constitutional political economy that informed both Jim Buchanan’s and Frank H. Knight’s work. MacLean’s historiography is that of social movement history, which sublimates the interests and motivations of the individual to that of the movement. The real scholar disappears into simply an agent of the movement’s master plan. Because MacLean is suspicious of the movement she believes Buchanan to be part of, his work is interpreted solely in light of what she assumes to be the master plan. In particular, she ignores Buchanan’s habit of returning to key themes in order to develop new modes of analysis. MacLean focuses solely on his public choice work, ignoring the latter developments of constitutional economics and even moral order.

Two issues in MacLean’s account are the focus on the review. The first is simply a research mistake that she drew unwarranted conclusions from regarding Buchanan’s connection to the “massive resistance” movement against desegregation of Virginia public schools. The second issue reveals MacLean’s unwillingness to consider the changes in Buchanan’s scholarship over his career. Taken together, the issues indicate that she refused to read Buchanan on his own terms in order to understand the progress of his work, even if she disagreed with him at the end.

In this paper, the authors aim to offer a cross-cultural comparison of the boycott intentions of university students in Canada with those of students in Korea.

The data were collected from students at Inje University and York University via self-administered questionnaire. A t-test found that Canadian students’ answers showed significantly greater scores in ethnocentrism, boycott attitudes prior to reading the target article and motivations related to self-enhancement compared to those acquired from Korean students. However, the motivation of counterarguments and the boycott intentions of Korean students’ toward Rogers, the parent company of Maclean’s magazine, showed significantly higher scores than those gained from Canadian students.

The boycott case used in the study is Maclean’s magazine, a Canadian news magazine, which published a controversial article called, “Too Asian? Some frosh don’t want to study at an “Asian” University”. A noticeable gap in each group of students’ boycott attitude and intentions toward Rogers, the parent company of Maclean’s magazine was found.

In the multiple regression analysis, the boycott motivation of self-enhancement was the most influential variable on boycott intentions. The boycott case examined in this paper is a practical case study of cross-national grouping as well as the perceptional difference of the locus of corporate accountability that comes from cross-cultural backgrounds.

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the significance of political and community activism in Toronto’s Chinese Canadian community between 2000 and 2016.

Adopting a mixed approach (historical, political and personal), the paper draws from both primary and secondary sources to explore three different cases – SARS in 2003, the Head Tax Redress in 2006 and Maclean’s “Too Asian?” controversy in 2010 – to illustrate discrimination against the Chinese Canadian community in Toronto during the 2000–2016 period while illuminating the importance of safeguarding human rights and dignity in the community.

The outbreak of SARS in early 2003 traumatized the whole city of Toronto and sparked waves of racial discrimination and bigotry directed at the Chinese Canadian community. Meanwhile, the community’s ongoing struggle to fight for justice and redress for the Chinese Head Tax seized the opportunity in 2006 to successfully challenge the Canadian government and other political parties to recognize and apologize for the racist tax and its long-term negative impact on the community. However, despite constant efforts, discrimination against Asian Canadians rose again, fueling Maclean’s controversial “Too Asian” article in 2010. Notwithstanding Canada’s positive image abroad, racial discrimination still exists. This paper urges that Canadians of all backgrounds must come together in solidarity and work hard to advocate for social and racial justice and human rights.

This paper will be of interest to community activists, journalists and scholars who are interested in the history of political and community activism in Toronto since 2000. Policymakers may also learn that an unexpected public crisis like SARS can ignite racial intolerance and negative attitudes toward Chinese Canadian and other communities.

This study aims to better understand the communication of sustainability by Canadian universities, specifically the use of websites, interactive features and sustainability plans.

A total of 95 Canadian universities were included in this study. The mixed-methods approach sought to capture the communication of sustainability via websites, the interactive features used, as well as to evaluate the quality of sustainability plans.

The study revealed that 67% of universities address sustainability on their websites. On average, universities offer three to four interactive features on their sustainability-related Web pages, and the average score of the quality of campus sustainability plans was 29 (out of 41).

This study does not investigate the extent to which interactive features enhance the involvement and participation in sustainability efforts or the extent to which the sustainability plans were put into practice by universities.

The findings assist with understanding how higher education institutions (HEIs) can enhance their sustainability communication via their websites to encourage interaction and engagement in campus sustainability. The findings can also help universities to enhance the effectiveness of sustainability plans.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to assess sustainability content and the interactive features on sustainability-related pages of Canadian universities’ websites. The quality of sustainability plans is also evaluated. The study informs the present understanding of communicating sustainability by Canadian universities and provides a basis for future investigations in HEIs in Canada and beyond.

In Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean draws attention to the influence that James M. Buchanan’s work has had on the political economic discourse of the past half century. Buchanan and his collaborators in the Virginia Political Economy tradition have provided intellectual firepower for efforts to delegitimize democratically sanctioned policies aimed at alleviating the dysfunctional consequences of market activity. While MacLean’s account contains some well-documented inaccuracies, her characterization of Buchanan’s agenda is broadly accurate. This chapter assesses Buchanan’s economics in light of the themes raised by MacLean. His work, we shall argue, is a modern manifestation of what Marx termed “vulgar economy,” that is, ruling-class ideology posing as science.

Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains, raised questions about James M. Buchanan’s commitment to democracy. This chapter investigates the relationship of classical liberalism in general and of Buchanan in particular to democratic theory. Contrary to the simplistic classical liberal juxtaposition of “coercion vs. consent,” there have been from Antiquity onward voluntary contractarian defenses of non-democratic government and even slavery – all little noticed by classical liberal scholars who prefer to think of democracy as just “government by the consent of the governed” and slavery as being inherently coercive. Historically, democratic theory had to go beyond that simplistic notion of democracy to develop a critique of consent-based non-democratic government, for example, the Hobbesian pactum subjectionis. That critique was based firstly on the distinction between contracts or constitutions of alienation (translatio) versus delegation (concessio). Then, the contracts of alienation were ruled out based on the theory of inalienable rights that descends from the reformation doctrine of inalienability of conscience down through the Enlightenment to modern times in the abolitionist and democratic movements. While he developed no theory of inalienability, the mature Buchanan explicitly allowed only a constitution of delegation, contrary to many modern classical liberals or libertarians who consider the choice between consent-based democratic or non-democratic governments (e.g., private cities or shareholder states) to be a pragmatic one. But Buchanan seems to not even realize that his at-most delegation dictum would also rule out the employer–employee or human rental contract which is a contract of alienation “within the scope of the employment.”

Building on relational inequality theory, this paper incorporates social capital as a device to trace the flow of resources through relationships originating within and beyond organizations. I draw on a survey of over 1,700 lawyers to evaluate key dynamics of social capital that shape earnings: bridging and bonding, reciprocity exchanges and sponsorship, and boundary maintenance. The findings show social capital lends a lift to law graduates through bridges to professional careers and sponsorship following job entry. Racial minorities, however, suffer a shortfall of personal networks to facilitate job searches, and once having secured jobs, minorities experience social closure practices by clients and colleagues that disadvantage them in their professional work. A sizeable earnings gap remains between racial minority and white lawyers after controlling for human and social capitals, social closure practices, and organizational context. This earnings gap is particularly large among racial minorities with more years of experience and those working in large law firms. The findings demonstrate the importance of identifying the interrelations that connect social network and organizational context to impact social inequality.