6,280 research outputs found

    Northern Powerhouses: the homes of the industrial elite, c.1780-1875

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    This thesis explores the world of the industrial elites of Manchester and Liverpool in the period c.1780-1875, through their houses. The homes of the industrial elites, namely merchants and manufacturers, were extremely important tangible communicators of wealth, taste, and comfort. Whilst status-building was closely connected to the house, this thesis argues that the industrial elites carved their own identities into their domestic spheres and that emulation was not solely linked with aspiration. The findings of this thesis are based around its three research aims regarding the changing location of houses in Manchester and Liverpool in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the appearance and use of houses, and the daily routines and involvement of the industrial elite in their domestic routines. An analysis of elite residential patterns in Manchester and Liverpool across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has created a more nuanced look at urban geographies of the region in this period. Though some residential patterns differed because of economic and political structure, a key finding has been that the process of suburbanisation in and around Manchester and Liverpool commenced earlier than previous scholarship has suggested. Suburbanisation among the elites began in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and into the early decades of the nineteenth century, with elite suburban communities being firmly established by the 1820s. This thesis discovered that despite socio-economic and political differences, the industrial elites of Manchester and Liverpool used their houses, gardens, and landed estates in very similar ways. This was a result of conformity which arose from emulation at both a community-based level and the emulation and aspiration of elite, gentrified lifestyle. Also, the merchants and manufacturers analysed within this work were involved in their home at every level of domesticity, from the construction of the house to the financial management of the household, although this latter theme was often a cooperative effort between spouses and family members, adding more to our understanding of gender, domesticity, and familial relations. Through detailed case studies and a combination of sources, the private lives of the industrial elites have been revaluated and redefined, including showing how their houses functions metaphorically and in reality

    From wallet to mobile: exploring how mobile payments create customer value in the service experience

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    This study explores how mobile proximity payments (MPP) (e.g., Apple Pay) create customer value in the service experience compared to traditional payment methods (e.g. cash and card). The main objectives were firstly to understand how customer value manifests as an outcome in the MPP service experience, and secondly to understand how the customer activities in the process of using MPP create customer value. To achieve these objectives a conceptual framework is built upon the Grönroos-Voima Value Model (Grönroos and Voima, 2013), and uses the Theory of Consumption Value (Sheth et al., 1991) to determine the customer value constructs for MPP, which is complimented with Script theory (Abelson, 1981) to determine the value creating activities the consumer does in the process of paying with MPP. The study uses a sequential exploratory mixed methods design, wherein the first qualitative stage uses two methods, self-observations (n=200) and semi-structured interviews (n=18). The subsequent second quantitative stage uses an online survey (n=441) and Structural Equation Modelling analysis to further examine the relationships and effect between the value creating activities and customer value constructs identified in stage one. The academic contributions include the development of a model of mobile payment services value creation in the service experience, introducing the concept of in-use barriers which occur after adoption and constrains the consumers existing use of MPP, and revealing the importance of the mobile in-hand momentary condition as an antecedent state. Additionally, the customer value perspective of this thesis demonstrates an alternative to the dominant Information Technology approaches to researching mobile payments and broadens the view of technology from purely an object a user interacts with to an object that is immersed in consumers’ daily life

    Songs without borders: complex interpretative song worlds and the audiences that inhabit them

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    The genre of music commonly referred to as art song often elicits emotionally charged responses in accounts of audience experiences. However, scholarship has largely neglected the object of inquiry where these responses and experiences materialise: the live art song event. The principal research task in this study is to investigate audience experience of live art song events in the UK. The audiences and events at the centre of this inquiry coalesce around the work of the art song promoter Oxford Lieder. Using a mixed method approach (questionnaire, diary methods and guided interviews), statistical and thematic analysis, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, is applied to a dataset that utilises 82 individual participants’ experiences of live art song events, including regular attendees and those experiencing live art song for the first time. To frame the findings of this inquiry, this study establishes the concept of complex interpretative song worlds: defined as a collection of interactions that audience members draw upon to construct their experience of live art song events, through a dynamic and multi-faceted interplay with the system of possibilities afforded by live art song environments. In this study, complex interpretative song world theorising takes place across three levels of audiencing: (1) Interactions with the live art song domain (the norms, behaviours, and conventions of live art song environments) are gathered under three themes. Collecting activity sees a desire for participants to scrutinise song objects, embrace familiar artists and repertoire, and adopt a connoisseur-like approach to knowledge acquisition. Connecting activity reveals a prized sense of close psycho-social resonance, which takes place between songs, performers, spaces and everyday experiences. Venerating activity foregrounds a view of songs as inviolable objects, where perceived changes to songs are deemed heretical by some, examined through the (re)introduction of sung English translations into the live art song corpus. (2) Interactions with live art song objects (the lexical and musical features that make up songs) reveal the ways audience members process words and music, and prioritise either, or both features during live art song events. The presentation of these materials in ways that blur senses (sights and sounds), and time (before, during, and after performances), are shown to be as additive to audience member conceptualisations of the nature of lexical-musical relationships as they are disruptive. (3) Interactions with live art song actors (performers, producers, and audiences) reveal processes of role formation at work, where vocal acts, non-vocal acts, and fixed and non-fixed traits complicate the way audience members derive impressions of performers. Art song’s hybridity as a genre, which is not a dramatic form, yet ‘not not’ a dramatic form, reveals the imbricated way audience members construct identities of performers: as professional musicians; as human beings; and as inhabitants of roles defined textually through a song’s poetic content. This interdisciplinary study draws predominantly on three overlapping areas of scholarship, and makes new contributions to knowledge in all three. For musicology, this inquiry develops deeper understandings of live art song objects to complement the hegemony of hermeneutic, musico-analytical and historiographical research that typifies much of the existing art song literature. For audience studies, these findings provide new audiencing insights, by examining an art form not yet analysed by empirical audience research methods, and one that simultaneously combines both words and music as a mode of expression. For translation theory, this inquiry responds to calls within the existing literature for more research to understand the reception of translation in music. This study also generates dividends outside of the academy, providing new insights for performers and promoters of art song to inform approaches to programming, presentation, production, marketing and audience development

    Strung pieces: on the aesthetics of television fiction series

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    As layered and long works, television fiction series have aesthetic properties that are built over time, bit by bit. This thesis develops a group of concepts that enable the study of these properties, It argues that a series is made of strung pieces, a system of related elements. The text begins by considering this sequential form within the fields of film and television. This opening chapter defines the object and methodology of research, arguing for a non-essentialist distinction between cinema and television and against the adequacy of textual and contextual analyses as approaches to the aesthetics of these shows. It proposes instead that these programmes should be described as televisual works that can be scrutinised through aesthetic analysis. The next chapters propose a sequence of interrelated concepts. The second chapter contends that series are composed of building blocks that can be either units into which series are divided or motifs that unify series and are dispersed across their pans. These blocks are patterned according to four kinds of relations or principles of composition. Repetition and variation are treated in tandem in the third chapter because of their close connection, given that variation emerges from established repetition. Exception and progression are also discussed together in the fourth chapter since they both require a long view of these serial works. The former, in order to be recognised as a deviation from the patterns of repetition and variation. The latter, In order to be understood in Its many dimensions as the series advances. Each of these concepts is further detailed with additional distinctions between types of units, motifs, repetitions, variations, and exceptions, using illustrative examples from numerous shows. In contrast, the section on progression uses a single series as case study, CarnivĂ le (2003-05), because this is the overarching principle that encompasses all the others. The conclusion considers the findings of the research and suggests avenues for their application

    A Cornish palimpsest : Peter Lanyon and the construction of a new landscape, 1938-1964

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    The thesis examines the emergence of Peter Lanyon as one of the few truly innovative British landscape painters this century. In the Introduction I discuss the problematic nature of landscape art and consider the significance of Lanyon's discovery that direct description and linear perspective can be replaced with allusive representational elements by fusing the emotional and imaginative life of the artist with the physical activity of painting. Chapter One concentrates on the period 1936-8 when Lanyon was taught by Borlase Smart, a key figure in the St Ives art colony between the wars. Chapter Two examines the influence of Adrian Stokes and the links between Lanyon's painting and the theories developed in books such as Colour and Form and The Quattro Cento. Chapter Three analyses the period 1940-45 when Lanyon was directly influenced by the constructivism of Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. I look closely at their approaches to abstraction and assess Lanyon's relative position to them. The importance of Neo-Romanticism and the status of St Ives as a perceived avant-garde community is also addressed. In Chapter Four I discuss how Lanyon resolved to achieve a new orientation in his art on his return from wartime service with the RAF by synthesising constructivism, and traditional landscape. The Generation and Surfacing Series demonstrate his preoccupation with a sense of place, a fascination with the relationships between the human body and landscape and his struggle to find a technique and style that was entirely his own. His sense of existential insideness is discussed in Chapter Five through an examination of the work derived from Portreath, St. Just and Porthleven - key places in Lanyon's psychological attachment to the landscape of West Penwith. In Chapter Six I examine Lanyon's attachment to myths and archetypal forms, tracing the influence of Bergson's vitalist philosophy as well as his use of Celtic and classical motifs. Chapter Seven is a discussion of the malaise evident in Lanyon's work by 1955 and the impact of American Abstract Expressionism at the Tate Gallery a year later. In the summer of 1959 Lanyon joined the Cornish Gliding Club and Chapter Eight looks at how this necessitated a dynamic, expanded conception of the landscape and a re-thinking of relations within the picture field. The ability to dissolve boundaries encouraged him to break down distinctions between painting and construction so that abstract sculptural elements were now assembled into independent works of art. Finally, Chapter Nine assesses Lanyon's overall position in relation to his early influences and to St Ives art as a whole, his response to new directions in art coming out of London and NewYork in the early 1960s and the importance of travel as a stimulus for further realignment in his artistic and topographical horizons. His pictorial inventiveness and vitality remained unabated at the time of his death and would undoubtedly have continued to be enriched by travel abroad and contact with new movements in modem art on both sides of the Atlanti

    Knowledge Transfer for and through the Replication of Organisational Routines in Franchise Systems

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    Routines are dispositions to behave according to established sets of rules that are also repositories of the organisational memory about “how things get done”. Franchise systems are organisational forms which expand through the replication of routines by new units owned by franchisees. Drawing on insights from the literatures on organisational learning, organisational evolution (under generalised Darwinism), and cognitive psychology, this thesis identifies the building blocks for a conceptual explanation of routine replication in franchise systems. It then proposes an original case study of Yázigi, a large Brazilian franchise system of language schools, which is used to develop a novel process model that captures how knowledge is transferred for and through the replication of routines within an expanding franchise system. Four principal lessons are derived. First, when direct knowledge transfer is not available, artefacts, most notably template representations of routines, are essential. Second, intermediaries, as agents of routine compilation who direct participants to template representations, are crucial to the process of routine replication. Third, just as routines are analogues of habits, routine compilation seems to reproduce habit compilation. Finally, existing learning-related habits of thought may work in favour of or against the adoption of new habits in the replication process. This thesis outlines the prescriptive implications of these lessons for franchise practitioners and details opportunities for future research
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