Snobbery and the triumph of bourgeois values: a speculative analysis of implications for hospitality

This is a ‘small’ paper that offers a broad-brush view of the nature of bourgeois values and implications of the same for our understanding of certain aspects of hospitality. The argument is speculative, but assertive. Bourgeois values, it is suggested, are inevitably snobbish in nature and designed to both construct and maintain largely irrelevant ‘cultural’ differences between and within social classes. This generation of difference is integrally consistent with the capitalist mode of production, facilitating the creation of demand for essentially artificial needs and wants. In the context of hospitality, bourgeois values sustain a language of hierarchy that simultaneously creates a culture of aspiration while allowing enterprises to extract optimum economic value from carefully segmented markets

Informing UK governance of resilience to climate risks: improving the local evidence-base

International assessments of evidence on climate change (e.g. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) or national climate change risk assessments (e.g. UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, CCRA) do not offer a sufficiently granular perspective on climate impacts to adequately inform governance of resilience to climate risks at the local level. Using an analysis of UK decision-makers managing and responding to heatwaves and flood risks, this paper argues how more robust local evidence is needed to inform decision-making regarding adaptation options for enhancing local resilience. We identify evidence gaps and issues relating to local climate change impacts, including sources and quality of evidence used, adequacy and accessibility of evidence available, ill-communicated evidence and conflicting or misused evidence. A lack of appreciation regarding how scientific evidence and personal judgement can mutually enhance the quality of decision-making underpins all of these gaps. Additionally, we find that the majority of evidence currently used is reductively based upon socio-economic and physical characteristics of climate risks. We argue that a step change is needed in local climate resilience that moves beyond current physical and socio-economic risk characterisation to a more inclusive co-constitution of social and politically defined climate risks at the local scale that are better aligned with the local impacts felt and needs of stakeholders

Germline selection shapes human mitochondrial DNA diversity.

Approximately 2.4% of the human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome exhibits common homoplasmic genetic variation. We analyzed 12,975 whole-genome sequences to show that 45.1% of individuals from 1526 mother-offspring pairs harbor a mixed population of mtDNA (heteroplasmy), but the propensity for maternal transmission differs across the mitochondrial genome. Over one generation, we observed selection both for and against variants in specific genomic regions; known variants were more likely to be transmitted than previously unknown variants. However, new heteroplasmies were more likely to match the nuclear genetic ancestry as opposed to the ancestry of the mitochondrial genome on which the mutations occurred, validating our findings in 40,325 individuals. Thus, human mtDNA at the population level is shaped by selective forces within the female germ line under nuclear genetic control, which ensures consistency between the two independent genetic lineages.NIHR, Wellcome Trust, MRC, Genomics Englan

Social status, social position and social class in post-war British society

In this chapter I consider the question of why the first substantial survey based empirical investigation of social mobility in Britain was conceived not through the lens of social class mobility but in terms of movements between social status groups. This presents itself as a puzzle because the principal investigator, David Glass was, arguably, an intellectual Marxist who might reasonably be thought to have some sympathy with a class framework. In the course of answering this question I discuss the web of personnel interconnections that contributed to Glass’ formation as a sociologist during the 1930s. I also uncover a wholly unexpected connection between his inquiry and a rather different tradition of empirical investigation with its roots in the 1930s—Mass Observation

Treat Texts as Data but Remember They Are Made of Words: Compiling and Pre-processing Corpora

When analysing corpora with automatic and statistical means, one should remember that the raw material being treated is language and the specific nature thereof ought to be considered in all stages of research. Since language cannot be investigated per se, corpora can only reveal the characteristics of limited instances of linguistic behaviour: even exhaustive corpora only supply a finite set of texts which should be assessed in the light of a number of extra-linguistic factors impacting linguistic traits from different viewpoints: the sender\u2019s and recipient\u2019s region of origin, social and educational background and gender; the channel of communication; the topic under discussion and the formality of the situation, not to speak of the period in history when texts were produced. Such factors come into play in defining the linguistic properties of each single text (fragment) in the corpus, and their overall balance should be considered during the preliminary stages of corpus design and compilation. After having made decisions in terms of the selection of the texts to be included in the corpus, linguistic data need to be prepared for automatic processing. This stage too is far from intuitive and automatic: from the very identification of tokens of language to the extraction of lemmas, researchers should take into account qualitative aspects. Both corpus compilation and pre-processing cannot be considered neutral operations with a view to the results of automatic analysis and should be made explicit to enable the assessment of results and further exploitation of the same corpus