European agriculture since World War II : technical change in south-west England, 1940-1985

The food shortages that beset individual European countries in 1945 had been transformed into surpluses that a common European agricultural policy struggled in vain to control by the 1980s. In the same period, the v olume of agricultural output in the United Kingdom rose by 255 per cent, with the pace of change reaching its peak of 2.8 per cent per annum in the years from 1945 to 1965 (Brassley, 2000ESR

Increased output in UK agriculture 1935-85: using Farm Management Survey data from south-west England to explore processes

Powerpoint presentationIncreased output in UK agriculture 1935 - 85: using Farm Management Survey data from south - west England to explore processes of technical changeESR

The writing on the wall: the concealed communities of the East Yorkshire horselads

This paper examines the graffiti found within late nineteenth and early-twentieth century farm buildings in the Wolds of East Yorkshire. It suggests that the graffiti were created by a group of young men at the bottom of the social hierarchy - the horselads – and was one of the ways in which they constructed a distinctive sense of communal identity, at a particular stage in their lives. Whilst it tells us much about changing agricultural regimes and social structures, it also informs us about experiences and attitudes often hidden from official histories and biographies. In this way, the graffiti are argued to inform our understanding, not only of a concealed community, but also about their hidden histor

The role of war in deep transitions: exploring mechanisms, imprints and rules in sociotechnical systems

This paper explores in what ways the two world wars influenced the development of sociotechnical systems underpinning the culmination of the first deep transition. The role of war is an underexplored aspect in both the Techno-Economic Paradigms (TEP) approach and the Multi-level perspective (MLP) which form the two key conceptual building blocks of the Deep Transitions (DT) framework. Thus, we develop a conceptual approach tailored to this particular topic which integrates accounts of total war and mechanisms of war from historical studies and imprinting from organisational studies with the DT framework’s attention towards rules and meta-rules. We explore in what ways the three sociotechnical systems of energy, food, and transport were affected by the emergence of new demand pressures and logistical challenges during conditions of total war; how war impacted the directionality of sociotechnical systems; the extent to which new national and international policy capacities emerged during wartime in the energy, food, and transport systems; and the extent to which these systems were influenced by cooperation and shared sacrifice under wartime conditions. We then explore what lasting changes were influenced by the two wars in the energy, food, and transport systems across the transatlantic zone. This paper seeks to open up a hitherto neglected area in analysis on sociotechnical transitions and we discuss the importance of further research that is attentive towards entanglements of warfare and the military particularly in the field of sustainability transitions

Sources of increased output in UK agriculture 1935-85 : using farm management survey accounts to identify technical change

On a world scale, the increase in agricultural production over the last half century has been sufficient to cope with a population that has more than doubled. Similarly, although the UK population has not increased to the same extent, import substitution has meant that the volume of domestic agricultural production nearly trebled in the same period. What is still controversial is the source of these increases. Are they the result of increased inputs of fixed and working capital (as in buildings, machinery, feedingstuffs and fertilizers), or of technical change (as in new crop varieties, genetic improvement in livestock, pesticides, and new kinds of machinery)? This paper examines the relative significance of these two possibilities. It explores the use of a long-term ongoing survey of a large sample of UK farms over the period 1935-1985. This enables detailed calculations of input and output levels to be made, and provides extensive evidence for levels of technical innovation and adoption.ESR