Garotas de loja, história social e teoria social [Shop Girls, Social History and Social Theory]

Shop workers, most of them women, have made up a significant proportion of Britain’s labour force since the 1850s but we still know relatively little about their history. This article argues that there has been a systematic neglect of one of the largest sectors of female employment by historians and investigates why this might be. It suggests that this neglect is connected to framings of work that have overlooked the service sector as a whole as well as to a continuing unease with the consumer society’s transformation of social life. One element of that transformation was the rise of new forms of aesthetic, emotional and sexualised labour. Certain kinds of ‘shop girls’ embodied these in spectacular fashion. As a result, they became enduring icons of mass consumption, simultaneously dismissed as passive cultural dupes or punished as powerful agents of cultural destruction. This article interweaves the social history of everyday shop workers with shifting representations of the ‘shop girl’, from Victorian music hall parodies, through modernist social theory, to the bizarre bombing of the Biba boutique in London by the Angry Brigade on May Day 1971. It concludes that progressive historians have much to gain by reclaiming these workers and the service economy that they helped create

The value of culture: economics, diversity and understanding in the 21st century

This article, drawing on a report for the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council, asks whether statistical indicators alone can capture the value cultural engagement brings to individuals and society. It broadens the approach to include diverse forms of cultural provision, emphasises personal cultural experience which shapes reflective individuals, and questions aspects of the familiar narrative with respect to economy, cities, health and education. It calls for greater use of arts and humanities methods in providing understanding, often through case studies, that can escape large-scale trawls for data

Evaluation of research publications and its impact on research: the case of Great Britain

The evaluation of research publications has been discussed in Britain for a number of years, but unlike some other European countries, this has not been in order to establish a formal system for evaluating or ranking journals or book publishers. The discussion has taken place in the context of the national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and its successor the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which take place at five- to seven-year intervals, and where individual research publications a..

Les institutions d'une économie de marché : nation, localité et Etat.

Crossick Geoffrey. Les institutions d'une économie de marché : nation, localité et Etat.. In: Revue du Nord, tome 76, n°307, Octobre-décembre 1994. pp. 881-891

La bourgeoisie britannique au XIXe siècle. Recherches, approches, problématiques

The Middle Class in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Research, Approaches, Problematics. G. Crossick. The social history of the middle class in nineteenth-century Britain has in recent years become a prominent theme in British analysis, in spite of decades of neglect. This article is a critical survey of the main themes which have dominated work in thisfield in the last fifteen years, focusing especially on the questions and approaches which distinguish research and analysis in Britain within a broader European framework. After a discussion of the way social history developed in Britain, which provides an essential context in which to understand its neglect of the middle class, the article is organised around a set of themes: words, classes and the discovery of the eighteenth century; an activity-based approach to class formation; the integrative power of voluntary action; cultural forces for cohesion and division; the petite bourgeoisie's struggle for attention; and, finally, landowners, bourgeois and the changing problematic. The relatively late development of the middle class as a subject for research in Britain means that it has grown at the very time when social structural history has fallen into disfavour, and when questions of representations and discourse have come to dominate the British social history agenda. Concern for the formation or appearance of the middle class in the first half of the nineteenth century has given way to questions of culture and elite relationships in the second. The distinctiveness of the British approach can be traced to the concerns of the national culture, to the nature of the sources for the analysis of the bourgeoisie, and to the distinctive character of the historical process itself.Crossick Geoffrey. La bourgeoisie britannique au XIXe siècle. Recherches, approches, problématiques. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 53ᵉ année, N. 6, 1998. pp. 1089-1130