Sparrows can't sing : East End kith and kinship in the 1960s

Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) was the only feature film directed by the late and much lamented Joan Littlewood. Set and filmed in the East End, where she worked for many years, the film deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. Littlewood’s career spanned documentary (radio recordings made with Ewan MacColl in the North of England in the 1930s) to directing for the stage and the running of the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East, often selecting material which aroused memories in local audiences (Leach 2006: 142). Many of the actors trained in her Theatre Workshop subsequently became better known for their appearances on film and television. Littlewood herself directed hardly any material for the screen: Sparrows Can’t Sing and a 1964 series of television commercials for the British Egg Marketing Board, starring Theatre Workshop’s Avis Bunnage, were rare excursions into an area of practice which she found constraining and unamenable (Gable 1980: 32). The hybridity and singularity of Littlewood’s feature may answer, in some degree, for its subsequent neglect. However, Sparrows Can’t Sing makes a significant contribution to a group of films made in Britain in the 1960s which comment generally on changes in the urban and social fabric. It is especially worthy of consideration, I shall argue, for the use which Littlewood made of a particular community’s attitudes – sentimental and critical – to such changes and for its amalgamation of an attachment to documentary techniques (recording an aural landscape on location) with a preference for nonnaturalistic delivery in performance

Still policing the crisis?

Writing this has been a troubling experience. Returning to a text 30 years on in this way combines intellectual, political and personal reflections in an unsettling way. These range from a powerful attachment to processes of collective or collaborative intellectual work that Policing the Crisis (PTC; Hall et al., 1978) embodied and enhanced to a rather depressed sense of how many things the book got right about the trajectory of the British social formation in the mid 1970s (other futures might have been preferable). And above all, there is a sense of what the book stands for in the emergence of cultural studies as an institutionalized academic field. As a way of trying to digest these different responses, I have tried to address three sorts of questions: why PTC mattered, where it belongs and why it continues to have echoes in the present

A moral economy of whiteness: behaviours, belonging and Britishness

This article outlines the complex stories through which national belonging is made, and some ways in which class mediates the racialisation process. It is based on fieldwork on the ways in which white UK people in provincial cities construct identities based on positioning vis-à-vis other groups, communities and the nation. I argue that this relational identity work revolves around fixing a moral-ethical location against which the behaviour and culture of Others is measured, and that this has a temporal and spatial specificity. First, attitudinal trends by social class emerge in our work as being to do with emphasis and life experience rather than constituting absolute distinctions in attitudes. Second, in an era supposedly marked by the hegemony of ‘new’ or ‘cultural’ racism, bloodlines and phenotypes are still frequently utilised in race-making discursive work. Third, in provincial urban England, there is a marked ambivalence towards Britishness (as compromised by Others) and an openness to Englishness as a more authentic source of identification

Meritocratic aspects concerning civil servant career: comparative study in Central and Eastern European countries

Central and Eastern Europe has known in the last 20 years profound changes. The shift from a dictatorial system to a democratic system forced the states from this area to adopt structural measures for all public institutions. In this context, the institution of "civil servant" could not remain unaffected. In the period of communist regimes, the institution of "civil servant" did not exist, the civil servant being just a simple employee of the state. Work relations were the same as for any employee. The shift to another political system, the democratic one, determined the reconsideration the role and the place of public administration, and implicit of civil servant in the framework of the state system. In this context, it has been a shift from the statute of simple employee to that of civil servant, representing the power of the state. In the process of accession to the European Union, the states from Central and Eastern Europe have been permanently pressured to clearly define a strategy concerning the competitiveness of public administration, concerning the statute and the career of civil servant. In the context of democratisation, we can notice that the principle of meritocracy has become a key principle in the civil servant's career. The term "meritocracy" is often used in order to describe a type of society in which wealth and social position are obtained mainly through competition or through ability or proved competences. A position invested with responsibilities and social prestige has to be acquired and not inherited or obtained by arbitrary criteria. Meritocracy represents also the term used to describe or to criticise a society in competition that accepts inequitable disparities of income, wealth and social position. Taking into account the above considerations, the present paper aims to achieve an analysis of meritocratic aspects in the systems of planning and promotion of civil servant's career in Central and Eastern Europe

Review debate: we need human rights not nationalism 'lite': globalization and British solidarity

The article explores the relationship of multiculturalism to social solidarity. The multicultural nature of Britain is accepted as a welcome reality but certain problems in relation to the development of multiculturalism in Britain are acknowledged. Various approaches to buttress or replace multiculturalism are reviewed. These are: a strengthened and/or reconstituted nationalism (`Britishness'); human rights; and social equality. The issue of citizenship recurs throughout. It is argued that a combined emphasis on human rights and greater social equality offer a better basis than nationalism for strengthening solidarity in Britain, especially in the longer term. Sociological theory offers a fruitful if strangely neglected starting point for understanding social solidarity. I draw critically on Durkheim and Marx to obtain some objective perspective on this controversial matter. Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution