The European art and Canadiana collections of Robert Wilson Reford (1867-1951)

Robert Wilson Reford, a Montrealer engaged in the shipping business, amassed a large collection of Old Master and European pictures which included a significant number of British paintings of the eighteenth century, and showed a preference for portraits. Highlights included portraits by Bronzino, Veronese, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Hoppner, a large collection of Boningtons, and the Madonna of the Yarnwinder attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Collected between 1909 and 1948, the paintings were purchased primarily from a few well-known dealers in London, New York and Paris who were to add considerably to the quality of Reford's collection. His taste, therefore, is representative of the international taste for Old Masters and eighteenth-century portraiture which dominated the art market from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. Reford also collected a large number of Indian medals and trade silver, watercolours, maps, prints, and other documents which constituted his collection of Canadiana. Collected from the mid-1880s to the 1930s, the collection reflects Reford's interest in material history concerning Canada's past. Several other collectors were equally interested in validating Canada's history and their concerns were related to the growth of Canadian nationalism during the later nineteenth and early twentieth century

Architectural design and managerial control:Lefebvre, Latour and the process of enrolment

Organizational scholarship on architecture often applies Henri Lefebvre’s conceived, perceived, and lived framework. Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell, most notably, have illustrated how architectural design exploits each of these, exerting managerial control through processes of enchantment, emplacement, and enactment. Although this “3E framework” has been productively applied to buildings from the modern and postmodern periods, its weaknesses become apparent in the current occupant-centric design period. Drawing on Actor Network Theory’s account of translation, we propose enrollment—a 4th “E”—which enables us to better capture the nature of spatial control in the occupant-centric design period. Our 4E expanded spatial control framework recognizes the tensions that Lefebvre originally observed, tensions concealed by Dale and Burrell’s otherwise rightly influential work. This expanded framework also augments our understanding of modern and postmodern periods: the dominant Building Movements of the past Century, we claim, have each engaged in a recursive enrollment of socio-political ideals

Legitimising sustainability: how individuals gain legitimacy for an emerging corporate strategy from internal organisational actors

Legitimacy is widely accepted as an important resource for an organisation, strategy, or individual to possess. However, the process of gaining legitimacy has received limited attention in the academic literature. This thesis examines the strategies and actions that individuals employ in the process of legitimising their sustainability strategy within an organisation. Based on semi-structured interviews with 51 Heads of Sustainability, the research extends the existing ‘conformance, selection, manipulation’ legitimising strategy model, becoming one of the first to demonstrate how these legitimising strategies are interrelated both concurrently and temporally. It finds that multiple legitimising strategies are used simultaneously by individuals. Moreover, a pattern emerges whereby individuals begin with conformance-only legitimising when sustainability has limited integration, but employ all three legitimising strategies where sustainability integration is extensive. In addition to this, the research articulates two specific categories of actions that are used by individuals in the process of deploying these umbrella legitimising strategies: framing and developing coalitions of support. Framing actions comprise micro-reframing, disassociation, contextualisation, analogy, and differentiation and personalisation. Developing coalitions of support actions comprise leveraging sponsorship, networking, enhancing employee engagement, and continually promoting. From this empirical research a generalised legitimising pathway is proposed which demonstrates the progression of legitimising from using conformance-only through to using all three legitimising strategies, and the actions employed by the individual in these different stages

Vegetation Controls on Weathering Intensity During the Last Deglacial Transition in Southeast Africa

Tropical climate is rapidly changing, but the effects of these changes on the geosphere are unknown, despite a likelihood of climatically-induced changes on weathering and erosion. The lack of long, continuous paleo-records prevents an examination of terrestrial responses to climate change with sufficient detail to answer questions about how systems behaved in the past and may alter in the future. We use high-resolution records of pollen, clay mineralogy, and particle size from a drill core from Lake Malawi, southeast Africa, to examine atmosphere-biosphere-geosphere interactions during the last deglaciation (~ 18-9 ka), a period of dramatic temperature and hydrologic changes. The results demonstrate that climatic controls on Lake Malawi vegetation are critically important to weathering processes and erosion patterns during the deglaciation. At 18 ka, afromontane forests dominated but were progressively replaced by tropical seasonal forest, as summer rainfall increased. Despite indication of decreased rainfall, drought-intolerant forest persisted through the Younger Dryas (YD) resulting from a shorter dry season. Following the YD, an intensified summer monsoon and increased rainfall seasonality were coeval with forest decline and expansion of drought-tolerant miombo woodland. Clay minerals closely track the vegetation record, with high ratios of kaolinite to smectite (K/S) indicating heavy leaching when forest predominates, despite variable rainfall. In the early Holocene, when rainfall and temperature increased (effective moisture remained low), open woodlands expansion resulted in decreased K/S, suggesting a reduction in chemical weathering intensity. Terrigenous sediment mass accumulation rates also increased, suggesting critical linkages among open vegetation and erosion during intervals of enhanced summer rainfall. This study shows a strong, direct influence of vegetation composition on weathering intensity in the tropics. As climate change will likely impact this interplay between the biosphere and geosphere, tropical landscape change could lead to deleterious effects on soil and water quality in regions with little infrastructure for mitigation

Climate, Vegetation, and Weathering across Space and Time in Lake Tanganyika (Tropical Eastern Africa)

Climate and vegetation influence weathering rates and processes; however, evaluating the effects of each and feedbacks between systems, has yet to be accomplished for many types of landscapes. A detailed understanding of how these processes interact to shape landscapes is particularly crucial for reconciling future scenarios of changing climate, where profound alterations to both the biosphere and geosphere are anticipated. In the tropics, ecosystem services, such as soil and water quality, are linked to both vegetation and weathering processes that form a strong control on natural resources that are the foundation of many communities’ daily subsistence. This understanding is further complicated by intensifying land-use within tropical watersheds, which decouples vegetation change from climate; it is yet unclear what the direct effects of vegetation change may be on erosion and weathering when operating independent of climate. Long term observational records tracking changes to the critical zone do not exist in tropical Africa, however, sedimentary paleo-records from lakes are often of sufficient length and resolution to record the impact of bioclimatic variability on surface processes. Here, we use a novel approach combining long (60ka) and intermediate-length (400yrs) lake sediment records along with historical repeat photography from Lake Tanganyika (Tanzania) to document changes and relationships among climate, vegetation, and weathering at multiple scales. These records illustrate that glacial-interglacial climate change did not significantly alter weathering intensity. Instead, we observe chemical and physical weathering responses only when the vegetation becomes more open beginning at the transition to the Holocene. Also, the largest change in chemical weathering intensity occurs only within the last ∼3ka. This is consistent with a major reorganization of vegetation and is directly attributable to Iron Age human activity, rather than climate. Furthermore, anthropogenic landscape alteration as early as ∼2.5ka, in addition to well-documented comparisons of historical land-use, suggest widespread responses of both chemical weathering intensity and enhanced soil erosion to human activity. This shows that changes in vegetation structure induced by anthropogenic activity, decoupled from climate change, generate a disproportionately large weathering response

Continuous 1.3-Million-Year Record of East African Hydroclimate, and Implications for Patterns of Evolution and Biodiversity

The transport of moisture in the tropics is a critical process for the global energy budget and on geologic timescales, has markedly influenced continental landscapes, migratory pathways, and biological evolution. Here we present a continuous, first-of-its-kind 1.3-My record of continental hydroclimate and lake-level variability derived from drill core data from Lake Malawi, East Africa (9–15° S). Over the Quaternary, we observe dramatic shifts in effective moisture, resulting in large-scale changes in one of the world’s largest lakes and most diverse freshwater ecosystems. Results show evidence for 24 lake level drops of more than 200 m during the Late Quaternary, including 15 lowstands when water levels were more than 400 m lower than modern. A dramatic shift is observed at the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), consistent with far-field climate forcing, which separates vastly different hydroclimate regimes before and after ∼800,000 years ago. Before 800 ka, lake levels were lower, indicating a climate drier than today, and water levels changed frequently. Following the MPT high-amplitude lake level variations dominate the record. From 800 to 100 ka, a deep, often overfilled lake occupied the basin, indicating a wetter climate, but these highstands were interrupted by prolonged intervals of extreme drought. Periods of high lake level are observed during times of high eccentricity. The extreme hydroclimate variability exerted a profound influence on the Lake Malawi endemic cichlid fish species flock; the geographically extensive habitat reconfiguration provided novel ecological opportunities, enabling new populations to differentiate rapidly to distinct species

Ecological consequences of early Late Pleistocene megadroughts in tropical Africa

Extremely arid conditions in tropical Africa occurred in several discrete episodes between 135 and 90 ka, as demonstrated by lake core and seismic records from multiple basins [Scholz CA, Johnson TC, Cohen AS, King JW, Peck J, Overpeck JT, Talbot MR, Brown ET, Kalindekafe L, Amoako PYO, et al. (2007) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:16416–16421]. This resulted in extraordinarily low lake levels, even in Africa\u27s deepest lakes. On the basis of well dated paleoecological records from Lake Malawi, which reflect both local and regional conditions, we show that this aridity had severe consequences for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. During the most arid phase, there was extremely low pollen production and limited charred-particle deposition, indicating insufficient vegetation to maintain substantial fires, and the Lake Malawi watershed experienced cool, semidesert conditions (\u3c400 mm/yr precipitation). Fossil and sedimentological data show that Lake Malawi itself, currently 706 m deep, was reduced to an ≈125 m deep saline, alkaline, well mixed lake. This episode of aridity was far more extreme than any experienced in the Afrotropics during the Last Glacial Maximum (≈35–15 ka). Aridity diminished after 95 ka, lake levels rose erratically, and salinity/alkalinity declined, reaching near-modern conditions after 60 ka. This record of lake levels and changing limnological conditions provides a framework for interpreting the evolution of the Lake Malawi fish and invertebrate species flocks. Moreover, this record, coupled with other regional records of early Late Pleistocene aridity, places new constraints on models of Afrotropical biogeographic refugia and early modern human population expansion into and out of tropical Africa