\u27The Inferior Parts of the Body\u27: The Development and Role of Women\u27s Meetings in the Early Quaker Movement

This article is a study of the development and role of early Quaker women\u27s Meetings during the second half of the seventeenth century. It is based upon the contemporary records of the Owstwick women\u27s Monthly Meeting, held in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Rather than focussing upon the individual travelling Quaker female ministers or their writings, as the historiography has tended to, it examines the everyday organisation and responsibilities that were held by early Quaker women. It argues that although the women\u27s Meetings were regarded as inferior to those of the men, they evolved alongside each other and operated in tandem, each with their own areas of responsibility. This allowed women to gain status as a group, rather than as individuals, in the early Quaker movement

Tolerance and toleration: the experience of the Quakers in East Yorkshire c.1660-1699

[From the introduction]:This thesis examines the practice of tolerance and intolerance that surrounded the development of Quakerism in the East Riding of Yorkshire in the mid seventeenth century. It is important to offer a distinction between the terms tolerance and toleration, which are used in the title of the work. Tolerance refers to the informal and unofficial actions of the local community in their daily relationships with their Quaker neighbours. In practical terms, these could be as insignificant as simply talking to them, trading with them, or not physically attacking them because of their religious beliefs. Toleration refers to the formal, and official, ideas and practice of religious toleration that was sanctioned by the local authorities and central government. Of course, the two are not as easily separable as these definitions suggest. Tolerance and toleration co-existed alongside each other, each impacting upon the other to various degrees throughout the second half of the seventeenth century.The study is an examination of the tolerance and toleration of the Quaker community in the East Riding. It investigates the extent to which despite, or perhaps because of, increasing uncertainty about official attitudes to religious toleration, Quakerism was able to take root and develop in the region within what was, effectively, a climate of religious tolerance

Promoting Sustainable Lifestyles: a social marketing approach. Final Summary Report

Commissioned by Defra

Sustainable lifestyles: sites, practices and policy

Author's draft. Final version published in Environment and Planning A. Available online at http://www.envplan.com/A.htmlPro-environmental behaviour change remains a high priority for many governments and agencies and there are now numerous programmes aimed at encouraging citizens to adopt sustainable forms of living. However, although programmes for addressing behaviour change in and around the home are well developed, there has been significantly less attention paid to activities beyond this site of practice. This is despite the environmental implications of consumption choices for leisure, tourism and work-related activities. Notwithstanding the extensive literatures which have explored environmental practices at a wide range of specific sites, there has been little research on the relationships between sites of practice and environmental behaviours. Using data from a series of in-depth interviews, this paper identifies two major challenges for academics and practitioners concerned with understanding and promoting more environmentally-responsible behaviour. First, attention must shift beyond the home as a site of environmental practice to consider the ways in which individuals respond to exhortations towards ‘greener’ lifestyles in other high-consumption and carbon-intensive contexts, particularly leisure and tourism. Second, in broadening the scope of environmental practice, policy makers need to re-visit their reliance on segmentation models and related social marketing approaches. This is in the light of data that suggest those with strong environmental commitments in the home are often reluctant to engage in similar commitments in other sites of practice

‘Helping People Make Better Choices’: exploring the behaviour change agenda for environmental sustainability

This paper examines the emergence of market-orientated approaches to public participation in environmental issues through an exploration of recent empirical research into ‘sustainable lifestyles’ as a practical tool for encouraging pro-environmental behaviour. Using the notion of ‘sustainable lifestyles’, current social marketing policies seek to encourage behaviour change amongst citizens by identifying population segments with similar commitments to environmental practices as the basis for behaviour change initiatives. However, the use of static ‘lifestyle groups’ implies that that citizens replicate sustainable practices across different consumption contexts and this paper explores this line of argument through the use of data collected as part of a recent UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) funded research project on sustainable lifestyles and climate change. Through a series of focus group discussions, participants explored notions of sustainable practices using the home and leisure contexts as framing devices to explore issues of environmental responsibility and climate change. The emphasis placed on practices and context reveal that the comfortable notions of environmental responsibility and sustainable consumption in the home are often in conflict with the discourses of consumption reduction associated with climate change in leisure and tourism contexts. In many cases, these ‘paradoxes’ are explicitly referred to, reflected-upon and discussed by participants who demonstrate that notions of sustainable practice are mediated by practice and spaces of consumption. Accordingly, the paper argues that in conceptualising market-based approaches to behaviour change around the notion of ‘sustainable lifestyles’, researchers and policy makers need to address the role of context and recognise the importance of consumption spaces and the conflicts that may arise between these

Business as Service? Human Relations and the British Interwar Management Movement

This is the author accepted manuscriptTo what extent should business have an implication of service when its fundamental purpose is profit-seeking? We explore this issue through a contextually informed reappraisal of British interwar management thinking (1918-1939), drawing on rich archival material concerning the Rowntree business lectures and management research groups. Whereas existing literature is framed around scientific management versus human relations schools, we find a third pronounced, related theme: business as service. Our main contribution is to identify the origins in Britain of the discourse of corporate social responsibility in the guise of business as service. We show that this emerged earlier than commonly assumed and was imbued with an instrumental intent from its inception as a form of management control. This was a discourse emanating not from management theorists but from management practitioners, striving to put the corporate system on a sustainable footing while safeguarding the power, authority, and legitimacy of incumbent managerial elites.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Boys’ love, byte-sized: a qualitative exploration of queer-themed microfiction in Chinese cyberspace

This project undertakes an in-depth, qualitative investigation into queer-themed ‘Boys Love’ microfiction within the realm of Chinese cyberspace, with the aim of further understanding both the features of the genre and the motivation for production and consumption among its primarily heterosexual female user-base. Expanding upon previous studies, which have focused primarily on investigation into the consumer groups of such fiction, this project seeks to establish links between the linguistic/discursive features of queer Chinese-language microfiction and observable social phenomena or cultural frameworks. Using and developing Gee’s tools of inquiry (2014) for textual analysis, this project explores the situated meanings, figured worlds and Discourses embodied in very short fictional stories representing male same-sex intimacies and queer sexualities. In doing so, I proposes a development of Johnson’s circuits of culture model (1986), in which I hypothesize that, confronted with heteronormative social structures—constructed along a gender binary and framed through patriarchal familial and social relationships—China’s cyberspace has offered a new platform for marginalized individuals (both queer-identified and those heterosexual consumers who enjoy fantasizing about same-sex intimacies) to engage, navigate and negotiate space to tell their stories. In doing so, they find opportunities to renegotiate citizenship based on sexual identity. Therefore, this study creates a ‘circuit of queer cyberculture’ framework through which to analyse queer-themed microfiction. This framework proposes that, through an emerging form of ‘cultural self-determination’ rooted in sexual and gender identity and the declaration and negotiation of sexual citizenship, netizens who experience social marginalization in the real world through their attraction to representation of queer lives begin to indigenize circuits of popular culture observable in mainstream media platforms by creating and distributing their own works of art and fiction online. Through a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis of 40 selected works of microfiction and applied thematic analysis of 39 interviews conducted with producers and consumers of the genre in Mainland China, this project therefore assesses the development of the Boys’ Love genre into a microfiction format, distributed via a publicly visible online platform. Investigation of the defining characteristics of the genre, in combination with data gathered from interviews, allows this project to demonstrate how this new empirical data can expand our global and local knowledge of theoretical and conceptual debates regarding identity, gender, representation, queer sexualities, sexual citizenship and circuits of culture

Sparse approximate inverses and target matrices

If P has a prescribed sparsity and minimizes the Frobenius norm ||I-PA||F it is called a sparse approximate inverse of A. It is well known that the computation of such a matrix P is via the solution of independent linear least squares problems for the rows separately (and therefore in parallel). In this paper we consider the choice of other norms, and introduce the idea of `target' matrices. A target matrix, T, is readily inverted and thus forms part of a preconditioner when ||T-PA|| is minimized over some appropriate sparse matrices P. The use of alternatives to the Frobenius norm which maintain parallelizability whilst discussed in early literature does not appear to have been exploited.\ud \ud This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research council and NAG Ltd