The ‘civilising’ effect of a ‘balanced’ night-time economy for ‘better people’: class and the cosmopolitan limit in the consumption and regulation of alcohol in Bournemouth

The British night-time economy today has been characterised by academics across various disciplines as the result of neoliberal attempts to regenerate the evening economy ‘on the cheap’, leading to the dominance of ‘mainstream nightlife’ at the expense of subcultural traditional working- class alternatives. One preferable alternative offered is the ideal of a ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’ ‘creative city’, with a greater focus on ‘culture’. This article shows how such ideas have been taken up in the planning and regulation of the night-time economy in Bournemouth. Despite the current emphasis on the value of making the Bournemouth night-time economy ‘more diverse’, offering more ‘balance’ than the current vista, policymakers, like drinkers, are aware of the considerable distinctions within the night-time economy. The emphasis on diversity as a policy objective can be understood rather as an attempt to encourage a particular drinking style. In this context, a ‘balanced’ night-time economy refers more to the overall atmosphere than the variety of consumer choice. The ideal drinking style is seen as characteristic of a wealthier group of customers, who will exert a ‘civilising’ influence on the town, as wealth is associated with broader cultural attributes of these ‘better people’. It is therefore argued that local alcohol policy can be seen as neoliberal in the sense of actively creating a particular form of market, rather than letting a free market develop and determine outcomes. The intersection of cultural, economic and social factors suggests that the local approach can be understood as both reflective and constitutive of class

'Binge' drinking, neo-liberalism and individualism

‘Binge’ drinking in the UK is perceived by government, media and academics alike as a topic of concern, despite the absence of any agreed definition. The current UK government’s approach to alcohol policy can be understood within the framework of neo-liberalism, its clear morals and ideals juxtaposed with increased opportunities for apparent transgression. ‘Binge’ drinking is constructed – by both media and government – as such transgression, in contrast with the ideals of ‘responsible’ or ‘moderate’ drinking. ‘Binge’ drinkers are seen as hedonistic, excessive and irrational; the antithesis of the rational, self-governing, moral individual that is the ideal neo-liberal subject. Conversely, most academic discussions of ‘binge’ drinking have focused on the contrast with what has been called ‘traditional’ drinking, based in community pubs and understood to have reinforced stable working-class, masculine identities based on workplace relations. ‘Binge’ drinking is presented as an individualistic practice, constructing identities through consumption under conditions determined by big business, with any sense of community being simply brand loyalty created by companies. ‘Binge’ drinking is thus understood not as the antithesis of neo-liberal ideals, but their apotheosis. My ethnographic research of drinking cultures in Bournemouth, UK, suggests that the relationship between individualism and drinking on the British night-time high street is more varied and nuanced than either of these models suggest. Some drinkers did present individualistic identities constructed through consumption, but they emphasised self-control, rationality and ‘good taste’, trying to distance themselves from conceptions of ‘binge’ drinking. On the other hand, many who might commonly be identified as ‘binge’ drinkers denounced the construction of such identities as ‘stuck up’ because of the stress on ‘image’ over ‘having a laugh’, and emphasised instead a sense of community that built on relationships from school and work, not simply shared patterns of consumption. The paper will therefore address the theme ‘New and Old Individualisms’, as it considers how ideas of individualism and distinction inform Bournemouth’s high street drinking cultures

Systematic development of equivalent circuits for synchronous machines.

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Improved Calculation of Vibrational Mode Lifetimes in Anharmonic Solids - Part I: Theory

We propose here a formal foundation for practical calculations of vibrational mode lifetimes in solids. The approach is based on a recursion method analysis of the Liouvillian. From this we derive the lifetime of a vibrational mode in terms of moments of the power spectrum of the Liouvillian as projected onto the relevant subspace of phase space. In practical terms, the moments are evaluated as ensemble averages of well-defined operators, meaning that the entire calculation is to be done with Monte Carlo. These insights should lead to significantly shorter calculations compared to current methods. A companion piece presents numerical results.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure

Augmented space recursion for partially disordered systems

Off-stoichiometric alloys exhibit partial disorder, in the sense that only some of the sublattices of the stoichiometric ordered alloy become disordered. This paper puts forward a generalization of the augmented space recursion (ASR) (introduced earlier by one of us (Mookerjee et al 1997(*))) for systems with many atoms per unit cell. In order to justify the convergence properties of ASR we have studied the convergence of various moments of local density of states and other physical quantities like Fermi energy and band energy. We have also looked at the convergence of the magnetic moment of Ni, which is very sensitive to numerical approximations towards the k-space value 0.6 $\mu_{B}$ with the number of recursion steps prior to termination.Comment: Latex 2e, 21 Pages, 13 Figures, iopb style file attache

A Convergent Method for Calculating the Properties of Many Interacting Electrons

A method is presented for calculating binding energies and other properties of extended interacting systems using the projected density of transitions (PDoT) which is the probability distribution for transitions of different energies induced by a given localized operator, the operator on which the transitions are projected. It is shown that the transition contributing to the PDoT at each energy is the one which disturbs the system least, and so, by projecting on appropriate operators, the binding energies of equilibrium electronic states and the energies of their elementary excitations can be calculated. The PDoT may be expanded as a continued fraction by the recursion method, and as in other cases the continued fraction converges exponentially with the number of arithmetic operations, independent of the size of the system, in contrast to other numerical methods for which the number of operations increases with system size to maintain a given accuracy. These properties are illustrated with a calculation of the binding energies and zone-boundary spin- wave energies for an infinite spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain, which is compared with analytic results for this system and extrapolations from finite rings of spins.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures, corrected pd