Visions of Utopia: Sweden, the BBC and the Welfare State

Drawing on manuscripts and transcripts of BBC programme output, and material from the Radio Times, and the BBC’s The Listener magazine, this article analyses radio talks and programmes that focused on Sweden in the immediate years after the Second World War when the Swedish model was widely popularised abroad. The article argues that BBC output entangled domestic politics and transnational ideas around post-war reconstruction and welfare. Sweden was used as a lens through which a modern welfare state could be visualised and justified. This was however Utopia in two senses since the image of Sweden presented was in itself a highly idealised representation

When research seems like clinical care: a qualitative study of the communication of individual cancer genetic research results

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Research ethicists have recently declared a new ethical imperative: that researchers should communicate the results of research to participants. For some analysts, the obligation is restricted to the communication of the general findings or conclusions of the study. However, other analysts extend the obligation to the disclosure of individual research results, especially where these results are perceived to have clinical relevance. Several scholars have advanced cogent critiques of the putative obligation to disclose individual research results. They question whether ethical goals are served by disclosure or violated by non-disclosure, and whether the communication of research results respects ethically salient differences between research practices and clinical care. Empirical data on these questions are limited. Available evidence suggests, on the one hand, growing support for disclosure, and on the other, the potential for significant harm.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This paper explores the implications of the disclosure of individual research results for the relationship between research and clinical care through analysis of research-based cancer genetic testing in Ontario, Canada in the late 1990s. We analyze a set of 30 interviews with key informants involved with research-based cancer genetic testing before the publicly funded clinical service became available in 2000.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We advance three insights: First, the communication of individual research results makes research practices <it>seem </it>like clinical services for our respondents. Second, while valuing the way in which research enables a form of clinical access, our respondents experience these quasi-clinical services as inadequate. Finally, our respondents recognize the ways in which their experience with these quasi-clinical services is influenced by research imperatives, but understand and interpret the significance and appropriateness of these influences in different ways.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our findings suggest that the hybrid state created through the disclosure of research results about individuals that are perceived to be clinically relevant may produce neither sufficiently adequate clinical care nor sufficiently ethical research practices. These findings raise questions about the extent to which research can, and <it>should</it>, be made to serve clinical purposes, and suggest the need for further deliberation regarding any ethical obligation to communicate individual research results.</p

Profiting from war:Bovril advertising during World War II

This article addresses the lack of research on commercial advertising during wartime. It takes as its focus Bovril ads during World War II, to argue that commercial advertising, rather than diverging from state propaganda consistently drew upon wider representations of war in order to integrate into a society increasingly dominated by the image. To examine this, all of the Bovril ads from World War II appearing in the Times, Daily Express and Daily Mirror are compared in both quantitative and qualitative analyses, which helps to avoid the “cherry picking” problems of relying on a qualitative analysis alone. The main contention is that ads are socially situated media and, as such, cannot strongly divert from other messages being circulated within society because their reception depends upon their message creating an instant identification with the reader. In the 1940s this was especially true because society was confronted with an unprecedented mass of state propaganda