Commercials, careers and culture: travelling salesmen in Britain 1890s-1930s

Within the lower middle-class, British commercial travellers established a strong fraternal culture before 1914. This article examines their interwar experiences in terms of income, careers, and associational culture. It demonstrates how internal labour markets operated, identifies the ways in which commercial travellers interpreted their role, and explores their social and political attitudes

Performance measurement : challenges for tomorrow

This paper demonstrates that the context within which performance measurement is used is changing. The key questions posed are: Is performance measurement ready for the emerging context? What are the gaps in our knowledge? and Which lines of enquiry do we need to pursue? A literature synthesis conducted by a team of multidisciplinary researchers charts the evolution of the performance-measurement literature and identifies that the literature largely follows the emerging business and global trends. The ensuing discussion introduces the currently emerging and predicted future trends and explores how current knowledge on performance measurement may deal with the emerging context. This results in identification of specific challenges for performance measurement within a holistic systems-based framework. The principle limitation of the paper is that it covers a broad literature base without in-depth analysis of a particular aspect of performance measurement. However, this weakness is also the strength of the paper. What is perhaps most significant is that there is a need for rethinking how we research the field of performance measurement by taking a holistic systems-based approach, recognizing the integrated and concurrent nature of challenges that the practitioners, and consequently the field, face

The Profumo affair in popular culture: The Keeler Affair (1963) and ‘the commercial exploitation of a public scandal’

This article demonstrates that the Profumo affair, which obsessed Britain for large parts of 1963, was not simply a political scandal, but was also an important cultural event. Focussing on the production of The Keeler Affair, a feature film that figured prominently in contemporary coverage of the scandal but which has been largely overlooked since, the article shows that this film emerged from a situation in which cultural entrepreneurs, many of them associated with the satire boom, sought to exploit the scandal for financial gain. Many Profumo-related cultural products found an audience, and thus formed an integral part of, and helped to shape public attitudes towards, the Profumo affair. However, these products did not go uncontested, and resistance to them, and especially to the idea that Keeler might benefit materially from her role in the scandal, speak to concerns about cultural mediations of sex, politics and humour in early-1960s Britain

‘Stop-go’ policy and the restriction of post-war British house-building

From the mid-1950s to the early 1980s the Treasury and Bank of England successfully advocated a policy of restricting both private and public sector house-building, as a key but covert instrument of their wider ‘stop-go’ macroeconomic policy framework. While the intensity of restrictions varied over the economic cycle, private house-building was restricted (through limiting mortgage availability) for almost all this period. This was achieved by keeping building society interest rates low relative to other interest rates and thus starving the building society movement of mortgage funds. Mortgage restriction was never publicly discussed and sometimes operated alongside ambitious housing targets and well-publicised policy initiatives to boost housing demand. This paper outlines the evolution of house-building restriction, together with its impacts on the housing sector and the wider economy. We review the evolution of the policy framework and its consequences, compare the level and stability of British house-building during this period - historically and relative to other countries, and undertake time-series econometric analysis of its impacts on both house-building and house prices. Finally, implications for debates regarding stop-go policy, Britain’s housing problem, and the distributional consequences of government macroeconomic policy are discussed

Biodiversity in marine invertebrate responses to acute warming revealed by a comparative multi-omics approach

Understanding species' responses to environmental change underpins our abilities to make predictions on future biodiversity under any range of scenarios. In spite of the huge biodiversity in most ecosystems, a model species approach is often taken in environmental studies. To date, we still do not know how many species we need to study to input into models and inform on ecosystem-level responses to change. In this study, we tested current paradigms on factors setting thermal limits by investigating the acute warming response of six Antarctic marine invertebrates: a crustacean Paraceradocus miersi, a brachiopod Liothyrella uva, two bivalve molluscs, Laternula elliptica, Aequiyoldia eightsii, a gastropod mollusc Marseniopsis mollis and an echinoderm Cucumaria georgiana. Each species was warmed at the rate of 1 °C h−1 and taken to the same physiological end point (just prior to heat coma). Their molecular responses were evaluated using complementary metabolomics and transcriptomics approaches with the aim of discovering the underlying mechanisms of their resilience or sensitivity to warming. The responses were species-specific; only two showed accumulation of anaerobic end products and three exhibited the classical heat shock response with expression of HSP70 transcripts. These diverse cellular measures did not directly correlate with resilience to heat stress and suggested that each species may have a different critical point of failure. Thus, one unifying molecular mechanism underpinning response to warming could not be assigned, and no overarching paradigm was supported. This biodiversity in response makes future ecosystems predictions extremely challenging, as we clearly need to develop a macrophysiology-type approach to cellular evaluations of the environmental stress response, studying a range of well-rationalized members from different community levels and of different phylogenetic origins rather than extrapolating from one or two arbitrary model species

Junkie love : romance and addiction on the big screen

This article investigates the filmic construction of two disparate but intertwining cultural practices: those engaging in the life-affirming rituals of romantic love and those performing the potentially self-destructive rituals of hard drug consumption. Discussing a number of key feature films from the (mini) genre “junkie love”, it aims to show what happens when elements of mainstream romantic drama merge with the horror conventions of the heroin addiction film. Drawing amongst others on Murray Smith’s theory of “levels of [spectator] engagement” and Greg Smith’s concept of the “emotion system”, the article concludes that junkie love films, using tropes of the romantic tragedy in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet, present a more complex and nuanced approach to drug addicts than the predominantly condemnatory media coverage—one that arguably invites the spectator’s understanding and compassion

‘An almost continuous picture of sordid vice’: The Keeler Affair, the Profumo Scandal and ‘Political’ Film Censorship in the 1960s

In 1963, the Profumo affair brought Christine Keeler to public attention and transformed her, briefly, into one of the most talked about women in the world. Seeking to exploit her notoriety, Topaz Films entered into an agreement with Keeler to make a cinematic version of her life story, The Keeler Affair. This article explores some of the controversies surrounding The Keeler Affair, especially in terms of the way in which the British Board of Film Censors dealt with the film. The Keeler Affair was submitted to the BBFC on two occasions – once when it was completed and then again in 1969 when Keeler's memoirs were serialised in the News of the World – and was rejected both times. On the second occasion, The Keeler Affair was also submitted to, and rejected by, the Greater London Council. The article seeks to establish some of the political factors that shaped the BBFC's and the GLC's attitudes towards politically contentious films, and demonstrates that the decisions made by the censors were guided not simply by the content of The Keeler Affair, but also by personal relationships, shared Establishment attitudes, concerns about public perceptions of the film industry and a desire not to be drawn into political controversies. Consequently, the article serves to reinforce the idea that censorship is best understood as a dynamic process shaped by a host of determining factors, many of which might best be described as extra- or para-cinematic

Turner syndrome and sexual differentiation of the brain: implications for understanding male-biased neurodevelopmental disorders

Turner syndrome (TS) is one of the most common sex chromosome abnormalities. Affected individuals often show a unique pattern of cognitive strengths and weaknesses and are at increased risk for a number of other neurodevelopmental conditions, many of which are more common in typical males than typical females (e.g., autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). This phenotype may reflect gonadal steroid deficiency, haploinsufficiency of X chromosome genes, failure to express parentally imprinted genes, and the uncovering of X chromosome mutations. Understanding the contribution of these different mechanisms to outcome has the potential to improve clinical care for individuals with TS and to better our understanding of the differential vulnerability to and expression of neurodevelopmental disorders in males and females. In this paper, we review what is currently known about cognition and brain development in individuals with TS, discuss underlying mechanisms and their relevance to understanding male-biased neurodevelopmental conditions, and suggest directions for future research

Organizational innovation in the multinational enterprise: internalization theory and business history

This article engages in a methodological experiment by using historical evidence to challenge a common misperception about internalization theory. The theory has often been criticized for maintaining that it assumes a hierarchically organized MNE based on knowledge flowing from the home country. This is not an accurate description of how global firms operate in recent decades, but this article shows it has never been true historically. Using longitudinal data on individual firms from the nineteenth century onwards, it reveals evidence of how entrepreneurs and firms with multinational activity faced with market imperfections changed the design of their headquarters and their organizational structures