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The question of health and safety at work is a central issue for trade unions. In Britain it is an area of concern where there were important legislative initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s, although surprisingly this has received relatively little attention in the debates about trade unionism. This neglect results in an aspect of union activity about which little is known. Explores through a detailed longitudinal study of a middle‐range engineering firm, from the late 1970s into the 1990s, the ways in which trade unions organize and act on health and safety questions. Argues that it is almost “routine” that workers face dangers and hazards at work, a central feature of the work and employment experience of most workers. However, this is often difficult to deal with as individual issues, or as matters which are subject to collective consideration. On the one hand, workers often appear to accept the dangers and hazards they face. On the other hand, managements are preoccupied with questions relating to production and finance, rather than the day‐to‐day problems faced by workers. This tension suggests that the future wellbeing of workers in unionized workplaces lies not so much with legislative provisions and rights at work, but in education and the organizing ability of workplace unions, raising and addressing what often seem like individualistic problems in collective ways.

The purpose of this paper is to explore philosophies of progressive education circulating in Australia in the period immediately following the expansion of secondary schools in the 1960s. It examines the rise of the alternative and community school movement of the 1970s, focusing on initiatives within the Victorian government school sector. It aims to better understand the realisation of progressive education in the design and spatial arrangements of schools, with specific reference to the re-making of school and community relations and new norms of the student-subject of alternative schooling.

It combines historical analysis of educational ideas and reforms, focusing largely on the ideas of practitioners and networks of educators, and is guided by an interest in the importance of school space and place in mediating educational change and aspirations. It draws on published writings and reports from teachers and commentators in the 1970s, publications from the Victorian Department of Education, media discussions, internal and published documentation on specific schools and oral history interviews with former teachers and principals who worked at alternative schools.

It shows the different realisation of radical aims in the set up of two schools, against a backdrop of wider innovations in state education, looking specifically at the imagined effects of re-arranging the physical and symbolic space of schooling.

Its value lies in offering the beginnings of a history of 1970s educational progressivism. It brings forward a focus on the spatial dimensions of radical schooling, and moves from characterisation of a mood of change to illuminate the complexities of these ideas in the contrasting ambitions and design of two signature community schools.

This study aims to examine mental health amongst two cohorts of single mothers in Australia before and after major social welfare reforms, which limited single parents’ access to welfare payments to encourage labour market participation.

The study analyses The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health, which surveyed 9,145 women born in the 1970s in 2003, and 8,346 women born in the 1990s in 2019.

Compared with other women of similar age, single mothers reported a higher prevalence of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicidal thoughts and lower levels of mental health, although the magnitude varied between age groups and cohorts. This difference disappeared after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics. Mental health of single mothers improved relative to that of other women between cohorts (1970s cohort surveyed in 2003, aged 25–30 versus 1990s cohort surveyed 2019, aged 24–30) and within the same 1970s cohort (surveyed 2003 and 2018), all else equal. Single mothers from the 1970s cohort aged 40–45 years and those in the 1990s cohort aged 24–30 years old were more qualified and held better jobs than the 1970s cohort at aged 25–30. Stress-related to money, ability to manage on available income and experiencing domestic violence were negatively associated with mental health across all cohorts and ages. Social support had a strong positive association with mental health.

The study suggests low welfare payment to encourage greater labour market participation is associated with financial distress linked to poor mental health.

The US feminist art movement of the 1970s is examined through selected works written by artists, critics, and historians during the 1990s. Books, exhibition catalogues, dissertations, and articles place the movement within the broader contexts of art history and criticism, women’s history, and cultural studies. The art includes painting, drawing, collage, mixed‐media, graphics, installations, video, and performance. An increasing historical perspective allows scholars to examine the movement’s institutions and unresolved issues surrounding class, race, and sexual preference. Background is provided by an introductory essay, which summarizes the movement’s facets of protest, pedagogy, networks and professional associations, and art making while noting examples of publications and institutions that form part of the record of the movement. This article will be useful to librarians and scholars in art, women’s studies, history, sociology, and cultural studies.

Child sponsorship programs have been accused of representing children in the developing world in a manner described as “development porn”. The purpose of this paper is to take an historical approach to investigating the use of advertising techniques by Plan Canada, a subsidiary of one of the oldest and largest child sponsorship‐based non‐governmental development agencies, Plan International, during the 1970s. This time period represents an important era in international development and a time of significant change in the charitable giving and advertising industries in Canada.

The authors conduct a content analysis on an archival collection of 468 print advertisements from the 1970s.

A description of the “typical” Plan Canada fund‐raising ad is presented and shown to be different, in several aspects, from other advertisements of the time period. It was determined that Plan Canada's advertisement did not cross the delicate line between showing the hardship and realities of life in the developing world for these children and what became known as “development porn”.

There has been little previous research which focuses specifically on the design of charity advertisements. This paper presents a historically contextualized description of such ads, providing a baseline for further research. It also raises important questions regarding the portrayal of the “other” in marketing communications and the extent to which aid agencies must go to attract the attention of potential donors.

The main purpose in this article is to highlight civil society activism that resulted in the inception of environmental auditing in the United States in the 1970s. The General Motors (GM) campaign which is discussed in this article led towards major institutional changes for the implementation of corporate social responsibility (environmental) reporting originally referred to as social (environmental) auditing. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) role and actions are analysed in detail in order to highlight the direction of this Federal Agency in relation to the implementation of social (environmental) auditing.

A detailed analysis of literature from the early 1970s is undertaken in order to identify the inception of environmental auditing and the types of environmental auditing as social auditing in its early stages. The case of the GM campaign is analysed in order to highlight the forms of historical institutionalism relevant to the critical stage of exogenous influences on companies to undertake social (environmental) auditing.

It is found that in the early 1970s companies resisted the incorporation of corporate social responsibility initiatives and actions as part of their agendas. Environmental Auditing as a type of social auditing at that time referred to corporate social responsibility disclosures that included environmental disclosures. Due to public pressure and civil society activism companies had to adopt and undertake social (environmental) auditing. The initial stages of environmental disclosures included reporting on environmental expenses and liabilities of the companies. The SEC imposed minimal disclosure requirements for environmental auditing, which were nevertheless adequate to undertake action against companies found to be providing misleading environmental information in their publicly available disclosures. The 1970s served as a critical juncture for the inception and development of mandatory and voluntary environmental reporting (auditing) in the United States.

This is an original research article.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the origins of today's new office concepts, focusing on the emergence of mobile and flexible working practices in the 1960s and 1970s. Thereby it intends to add a sense of historical awareness to the ongoing debate about the work environment.

The historical description is based on literature study, looking at research reports, design handbooks and depictions of office life in popular culture such as movies and advertisements.

The paper demonstrates that today's “new ways of working” are by no means new. It shows that the concepts of mobile offices, paperless offices, videoconferencing and flexible workplaces all originate from the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. It also shows that these concepts were far from mainstream, standing in stark contrast to the rigidity and conservatism of everyday office life at the time.

This paper is the first result of a larger historical analysis of the recent history of the work environment. Further historical research will add to the presented insight in the evolution of office concepts.

The paper's insight into the historical development of office concepts can help workplace strategists to make better, more careful forecasts of future workplace trends.

Whereas most literature on the office concept tends to look at novel ideas and future developments, this paper looks back at the recent past. It discusses early workplace experiments that have been largely ignored, or remained unidentified, in much of the discourse on new ways of working.

In the recent literature on financialization and the rise of investor capitalism, the successor of managerial capitalism, which dominated until the 1970s, suggests that the firm is today enacted as a bundle of financial assets managed to create value for the shareholders. This paper aims to demonstrate how such views are established relatively recently by examining leadership literature published in the 1970s, representing an entirely different view of leadership work, the role of the firm and capital–labour relations.

Two books and one Harvard Business Review article published by the Volvo CEO Pehr G. Gyllenhammar, one of the most prominent Swedish industry leaders of the past century and one of the architects behind Volvo’s internationally renowned Kalmar and Uddevalla plants in Sweden, are examined. Based on a critical discourse analysis framework, these two volumes are treated as representatives of what Alfred Chandler speaks of as the regime managerial capitalism, today largely displaced by the regime of investor capitalism.

Gyllenhammar’s discourses stresses the role of the corporations as serving a wider social community than merely the shareholders, and regard the manufacturing industry as the legitimate site for the development of new production systems better suited to a more educated workforce demanding more qualified work assignments and greater autonomy. This argument, in favour of a view of the corporation as being socially embedded and responsive to wider social needs, can be contrasted against the contemporary view of leadership and corporate governance practice.

The paper addresses the shift from managerial capitalist regime of the post-Second World War period to the investor capitalism of the financialized economy and the financialized firm by contrasting leadership writing of the 1970s against today’s strong focus on shareholder enrichment and the enactment of CEOs and directors as the servants of the capital owners. A long-term perspective on the changes occurring over the past four decades may enable a better understanding how leadership, governance and industry are subject to ongoing re-interpretations and understanding in the face of novel economic, social and political conditions.

This monograph is an attempt to examine some of the changes which have occurred in the structure of the workforce in Australia during the 1970s. The study has the form of exploratory analysis of data extracted from official labour market statistics, and its aims are to consider three broad issues: the significance changes in the labour market may have for Australian society, and particularly for the people who constitute the workforce, actual or potential; the implications of those changes for social policy; and the appropriate research methods of identifying social and social welfare issues in economic activities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolution of wedding-related consumption of urban families in China during the past 50 years.

This study used qualitative and quantitative approaches to collect and analyse data from 157 families in China. Data collection occurred through semi-structured interviews and questionnaire surveys.

The findings are as follows: average wedding expenses per family have increased, mainly as a result of the substantial growth of indirect wedding costs; the percentage of total wedding expenses represented by direct costs pertaining to the ritual is trending downwards; the percentage of total wedding expenses borne by the groom’s family is much higher than that borne by the bride’s family, and the gap is enlarging; the proportion of newlyweds living with parents was more than 50 per cent in the 1970s and 1980s, decreased to 10 per cent in the 1990s and began slightly increasing again after 2000.

The authors used signal investment theory to explain the fact that the groom’s family bears more of the wedding expenses than the bride’s family does, but more evidences are needed to verify the theory.

This study contributes to the understanding of evolution of wedding consumption of urban families in China, as well as how social and economic factors influence wedding consumptions in different ages, an area with limited previous research. The authors also propose signal investment theory as an alternative explanation to current wedding consumption theories to justify the phenomenon.