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This article presents a historical investigation into the foreign policy messages of the British Union of Fascists' (BUF) publicity and propaganda from its foundation in 1932 until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, along with a discussion of the methods and institutional arrangements used to propagate its ideas of peace, empire and transnational co-operation.

The historical investigation is based upon scrutiny of original BUF documents relating to the period 1932–1939 from various archives. After cataloguing of the relevant publicity and propaganda materials in time sequence and thematically, analysis was organised using a historical institutionalism approach.

The article explains the different phases of the BUF's message development and how publications, meetings and media were used to project its ideas. It also discussed the impact of support from Viscount Rothermere's newspapers and financial support from Benito Mussolini. Consideration of publicity materials alongside files from BUF headquarters enabled identification and investigation into the communicative actors who did the publicity work, including Director of Publicity, John Beckett.

The article reflects upon how the British Union of Fascists' publicity and propaganda relates to modern manifestations of the communication of authoritarian and nationalistic political propositions and the historical continuities that endure therein.

The project makes an original contribution to the history of British political propaganda and public relations through an inquiry based upon scrutiny of historical documents in UK archives relating to BUF publicity related to foreign policy.

MR. DENIS HOWELL, M.P., Minister for Libraries, who was to have told Conference how public libraries had progressed since the Act, had to withdraw and so we did not find out how the responsible minister felt about us.

The purpose of the study is to examine educational history through television's portrayal of educational activity in post-apocalyptic society. The paper examines how and why television drama set after a catastrophe is in dialogue with, but rejects, both contemporary government discourse of “protect and survive”.

The paper treats television programmes as historical artefacts made during periods of heightened anxiety about nuclear and bacteriological war. This paper follows established methods for interpreting educational history by examining the representation of schooling and the discursive construction of teachers and their practices via television. This paper proceeds by tight selection of sections from two texts, examining them as documentary evidence of education in later-20th-century Britain and representations of specific types of schooling that were found in real-world Britain in the period, namely, the minor public school and educational television.

Television drama showing education during and after an apocalyptic event was a reaction to and critique of official assurances that life would continue after a large-scale catastrophe. The representations of schooling reflect the preoccupations of the writers and depict the intersection of schooling, teachers and students with contemporary anxieties in a period where global war and large-scale catastrophe were prominent fears in popular consciousness. Representations of schooling enabled a twofold critique of education. One is critique of the industrial and civil society that had called formal schooling into existence, questioning the value of what in the 1970s and 1980s was being taught in schools. The second is the subversion of the assurances contained in “disaster” education, which promised that disaster would be a temporary setback and underlying social structures and institutions would survive. This paper suggests these sources of educational history present the need to unlearn old knowledge, urge the recourse to self-teaching and question the reliance on a television to teach.

This paper endorses educational, historical and popular cultural research that has found meaning and importance in popular television as a reflection of actual educational practice. Efforts to educate a civilian population about civil defence have received some scholarly attention; however, so far, the way educational practice is portrayed in television that shows the end of the world as we know it has received limited attention. These sources yield valuable insights regarding the interaction between education, disaster and popular consciousness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges faced by an Australian accounting academic, R. J. Chambers, in the 1950s, in breaking into the accounting research community, at that time, almost entirely located in the USA and the UK. For academics outside the networks of accounting research publication in these countries, there were significant, but not insurmountable obstacles to conducting and publishing accounting research. We examine how these obstacles could be overcome, using the notion of “trials of strength” to trace the efforts of Chambers in wrestling with intellectual issues arising from post-war inflation, acquiring accounting literature from abroad and publishing his endeavours.

The article uses actor-network theory to provide an analytical structure for a “counter-narrative” history firmly grounded in the archives.

Documents from the R. J. Chambers Archive at the University of Sydney form the empirical basis for a narrative that portrays accounting research as a diverse process driven as much by circumstances – such as geographical location, access to accounting literature and personal connections – as the merits of the intellectual arguments.

Although the historical details are specific to the case being studied, the article provides insights into the challenges faced by researchers on the outside of international research networks in achieving recognition and in participating in academic debates.

The findings of this article can provide guidance and inspiration to accounting researchers attempting to participate in wider academic communities.

The article uses documents from perhaps the most extensive archive relating to an individual accounting academic. It examines the process of academic research in accounting in terms of the material context in which such research takes place, whereas most discussions have focussed on the underlying ideas and concepts, abstracted from the context in which they emerge.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

Unions are the potential but secure democratic counterforce to capital. The creation of “objective conditions” for international co‐operation has preceded but must result in “subjective conditions”. This theme survives little challenged as a central tenet of the official labour movement in country after country. The pervasive complacency in other circles concerning the prospects for industrial democracy to be achieved through the internationalisation of the evolutionary, pluralistic collective bargaining model, particularly at a time when that model seems unable to cope with born again free market philosophies even at a national level.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.