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This paper aims to provide a close reading of Daniel Defoe’s The Complete English Tradesman. It makes a case that many of the themes that Defoe engages with are consistent with later arguments offered by relationship marketing scholars.

This is a close reading of one of Defoe’s most popular texts, The Complete English Tradesman. It links this discussion with relationship marketing tenets.

Defoe pays considerable attention to key relational ideas, including the cultivation of a public perception of business honesty, the need to cater to customer requirements, treating the customer as the “idol” of the practitioner and undertaking a variety of actions to ensure that consumers trust the words and actions of the tradesman.

This paper highlights how ahistorical debates surrounding relationship marketing have been and calls for a return to the archives.

This paper supplements existing research that charts the implications for marketing thought of Defoe’s work, extending this via a juxtaposition of his writing with relational tenets.

Daniel Defoe, best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, was also an early entrepreneur who late in his life published a business text called The Complete English Tradesman. The purpose of this paper is to argue that The Complete English Tradesman should be given renewed consideration as an early predecessor to the great works in management literature.

The paper compares the content found in The Complete English Tradesman with topics and content typically found in modern small business management texts.

The paper finds considerable overlap between Defoe's advice and modern small business management principles. Besides the overall relevant content, the paper also finds unique insights offered by Defoe that could be applied by the modern small business entrepreneur. The paper presents possible reasons why Defoe's work is not widely known today.

Defoe's work may be reflective of the general eighteenth‐century entrepreneurial climate. There may be other related sources of interest, as well as potential parallels between the eighteenth‐century climate and the modern entrepreneurial environment.

A timeless core set of actions may be essential for entrepreneurial success.

This is the first research to compare Defoe's work explicitly with modern small business management theory or practice.

The worldwide environmental crisis has also influenced the field of literary studies. Posthumanism and ecocriticism is a new way of reading in which the anthropocentric approach and the binary oppositions such as human/non-human, wild/tame and natural/cultural are overcome. Posthumanism pays attention to all sorts of non-human life, animals, for sure, but aliens and robots are included too, while ecocriticism is concerned with the role and function of nature in literary texts. The chapter offers an ecocritical approach of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) and Friday (Tournier). Rereading these novels we see that nature, or the elements, make up an ‘actant’ equal to the human characters and a special interest is created in the mutual conflicts which arise between nature and the human characters.

Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1719) is considered by many as an appropriate book to allow pupils to escape from or be shielded from the negative influence of civilization. Like Robinson on his island pupils should learn from experience. Defoe’s work was so popular it inspired a whole series of imitations called ‘Robinsonnades’ and many of them were edited specifically for children. But is Robinson Crusoe a valuable book from an ecological point of view? How does Robinson relate to nature? Does the novel focus on nature or rather on the human hero seeking to control and tame the environment?

In 1967, the French author Michel Tournier reworked the Crusoe myth in Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday or the Pacific Rim), followed by a parallel text for children Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday or the Wild Life, 1971). In both novels Robinson’s black servant, Friday, initiates his colonial master into alternative ways of living, dismantling civilization and restoring nature. That same deconstruction of the idea of Western superiority fits well with the postcolonial philosophy that attacks the logic of domination and its hierarchical dichotomy: white above coloured.

The purpose of this paper is to critique four marketing textbooks written during the Age of Enlightenment (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries) to understand the educational lessons they taught students of marketing at the time and the lessons they might hold for the present day.

The method entails critically examining several marketing textbooks within the context of the great social, religious, intellectual, political and economic changes taking place at the time.

Over the period, paralleling developments in the Enlightenment, the two earlier textbooks of the age have a heavier emphasis on religious and ethical concerns along with their discussions of business issues. The two later textbooks de-emphasize spiritual themes in favor of almost completely focusing on business matters. In addition to discussing themes relevant to their times, the books anticipate concepts found in marketing textbooks of today. Generally, there is also more stress placed on immediate facts rather than enduring business principles. Yet many principles are discussed, including the most fundamental and durable principle of merchandising: “buy cheape, sell deare”.

There is no other review of a collection of marketing textbooks during the Age of Enlightenment in the published literature.

The purpose of this paper is to enrich the understanding of current models of organisational response to crises and offer additional perspectives on some of these models. It is also intended to confirm the value of fiction as a truth-seeking and hermeneutic device for enriching the imagination.

The study uses Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year to draw parallels between his portrayal of the London Great Plague of 1665 and the management of modern-day crises. Defoe uses London’s ordeal of the Great Plague to advise those subjected to future crises. Through his representation of plague-ridden streets, Defoe shows stakeholders acting in ways described in current crisis management literature.

The authors note how the management of the Plague crisis was unsuccessful and they challenge the very idea of managing a true crisis. The authors are able to illustrate and offer refinements to the Pearson and Clair (1998) and Janes (2010) models of crisis management as well as confirming the value of their constructs across a lapse of centuries.

Although it is an examination of a single novel, the findings suggest value in conceptualising organisational crises in innovative and more imaginative ways.

It confirms the heuristic value of using fiction to understand organisational change and adds value to current models.

German legal historians of nineteenth and twentieth centuries defined the main characteristics of the corporations and believed that one renaissance institution, the Casa di San Giorgio at Genoa (1407–1805), was similar to the corporations of later centuries. This paper proposes to reverse this perspective: did the founders of early modern corporations know the financial model of the fifteenth century Casa di San Giorgio? The research shows the connection between the model of the Casa di San Giorgio and the Mississippi Company of John Law (1720), the famous financial scheme and bubble. The history of the Casa di San Giorgio was mainly transmitted through a passage of Machiavelli’s History of Florence (VIII, 29). The paper offers new biographical evidence that Law had been to Genoa and introduces sources connecting the genesis of Law’s scheme for the Mississippi Company in France with the model of the Casa di San Giorgio.

Karl Marx could only pen the memorable line, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” because he was heir to the sanitary and public health reforms of the nineteenth century (Marx [1848] 1972, p. 335). The Black Death, which had wiped out much of fourteenth-century Florence and which had regularly decimated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, was now but a faint memory. Yet had a historian of some earlier period of European history thought to pen a line as presumptuous as Marx's, it might have read: “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggle with plague or pestilence.” Epidemics and pandemics have haunted human societies from their beginnings. The congregation of large masses of humans in urban settings, in fact, made the evolution of human infectious disease microorganisms biologically possible (McNeill, 1976; Porter, 1997, pp. 22–25). Epidemics have been as determinative of the course of economic, social, military and political history as any other single factor – emptying cities, decimating armies, wiping out generations and destroying civilizations.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the application of the ratio in Ankerson v Connelly 1906 2Ch 544(Ch) and 1907 1Ch 678(CA) to a modern domestic right to light situation and the need for rights of light surveyors to be aware of relevant case law when advising their client.

This paper adopts a case study approach describing the circumstances of the case, the approach of the appointed experts and the decision of the court.

The court found for the Respondent in that the Dominant Owner’s property had been altered to create an additional burden upon the Servient Owner and the altered part of the Dominant Owner’s property had not yet acquired an independent right to light through prescription.

This is an unreported case that illustrates the application of a case decided over 100 years ago.

Over the last few years it has been established that there is a need to re‐evaluate the basis of assessment of the sufficiency of daylight, in rights to light cases, where the loss of daylight after obstruction might lead to injunction and/or damages. The purpose of this paper is to further examine whether the methodology used by surveyors, whereby the effect of glazing, window frames and internal reflectance are ignored, is valid and whether theoretical values can be translated into real values obtained through practical experimentation.

Modern methods of assessment of daylighting, for design purposes, calculate a whole room average as a percentage of available daylight from a Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage (CIE) sky whereas Waldram's methodology, in rights to light cases, results in a contour line marking the series of points in a room where the task lighting, from a uniform sky, would be insufficient for normal use. These two methods appear incompatible and the conundrum is that whilst the courts are seeking to determine adequacy of daylighting to a room, the practitioners need to be able to measure the reduction in a way that has real meaning and can be valued.

By comparing theoretical results using the Waldram methodology with those obtained using the Building Research Establishment (BRE) methodology and with physical measurements on site and in an artificial sky dome, it can be demonstrated that results using the Waldram Diagram, or the proposed CIEL Diagram, can be translated into real values of daylighting for a room and that these values are more realistic than those obtained through the BRE methodology.

This research (which is ongoing) will be useful to practitioners and the courts in determining rights to light cases and is a significant contribution to the debate initiated in this journal by Michael Pitts some 12 years ago.

The purpose of this paper is to continue the research set out in the consideration of trees in rights of light cases Part 1. To consider whether it is possible to measure a tree with sufficient accuracy that the impact on daylight within a building can be predicted in a way that can be applied in rights to light cases.

By reading published research on tree growth rates, crown transparency and theoretical modelling it is intended to determine the available methodologies for predicting light transmission through tree crowns. Then by inspecting common oak trees in all parts of the country, it is intended to review whether the available methodologies are capable of producing a relatively accurate result using manual methods or whether it is necessary to devise a software solution.

The research found that whilst theoretical methods exist for predicting light obstruction by trees, these could not be used in practice and that manual methodologies would not provide sufficient accuracy. However, survey techniques such as 3D Point Cloud can be taken further with the development of a software solution that uses an algorithm to predict branch size and location where these are not visible in a survey.

This research concentrates on the theoretical aspect of assessing trees in rights to light cases. It is usually necessary for a live legal case to occur before research into software takes place. It will be necessary to develop the software and then test survey a tree in full leaf and in the absence of foliage to determine whether the algorithm is sufficiently accurate and this will take time.

This research concentrates on the theoretical aspect of assessing trees in rights to light cases. It is usually necessary for a live legal case to occur before research into software takes place and the conclusion reached was that it will be necessary to develop the software and then test survey a tree in full leaf and in the absence of foliage to determine whether an algorithm is sufficiently accurate and this will take time. It has also been demonstrated that trees may be considered as existing obstructions in rights to light cases and that once software has been developed and tested then it will enable developers to show that their proposals have less impact on the daylight within an adjoining property than would be the case if trees are ignored.

In many instances, the economic development of a site, especially social housing, is limited by the rights to light of adjoining owners. Where it can be shown that the light levels enjoyed by those owners are already impaired by existing trees then this may assist the developer.

At this point no one else has researched this subject to the extent contained in this paper.