Search results

In February 1922 the editor of the SA Teachers’ Journal introduced a ‘Country Corner’ column that was to be contributed by a member of the Women Teachers Progressive League (WTPL) under the pen name ‘Tish’. Tish was Phebe Watson, the WTPL secretary (a position she had held since its inauguration in 1915), Women’s Warden at the Teachers College and Mistress of Method in charge of the short course of training for country teachers. This article focuses on representations of the country teacher in the Country Corner column in the interwar years. I argue that Phebe invoked contemporary discourses of youth and femininity to construct the rural teacher as a youthful, responsible, attractive and marriageable woman. Following on from recent research into ways in which city functioned both as a place and representation in education, I also begin to identify discourses of the country and the city in constructions of the teacher and teachers’ work.

The purpose of this paper is to examine expert ideas about education for citizenship in 1930s Australia. Drawing on a larger study of adolescence and schooling during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the paper explores the role of international networks and US philanthropy in fostering the spread of new psychological and curriculum ideas that shaped citizenship education, and broader educational changes during the interwar period. A second purpose is to provide historical perspectives on contemporary concerns about the role of schooling in addressing social values and student wellbeing.

The discussion is informed by approaches drawn from Foucauldian genealogy and historical studies of transnationalism. It examines constructions of the good and problem student and the networks of international educational expertise as forms of “travelling ideas”. These transnational exchanges are explored through a close analysis of a defining moment in Australian educational history, the 1937 conference of the New Education Fellowship.

The analysis reveals the ways in which psychological understandings and curriculum reforms shaped education for citizenship in the 1930s and identify in particular the emergent role of psychology in defining what it meant to be a good student and a good future citizen. The paper further finds that Australian education during the interwar years was more cosmopolitan and engaged in international discussions about citizenship and schooling than is usually remembered in the present. Elaborating this is important for building transnational histories of knowledge exchange in Australian education.

The paper shows the value of a relational analysis of school curriculum and psychological understandings for more fully grasping the different dimensions of education for citizenship both in the interwar years and now. It offers fresh perspectives on contemporary educational debates about globalisation and youth identities, as played out in current concerns about social values and schooling.

France's defeat by Germany in 1940 is one of the most shocking events in the annals of military history. Explanations for France's defeat have traditionally focused on battlefield mistakes, an unmotivated population, and even bad luck. Yet, the seeds of France's failure were sown long before her 1940 surrender. The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence of groupthink in the French General Staff during the interwar years with its deleterious effect on France's military preparedness.

Groupthink is used to understand the reasons behind France's decisive defeat at the start of World War II. Historians of the period and primary and secondary works were consulted and analyzed.

Multiple examples of the main eight groupthink symptoms were identified from the documentary evidence. Groupthink present in the French General Staff had an adverse impact on the France's preparations. Groupthink led to the downplaying of important information, the failure to question vital assumptions about German capabilities, and the misapplication of new military technology. This led to inflexibility and the inability to respond to innovative German technology and operational doctrine.

Groupthink is useful in explaining complex historical events – events which often have been attributed to poor leadership, corrupt or incapable politicians, or simply luck. The application of social science theory and methods to well‐documented events, whether “historical” or otherwise has the potential to enrich the understanding of these events and the ways in which they may be studied.

This study also contributes to evidence on groupthink and the application of theory in social science and management to the study of well‐documented historical events.

This paper aims to reassess the marketing strategy of Britain’s Big Four railway companies during the interwar period to locate railway marketing in the broader context of railway business and the general development of service marketing in Britain.

By a detailed analysis of internal company records, this paper discusses three aspects of railway marketing: the development of marketing departments within the companies, the control of marketing expenditure and the industry-wide marketing alliance. The three areas of railway marketing are examined by way of comparing them with the corresponding situations in other British industries.

It reveals the relatively advanced state of railway companies’ marketing in the contemporary context. Furthermore, a series of re-organisations are interpreted as a response to the inter-modal competition from road traffic.

By characterising railway marketing in the interwar period as part of the industry’s rear-guard battle in the competitive travel market, in which railways were clearly losing out to road traffic, the paper provides a perspective that enables to understand how the “golden age” of railway marketing coincided with the railways’ decline in the passenger business.

This article on coalmining, a key industry for Britain in the period covered, has three main purposes. First, it updates previous overviews of entrepreneurial performance by surveying recent contributions to old controversies. Second, it provides a new perspective by looking at 1900‐1946 as a whole, instead of separately assessing performance before and after 1914. This view takes account of the fact that frequently the same individual acted as entrepreneur over several decades. It also points to elements of continuity which existed in contrast to marked changes in markets after 1914. The third aim is to identify further work required before a more conclusive assessment of entrepreneurial performance can emerge. Meanwhile however the article tends, while not denying individual cases of poor performance, to concur with previous studies which have concluded that the strikingly poor reputation of entrepreneurs in coal among contemporaries during the interwar years was not generally justified.

In Australia as elsewhere, kindergarten or pre-school teachers’ work has almost escaped historians’ attention. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the lives and work of approximately 60 women who graduated from the Adelaide Kindergarten Training College (KTC) between 1908 and 1917, which is during the leadership of its foundation principal, Lillian de Lissa.

The paper is a feminist analysis and uses conventional archival sources.

The KTC was a site of higher education that offered middle class women an intellectual as well as practical education, focusing on liberal arts, progressive pedagogies and social reform. More than half of the graduates initially worked as teachers, their destinations reflecting the fragmented field of early childhood education. Whether married or single, many remained connected with progressive education and social reform, exercising their pedagogical and administrative skills in their workplaces, homes and civic activities. In so doing, they were not only leaders of children but also makers of society.

The paper highlights the links between the kindergarten movement and reforms in girls’ secondary and higher education, and repositions the KTC as site of intellectual education for women. In turn, KTC graduates committed to progressive education and social reform in the interwar years.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how one Canadian retailer developed customer confidence in the interwar years when the automobile was in its infancy. The emphasis is on products and product information in the mail‐order catalogue.

The research design strategy draws on a longitudinal case study research using primary archival data collection and analysis.

In the 1930s, the firm used multiple approaches to respond to opportunities and challenges and to reassure customers through product assortment, guarantees, branding, quality assurance and support services. Generating an extensive mail‐order business occurred in tandem with the opening of stores, and together these approaches created rapid growth. In the early years, the emphasis was on maintenance, repairs and some augmentation through accessories. From the mid‐to late 1930s, with easing economic conditions, the focus shifts from automobile functionality to include roles for leisure and sport products, and the injunction to engage with the Canadian countryside.

The paper uses original historical research to contribute a new way of understanding how retailers developed customer confidence. The study contributes to knowledge about Canadian retailing in the interwar years, and the means for building customer confidence using a range of marketing techniques. For researchers, the study demonstrates a further example of the efficacy of using archival materials to explore marketing questions.

Beginning with the introduction of mass compulsory schooling legislation in the 1870s, and using age and marital status as key categories of social difference, this article provides an overview of issues surrounding the ‘woman teacher’ through to the postwar baby boom. It shows how women teachers were increasingly differentiated according to location (country and city) and level of schooling (kindergarten, primary and secondary), and it also casts them as somewhat threatening to the gender order. Firstly, the article describes the processes by which teaching in both city and country primary schools became normalised as single women or spinsters’ work with the advent of mass compulsory schooling. Part two focuses on the turn of the twentieth century, a period in which anxieties about single women, so many of whom were teachers, coalesced around the figure of the ‘new woman’. In this context I investigate what state school teaching might have meant for single women, be they unqualified ‘girl teachers’ in country schools or mature women whose qualifications and career paths brought them into city schools. The third section shows that the expansion of state schooling in the early twentieth century produced further differentiation of the ‘teacher’ as primary, kindergarten or secondary. Furthermore, in the interwar years new meanings of singleness for women were proposed by sexologists and psychologists, and spinster teachers became more stigmatised as women. Finally, I turn to the women who taught from the late 1930s into the postwar era.

This paper aims to examine the development of an iconic corporate brand by the General Post Office (GPO) in Britain in the 1930s by adapting the work of Douglas Holt (2004).

The paper uses a historical approach by developing a historical case study. It combines this historical approach with Holt’s theory and writing on iconic branding and the current literature on corporate identity, corporate branding and corporate communication.

The study argues that the GPO was able to construct an iconic brand in the interwar period (1918-1939) by responding to anxieties in British society generated by social tension and fears of decline. This was facilitated by the establishment of a public relations department, which created “myths” of national identity and imperial unity through telecommunications, and national strength through technology. These myths assuaged social anxieties and enabled the GPO to construct an iconic corporate brand.

This paper provides an important insight into iconic branding. It examines corporate rather than product branding, where research has predominantly focused. It also combines cultural branding theory with historical analysis and provides an adapted approach to Holt’s myth market model (1994, p. 58).

Management is a “hot field” in China, yet little has been written in English about the history of management in China. Contrary to contemporary management literature, the paper aims to show that Chinese entrepreneurs and managers were exposed to modern management ideas from the early twentieth century. The paper is an initial exploration of the transfer of managerial knowledge to China, especially Scientific Management, during the interwar period.

Draws on Chinese journal articles and books from 1910‐1930s, supplemented with archive materials and secondary sources in Chinese and English.

Chinese industrialists, officials and academics were attracted to Taylor's ideas of scientific management during the 1920s and 1930s, which were experimented with on a wider scale than is commonly realized. The interest in “new” management extended beyond industrialists and industry officials to reportage in the popular press.

Future research should consider first how new ideas about management and organization were implemented on the shopfloor in individual Chinese enterprises, and second examine the role of social networks constituted by native place, industry ties and professional association membership in the diffusion of managerial ideas among the Chinese business elite of the period.

The paper shows that the transfer to China of modern management as an ideas system was not a recent phenomenon, but part of a century‐long process of transfer and adaptation of western management theory and practice.