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It is a tenet of the marketing and advertising communities that the claims and appeals contained in advertisements must reflect the behaviour, aspiration or dreams of potential customers. Work undertaken in New Zealand challenged the received wisdom, suggesting that the content of advertisements exhibited marked cyclical patterns that had little to do with societal trends. This paper seeks to replicate and extend the earlier study in a larger and less derivative economic environment.

For each year over the period 1950‐2000, the levels of usage of 58 variables in a large sample of advertisements from major UK magazines were analysed. The patterns from the resulting data were examined to determine whether deviations around long‐term secular trends were random, or whether cyclical tendencies were apparent.

The findings confirm that the generally espoused view of advertising as a mirror of society may require substantial modification. Over time periods of five to 15 years the level of usage of various claims and appeals is cyclical, and the stage of the cycle is a far more important factor than the secular trend in understanding the changing levels of usage over operational time periods.

Because the study is limited to advertising in UK magazines, further content analysis work is required using other media (TV) and other countries.

The paper argues that cyclicality is a general phenomenon of aggregated human behaviour, and consequently that advertising cycles should be viewed as a particular case of a general rule rather than a unique occurrence.

It is widely believed that contemporary female fashion and advertising models are thinner than those of the 1950s and it has been suggested that the use of thin models in advertisements is causally linked to the increased incidence of anorexia nervosa. Reports on a study to quantify the changes in the body‐shape and weight of female models in New Zealand print advertisements over the period of 1958‐88. The findings confirmed that advertising models became thinner and less curvaceous over the period studied, resulting in contemporary models being approximately 8.5kg lighter than they would be if they had the same body‐shape as models of the early 1960s. To achieve the currently fashionable body‐shape, a young woman of average height would weigh approximately 42kg, which is far below the recommended level for good health. Visually, the changes in body‐shape have been accentuated by changes in pose and camera angle, presenting an image of a body‐shape that is unattainable.

The extent to which advertisers choose to make more or less use of “informative copy”, or “copy points”, as a communicative and persuasive technique, represents a model of how an advertisement will work. With changing media technology, changing popular culture, and changing advertising fashions, it might be expected that models of effective advertising would change over time. Such changes would be reflected in the use of “copy points” in advertisements. Using a variant on the methodology developed by Resnik and Stern, extends research on the information content of advertising copy through a study of magazine advertisements over a period of 40 years. The number of copy points contained in an advertisement rose steadily from 1953 until the late 1970s. In the 1980s this trend was reversed, with the number of copy points falling sharply to below the 1953 level. While the observed fall in copy point level in the 1980s was expected, the long prior period of increase was not and may go some way to explain why the 1980s fall occurred.

America's strategists are at sixes and sevens. At issue: how to chart the United States' moral compass. Repeatedly, we intervene in a host of nations—Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Haiti—to redress grave human suffering. To date, our responses have been uneven, without any clear‐cut guidelines for engagement.

You never know, that's all, there's no way of knowing … Last week our lives were all right … But now I think we're going to be murdered. Just like that.” So begins The Shadow Knows, a novel whose major theme is a woman's panic about the possibility of danger to her family. She is not alone; Americans are increasingly fearful of violence as it becomes more pervasive. According to the 1982–83 Statistical Abstract of the U.S., published by the Bureau of the Census, one of every 30 people over 12 years old was the victim of violence in 1980. And those statistics refer only to reported violence; they do not include the victims of private violence: child abuse, incest, or spouse beating. Such domestic violence more than doubled between 1976 and 1981, and accounts for more than one‐third of the nation's police forces' time. The statistics pertaining to women are particularly worrisome. A woman's chances of being raped at some point in her life are now one in ten—and her chances of being injured by battery are even greater. Such statistics are very frightening.

In this chapter the authors take an auto-ethnographic approach to draw from recent experiences of being integrally involved in the death rituals pertaining to a close family member, ranging across three different cultural backgrounds, all located in Aotearoa New Zealand and involving intercultural complexities. All of these funeral proceedings were unusual circumstances, due to the status of the deceased, meaning that in all three instances, the rituals were very public, due to cultural expectations. Through narrative descriptions, this chapter illuminates the ways in which traditional cultural values are played out in contemporary contexts and their importance in providing a framework of support for the bereaved families through the mourning period, albeit in the public gaze. Despite the impacts of colonization, immigration, and globalization, these traditional practices, passed down through generation after generation, demonstrate their resilience and contemporary application in service of the emotional and spiritual well-being of the respective collectives.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on an unusual course, a historically focused course on marketing theory taught to a range of students from their fourth year of study through to the doctoral level.

The staff, who have taught the course since before 2000 to date, reflect on its purpose, the curriculum and the student experience.

Studying the history of marketing theory has considerable value for able and engaged students, especially those wishing to proceed to masters or doctoral level study. Students who are exposed to the history of marketing thought are also likely to be better prepared for the business of the future.

The originality of this paper is centered on the uniqueness of the course being taught; insights are provided into this unusual curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the understanding of how external loads are reacted through preloaded bolted joints and the interaction of the joint elements. The paper develops ideas from how to do an analysis to understanding the implications of the results.

Classical methods of analysis are applied to preloaded bolted joints, made with multiple bolts. The paper considers both the detailed analysis of bolts stresses, fatigue analysis and load-based design analysis, to demonstrate the structural integrity of preloaded bolted joints.

In preloaded joints the external tensile axial load and moments are mainly supported by changes in contact pressure at the faying surface. Only a small proportion of the external loads produce changes in bolt tensile stress. The bolts have a significant mean stress but experience a low working stress range. This low stress range is a factor in explaning why preloaded bolted joints have good fatigue performance.

In many cases the methods presented are adequate to demonstrate the structural integrity of joints. In some cases finite element methods may be more appropriate, and the methods discussed can be used in the validation process.

The paper brings together a number of concepts and links them into a practical design analysis process for preloaded bolted joints. Interpretation of results, within the context of design standards, is provided.

Critical theory has rarely articulated an agenda for social change linking theory to practice. This paper provides several examples of “critical theory in practice” and focuses specifically on Fay’s Critical Social Science (CSS) model. The methods of conflict transformation are then applied to CSS in order to accomplish two goals. First, political conflicts resulting from decision making can be used to transform both individuals and systems. Second, CSS more adequately accounts for some of the non-rational aspects of human nature, such as our resistance to change, thus improving its catalytic validity as a critical social theory. Together, the processes of CSS and conflict transformation provide a framework for enhancing the potential for citizen governance.