Search results

This paper uses newly compiled data from two surveys of female home workers undertaken by the Women’s Industrial Council in London in 1897 and 1907 to investigate various issues related to their work and wages. The reports detail the occupations, average weekly earnings and hours, marital status, and household size, composition, and total income of approximately 850 female home workers, offering a unique, and as yet unused, opportunity to explore the labor market characteristics of the lowest-paid workers in the early twentieth century. Analysis of the data reveals that the female home workers who were surveyed were drawn overwhelmingly from poor households. Home workers were older than female factory workers, most were married or widowed, and the majority of married workers reported that their husbands were out of work, sick, disabled, or in casual or irregular work. Weekly wages and hours of work varied considerably by industry, but averaged about 7–9s. and 40–45 hours per week, with many workers reporting the desire for more work. The relationship between hours of work (daily and weekly) and hourly wages was negative, and the wives and daughters of men who were out of the labor force due to unemployment or illness tended to work longer hours at lower wages, as did women who lived in households where some health issue was present. These findings lend support to contemporary perceptions that women driven into the labor force by immediate household need were forced to take the lowest-paid work, whether because they lacked skill and experience or bargaining power in the labor market.

Jill Beard is a Library and Learning Support Manager at Bournemouth University, a service which includes libraries, learning technology, and academic skills development. She has written extensively over many years on a wide range of subjects and is currently co-editing a book on Digital Library Environments in Higher Education (Ashgate, 2010).

The study of the diffusion of innovations into libraries has become a cottage industry of sorts, as libraries have always provided a fascinating test-bed of nonprofit institutions attempting improvement through the use of new policies, practices, and assorted apparatus (Malinconico, 1997). For example, Paul Sturges (1996) has focused on the evolution of public library services over the course of 70 years across England, while Verna Pungitore (1995) presented the development of standardization of library planning policies in contemporary America. For the past several decades, however, the study of diffusion in libraries has tended to focus on the implementation of information technologies (e.g., Clayton, 1997; Tran, 2005; White, 2001) and their associated competencies (e.g., Marshall, 1990; Wildemuth, 1992), the improvements in performance associated with their use (e.g., Damanpour, 1985, 1988; Damanpour & Evan, 1984), and ways to manage resistance to technological changes within the library environment (e.g., Weiner, 2003).

The chapter is a personal opinion piece designed to provoke thought and discussion.

It reviews the ways in which libraries have responded to technological change over the last 50 years.

The focus is very much on higher education libraries, however the conclusions also have general applicability. The chapter concludes that libraries have to rethink their approach to services and accept a cultural change which embeds them as part of an information flow rather than a filter for the organisation and encourages them to focus much more on integration with corporate mission. There are real implications for the practice of libraries and for a rethinking of their social value and nature.

The chapter synthesises many strands of thought and the practical recommendations for change are of undoubted value to the reader.

Since the advent of the digital campus, numerous changes have occurred. In early developments, we were able to improve efficiencies and eliminate the need for human intervention to conduct routine activities. The power of processing massive amounts of data moved from mainframes to desktops and mobile computers. The transition to a ubiquitous computing environment was a relatively quick transition and one that has had a profound impact on the work we do and the way we do it. The presence of information technology has actually transformed the teaching, learning, and administrative environment in post-secondary education world-wide.

In order to sustain our argument that a blending of visual sociology and the sociology of development can be productive and politically engaged, we need to locate the debate in the wider developmental context into which sociological interventions can be made. As this chapter will demonstrate, popular understandings of development, mostly mediated by visual imagery, reflect a rapidly changing development industry, as well as affording significant social theoretical insights. Thus, we need to briefly consider some of the key features of the development landscape, and the ways in which sociologists might engage in this, particularly in the context of the globalisation of development; the ways in which processes of globalisation are transforming the actors and agents involved in development, the roots of development authority and legitimacy and the changing ways in which development is defined and understood. This already hints at an important link with the visual; “development” must be understood as being linked to the same processes and relationships which underpin a world increasingly shaped by the visual image.