Search results

Aims to examine the issue of industrial strategy (IS), paying particular attention to the case of Britain. Sets out to assess the possibility and nature of an industrial strategy for Britain, in Europe, and within the global scene, taking into account the world we live in as we see it. Accordingly, the perspective is driven and shaped by a quest for a realistic, feasible and sustainable industrial strategy. In order to achieve these objectives, first examines the theoretical arguments behind much of British, and more generally, Western industrial policies. Following this, outlines and assesses British industrial policy post‐Second World War then compares and contrasts British industrial policy with that of Europe, the USA, Japan and the newly industrialized countries. Then examines recent developments in economics and management which may explain the “Far Eastern” miracle, and points to the possibility of a successful, narrowly self‐interested, IS for Europe and Britain, based on the lessons from (new) theory and international experience. To assess what is possible, develops a theoretical framework linking firms in their roles as consumers and/or electors. This hints at the possibilities and limits of feasible policies. All these ignore desirability which, in the author′s view, should be seen in terms of distributional considerations, themselves contributors to sustainability. Accordingly, discusses a desirable industrial strategy for Britain in Europe which accounts for distributional considerations, and goes on to examine its implications for the issue of North‐South convergence. Concludes by pointing to the limitations of the analysis and to directions for developments.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the risks of building defects associated with rapid advancement of “green” construction technologies. It identifies the methods adopted by the sector for the determination of pre-construction defects that are framed within the context of, traditional; scientific; and professional design approaches. These are critically evaluated and utilised in attempts to mitigate defects arising from diffusing low carbon construction innovations.

The paper takes the form of an evaluative literature review. Polemic in orientation, the paper critically compares two periods of time associated with rapid advancement of innovation. The first, the post-Second World War housing boom is synonymous with a legacy of substandard buildings that in many cases rapidly deteriorated, requiring refurbishment or demolition shortly after construction. The second, is today’s “green” technology “shift” with its inherent uncertainty and increased risk of latent building defects and potential failure to deliver meaningful long-term performance. Central to this is an exploration of the drivers for innovation, and subsequent response, precautionary measures initiated, and the limitations of institutionalised systems to identify and mitigate defects. Similarities and differences between these historical periods frame a discussion around the theoretical approaches to defects and how these may be limited in contemporary low carbon construction. A conceptual framework is presented with the aim of enhancing the understanding for obviation of defects.

Sufficient commonality exists between the periods to initiate a heightened vigilance in the identification, evaluation and ideally the obviation of defects. Design evaluation is not expressly or sufficiently defect focused. It appears that limited real change in the ability to identify defects has occurred since the post-war period and the ability to predict the performance of innovative systems and materials is therefore questionable. Attempts to appraise defects are still embedded in the three principle approaches: traditional; scientific; and professional design. Each of these systems have positive characteristics and address defect mitigation within constrains imposed by their very nature. However, they all fail to address the full spectrum of conditions and design and constructional complexities that lead to defects. The positive characteristics of each system need to be recognised and brought together in an holistic system that offers tangible advantages. Additionally, independent design professionals insufficiently emphasise the importance of defect identification and holistic evaluation of problems in design failure are influenced by their professional training and education. A silo-based mentality with fragmentation of professional responsibility debases the efficacy of defect identification, and failure to work in a meaningful, collaborative cross professional manner hinders the defect eradication process.

Whilst forming a meaningful contribution to stimulate debate, further investigation is required to tangibly establish integrated approaches to identify and obviate defects.

The structured discussion and conclusions highlight areas of concern for industry practitioners, policy makers, regulators, industry researchers and academic researchers alike in addressing and realising a low carbon construction future. The lessons learned are not limited to a UK context and they have relevance internationally, particularly where rapid and significant growth is coupled with a need for carbon reduction and sustainable development such as the emerging economies in China, Brazil and India.

The carbon cost associated with addressing the consequences of emerging defects over time significantly jeopardises attempts to meet legally binding sustainability targets. This is a relatively new dimension and compounds the traditional economic and societal impacts of building failure. Clearly, blindly accepting this as “the cost of innovation without development” cannot be countenanced.

Much research has been undertaken to evaluate post-construction defects. The protocols and inherent complexities associated with the determination of pre-construction defects have to date been largely neglected. This work attempts to rectify this situation.

Educational standards debates are a promising area of investigation for transnational study by historians of education. Drawing upon the work of Foucault, Kliebard, and Aldrich, the paper critically examines some of the outstanding features of the emerging debate over literacy and numeracy standards that sharply divided teachers, educational officials, parents, and employers in New Zealand during the mid-to-late 1950s. These included the polarisation of opinion across the nation, the involvement of the national media, and the tactics of mass persuasion adopted by the various protagonists.

The paper utilises contemporary theory to critically interrogate an historical episode in which controversy over literacy and numeracy standards in schools led first to an in-house report, and finally to a national inquiry. The paper draws upon contemporary newspaper commentary, professional journals and parliamentary debates, as well as a considerable amount of archival material held at Archives New Zealand repositories in both Wellington and Auckland.

The paper contributes to the field by illustrating the way in which historical debates over literacy and numeracy lie at the intersection of completing claims to truth. Behind such claims lie rival conceptions of education that make it unlikely that standards issues will ever be resolved satisfactorily. Hence the title of the paper, which refers to a jocular suggestion by a newspaper editor of the time that only an “August Assembly of Suave Venusians” could adjudicate in the debate.

The value of the paper is that it links current theories on transnationality with archival research in order to critically examine a national case study. Much of the primary source material has never been utilised previously for research as Archives New Zealand has only just released the relevant files for research purposes.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the increasingly congenial relationship between business and government that developed in the immediate post Second World War period. This study explores the subtle, but systematic, uses of advertising for propaganda purposes to secure American political and commercial world dominance. It locates the relationship between the US Government and the Advertising Council as key components in a strategy to blur the lines between political and commercial messages. In addition to study the relationship between the two stakeholders, the study identifies some of the implications for both.

Scholarship on the government’s postwar relationships with other organizations is relatively scant and few other scholars have focused on the advertising industry’s role in this transformation. This paper draws on trade periodicals and newspaper accounts, and relies on archival material from the Arthur W Page and the Thomas D’Arcy Brophy collections at the Wisconsin State Historical Society and the Advertising Council’s papers at the University of Illinois. Charles W. Jackson papers, located at the Harry S. Truman Library, and the papers of Office of War Mobilization and Re-conversion, deposited at the National Archives, have also been consulted.

The Advertising Council’s “Peace” and “World Trade and Travel” demonstrate an acceleration of collaboration between business and government that continued into the postwar era. It shows the government’s willingness to trade on the Advertising Council’s goodwill and to blur the lines between political and commercial messages, in what can accurately be characterized as a duplicitous manner. Key conclusion includes a willingness among Washington’s policymakers to propagandize its own citizens, a strategy that it commonly, and disparagingly, ascribed to the Soviet Union, and a Council so willing to appease Washington, that it was putting its own reputation at considerable risk.

This paper is based on a study of two campaigns (“Peace” and “World Trade and Travel”) that the Advertising Council conducted in collaboration with the US State Department. While these were the first campaigns of this nature, they were not the only ones. Additional studies of similar campaigns may add new insights.

Recent political events have brought propaganda and government collusion back on the public agenda. In an era of declining journalism credibility, rising social media and unprecedented government and commercial surveillance, it is argued that propaganda demands scholarly attention more than ever and that a historical study of how the US Government collaborated with private industry and used advertising as a propaganda smokescreen is particularly timely.

This study adds to the scholarship on advertising, PR and propaganda in several ways. First, it contributes to the understanding of the advertising industry’s important role in the planning of US international policy after the Second World War. Second, it demonstrates the increasingly congenial relationship between business and the US Government that emerged as a result. Third, it provides excellent insights into the Adverting Council’s transition from war to peacetime. The heavy reliance on archival material also brings originality and value to the study.

By deconstructing centres and peripheries in Australian history curricula, the purpose of this paper is to establish in what ways these documents blended local, state‐specific concepts of major civilisations with trans‐local, and even global cultural assumptions about centre and periphery in world history.

The paper identifies a specific idea of centres in the 2009 Shape of the Australian Curriculum published by the National Curriculum Board. It demanded that “[s]tudents should have an appreciation of the major civilisations of Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Australia”. The idea of five groups of “major civilisations” is used to frame an analysis of history curricula from Western Australia and New South Wales. Syllabi from these States are used as examples because they demonstrate oppositional positions, geographically and in their approach to history teaching. Only senior secondary syllabi exhibit a continuous development of the subject history in most Australian states and territories. Hence, the paper deconstructs history syllabi for Years 11 and 12 and discusses in what ways a discourse between centre and periphery can be identified.

The author proposes a concept of a global centre in history curricula, which is found in multifaceted expressions at the peripheries.

Fully acknowledging that syllabi emerge from a web of local influences, which include state‐specific social, political, economic, and administrative factors, the paper adds a global perspective to the understanding of Australian history curricula which draws on the idea of cultural power.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the conceptions of Chineseness and the perceptions of China in Ontario's High School History Curriculum from 1945 to the end of the 1980s.

The paper examines the syllabus and textbooks in the period that were taught in schools in Ontario. Curriculum guidelines and documents published by the Ontario Department (later Ministry) of Education were studied, as well as the Circular 14, which lists the approved textbooks from which the textbooks where chosen for this paper. The impact-response and tradition-modernity approaches to the study and writing of Chinese enabled the unpacking of the western-centric presuppositions in the textbooks.

From the onset, the Chinese history that was taught and presented was a western-centric one. The paper demonstrates that post Second World War Chinese history that was taught via the Ontario High School History Curriculum and textbooks reflected a view of Chineseness that regards the Chinese and the Chinese civilization was regarded as essentialized, backward and static vis-à-vis the modern West. Implicit in such a conception of Chineseness is that of western superiority over the Chinese civilization.

There have been few studies on how the history of Asia is represented in Canadian school history. Knowing how Chinese history is represented in Ontario High Schools is an interesting case study of how white settler societies viewed and understood China. This study also sheds light on the broader issue of the problematic at play when Asian history is taught and represented in other white settler societies like Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

Did the expansion of democratic institutions play a role in determining central government spending behavior in the 19th and 20th centuries? The link between democracy and increased central government spending is well established for the post-Second World War period, but has never been explored during the first “wave of democracy” and its subsequent reversal, that is 1870–1938. The main contribution of this paper is the compilation of a dataset covering 24 countries over this period to begin to address this question. Utilizing various descriptive techniques, including panel data regressions, we explore correlations between central government spending and the institutional characteristics of regimes. We find that the data are consistent with the hypothesis that democracies have a broader need for legitimization than autocracies as various measures of democracy are associated with higher central government spending. Our results indicate that the extension of franchise had a slight positive impact on central government spending levels, as did a few of the other democracy variables. We also find that early liberal democracies spent less and monarchies more than other regimes; debt increases spending; and participation in the Gold Standard reduced government spending substantially.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of formal religion in the early years of Outward Bound, a significant outdoor education organisation in Britain, from the 1940s to the 1960s.

This article is based on archival and other documentary research in various archives and libraries, mostly in the United Kingdom.

The article shows that religious “instruction” was a central feature of the outdoor education that Outward Bound provided. The nature and extent of this aspect of the training was a matter of considerable debate within the Outward Bound Trust and was influenced by older traditions of muscular Christianity as well as the specific context of the early post–Second World War period. However, the religious influences at the schools were marginalised by the 1960s; although formal Christian observances did not disappear, the emphasis shifted to the promotion of a vaguer spirituality associated with the idea that “the mountains speak for themselves”.

The article establishes the importance of organised Christianity and formal religious observances in the early years of Outward Bound, a feature which has generally been overlooked in the historical literature. It contributes to wider analyses of outdoor education, religious education and secularisation in the mid-twentieth century.

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.