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Scepticism about organizations has become an integral part of the field organizational theory. This article aspires to develop through historical analysis a taxonomy of organizational scepticism. Though scepticism of all types have generic traits, there are three distinct types of scepticism: premodern, modern and postmodern scepticism. Premodern scepticism attacks the modern organizational by stressing concepts grounded in nature and tradition. Modern sceptics attack the optimism of managerialism about organizations. Postmodern sceptics stress that technological developments, economic self interest, and irrationality will be the eventual undoing of modern organization. Organizational scepticism is now so pervasive that it should be treated as an integral part of the field.

This study aims to discern medieval information literacy (IL) practices through scrutiny of medieval manuscripts: both the content and the “marks of usage” evident therein.

Analysis of the writing of scribes. Engagement with selected primary texts (manuscripts) and prior scholarly investigations.

Ample evidence exists of the practice of IL in the medieval era, and how it was transmitted and negotiated across time and space. Popular guides for scholars, including Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalicon, and the marks of usage left on manuscripts by readers/scribes, are evidence of how members of scholarly communities engaged in collaborative metacognitive work, helping each other with tasks such as understanding the ordinatio (organisation) of texts; cross-referencing; locating information; and making judgments about relevance, amongst others. New practices were stimulated by key historical transitions, particularly the shift from ecclesiastical to secular settings for learning.

This is a preliminary study only, intended to lay foundations and suggest directions for more detailed future investigations of primary texts. The scope is Eurocentric, and similar work might be undertaken with the records of practice available elsewhere, e.g. the Arab world, South and East Asia.

Some previous work (e.g. Long, 2017) has investigated medieval scholarly communities by retrospectively applying notions from practice theory, but no prior work has specifically focused upon IL as the practice under investigation.

Reflecting on the forces that produced the first universities 800 years ago provokes consideration of today's universities at the start of the new millennium. The paper complements Snyder's critique by suggesting that higher education engage in an exacting review of its most cherished assumptions, from the categorical definitions of disciplines to the fundamental structure of its pedagogy.

Comparative historical research fuels a conceptual examination of the university today. It adopts Snyder's view that higher education is currently adrift in fulfilling its academic mission and sustaining itself in a competitive environment. This approach yields a much more dramatic range of future plausibilities for contemporary universities than do more conventional extrapolations.

Rearranging schools and departments will not solve its problems, nor will it make much of a contribution to the state of the world. But digging deep into the wellsprings of knowledge, learning, and wisdom, and engaging in the great work of harmonizing the university with the emerging needs of its era and the concomitant forces of social change, can only energize the culture of higher education.

The article has important implications for strategic planning in higher education. It argues that universities will become increasingly irrelevant if they fail to recapture the spirit of exuberance, intellectual discovery, and social relevance evidenced by the earliest universities. This can be achieved by reassessing the university's mission and social role, utilizing technology to accelerate the learning process, and rethinking disciplinary definitions to reflect the explosive growth of knowledge and changes in methodologies in virtually every academic field. The most enduring transformation will begin with a dramatic shift in program content and pedagogy rather than reliance upon organizational restructuring.

A historically‐grounded vision of the university's current creative potential establishes a reference frame that bestows the freedom to transcend linearly progressed trends. The university can then be re‐imagined as a vital transformative and healing institution uniquely suited to its mission in an era rife with anxiety, uncertainty, and risk.

This chapter uses a dataset of heights calculated from the femurs of skeletal remains to explore the development of stature in England across the last two millennia. We find that heights increased during the Roman period and then steadily fell during the “Dark Ages” in the early medieval period. At the turn of the first millennium, heights grew rapidly, but after 1200 they started to decline coinciding with the agricultural depression, the Great Famine, and the Black Death. Then they recovered to reach a plateau which they maintained for almost 300 years, before falling on the eve of industrialization. The data show that average heights in England in the early nineteenth century were comparable to those in Roman times, and that average heights reported between 1400 and 1700 were similar to those of the twentieth century. This chapter also discusses the association of heights across time with some potential determinants and correlates (real wages, inequality, food supply, climate change, and expectation of life), showing that in the long run heights change with these variables, and that in certain periods, notably the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the associations are observable over the shorter run as well. We also examine potential biases surrounding the use of skeletal remains.

Estimates are developed of the major macroeconomic aggregates – wages, land rents, interest rates, prices, factor shares, sectoral shares in output and employment, and real wages – for England by decade between 1209 and 2008. The efficiency of the economy in the years 1209–2008 is also estimated. One finding is that the growth of real wages in the Industrial Revolution era and beyond was faster than the growth of output per person. Indeed until recently the greatest recipient of modern growth in England has been unskilled workers. The data also create a number of puzzles, the principal one being the very high levels of output and efficiency estimated for England in the medieval era. These data are thus inconsistent with the general notion that there was a period of Smithian growth between 1300 and 1800 which preceded the Industrial Revolution, as expressed in such recent works as De Vries (2008).

Officially, of course, the world is now post-imperial. The Q’ing and Ottoman empires fell on the eve of World War I, and the last Leviathans of Europe's imperial past, the Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist empires, lumbered into the grave soon after. Tocsins of liberation were sounded on all sides, in the name of democracy (Wilson) and socialism (Lenin). Later attempts to remake and proclaim empires – above all, Hitler's annunciation of a “Third Reich” – now seem surreal, aberrant, and dystopian. The Soviet Union, the heir to the Tsarist empire, found it prudent to call itself a “federation of socialist republics.” Mao's China followed suit. Now, only a truly perverse, contrarian regime would fail to deploy the rhetoric of democracy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the development of marketing practice in Britain from the ancient to the early twentieth century. It builds upon the author’s chapter in the 2016 Routledge Companion to the History of Marketing.

This paper is based on a review of secondary history and archaeology literature supplemented by digitised historic newspaper and magazine advertising. The literature is frameworked using a modified version of Fullerton’s 1988 periodization which has been extended to include the medieval and Roman eras.

One of the significant findings of this paper is the key role the state has played in the development of marketing practice in Britain, the construction of pavements being a good example.

Apart from Nevett’s 1982 history of British advertising and the author’s Routledge Companion to the History of Marketing chapter, this is the first survey of the historical development of British marketing practice. It assembles and presents in a useful way important information. This paper will be of interest to marketing historians, especially students and researchers new to the subject.