‘Unfinished work and damaged materials’: historians and the Scots in the Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania (1569–1795)

The burgeoning of a historiography of the Scots in Poland–Lithuania has been hindered by either the unavailability to scholars of, or their unwillingness to tackle, secondary sources in the relevant foreign languages. Despite this ethnic group having comprised, at one time, the largest representation of the Scottish diaspora in a foreign state, this article demonstrates that, since Poland–Lithuania’s partition, historiographical coverage has been compartmentalised along linguistic and national lines. The article is tripartite, outlining work in the German, Polish and English languages, albeit highlighting the detrimental effects caused, until recently, by the frequent isolation of these, and other linguistic traditions of historiographical significance, from one another.     

The Work of the Russian Liberation Committee in London, 1919–1924

Abstract

The Russian Liberation Committee was one of the most active of the Russian émigré organizations operating in London in the period following the Russian Revolution. It acted as a clearing house for news on the Russian civil war, receiving telegrams from each of the fronts and distributing them to the British press. It also produced a variety of publications of its own, for distribution to the public, government officials and to soldiers in Russia. In this article, the Committee's work and publications are examined for the light they shed on anti-Bolshevik propaganda in Britain, and on the sources of information on the civil war available to the British press. While the Committee's efforts could not alter the pragmatic policy of the British government or the already anti-Bolshevik attitude of the British press, their presence made an important difference to the amount and kind of information that was available in Britain during the course of the Russian civil war.     

Parental religiosity and daughters’ fertility: the case of Catholics in southern Europe

Preferences, including preferences for children, are shaped during the formative years of childhood. It is therefore essential to include exposure to religious practice during childhood in an attempt to establish a link between religiosity and fertility. This path has not been explored in the documented literature that looks at the relationship between current religiosity and fertility. The International Social Survey Programme: Religion II (ISSP) provides the data base. It includes information on maternal/paternal/own mass participation when the respondent was a child (nine levels each), as well as on his current churchgoing (six levels) and prayer habits (eleven levels). These variables are included as explanatory variables in ‘fertility equations’ that explain the number of children of Catholic women in Spain and Italy. The core findings are that exposure to religiosity during the formative years of childhood, has a pronounced effect on women’s ‘taste for children’ that later on translates into the number of her offspring. In Spain, the two parents have major opposite effects on women. Most striking is the negative effect of the mother’s intensity of church attendance on her daughter’s fertility: Women who were raised by an intensively practicing mother have on average one child less that their counterparts who were raised by a less religious mother. On the other hand, an intensively practicing father encourages the daughter to have more children (by about 0.8, on average). The Italian sample confirms the statistically significant negative effect of the mother’s religiosity. The father’s religious conduct has apparently no effect on Italian women’s birth rates. Current religiosity seems to be irrelevant, both in Spain and in Italy. It follows that religiosity and fertility are interrelated but the mechanism is probably different from the simplistic causality that is suggested in the literature.

The black community of Salford and Hull 1919–21

Although some attention has been paid to the collective violence which occurred in Liverpool and Cardiff in 1919 other examples of racial violence at that time have been relatively ignored. This study concentrates upon events in two other centres, Salford and Hull. Moreover, by taking a three‐year time span it is shown that such violence continued after 1919. In other words ‘the riots of 1919 were not simply isolated incidents to be touched upon by historians as a convenient way to round off the war period in the history of Blacks in Britain’ but evidence of a persistent anti‐Black sentiment in British society which, at times, in specific circumstances, spilled over into violence.     

Representing the interests of the public?: the case of the local health council in Scotland

The statutory function of local health councils in Scotland (and of community health councils in England and Wales) is to represent the interests of the public in the health service. This article, based on data from a four-year research project financed by the Scottish Office, examines official and participants' assumptions and claims about the legitimacy of health councils, as at present constituted, to carry out this function. Clarification of the basis of their legitimacy would assist, it is argued, in the resolution of a central dilemma: How are councils to represent the interests of the public? The conclusion is reached that inadequate thought was given to developing theoretically sustainable arrangements. Several interpretations of representation are admixed in the rationale for the present system and they cannot be aggregated to produce a coherent defence of it.     

Technological transfer: the case of Canadian involvement in the New Zealand dairy industry, 1880–1920

Although New Zealand's potential to become a major dairy exporting nation was recognised within the country by the 1890s, it was also acknowledged that a shortage of trained diary personnel was an obstacle to early achievement. In order to overcome this problem the government employed a number of Canadian and Danish dairy experts between 1890 and 1903. Three Dairy Industry Acts, passed in the 1890s, provided the necessary institutional support for development; and the overseas dairy specialists contributed to the necessary organisational, educational and technical improvements. Rising world prices, improved markets and an improvement in the quality of factory butter and cheese promoted rapid growth in New Zealand's exports of these products between 1896 and 1921. Probably the most important attribute that the four Canadians brought with them was their knowledge, training and practical experience in the dairy industry. As Commissioner or Director, a position that each was to hold, they were able to exercise leadership and influence the development. Finally, a more intangible contribution was suggested in a tribute to W.M. Singleton upon his retirement after more than forty years of New Zealand government service. That contribution was a philosophy which placed greater emphasis on instruction than inspection, and on co-operation than coercion. This educational and co-operative approach has been the hallmark of, and a major factor in, the success of the New Zealand dairy industry.     

The great transition: The dynamics of market transitions and the case of Russia, 1991–1995

Theory and Society -     

Post-Fordism,union strategy and the rhetoric of restructuring: The case of Australia, 1980–1996

Theory and Society -     

Risk management in public procurement for innovation: the case of Nordic–Baltic Sea cities

State support for innovation in enterprises has been long-standing. One of the specific support measures is public procurement for innovation, which has only recently re-emerged in academic discussion as well as in the European policy discourse. While the spillovers from this type of innovation policy measure may be substantial, the complex processes underlying the support for innovation through public procurement are associated with high risks. We take an exploratory approach to determine the state of practice of risk management in public procurement for innovation at the local level. Five case studies, which were selected as representative cases of the Nordic–Baltic Sea region in Europe, were analyzed. We found that the cities were, for the most part, actively involved in risk identification; the risks are primarily being met with mixed contracting strategies rather than comprehensive risk management tools.     

Collaboration in EU Framework Programmes – the case of the social sciences and humanities

The impact of the European Framework Programme (hereafter FP) projects is usually measured with reference to the possibilities offered for collaboration. In this research note we take a different perspective and explore the extent to which FPs have influenced the traditional performance of researchers and vice versa. The population reference for our study consists of the projects funded within the EU Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) between 2002 and 2006. Here, we have concentrated our analysis on the priority area of “citizens and governance in a knowledge-based society” (CIT).     

Making sources of energy: the case of coal (1900–1936)

Recent contributions to a sociological analysis of energy and society focus mostly on its political, economic and technological organization. Yet contrary to other parts of nature, little social scientific attention has been paid to how politics, economics and technology have come to produce and stabilize the concept of energy in the first place and how different natural materials were transformed into “sources of energy.” Drawing from insights of the sociology of comparison, quantification and commensuration, “energy” in this paper is conceived as a “statistical object,” around which a public discourse develops in which comparisons between resources are drawn. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, this discourse has been more and more stabilized by the regular, public production and ever tighter net of elements of comparison, the creation of a highly abstract, potentially quantified point of comparison, and the definition of various criteria tying the compared entities together with more general models and narratives. This theoretical framework is put into practice by an explorative analysis of coal classification in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In this empirical analysis, three fields are identified where coals were “made the same”: engineering, economics and resource statistics. It is shown that the “calorific value” plays an important role for classification in all three fields and, furthermore, constitutes a measure that links coal to other fuels.     

Historiography and transformation of ethnic identity in the Mongol Empire: the Öng’üt case

Throughout their history, Inner Asian empires used familiar imperial institutions to rapidly impose new ethnic designations and their attendant languages, such as ‘Türk’ or ‘Mongol’, on their subjects. The swiftness of this integration into new ethnic designations should not be taken to mean that this integration was painless, however. In the well-documented Mongol empire, for example, this incorporation was extremely traumatic for many Inner Asian ethnic groups, even where the subordinate local elites achieved high status in the new regime. This may be seen in the case of the Öng’üt, a Christian Turkic-speaking people of Inner Mongolia whose rulers then became key marriage partners of the Mongol aristocracy. Successive iterations of the origin story of the Öng’üt rulers show how these histories went through vast changes as they were forcibly incorporated into the new empire, and dealt with the internal conflicts sparked by that incorporation. Previously central parts of their historic past, such as Christianity and service as border guards to the previous Jin dynasty, had to be marginalized and a new historical past had to be created. Historiography thus reflected and shaped changes in ethnic identity in a traumatic dynastic transition.     

Rural young people in regional development—the case of Finland in 1970–2000

In view of the crucial role of young people in society, especially as far as the future of sparsely populated rural areas is concerned, an analysis is made of absolute and relative changes in the 15–24-year age cohort in Finland and their effects on demographic and regional structure, employing GIS methods. The main material for this consists of georeferenced population data based on 1×1 km grid squares produced by Statistics Finland for the period 1970–2000. An example is taken of one rural municipality where the georeferenced data were supplemented with qualitative interview material obtained in 1999. The results show that the number and proportion of young people in the population of Finland have declined since 1970, although not consistently, at the same time as the total population has continued to increase. The dichotomy between the sparsely populated rural areas and the built-up areas has been accentuated by a distortion of the population structure and gender ratio, in that the young people, and particularly young women, have been inclined to move into the growth centres and to the more densely populated areas in general. The georeferenced data clearly point to a worsening regional imbalance in the areal distribution of population in Finland, although the interview material suggests that the young people still living in the countryside do not regard their position as hopeless but are prepared to weigh up their future on the basis of the alternatives open to them.     

Cracks in a policy paradigm – poverty reduction and social security: the case of Belgium

Poverty reduction rests on the mechanisms of horizontal and vertical solidarity and on prevention and repair of social risks. In this contribution, we argue that in contemporary welfare states the poverty-reducing capacity of existing social security systems has inherent limitations. Focusing on Belgium, we present and discuss empirical indications of a persistent (over a period of at least 30 years) decline in poverty reduction through social transfers, particularly among households who are highly dependent on such transfers. Firstly, we show that prevention and repair have failed to contribute to a reduction in the proportion of work-poor households who are highly dependent upon social security and face a high (rising even) poverty risk. Secondly, we find that given the fragmentation of social risks – in terms of both ex post poverty outcomes and ex ante social stratification – horizontal redistributive mechanisms through risk pooling have become less obvious, especially in respect of unemployment. Thirdly, it appears that the mechanisms of vertical solidarity also face inherent limitations. In a final section we summarise some important research questions for the future and potentially worthwhile policy avenues to resolve the question of how social policy-making might succeed in the future where it has failed in the past.     

Interlocks in the Netherlands: Stability and careers in the period 1960–1980

The article is oriented towards the dynamics behind the network of interlocking directorates. In the interorganizational perspective the stability of different types of interlocks/lines between corporations is of strategic importance; in the intraclass perspective, the carriers of persons. The article therefore analyzes both. It shows that particularly primary interlocks (interlocks between the corporation in which the multiple director has an inside position and the other corporations in which he has outside positions) as well as multiple interlocks between corporations are considerably more stable than other interlocks. They are most likely being used for interorganizational purposes. Most of the interlocks however are generated by a very specific career pattern in which an executive position in a large corporation is almost a prerequisite to obtain many directorships.     

Ergonomics and usability of children interfaces: Spore®, the case study

This study supports itself in ergonomic concepts and usability criteria by prioritizing the identification and correction of problems found during the interaction of children with projected interfaces for them and left from the cognitive, interactional and interfacial difficulties caused by the excesses of color, elements and animation in sites and games, between them the difficulty of recognition of the information during the interaction with the elements of grid of the interface. The results of the methodology had proven that 78.38% of the 37 children got so absorbed by the game and forgot to fulfill their tasks, at least partially, and that the application of the supported ergonomic beddings in usability criteria is imperative. It is relevant to point out that the projetual activity of the game is centered in the user, the child, whose behavior is distinct and particular. Points that had been disclosed that had passed unobserved by the involved adults in this project, and that they had displayed the unappropriateness of some screens of the Spore? to the etária band due to the ambiguity of the game, besides, the children had been sensible to the clarity in some screens and had passed for unnecessary situations of stress.