Time,Space, and Memories

ABSTRACT

This article traces the ways that gendered and generational family practices were remembered across time in the context of working-class homes in Victorian Britain. Two everyday domestic objects—the father's chair and the grandfather clock—are examined and analyzed, drawing on John Gillis' work on ritualized family spaces and contested notions of time (Gillis 1996). Both these objects resonate with the contested use of domestic space and the layered meanings of family time in working-class lives, not least because both are often remembered in autobiographical accounts of home and family. The special place of the father's chair highlighted the feminizing of the home and accompanying development of rituals to welcome and ensconce the father in his domestic domain each day. The sound of clocks underpinned the bringing together of industrial time, separating leisure and work for those at school or employment away from home, and at the same time conveying the cyclical nature of family life and its everyday routines from day to day, year to year, and generation to generation. Memories of chairs and clocks embedded in autobiographies offer important evidence about the images, sounds, and sensory experiences that resonated most powerfully when remembering and composing the hierarchies and tensions of working-class family life.     

‘No Power on Earth can Remove his Liability’: Emperor Haile Selassie and the Foreign Office,a Documentary Essay

Using the newly released unregistered files of the Foreign Office Permanent Under Secretary's Department (PUSD) Macklin's documentary article examines an interesting, if somewhat arcane, ‘missing dimension’ in the history of Abyssinian Emperor Ras Tafari Makonnen, more commonly known as Haile Selassie, and his covert financial relationship with the British government following his exile to Britain in 1936 after the conquest of his country by Mussolini's Fascists, until his return in 1941. By examining how the Foreign Office employed covert politics in order to obviate disruption to its ‘official’ diplomatic strategy Macklin examines how the British government set about ‘neutralising’ the Emperor's diplomatically awkward presence in England in their pursuit of rapprochement with Mussolini through which to drive a wedge between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.     

Hugh George Brennan: Glasgow University’s First Lecturer in Russian

To date little has been known, and less written, about the life of Hugh George Brennan, Glasgow University's first lecturer in Russian. The uncovering of previously unused Russian and British sources throwing fresh light on his life, intellectual development and occupations has made possible a fuller assessment of a significant figure in Glasgow's contribution to Slavonic Studies. Brennan lived and taught in Russia for 20 years. The resulting intense and unusually intimate experience of Russian life probably explains unconventional aspects of his Glasgow appointment. Brennan was an undoubted educational and social success in Russia. Events in the shape of the February Revolution of 1917 forced him to return to Britain. Glasgow's timely offer of a new position was the start of a very different life. This aspect of Brennan's career is reviewed mainly through his commitment to extensive public activities.     

Joseph Mainzer (1801–1851) and the Popularisation of Choral Singing in Britain

Singing master Joseph Mainzer came to England in 1841 as a political refugee from Germany. Through his music schools, his textbook Singing for the Million, and his journal Mainzer's Musical Times (today The Musical Times) he contributed significantly to the popularisation of choral singing in Britain. This essay takes Mainzer's political background as a starting point to investigate the complex relationship between refuge and artistic production. It is argued that the latter was deeply informed by the former. Mainzer not only transferred choral traditions but also a politicised concept of popular culture which started to take hold in pre-revolutionary Vormärz-Germany. The case study is integrated into the larger framework of Anglo-German cultural relations and political refuge in mid-nineteenth century Britain.     

New bottles for new wine: Julian Huxley,biology and sociology in Britain

Although sociologists in Britain have debated the nature of their field's relationship with biology since the late nineteenth century, interest in the full range of responses has only grown in recent years. This paper contributes to the spirit of historical revisionism by turning to the work of the biologist and first director of UNESCO, Julian Huxley (1887–1975). Paying particular attention to the doctrine he called ‘scientific humanism’ and his ideas about a biosocial agenda separate from the priorities of biology itself, the paper uses historical tools to address a concern that has frequently cast a shadow over debates about biosocial science: does it interfere with the progressive agenda sociologists have traditionally seen themselves as contributing to? The paper argues that Huxley's work is evidence that biosocial science is compatible with progressive goals and that recent developments in biology mean it may be the ideal time to reconsider long-standing attitudes.     

Child abuse,child protection and disabled children: a review of recent research

This paper reports the results of a scoping study that reviewed research about child abuse, child protection and disabled children published in academic journals between 1996 and 2009. The review was conducted using a five stage method for scoping studies. Several studies have revealed a strong association between disability and child maltreatment, indicating that disabled children are significantly more likely to experience abuse than their non‐disabled peers. Those with particular impairments are at increased risk. There is evidence that the interaction of age, gender and/or socio‐cultural factors with impairment results in different patterns of abuse to those found among non‐disabled children although the reasons for this require further examination. It appears that therapeutic services and criminal justice systems often fail to take account of disabled children's needs and heightened vulnerability. In Britain, little is known about what happens to disabled children who have been abused and how well safeguarding services address their needs. Very few studies have sought disabled children's own accounts of abuse or safeguarding. Considerable development is required, at both policy and practice level, to ensure that disabled children's right to protection is upheld. The paper concludes by identifying a number of aspects of the topic requiring further investigation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

MILK BARS,STARBUCKS AND THE USES OF LITERACY

The starting point for this article is the passage on ‘The Juke-Box Boys’ in Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy. This passage is often cited as evidence of Hoggart's residual, Leavisite suspicion of mass culture and his nostalgia for more ‘authentic’ working-class culture. This article moves beyond this critique by discussing Hoggart's account in relation to the broader historical shifts signalled by the development of milk and coffee bars in postwar Britain, and their more recent replacement by corporate fast-food and coffee chains. It argues that Hoggart's critique was not simply a knee-jerk fear of the new; it fed into more widespread anxieties which long predate the media invention of the ‘teenager’ or the emergence of organized youth subcultures. These anxieties were not simply about mass culture and Americanization, but also about cultural literacy, class, the relationship between the public and private sphere, and the losses and gains of rising affluence – concerns that have been increasingly submerged in post-Thatcherite political culture.     

Do ‘his’ education and class matter? The changing effect of the husband on women's labour‐market transitions in Italy and Britain

A new stream of sociological and demographic theory emphasizes individualization as the key process in late modernity. As maintained by Hakim ( 2000 ), women also have increasingly become agents of their own biographies, less influenced by the social class and the family. In this study, I intend to contribute to this debate by analysing how, in Italy and Britain, women's movements between employment and housework are linked to their husband's education and class, and how this link has changed across cohorts. Using discrete‐time event‐history modelling on the BHPS and ILFI, my findings show that in both countries, if the woman's educational and labour‐market profile is controlled for, the husband's occupation and education have lost importance. Yet, although based more on ‘her’ than ‘his’ profile, divisions along ‘classic’ lines are still evident and not context‐free, and they assume different forms in the two countries with distinctive institutional and cultural settings. In ‘liberal’ Britain, women's labour‐market participation responds more to motherhood and class than to education, while in ‘familistic’ Italy education seems more important, which suggests the existence of returns over and above strictly human capital/economic ones.     

Reactions to Motivational Accounts of Child Molesters

This study examined reactions to child molesters' accounts for their deviant behavior. Subjects (probation officers, therapists) rated various explanations for a man sexually touching his step-daughter. The results showed that almost all subjects changed their perceptions of an offender's culpability based on the accounts provided. The results suggest that authorities are most likely to be sympathetic to accounts that are perceived as credible and that minimize the offenders' responsibility for their offenses. Implications for the assessment and treatment of child molesters' "cognitive distortions" are discussed.     

Scoring Ecstasy: MDMA,Consumerism and Spirituality in the Early Fiction of Irvine Welsh

Ecstasy (MDMA) is a drug whose short-term dangers have been demonstrated by a number of deaths, and whose long-term effects are still unknown. It is also illegal. Nevertheless, people continue to take it. This essay aims to address the question of why they do so. I argue that MDMA's ability to enhance communication and offer people a version of religious ritual means that the drug has the potential, at least, to modify subjectivity and intersubjective relationships. In particular, I study how one contemporary novelist and commentator on the club/rave scene, Irvine Welsh, explores this potential in his work. I focus mainly on his novel Marabou Stork Nightmares, the novella “The Undefeated” (from the collection Ecstasy) and the title story of the collection The Acid House. I am especially concerned with how Welsh reads MDMA's problematic relationships to consumer capitalism and to the ecstatic or otherworldly states that are loosely described by his characters as “spirituality.” I also address Welsh's accounts of LSD experience in the same stories in order to show how he situates the identity of the drug user as poised between the sense of self-affirmation and empathy offered by MDMA and the sense of self-annihilation (via an encounter with subjectless language, or Foucault's “thought of the outside”) offered by the LSD experience. I argue that the reason for this bipolar construction of subjectivity in Welsh's work is his wish to explore the drug-using subject's conflicting relationship to consumerism, which offers neither selfaffirmation nor self-annihilation, but a merely passive relation to experience, in which the subject's task is to absorb (consume) images and material goods. I will suggest that in playing out these conflicts, Welsh's stories show how the literary and philosophical tradition linking drug use and mysticism refuses to die; in effect, his work revitalizes the ideas of de Quincey, Huxley, Leary and others, reshaping them for the consumerist age while never being uncritical of house culture or the illicit drug scene. Like Derrida in “The Rhetoric of Drugs”, Welsh seeks a position on the issue that avoids the oversimplifications of much pro- and anti-drug rhetoric. Welsh's work is as much about consumerism and spirituality as about drugs, and his exploration of the subject positions of MDMA users is bound up with a dual critique of late capitalism and house culture that exposes the problematic connexions between them. His work shows, for instance, that Ecstasy does not offer an escape from the cash nexus: it is, is in many ways, just another consumer product tied to the leisure industry. While Ecstasy can initiate a new spiritual awareness in some users, this is best sustained by distancing oneself from the “chaos” of hedonistic excess and reducing the frequency of MDMA use. I conclude that Welsh is not so much an apologist for dangerous illegal drugs as an intelligent critic of consumerism.     

Editor's Choice: An Interview with Hans Joas

The interview explores multiple aspects of social theory, most of them directly related to Joas's theory and others to symbolic interactionism and Goffman. The first part delves into Joas's theory in three respects. First, a clarifying note on a common misunderstanding about his book The Creativity of Action. Second, a clarification on the scope of his theoretical endeavor, and third, a look into his coming books to have a better grasp of the course that his theory is taking. The second part is dedicated to symbolic interactionism and Goffman. Firstly, Joas's opinion about the theoretical relationship between symbolic interactionism and macrosociology is emphasized, secondly, his opinion about the pertinence of locating Goffman within symbolic interactionism is stated, and thirdly, a brief commentary about the relationship between Joas's theory and Goffman's is introduced.     

Salvete et Valete: On Saying Goodbye to a Deceased Former Parent*

Following Bowen's lead, a number of family therapists have shared accounts of their efforts at defining themselves in their families-of-origin. Some reports have been anecdotal in form, while others have been research oriented, with considerable theoretical exposition as to strategy and tactics. This report is neither. With a style more akin to that of the memoir, the paper deals with contacts between the writer and his family-of-origin over many years, the death of the writer's father providing the initial impetus.     

Alternative approaches to researching social capital: A comment on van Deth's measuring social capital

This paper responds to van Deth's overview of empirical research on social capital and the difficulties of measuring the concept. We entirely agree with many of the problems that he identifies with the dominant mode of enquiry to date: namely survey and polling methods of attitudinal data. We are sure there are ways of improving on such quantitative methods although we are of the view that qualitative research is especially helpful for exploring the processes of social capital formation and the relationship between networks and norms so crucial to Putnam's use of the concept. Briefly, we discuss our own qualititive work involving intensive interviews with 120 activists drawn from a Citizens Audit of Britain. We address the importance of pre-existing trust and informal processes of mobilization, the significance of experiences of group involvement for generating norms of trust as well as distrust and the extent to which evaluations of such experiences influence wider views of participation and democracy in Britain. In sum, we totally endorse van Deth's call for the greater use of 'multi-methods and multi-level srategies' in empirical research by extending his plea to consider the valuable role of qualitative methods in the study of social capital.     

Rethinking industrial citizenship: the role and meaning of work in an age of austerity

T. H. Marshall in his famous tract Citizenship and Social Class wrote briefly about what he called ‘industrial citizenship’, a type of belonging rooted in the workplace. Here Marshall's ideas are developed alongside a consideration of Durkheim's Professional Ethics and Civic Morals together with research material from the Guinness Company. It shows the way the Company actively sought to create ‘Guinness citizenship’ within its London brewery. The article draws out the ways in which the significance and potential of work based citizenship for ameliorating the ills of industrial society are clearly articulated in mid‐twentieth century Britain and echo earlier neglected Durkheimian sociological ideas on work. These ideas have real potential to inform contemporary academic and policy debates about the nature of capitalism and the form and content of work now and in the future.     

Eyes on the Prize: Journeys in Slave Ships Taken as Prizes by the Royal Navy

Eyewitness accounts of voyages in slave ships seized as prizes during the Royal Navy's anti-slave-trade patrols were an important source of information and subject of discussion for abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century. In a close reading of the chaplain Rev. Pascoe Grenfell Hill's Fifty Days on Board a Slave-Vessel in the Mozambique Channel (1844), this essay assesses representations of slave-ship prize journeys, and responses to these representations in Britain. It argues that because voyages of this kind provided uncomfortable reminders of the shortcomings of abolitionist policies, they were not readily incorporated into the dominant narrative that glorified Britain's antislavery movement.     

William Blake and America: Freedom and Violence in the Atlantic World

Abstract

In this article, I consider the absence of a general readership of William Blake's poetry in nineteenth-century Britain and compare that neglect to the American Transcendentalists' reading of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) in the 1840s. The American interest in Blake's poetry is complemented by his fascination with the events in the Atlantic World in the years culminating in the American War of Independence. I will offer a reading of Blake's America: a Prophecy (1793) showing that the Civil War fulfilled his prophecy of inevitable future conflict. This is developed first by considering Ralph Waldo Emerson's changing responses to slavery and race during the turbulent middle decades of the century, and then by addressing Walt Whitman's attempt to negotiate postbellum America. This negotiation, I argue, results in the emergence of those two powerfully conflicting strains in his mature poetry: emancipatory fervour and simultaneous despair at the violence intrinsic in liberty.     

THE CONCEPT OF COMPETITION IN ROBERT PARK'S SOCIOLOGY*

This article examines Robert Park's concept of competition and the way in which it appears in his analysis of civilization and social change. Conventional interpretations of his writings have tended to emphasize that he radically separated presocial, ecological processes from interaction based on communication. Although Park does attempt such a separation, I argue that his thoughts on social change reflect an ambivalence about the relative degree of autonomy of social and cultural processes. Consequently, Park's evaluation of these processes reflects the judgment that contemporary forms of competition are instrumental for societal progress.     

Robert W. Cox and the Idea of History: Political Economy as Philosophy

Abstract

Within the discipline of international political economy (IPE), the work of Robert Cox is usually associated with the tradition of historical materialism, especially its Gramscian-inspired version. In this paper, however, I explore some of the less visible elements of Cox's thought. In particular, I highlight a variant of historicism which, although not without a connection to Gramsci's conception of the philosophy of praxis and absolute historicism, is more fully aligned with the work of Collingwood, Vico, Braudel, and Carr. I identify this as a variant of historical idealism, and I suggest that it is this element of his thought which provides a deep intellectual coherence to his work across the different stages of his career. Furthermore, I argue that this use of the idea of history distinguishes Cox's approach from more radical and constructivist accounts of world order, and allows him to connect his framework of historical structures to his method of diachronic change, which centres ultimately on his conception of intersubjectivity. I close by suggesting that Cox's interest in civilizations is deeply connected to these formative historicist influences, which in turn helps to account for why his later work resonates less well with much contemporary historical materialist IPE analysis.     

ACCOUNTING FOR COMPLEMENTARY SKILL SETS: EVALUATING INDIVIDUAL MARGINAL VALUE TO A TEAM IN THE NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

Identifying an individual worker's contribution to firm production can be difficult in a team setting where spillovers in labor productivity exist among team members. This paper studies a model of labor productivity where workers have heterogeneous abilities, and can differently affect the productivity of their fellow teammates. Applying the model to the setting of the National Basketball Association (NBA), I can identify the marginal value that a basketball player brings to a particular team lineup, both through his own individual contributions and his complementary contribution to teammates' productivity. Estimates from the model imply that teammates have a significant impact on individual player productivity, and that taking into account spillovers across teammates is important to assessing both overall team productivity and an individual player's contribution to team productivity. I then evaluate whether player complementarities are valued in the NBA labor market in terms of higher salaries, and find that they are undervalued, and that players are instead paid mainly for their individual offensive production. This creates an asymmetry between player incentives and the team objective. To assess the size of this inefficiency, the top trading cycle algorithm of Shapley and Scarf (1974) is used to identify a Pareto optimal matching between players and teams, that accounts for the complementarities between heterogeneous players' skill sets. (JEL J30, L25, L83, M51)     

Peter Kireevskii and the Development of Moscow Slavophilism

Abstract

Although the name of the folklorist Peter Kireevskii is well known to historians of nineteenth-century Russia, comparatively little has been written about his place within the Slavophile circle. Some scholars have treated him as the 'first' Slavophile. Others have questioned whether his views were in any sense really Slavophile at all. This article argues that Peter Kireevskii's life-long interest in Russian folklore was rooted both in his understanding of the Russian countryside and his exposure to the influence of a Russian Romantic tradition that viewed the narod as the authentic representative of national identity. It suggests that Kireevskii was from his youth convinced that Russia possessed a culture and history that was equal in value to any country in the West, but that it was only in the late 1830s that he stressed the role played by Orthodoxy in shaping Russia's development. Although his mature views brought him closer to the Slavophile 'mainstream', there were always some elements that set him apart, perhaps reflecting the fact that Slavophilism was a more eclectic and diverse phenomenon than sometimes realized.