Reviews

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324, translated by Barbara Bray (1978), xvii+383 (The Scolar Press, £12.50).

Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism. The Family, Property and Social Transition (Oxford, 1978), xvi+216 (Basil Blackwell. £8.50).

Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Ruling Class, Régime and Reformation at Strasbourg 1520–1555 (1978), xxi+458 (Brill, Leiden, 124 guilders).

Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (1978) x+250 (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, £10.75). Victor Skipp, Crisis and Development. An ecological case study of the Forest of Arden, 1570–1674 (1978) xii+132 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £6.50).

Patricia Branca, Women in Europe since 1750 (1978), 233 (Croom Helm, £8.95, paperback £3.95).

John W. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (1977), lxv+777 (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, paperback £7.50).

Jonas Frykman, Horaa i bondesamhället (1977), 230 (Liber Läromedel, Lund, 24 Sw. cr.). (The Whore in Peasant Society)

Helmut Bleiber (ed.), Bourgeoisie uad bürgerliche Umwälzuagin Deutschland 1789–1871 (Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR: Schriften des Institute für Geschichte, 50, 1977) xii+525 (Akademie‐Verlag, East Berlin, 48M). (Bourgeoisie and Bourgeois Upheaval in Germany 1789–1871)

A. P. Donajgrodzki (ed.), Social Control in Nineteenth‐Century Britain (1977)! 258 (Croom Helm, £8.50).

Anthony S. Wohl (ed.), The Victorian Family (1978), 224 (Croom Helm, £7.95).

M. J. Daunton, Coal Metropolis Cardiff 1870–1914 (1977), 260 (Leicester University Press, Leicester, £12.00).

W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714–1760 (1977), viii+311 (Edward Arnold, £9.95, paperback £3.50).

Howard Newby, The Deferential Worker: a study of farm workers in East Anglia (1977), 462 (Allen Lane, £9.00).

John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump: Society and Politics during the Depression (1977), 348 (Jonathan Cape, £8.95).     

In support of evidence-based management and research-informed HRD through HRD professional partnerships: an empirical and comparative study

This article describes a programme of practice-grounded empirical management research set within an NHS Trust Hospital in the UK that was conducted as part of an HRD Professional Partnership of the kind advocated by Jacobs (1997). The research was concerned with identifying the criteria of managerial effectiveness at the middle and front-line levels of management using critical incident technique and factor analytic methods. The results are compared against those from an equivalent partnership research study carried out previously by the author within one part of the British Civil Service, namely the Anglia Collection of HM Customs & Excise. The findings lend support to the notion of the 'universally effective manager', and provide empirical support for the potential development of evidence-based and research-informed approaches to management and human resource development within the case-study NHS Trust Hospital, and possibly beyond.     

Acting ethically,responding culturally: framing the new reproductive and genetic technologies in Sri Lanka

The spread of new reproductive and genetic technologies to the developing world stimulates reflection on the ethical issues they generate. The ‘built-in-ness’ of assumptions about personhood and relationality within these technologies means that local professionals must, perforce, engage with attempts to make sense of new technology with reference to local meanings and traditions or take positions which reject them. This paper explores such attempts to indigenise bioethics in contemporary Sri Lanka with reference to ethical/ cultural conflicts surrounding two practices: donor insemination and consanguinity counselling. The former is discussed in relation to the now defunct practice of polyandry and the latter in relation to matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. The final discussion takes up the consequences of this detailed parsing of local relationality for the larger project of rendering bioethics in some sense comparative.     

FERAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE ATLANTIS PROBLEM: THE 'HOAX' TRICK AS DISCURSIVE PATHOLOGY

This article uses a case study of a TV programme, Atlantis Uncovered, an archaeological programme debunking popular ideas of Atlantis and the ancient past, as an instance of a discursive paradox, or discursive pathology, in which defenders of traditional canons of scholarship (science and rationality) decide they must go feral, fighting fire with fire, using the illogical and irrational methods of thought they attribute to what they perceive as the enemies of reason in order to defeat them. The devices used in the archaeological programme are compared with the devices used in a more famous and influential ‘hoax’, Sokal's so-called ‘spoof’ of postmodernism published in the journal Social Text, used to discredit ‘postmodernism’ and cultural studies. The two episodes, with all their differences, suggest that whether these tactics are successful or not, they contradict the core beliefs in rationality and science of their protagonists, illustrating instead the ‘postmodern’ decline in intellectual values that they claim to deplore.     

Compounding the trauma: the coercive treatment of voice hearers

For more than a hundred years, voice hearing has been treated as a symptom of serious mental illnesses with biological origins. Pharmaceutical companies have expanded the range of products targeted at treating these illnesses and the diagnosis of schizophrenia now underpins a multi-billion dollar, world-wide business. Throughout the western world, nation states have vested an authority in psychiatry to compulsorily treat people who meet a set of diagnostic criteria that is widely discredited. There is considerable evidence that more effective ways of responding to people experiencing psychosis can be provided without coercion. These approaches differ in essence to traditional Kraepelinian psychiatry in that they acknowledge the role of people's life experiences in creating the problems they face, and the professionals work in partnership with the service users. The approaches recognise that people have histories which often include considerable trauma and social workers are in an ideal position to work with voice hearers to help them understand their experiences and to develop ways of coping. The authority vested in psychiatry is not static and within Europe mental health professionals can contribute to changing what is meant by ‘unsound mind’ and extending the right of liberty to voice hearers. In doing this, social workers can ensure that they do not compound the trauma by devaluing and discrediting people's experience.