Suchergebnisse

The four national associations studied in this book are the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS), the Royal Archaeological Institute (RAI) and the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE), who held annual meetings in 62 different provincial towns and cities from 1831 to 1884. In this book it is contended that these meetings were as important as royal visits and major civic ceremonies in providing towns with an opportunity to promote their own status and identity. By deploying a wealth of primary sour.

This article examines the efforts of one British steel company to acquire knowledge about American industrial productivity in the first post-World War II decade. It argues that company information-gathering initiatives in this period were overshadowed by the work of the formal productivity missions of the Marshall Plan era. In particular, it compares the activities of the Steel Company of Wales with the Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP), whose iron and steel industry productivity team report was published in 1952. Based on evidence from its business records, this study shows that the Steel Company of Wales was undertaking its own international productivity investigations, which started earlier and were more extensive and differently focused from those of the AACP. It makes the case for viewing companies as active participants in the gathering and dissemination of productivity knowledge in Britain's steel sector after 1945.

ABSTRACT:This article presents a case-study of 'parliaments of science' and their impact on towns in the south-west of England in the second half of the nineteenth century. These were the week-long annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and other national associations for different branches of knowledge which became a much publicized feature of the social and intellectual calendar of Victorian Britain. With particular reference to Exeter, it is argued that these events were used by towns and cities to assert their status and reputation and to compete with rival urban centres, and it is contended that they should be viewed, along with other cultural initiatives, as an important instrument in the shaping of urban and civic identity in mid-Victorian Britain. The study demonstrates the role of towns as scientific locations in the nineteenth century and suggests that they deserve attention in place-centred studies of Victorian science.

This study explores the problems of entry by middle-class Irish migrants into respectable urban elite networks in British towns. Although opportunities to participate in political, cultural and charitable institutions were plentiful in nineteenth-century urban Britain, few Irish migrants achieved such distinctions. In the context of south Wales, this was because there were few opportunities for Irish migrants to acquire the necessary occupational status for entry into public life. Those Irish who worked in 'middle class' occupations, were more likely to do so in the retail and service sectors than in the professions, from which ranks local 'worthies' were more likely to be drawn. As a result, they struggled to attain status and remained on the margins of respectable Welsh middle-class life. For these Irish, the 'ethnic sphere' provided an alternative network within which status and recognition could be achieved. References. Adapted from the source document.

This article offers a case study of urban improvement in Dundee, where the unco-ordinated efforts of different interest groups were largely adequate for the needs of the town in the first half of the nineteenth century, after which a more centralized approach evolved to address urban problems on a new scale. The Dundee case offers some explanations for this shift, which was mirrored in many other British towns.