British Engineering Research Articles

Water resources development in the Cauvery river basin, India

The first centrally planned initiative to secure water for irrigation and control flooding in the Cauvery river basin, India, dates to c. 200 CE when Karikal Cholan constructed the Grand Anicut. The irrigation infrastructure was extended by British military engineers in the nineteenth century when several large barrages and regulators were constructed. In the twentieth century, water demand increased in those parts of the Cauvery basin in the Princely State of Mysore (now in Karnataka) and the Madras Presidency (now in Tamil Nadu). Disagreement between the states over water use was partially resolved by the agreements of 1892 and 1924. Two impressive reservoirs, the Krishnarajasagar in Mysore and the Mettur in the Madras Presidency, were then constructed on the Cauvery river; other smaller reservoirs were built on its tributaries. By 1972 over 1·2 Mha were being irrigated from the Cauvery. Rapid expansion of the irrigable areas, however, renewed the dispute over the use of the Cauvery waters. In 1990, the Cauvery water disputes tribunal was constituted but, despite its rulings, disagreements re-emerge in dry years. The history of the development of water resources in the Cauvery river basin is described in this paper.

Sacrificial Experts? Science, Senescence and Saving the British Nuclear Project

This essay is an enquiry into the roles scientists and engineers might make for themselves in an aging society. At its centre is a case study of an extraordinary response to a devastating event: a British project after Chernobyl to set up a cadre of volunteers, aged 65 or over, willing to act swiftly, expertly and, perhaps, expendably, in the wake of a nuclear emergency. Surprisingly obscure now, the would-be volunteers included many of the elite of British science and engineering. The episode is fascinating on many levels and invites several different analytical perspectives, which I will explore. However, the dimension that interests me most concerns primarily old age. Most obviously, the project mobilised an elderly population of elite experts, who felt themselves to be both qualified and occasionally disqualified to act because of their age. The project prompted them to reflect, soberly and insightfully, on the qualities and capacities of aged scientists and engineers, sometimes as self-reflection as individuals, sometimes as a group with identifiable characteristics. But there are other, just as interesting dimensions of age raised in the project. In particular, this generation felt responsible and protective over its achievements, not least the nuclear programmes of the second half of the twentieth century, and were willing to exchange physical jeopardy to secure its continuation.Furthermore, there is a dynamic social context to aging within which the generation who reached their 60s in the 1980s must be located: an aging society in which what it was to be old was changing both quantitatively and qualitatively. In terms of simple numbers more people in the West were living far beyond the traditional life span of three score and ten. Qualitatively, the period was marked by the articulation of ideas of a old age, a 'Third Age of activity before senescence, and a gerontological interest in successful aging. A proportion of the elderly are now seen as resilient, healthy, keen to stay in employment or to continue to be involved in social and community matters.1 A final twist that makes the examination of scientists and engineers attempt to carve out new roles in an aging society particularly meaningful is that this extension of life, in both senses, was seen as a product of scientific intervention.2EXPERTS, EXPERTISE AND THE BRITISH NUCLEAR PROJECTBritish involvement in nuclear weapon and power projects began during the Second World War. Following the calculations of the critical mass necessary to generate a chain reaction of uranium fission by the emigres Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, working at the University of Birmingham, in 1940 the UK government set up the MAUD committee to establish the feasibility of an atomic bomb.3 As is well known, British efforts, beginning with the arrival in 1 943 of nineteen scientists at Los Alamos, were soon drawn in to the Manhattan Project. In December 1945, four months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prime minister Clement Attlee's GEN 75 Cabinet Committee on Atomic Energy, authorised the construction of an atomic reactor at Windscale on the Cumbrian coast. The aim was to produce plutonium. In 1946, the McMahon Act in the United States superseded previous UK-US agreements on the sharing of nuclear knowledge and responsibilities, and prohibited further transfer of information. Previously sceptical views (on economic grounds) in the British Cabinet were sidelined, and commitments made in 1946 and 1947 to complete a British nuclear bomb and to expand necessary research and development work. The institutional landscape of the British nuclear project was filled out, including the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, and a nuclear factory at Windscale. A British atomic bomb was first tested on the Monte Bello islands, Australia, in October 1952.The 1950s witnessed further institutionalisation and expansion of the British nuclear projects. …

NEW FRONTIERS OF ANTARCTIC SUBGLACIAL LAKES EXPLORATION

Antarctic subglacial aquatic environment have become of great interest to the science community because they may provide unique information about microbial evolution, the past climate of the Earth, and the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet. Nowadays it is generally recognized that a vast network of lakes, rivers, and streams exists thousands of meters beneath Antarctic Ice Sheets. Up to date only four boreholes accessed subglacial aquatic system but three of them were filled with high-toxic drilling fluid, and the subglacial water was contaminated. Two recent exploration programs proposed by UK and USA science communities anticipate direct access down to the lakes Ellsworth and Whillans, respectively, in the 2012/2013 Antarctic season. A team of British scientists and engineers engage in the first attempt to drill into Lake Ellsworth but failed. US research team has successfully drilled through 800 m of Antarctic ice to reach a subglacial lake Whillans and retrieve water and sediment samples. Both activities used hot-water drilling technology to access lakes. The main troublesome of the implemented and planned projects for accessing of Antarctic subglacial lakes is connected with the hydrostatic unbalance resulted in the upwelling of water into the hole with subsequent difficulties. The proposed RECoverable Autonomous Sonde “RECAS” would measure and sample subglacial water while subglacial lake is reliably isolated from surface environment, and at the same time the sonde is able to measure geochemical signals in situ throughout the depth of ice sheet on the way to the bed. All process is going on in semi-automatic mode, and the estimated duration of subglacial lake exploration at the depth of 3500 m is 8–9 months. The general concept of the sonde as well as proposed power-supply and performance are given.

British Engineering and Africa, 1875-1914 by Casper Andersen (review)

Reviewed by: British Engineering and Africa, 1875-1914 by Casper Andersen Chandra D. Bhimull (bio) British Engineering and Africa, 1875-1914. By Casper Andersen. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. Pp. x+229. $99. Casper Andersen's British Engineering and Africa, 1875-1914 is a thought-provoking book about the relationship between engineering and empire. Unlike other works that deal with this topic, its focus is on imperial projects imagined, arranged, evaluated, and contested in Britain, not the colonies. Written in dialogue with the new imperial history, Andersen avoids the pitfalls of diffusionism and Eurocentrism by insisting that empire manifested itself at home. Rather than examining empire as a thing out there in the world, he is adamant about tracking dynamic networks, investigating layered interactions, and probing messy nodes in the metropolitan center. Consequently, he draws readers into the complex ways the domination of far-off others shaped lives and livelihoods in Britain. Andersen deals with complicated themes, but his book is clearly written and nicely organized. The first chapter looks at the politics of professional journals, namely the circulation of imperial engineering dreams and the power of knowledge production. Chapter 2 offers a compelling spatial analysis of the London-based institutional sites where members of the engineering profession met. The third chapter grapples with specific engineering networks and their colonial interests, engagements, allies, and opponents, while the fourth provides a detailed analysis of the Institution of Civil Engineers and its explicit ties to the empire. The fifth chapter addresses the public life of the engineer, a figure whose cultural status ranged from gentleman to explorer. Chapter 6 concerns the modernizing efforts of and preservationist fears about dam building in the Nile Valley, a controversy that reveals the moral predicaments surrounding British engineering projects abroad. Who were the engineers? There were two types in Victorian through Edwardian Britain: military and civil. Andersen is interested in the civil, a [End Page 193] flexible term used to describe a wide range of scientifically minded experts who designed, planned, managed, and built. Within this broadly defined group, he is particularly interested in the pivotal efforts of a fascinating yet "contested and ambiguous" subset of practitioners known as consulting engineers (p. 5).Unlike most engineers, these specialists were "independent professionals," meaning that they did not work exclusively for private firms or the state (p. 6). Over time, as demand for their design expertise increased, consulting engineers grew in wealth, status, and power. Like the other engineers encountered in this book, they were highly influential men whose personal and professional identities were forged through and invested in the exploits of empire. Race is notably absent in Andersen's thoughtful and thorough work about British men and Africa. With a works-cited section that includes pieces by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha and an analysis that seeks to show how ideas about and projects in the colonies shaped as they were transformed by metropolitan life, this omission is surprising. How did race bear down on engineering projects and vice versa? How did whiteness and the privileges it enabled affect the engineering men? To what extent did race define the urban, elite, and discursive spaces that molded the profession? For those of us who deal with chronologies and cultures popularized by period dramas like Downton Abbey, heeding the postcolonial call to deconstruct racialized practices in their historical context is paramount. Given this gap, it is interesting that Andersen finds diaspora a productive way to think about British engineers in the world. Building on Robert Angus Buchanan's work, he deploys phrases such as "complex imperial diasporas" and "the diasporas of British engineers in Africa" to describe metropolitan men working in the territories (pp. 4, 9). On one hand, this is understandable. The word diaspora does connote the dispersal, spreading, or scattering of people and, as this book demonstrates, British engineers and their projects were strewn across Africa. On the other hand, as diaspora scholars have shown, diasporas are not usually voluntary: the people who tend to (be forced to) claim this subject position do so amid slavery, genocide, and other violence. Observations about the politics of difference, mobility, and displacement aside, this important work will stimulate discussion about the...

Bibliography of Books and Articles Published in English on Colonialism and Imperialism in 2011

Bibliography of Books and Articles Published in English on Colonialism and Imperialism in 2011 Marcella Fultz, MLS Marcella Fultz Librarian Emeritus, Towson University Books Achebe, Nwando. The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011. Google Scholar Adorno, Rolena. Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Google Scholar Adyanga, Onek C. Modes of British Imperial Control of Africa: A Case Study of Uganda, c.1890–1990. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Google Scholar Aguiar, Marian. Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Google Scholar Ahmed, Siraj. The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011. Google Scholar Alcocer, Rudyard J. Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination: Re-Reading History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Google Scholar Al-Dabbagh, Abdulla. D. H. Lawrence: A Study of Literary Fascism. New York: Lang, 2011. Google Scholar Alexander, Andrew. America and the Imperialism of Ignorance: US Foreign Policy since 1945. London: Biteback, 2011. Google Scholar Alves, Abel A. The Animals of Spain: An Introduction to Imperial Perceptions and Human Interaction with Other Animals, 1492–1826. Boston: Brill, 2011. Google Scholar Andersen, Casper. British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. Google Scholar Anderson, Warwick, Deborah Jenson and Richard Charles Keller, eds. Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Google Scholar Andrew, Edward. Imperial Republics: Revolution, War, and Territorial Expansion from the English Civil War to the French Revolution. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Google Scholar Angelov, Dimiter. Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium, 1204–1330. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Google Scholar Araujo, Ana Lucia, Mariana P. Candido and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds. Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora. Trenton: Africa World P, 2011. Google Scholar Arenas, Fernando. Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Google Scholar Au, Sokhieng. Mixed Medicines: Health and Culture in French Colonial Cambodia. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. Google Scholar Aung-Thwin, Maitrii. The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma. Athens: Ohio UP, 2011. Google Scholar Ax, Christina Folke, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen and Karen Oslund, eds. Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies. Athens: Ohio UP, 2011. Google Scholar Axelrod, Alan. A Savage Empire: Trappers, Traders, Tribes, and the Wars that made America. New York: St. Martin’s P, 2011. Google Scholar Ayala, César J. and José L. Bolívar. Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War II to the Korean War. Princeton: Wiener, 2011. Google Scholar Bagchi, Amiya Kumar, et al. Four Essays on Writing Economic History of Colonial India. Kolkata: Institute of Development Studies in association with Progressive Publishers, 2011. Google Scholar Bain, Jim. Uncertain Beginnings: The Remarkable Story of how Australia was Colonised by the British rather than the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch or the French. Glen Waverley: Sid Hartha, 2011. Google Scholar Baker, Geoffrey and Tess Knighton, eds. Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Google Scholar Bang, Peter Fibiger. Tributary Empires in Global History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Google Scholar Baranowski, Shelley. Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Google Scholar Barbas-Rhoden, Laura. Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2011. Google Scholar Barrows, Adam. The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. Google Scholar Bateman, Fiona and Lionel Pilkington, eds. Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Google Scholar Batiste, Stephanie Leigh. Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Google Scholar Baugh, Daniel A. The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest. Harlow: Longman, 2011. Google Scholar Beattie, James. Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Google Scholar Beauchesne, Kim and Alessandra Santos, eds. The Utopian Impulse in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Google Scholar Becker, Elisa Marielle. Medicine, Law, and the State in Imperial...

Project Management Training Curricula at South African Public Universities: Is the Balanced Demand of the Profession Sufficiently Accommodated?

In March 2004, the British Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) commissioned a study that focused on the “rethinking” of project management. The objective of the EPSRC study, commonly known as the EPSRC Network, was first to create a multidisciplinary network of academics, researchers, and practitioners interested in developing project management and the practice thereof in industry and, second, to define and identify a new interdisciplinary research agenda that would allow the field of project management to develop beyond the conceptual foundations that existed at the time—a conceptual base that attracted criticism for its lack of relevance to practice. The core philosophy behind the network was to link theory and practice through an organized process of interaction between academics and practitioners. Research was conducted to determine the extent to which South African universities have extended or adapted their project management curricula to accommodate the issues identified in the findings of the EPSRC study and other relevant research, as it is the norm for South African universities to review their curricula every 3 to 5 years. A way forward is mapped out to ensure that the training of project managers in South Africa sufficiently accommodates the balanced demand of the profession.

Real wage cyclicality and the Great Depression: evidence from British engineering and metal working firms

Based on occupation-level payrolls from around 2000 member firms of the British Engineering Employers' Federation we examine the behaviour of real hourly earnings over the 1927--1937 Great Depression cycle. Pay and working time data cover adult male blue-collar workers within engineering and metal working firms. We attempt to tackle the problem of countercyclical aggregation bias linked to workforce composition by distinguishing between pieceworkers and timeworkers who are broken down into 14 occupations and 51 travel-to-work engineering districts. We test for the likely effects on our estimates of within-occupation heterogeneity. For pieceworkers we find significant, though modest, real hourly wage procyclicality. Timeworkers' real hourly wages are found to be acyclical. Due to procyclical fluctuations in weekly hours, the real weekly pay of both pieceworkers and timeworkers are strongly procyclical. We compare hourly and weekly pay outcomes with findings based on more recent micro data. Copyright 2013 Oxford University Press 2012 All rights reserved, Oxford University Press.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Hybrid knowledge: the transnational co-production of the gas centrifuge for uranium enrichment in the 1960s

AbstractThe ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of knowledge circulation is explored in a study of the encounter between American and British nuclear scientists and engineers who together developed a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium in the 1960s. A fine-grained analysis of the transnational encounter reveals that the ‘how’ engages a wide variety of sometimes mundane modes of exchange in a series of face-to-face interactions over several years. The ‘why’ is driven by the reciprocal wish to improve the performance of the centrifuge, though this motive is embedded in the asymmetric field of the ‘special relationship’ in nuclear matters between the United Kingdom and the United States. The result of the encounter is co-produced, hybrid knowledge in which the national provenance of the contributions from each side of the Atlantic is at once diluted and a contested site for the affirmation of national power.

An assessment of cost management regimes in British rail infrastructure provision

Over the last decade, British railway engineering efficiency has come under close scrutiny, with general perceptions of massive maintenance cost escalations and a general lack of control over these costs. This is exemplified by headline figures such as Roger Ford’s perceptions of a 50% rise in maintenance costs since privatisation (Mod Railw 638:8, 2001), or the more recent figure of a doubling in all rail costs since privatisation presented by Shaoul (Public Money Manag 26:151–158, 2006). Little, however, has appeared in the academic literature on the subject. This paper considers these issues through an examination of British railway infrastructure costs over the period 1980–2009, which has seen three different infrastructure management regimes in place—the nationalised BR (1980–1994), the privatised Railtrack (1995–2001) and the not for dividend Network Rail (2002–2010). Infrastructure costs are examined in total for all operating costs (including maintenance but excluding renewals and depreciation), and under two sub categories, signalling and management costs. The results show that in the case of total operating costs, by the end of the period (up to 2010) these had returned to pre-privatisation levels. The results also show that costs increased significantly following privatisation due to imperfect competition in sub contractor markets, but large declines in the last 6 years have eradicated most of these costs increases, although still do not match the best achieved under full public sector management. Management costs associated with the infrastructure on the other hand have increased significantly.

Colonial connections and consulting engineers 1850–1914

The paper analyses colonial connections and networks of British consulting engineers. It unravels how consulting engineers operated within different imperial contexts, including settler colonies, Egypt and Crown colonies in West Africa in particular. The paper also examines the close and at times strained connections that existed between London's consulting engineers and British engineers stationed overseas in colonial public works departments. By examining the colonial connections of metropolitan engineers, the paper sheds light on a hitherto ignored factor that tied Britain and the colonies together during the diaspora of British engineering. It argues that personal connections and relations remained of paramount importance during this period, which has traditionally been described as characterised by growing professionalisation and a subsequent loss of the personal element in British engineering.

Translation of a Discipline

This paper examines the translation of the academic discipline of engineering from Britain to Japan in the early Meiji era (1868–1880). It argues that engineering, like other disciplines, is a discursive field shaped by the context in which it develops. British academic engineering was greatly influenced by W.J.M. Rankine, professor of engineering at the University of Glasgow, who delineated a discursive identity for the field by meeting the demands of both practising engineers and the academy. The resulting character of this discipline was but one of multiple possibilities, but it gained legitimacy, and ultimately orthodoxy. In Japan, there were a number of competing visions but Rankinian engineering eventually prevailed as it was granted privileged status by the Ministry of Public Works through the selection of Rankine’s protégé, Henry Dyer, as head of the Imperial College of Engineering, and later by the Ministry of Education through its selection of Rankine’s works for translation into Japanese. This paper demonstrates that the Rankinian vision was but one of multiple choices available in the early Meiji era. It also examines how Rankine’s engineering science became entrenched as orthodoxy in Japan and how translation reflects this process.

A Good Time to Stay Out? Strikes and the Business Cycle

AbstractIn this article, we compile a unique historical dataset that records strike activity in the British engineering industry from 1920 to 1970. These data have the advantage of containing a fairly homogeneous set of companies and blue‐collar workers. They cover a long period with varying labour market conditions, include information that enables the addition of union and company fixed effects, and provide geographical detail that allows a district‐level analysis that controls for year and seasonal effects. We study the cyclicality of strike durations, strike incidence and strike outcomes, and distinguish between pay and non‐pay strikes. We find evidence that strikes over pay have countercyclical durations. However, in the post‐war period, the magnitude of this effect for pay‐related strikes is much reduced when union and firm fixed effects are included. These findings suggest that it is important when studying strike durations to take account of differences in the types of companies and unions that are involved in strikes at different points of the business cycle. We also find that strike outcomes tend to be more favourable to unions when the national unemployment rate is lower.

British engineers help Olympic athletes become more competitive

British engineers help Olympic athletes become more competitive

Interview with Lionel Tarassenko

Professor Lionel Tarassenko has been the Chair in Electrical Engineering at Oxford University since October 1997, and the Director of the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering since 2008. He became a Fellow of the IEE in 1996, when he was also awarded the IEE Mather Premium for his work on neural networks. In 2000 he became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. His work on mobile phones for healthcare was awarded the E-health 2005 Innovation Award for ‘best device to empower patients’. He was awarded the 2006 Silver Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering for his contribution to British engineering leading to market exploitation, and he also won the IET's IT Award for ‘Data Fusion Software for Early Detection of Patient Deterioration’.

Carriages, coffee-cups and dynamometers :representing French technical cultures in the London Mechanics’ Magazine,1823-1848

British discussions of French technical culture have often assumed, if not explicitly stated, contrasting ‘national styles’ : centralized, state-oriented, theoretically driven, and institutionally supported work in France ; dispersed, individualistic, empirically driven, school-shy practice in Britain. In this paper I examine a spectrum of French-British technical interactions during the second quarter of the nineteenth century and ask whether such caricatures have any power. To make this study more concrete I consider representations of France, and of French technical culture, in one important British periodical and, by way of occasional contrast, in some British professional and academic institutions. From the late 1830s there was a notable increase in the volume of technical literature ; but here, I focus on a periodical founded in 1823. The Mechanics’ Magazine (MM) was edited and printed in London but it was read far more widely. Its readership consisted primarily of literate but disputatious mechanics. Defining themselves against the gentlemanly, status-conscious civil engineers, the literary activists of the MM celebrated democracy, discourse and dispute. Their gaze fell on France and on French figures, institutions, technical processes, textbooks and theories. France was a distant arena of mechanical politics. There, exhibitions (it said) pandered to the useless wants of the aristocracy – were there only Kings in France ? There, Protestant craftsmen had resisted Catholic oppressors. There, fledgling Mechanics’ Institutes struggled against despotism. But not all was caricature : France was the land of heroes, like Charles Dupin, or a workplace for skilled artisans ; through de Pambour, Poncelet and Morin it could be a source, selectively, of technical insight and theory – even if built upon the example of British engineering works. Such representations of French technical culture ‘from below’ complement existing accounts of intellectual, cultural, or political encounter ; and they provide some clues as to the mechanisms whereby elite technical literature from France was appropriated in Britain.

The Origins of Disorderly Wage-Bargaining in the British Engineering Industry

The Origins of Disorderly Wage-Bargaining in the British Engineering Industry

Two Classes of British Engineers: An Analysis of Their Education and Training, 1880s-1930s

The debate on the adequacy of British engineers' education and training has been hampered by the scanty nature of the evidence upon which it is based. As a result inadequate attention has been paid to the correlated influence of three features, namely the existence of two classes of engineers, the control of qualifications by the professional institutions, and the tradition of practical training. This research note casts new light on these factors through an analysis of the education and training of samples of engineers from the 1880s through to the mid 1930s. This survey confirms that the retention of practical training after the introduction of scientific qualifications helped to maintain, in the twentieth century, the kind of socially differentiated routes to professional status that had emerged in the previous century. The retention of practical training even for graduates arguably restricted the numbers taking an engineering degree.

Real Wages, Working Time, and the Great Depression: What Does Micro Evidence Tell Us?

Based largely on industry-level aggregate statistics, the prevailing view, and one that has strongly influenced macroeconomic thought, is that real wages during the cycle containing the Great Depression are either acyclical or countercyclical. Does this finding hold-up when more micro data are employed? We examine this question based on detailed blue-collar workers’ company payroll data for a large section of the British engineering and metal working industries. We distinguish between pieceworkers and timeworkers, with pieceworkers accounting for over half the workforce. For the period 1927 to 1937, the two pay groups are broken down into 14 occupations, and 48 travel-to-work geographical districts. We estimate wage and hours cyclicality in respect of the national unemployment rate as well as the district rates. Weekly hours and real weekly earnings are found to be strongly procyclical. Real hourly earnings of pieceworkers are also significantly procyclical. The roles of standard and overtime hours are crucial to these findings.

Travelling technocrats, embodied knowledges: Globalising privatisation in telecoms and water

The decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s was a key moment in the unfolding of the global privatisation agenda. During this decade privatisation shifted from a nation-state project to become part of the structural adjustment measures associated with economic globalisation. These measures were not only promoted by international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, but by a range of other organisations and actors who have received little attention. In particular, virtually no attention has been paid to the mid-level technocrats who enacted privatisation strategies and techniques. This paper focuses on these actors through the cases of New Zealand telecommunications engineers and British water engineers. In discussing the significance of these actors we argue for the unpacking of the messy histories, geographies and sociologies of privatisation using both publicly available documents and ethnographic methods. This will allow us to understand why certain courses of action were pursued in particular times and places, why other actions dropped out, and will reveal more about the national imaginaries and embodied knowledges underpinning the globalisation of privatisation.