British Industry Research Articles

December 1993

The British machine tool industry is not performing well; EU research funding success for UK-led consortia; largest CNC lathe built in UK for 20 years; low-cost vertical machining centre success for Cincinnati Milacron; machine tool spares & more

Cinematic London: Brexit and symbolic power

In this paper, I examine the ways in which London’s symbolic power and, correlatively, its cinematic image, are evolving in the post-European Union referendum era. This paper identifies the ways in which the possible changes in London’s material and cinematic image as a dynamic, opening and welcoming city are beginning to manifest themselves in mainstream cinema and cinema-inspired advertising. In particular, I provide an assessment of the current state of the British film industry, highlighting the ways in which EU-funded programmes, like Creative Europe, provide filmmakers in the UK with access to funds and potentially wide distribution. I then discuss the impact the Brexit decision has had on London-based films released after the referendum. Finally, I provide a sociological-thematic analysis, influenced by discourse analysis and semiotic analysis, of two film-themed advertisements (London is the City of Film and Nothing Beats a Londoner), demonstrating the ways in which the uncertainly following the EU referendum is manifested on screen. Ultimately, this paper provides an Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays N. 20 – 11/2018 157 insight into the ways in which London’s material and cinematic identities are evolving as the city and indeed the rest of the UK re-evaluate their place on the global stage

Bovine tuberculosis elimination: playing the long game

Bovine TB (bTB) is a global disease (Fig 1) that has been around for centuries, with evidence of disease identified in prehistoric bovine remains.1 It is likely that close contact...

The Needle not the Spindle? Domestic Training at the London Asylum or House of Refuge for Orphan and Deserted Girls in the Eighteenth Century

This article considers the place of The Asylum or House of refuge for orphan and deserted girls amongst other mid eighteenth-century London charitable institutions. It was established in 1758 amid concerns about London’s working population not keeping pace with the demands for labour and while campaigners were fighting for the moral wellbeing of the metropolis. The article highlights the role played by some female subscribers who, through a Visiting Ladies committee, provided practical advice to the Guardians for improvements to the running of the institution and the quality of the girls’ training. Throughout the century, there was a demand for hand-spun yarn to supply the British textile industry. Poorer girls were taught spinning to meet this demand and so emphasise the perceived female characteristics of diligence and industry. However, needlework, not spinning, was the key component of the girls’ daily routine and training at the Asylum.

Japanese tourists in Victorian Britain: Japanese women and the British heritage industry

ABSTRACTThis article explores Japanese women’s engagements with the British heritage industry in the 2000s by reading two recent Japanese texts concerned with commodified British heritage, especially heritage from the Victorian period. Reading these Japanese ‘heritage texts’ reveals that a perceived lack of aristocratic cultural capital, which has grown out of Japan’s encounter with informal British imperialism in the nineteenth century, continues to shape young Japanese women’s avid participation in the British heritage industry. In the second half of the nineteenth century, British merchants brought material goods and the cultural practices associated with these goods to Japan through trade. On the other hand, Japanese officials and students travelled to Britain to learn from British civilisation at its source. This history has given rise to a longstanding Japanese ‘aspiration’ (akogare) to emulate Britain. The Japanese manga and magazine publishing industry in the 2000s reaffirms these sentiments but also exploits them to its own advantage, by channelling young Japanese women’s perception of their cultural belatedness into the buying of both British heritage commodities and the Japanese ‘heritage texts’ that promote these commodities.

Rebuilding Britain

Women's marginalization in the British feature film industry is well documented: gender discrimination, and sometimes overt segregation, shut most women out of senior creative roles after the introduction of sound. What has received less critical attention is their participation in nonfiction filmmaking, which offered women greater employment opportunities, especially in the decades after World War II as Britain rebuilt its economy. This article provides the first historical mapping of women's involvement in sponsored nonfiction filmmaking in Britain in the period between 1945 and 1970, using newly available statistical data from Britain's film trade union, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT). It also draws on oral histories, extant films, and specialist trade publications to outline two case studies, one featuring three editors, and the other a director (Sarah Erulkar) who between them produced, directed and edited more than two hundred shorts on topics ranging from mineshaft sinking to French cookery. It argues that evidence of women's creative agency in this sector offers new ways of thinking about film history.

The Colour of Social Realism

During the 1960s Eastmancolor, a relatively cheap, widely available film stock, revolutionised the British film industry's approach to colour. This article discusses the consequences of this major representational and aesthetic shift on social realism, a sub-genre of British cinema primarily associated with black and white cinematography. While colour provided an opportunity for greater realism, critics argued that it distracted audiences with hues considered inappropriate for social commentary. The article examines how a number of notable 1950s and 1960s British colour films navigated entrenched critical positions while deploying colour in distinctive, often innovative ways to reflect their social realist environments and themes. Films examined include A Kid for Two Farthings (1955), Miracle in Soho (1957), Sapphire (1959), Flame in the Streets (1961), Some People (1962), The Family Way (1966) and Poor Cow (1967). It is argued that critics' preoccupation with the New Wave cycle of films, 1959–63, has been at the expense of colour films that extended the range of representation, both aesthetically and thematically. Bringing colour more centrally into scholarship about British cinema contributes to revisionist research on social realism that privileges the foregrounding of style and textual aesthetics. In addition, the article shows how analysing films from the perspective of colour encourages relating them to broader chromatic tastes and trends. By the mid-1960s, as culture was generally becoming more chromatically vibrant, film-makers were able to take greater advantage of the colour stocks that enabled them to experiment with realist conventions.

‘Run with the fox and hunt with the hounds’: Managerial Trade-Unionism and the British Association of Colliery Management, 1947–1994

This article examines the evolution of managerial trade-unionism in the British coal industry, focusing on the development of the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM) from 1947 until 1994. It explores the organization’s identity from its formation as a conservative staff association to its emergence as a distinct trade union, analysing its policy towards industrial action and strike cover, affiliation to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), colliery closures, and the privatization of the coal industry. It examines BACM’s relationship with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS), the National Coal Board (NCB) and subsequently the British Coal Corporation (BCC). This is considered within the wider context of managerial identity in the coal industry and discussions over the growth of managerial (and white-collar) trade unions in post-war Britain.

Black British Women Filmmakers in the Digital Era: New Production Strategies and Re-Presentations of Black Womanhood

Abstract The story of Black women in British mainstream cinema is certainly one of invisibility and misrepresentations, and Black women filmmakers have historically been placed at the margins of British film history. Up until the mid-1980s, there were no Black female directors in Britain. Pioneers like Maureen Blackwood, Martina Attille and Ngozi Onwurah have actively challenged stereotypical representations of Black womanhood, whilst asserting their presence in Black British cinema, often viewed as a male territory. In the 2010s, it seems that the British film industry remains mostly white and masculine. But the new millennium has brought a digital revolution that has enabled a new generation of Black women filmmakers to work within alternative circuits of production and distribution. New strategies of production have emerged through the use of online crowdfunding, social media and video-sharing websites. These shifts have opened new opportunities for Black women filmmakers who were until then often excluded from traditional means of exhibition and distribution. I will examine these strategies through the work of Moyin Saka, Jaha Browne and Cecile Emeke, whose films have primarily contributed to the re-presentation of Black womanhood in popular culture.

Is there a significant change in the price transmission between producer and retail prices within the British Pork industry

Abstract. The purpose of this study is to examine price transmission between the producer and retail in the UK pork industry. It aims to find the direction of causality in the long and short-run, and whether there is a long-run relationship between producer and retail prices. This study used monthly time series data for producer and retail prices ranging from 1988-2016. Econometric tests were used such as the Augmented Dickey-Fuller ( 1979 ) and Phillips-Perron ( 1988 ) Unit Root tests; Bai-Perron ( 1998 ) Unit Root test allowing for multiple structural breaks; Johansen ( 1991 ) and Engle-Granger ( 1987 ) Co-integration tests; Granger ( 1988 ) Causality, and the Error Correction Model showing the speed of recovery in the long-run after a shock. The results of the Unit Root tests found both producer and retail prices to be integrated of order one I(1). Three structural breaks were found occurring in the years of 1996, 2002 and 2012. The Co-integration tests found that there is one long-run relationship between producer and retail prices. The Error Correction Model showed the return to a new equilibrium after a shock was 9% per month totalling over 11 months for a full recovery from a shock. The Granger ( 1988 ) Causality test indicated that producer prices do Granger cause retail prices in the short-run. In this study the latest econometric techniques were used including structural breaks which some previous studies overlooked. This study into the producer and retail prices in the UK pork industry is the latest study of this kind since the Brexit decision. Keywords. Price transmission, Producer, Retail, Pork, Unit Root, Bai-Perron co-integration, Structural breaks, Error correction model, Causality, Brexit. JEL. L60, L70, L80.

Hot and Cold!

In Britain, the microelectronics industry has - like all forms of British industry - been subject to Government involvement lurching from hands-on to arms-length and covering most stages in between. Equally broader economic forces have also had their impact.

Programmed Inequality [Book Reviews

This book examines how the British computer industry has been adversely affected by the inability to promote and attract female programmers. In the 1960s and 1970s the British government sought to rebuild its wartime dominance in the computing sector to restore its position as a global power. This plan necessitated a gender power shift in computing, from viewing computing as low-wage, unskilled secretarial. or “machine grade” work performed by women, to seeing it as high pay and prestigious work performed by men. In Britain’s effort to rebrand computing as “high value men’s work” they booted out their qualified and experienced workforce of women and tried to replace them with inexperienced and largely uninterested men. The fact that the government’s efforts here were a flop necessitated increasing government micromanagement of the private British computing industry. Their inability to attract a sufficiently large male computing workforce (and, of course, now that computing was important work, women could no longer be allowed to engage in it) meant that Britain’s enormous Civil Service sector needed powerful supercomputers that could be “controlled” by a small number of high level, trained male executives. Note that this obsession with supercomputers took place while the rest of the world was focused on the emergence of the personal computer or PC. But the British government insisted on dictating the future direction of the U.K.’s computing industries, shoring them up with government funds and eventually forcing a merger into a single computing company capable of designing and building the colossal supercomputers to run the country. The author meticulously details the story of Britain’s intertwined desire for world power status in computing with its economic woes as well as its stubborn adherence to a strongly gendered workplace. She also demonstrates why this approach caused Britain to fail, sealing the demise of both its reemergence as a world power and its dominance of worldwide computing. Instead of being a fix for Britain’s economic and political power woes, computing and the changes it ushered in simply exacerbated the inherent problems embedded in both systems.

Spinning the industrial revolution

AbstractThe prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's ‘high wage economy’ view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such ‘high wage economy’ in spinning, which was a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spinning emerges as a widespread, low‐productivity, low‐wage employment, in which wages did not rise substantially in advance of the introduction of the jenny and water frame. The motivation for mechanization must be sought elsewhere.

Capacity for War: Preparing the British Aviation Industry in the 1920s

This article explores the relationship between the Air Ministry and the British airframe industry in the 1920s and the efforts undertaken to increase the capacity of the industry to increase output in the event of a national emergency. It charts the negotiations between the Society of British Aircraft Constructors (SBAC) and Air Commodore Lionel Evelyn Oswald Charlton in 1925. It argues that the Air Ministry was looking at the strategic problems that would be faced if the industry were not able to increase production while the SBAC was only concerned with its survival and looked to exploit the Air Ministry’s concerns.

Trees, Trade and Textiles: Potash Imports and Ecological Dependency in British Industry, c.1550–1770*

Trees, Trade and Textiles: Potash Imports and Ecological Dependency in British Industry, c.1550–1770*

Border disease: an under-appreciated threat to flock health and productivity?

Border disease is a syndrome of sheep caused by pestiviral infection, most commonly by border disease virus (BDV), but also by bovine viral diarrhoea virus (BVDV). Border disease results in a varied spectrum of clinical signs, but most commonly increased barren rates, abortion, stillbirths and the birth of weak lambs. Outbreaks of acute severe clinical disease in adult sheep are rare, but have been reported. There is increasing evidence of its negative impact on lamb health and growth rates through its immunosuppressive effects. There is currently little knowledge on how widespread border disease is within the British sheep industry and how much of an effect it is having on flock health and productivity.

Long term productivity gains in the privatised British passenger rail industry – A case study of Malmquist productivity index measurements

This paper assesses long term productivity in the privatised British passenger rail industry using a Malmquist productivity index (MPI) generated using three different efficiency assessment methods, namely data envelopment analysis (DEA), corrected ordinary least squares (COLS) and the stochastic production frontier (SPF). The results indicate that over the period 1997 to 2015, the industry achieved annual average productivity gains of around 1% to 1 1/2%, with most of this improvement coming in the first half of the period, and the second half of the period displayed unitary productivity returns. Virtually all gains have come as a result of technical change, however the rate of increase was found to gradually decreasing throughout the whole time period, hence future productivity gains may be more difficult to achieve. The results from the three approaches are considered, and the COLS is found to be most consistent with the idea of total factor productivity and technical change ss long run concepts and efficiency change as a short run phenomenon.

Initial submarket positioning and firm survival: evidence from the British automobile industry, 1895–1970

A firm’s initial choice of its submarket may have a long-lasting influence on its subsequent performance. By examining the duration of firm survival in the British automobile industry between 1895 and 1970, we find that a firm’s initial submarket positioning (defined by the quality level of its first-launched model) influenced its subsequent survival. Additionally, we find that the initial positioning also helped firms to survive a major shakeout, and argue that innovation and path-dependence were two possible channels through which the benefits of initial positioning were felt.

Internecine strife in trade union organisations: status, competition and the effect of industry rationalisation and neo-liberalism

Internal conflict in trade unions has been the subject of considerable academic interest. Often described as intra-union tensions, the basic divergence in priorities and concerns between union officialdom and their members on the shop floor has inspired a multiplicity of pioneering workplace studies and theoretical frameworks. However, while these hierarchical divisions in trade union organisations have received concerted attention, another manifestation of intra-union discord remains relatively under-explored. Inter-sectional or ‘horizontal’ conflict can be described as two sets of workers from different trade groups within the same union which are embroiled in competition or rivalry, usually in the same workplace. Although the loosely associated concept of sectionalism was identified as a re-emerging trend in British trade unionism in the 1960s and 1970s, there has been little attempt to document how conflict can occur between two sections of workers working side-by-side. This article will present a case of horizontal conflict from the British dock industry and consider under what circumstances and pressures the phenomenon is likely to occur. The two sections featured historically had an uneasy relationship and rationalisation of the industry, allied with the neoliberal restructuring of the British economy in the 1980s, exacerbated this. In these contexts, workers began to exhibit greater levels of group self-interest which amplified inter-sectional tensions further.

Creating Market Failure: Business-Government Relations in the British Paper-Pulp Industry, 1950–1980

This article examines the nuances and complexities of business-government relations in the British paper-pulp industry between 1950 and 1980 through the prism of interactions between Wiggins, Teape & Co., a paper company, and various U.K. government departments in the postwar period. It highlights the complexity of business-government and interdepartmental relations and tensions, set against the global and domestic paper industry competition and the United Kingdom's international economic position. Long-standing industry underinvestment and interdepartmental tensions in government are identified as principal contributors to the failing competitiveness of the industry and of British businesses more generally in the twentieth century.