British Work Research Articles

The last British work songs: Music, community and class in the Kent hop fields of the early-mid 20th century

This article examines the widespread practice of singing during the picking of hops in the Kent hop fields from the 1920s through to the 1950s. The singing is analysed both in terms of its position as a late, rare and therefore potentially revealing example of British work songs in the 20th century, and in terms of the light it casts on the musical culture of the singers, working class women of London’s East End. It is argued that the songs expressed and sprang from the strong sense of community amongst the hop-pickers. Further, singing emerged in hop-picking precisely because it was a ‘working holiday’ in which the dichotomies of work and leisure broke down. The musical activity of the hop-pickers is seen as expressing an active culture of creativity, class and community – in contrast to Stedman Jones’ influential characterization of London’s working class as enmeshed in a culture of passive consolation.

Engendering Spanish geography

During the last two decades gender studies have advanced in Spanish geography, constituting a subfield of social and cultural geography. They have incorporated the international perspectives that understand gender as a construction which challenges the artificial boundaries between the social, the cultural and the economic. On the one hand, Spanish gender geography drew early inspiration from the British and American work but, on the other, it has sustained the Spanish tradition of being more applied than theoretical. In this article, we will deal first with the institutional aspects linked to gender and power within the discipline in Spain ; then we will deal with three topics that have been relevant in Spanish gender geography : the study of rural spaces, research on urban spaces and studies in postcolonial geography.

What is the extent and nature of quantitative research in British social work?

What is the extent and nature of quantitative research in British social work?

Creating value from cross‐cultural teams

PurposeTo demonstrate the added value potential of cross‐cultural teams specifically related to Franco–British joint ventures. The paper begins by outlining the current context in M&As across Europe, then homes in on the specific trade links between France and the UK. To what extent are cultural differences a hindrance or a driving force in attaining mutual performance goals?Design/methodology/approachThe main findings are collected from a survey of 300 companies in France and the UK carried out in 1999. The respondents were HR managers, training officers or middle managers in general. The research was supplemented by three in‐depth, semi‐directive interviews with HR managers at BP, Vivendi and Eurotunnel.FindingsThe research uncovers some of the main obstacles encountered when setting up Franco–British teams. Certain factors such as education systems, training systems and employment norms are brought to the forefront in an attempt to explain these fundamental differences.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is longitudinal and aims at providing a more representative sample since the response rate on the English side was lower than that in France. The authors viewpoint is fuelled by information received during the in‐depth, semi‐directive interviews.Practical implicationsThe article provides a useful insight into the workings of cross‐cultural teams in France and the UK.Originality/valueLittle has been written to date on the specific field of the cultural barriers influencing the success of Franco–British work teams.

Specialist Maps Prepared by British Military Geologists for the D-Day Landings and Operations in Normandy, 1944

During the Second World War, British military geologists assisted planning for the Allied liberation of Normandy by generating specialist maps – supporting the greatest amphibious operation in world history. Maps of the landing beaches at a scale of 1:5000 indicated natural hazards to cross-beach vehicle mobility. Maps of northwest Europe at 1:1000 000 showed the varying suitability of ground for airfield construction, and larger scale maps guided the site selection and rapid construction of numerous temporary airfields. Hydrogeological maps were prepared as tracing overlays for topographical maps to guide enhancement of potable water supplies from new wells and boreholes – at a scale of 1:50 000 for coastal areas from the Cherbourg peninsula eastwards to Calais, and at 1:250 000 for most of northern France east into the Low Countries. A few 'soil' maps guided emplacement of depots for stores and vehicles, and at least two resource maps were prepared – to guide quarrying of material for road construction and sand for engineering work in general. Pioneering British military geological work on Normandy was extended for western coastal areas by large-scale American maps which included geological features for exit routes from the Omaha and Utah beaches. Bordering the eastern coast, at least two Canadian maps at 1:100 000 related geology to 'going' (cross-country trafficability). Printed in small numbers and great secrecy, few copies of any of these maps appear to have survived the war. The most extensive collection known is preserved in the Lapworth Museum of Geology, University of Birmingham. This is part of a unique personal archive, generated by Major F. W. Shotton when serving as Staff Officer (Geology) of the invasion force. It provides the basis for appraisal of broader specialist cartographic achievements contributing to Allied victory in Europe.

Britain and the Flying Bomb: The Research Programme between the Two World Wars

The article evaluates British work on unmanned aircraft and guided missiles in the interwar years. It emphasizes radio control from the ground or from a parent plane in the air. Britain’s relative failure in this field compared to Germany reflected a lack of financial support combined with consistent overestimating of conventional bombing’s accuracy on the part of both RAF officers and civilian scientists.

Transnational Journeys and Domestic Histories

This essay considers the potential of histories of transnational movements of people, and the erosion of boundaries between British domestic and imperial history, to expand and revise the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British domestic life and work. Literatures on migration demonstrate how far the history of home involves transnational themes, including the recruitment of migrants and refugees who crossed national borders to do domestic work—in Britain and empire—and their development of what has been called the 'transnational family'. Domestic life, including motherhood, cannot be fully understood outside the history of the control and orchestration of national borders: which people were allowed inside for settlement, which people were refused entry, which people were positively encouraged to enter. The essay considers refugee movements as part of transnational movements—a neglected area in historical work, including work on Britain—developing a case study that compares the recruitment of people from displaced persons camps to the Australian and British labour markets in the late 1940s, situating both recruitment schemes in the context of post-war British migration to Australia.

Brief Gestalt Therapy (BGT) for Clients with Bulimia

"Abstract: Although recent years have seen a rapid increase in the body of literature relating to both the theory and practice of Gestalt psychotherapy, there has been remarkably little written conceming the use of the model within the British National Health Service. This is where most British mental health practitioners work, and certainly an environment where Gestalt psychotherapy has much to offer to clients and the wider organisation. This paper describes the author's use and development of Gestalt psychotherapy within her routine clinical practice in that setting. Kqt words: Gestalt, bulimia, 'National Health Service'."

The Evaluation of the New Social Work Degree Qualification in England: Wider Perspectives

The phased introduction of the new degree level professional qualification in the United Kingdom provides an ideal opportunity for ensuring that debates about social work education in the UK are set within a broader European perspective. Until now, the refusal of the UK government of the time to make changes in line with a European Union (EU) directive of 1989 which declared common recognition for all social work courses of minimally three years study in higher education at degree level leading to entry to a regulatory profession, meant that British social work awards were not recognised in other EU countries. Ironically, faced with a recruitment crisis at home, social work employers have been recruiting internationally qualified social workers from overseas and, since 1990, nearly 10,000 such social workers have applied to have letters of verification to allow them to practise in the UK.

Looking Back: The View from Here

This article considers key developments in social work in the last decade. From the vantage point of Australia, British social work (and the British Journal of Social Work) is seen in a particular perspective. However, some international comparisons are possible. Thus, the article focuses on two apparently contradictory developments: the 'search for uncertainty' in post-structural theory and the 'search for certainty' in evidence-based practice. It con cludes that both, in different ways, describe social work in the early twenty-first century.

Joseph Losey (review)

Self-Conscious Bravura British filmgoers have good reason to be grateful to Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities; without them, Joseph Losey might never have fled his native America and given his adopted country some of its most distinctive films. Colin Gardner's publishers claim that this book is "the first full-length critical analysis of Losey's British films in the context of his entire career", and its great strength is that it shows both the range and the significance of that output. For, whether he was making a genre thriller like Blind Date (1959) or an art-house product like Eve (1962), the director was always pushing the boundaries in some way, revealing the dishonesties of class, the tyranny of money, and the paranoia and violence that lay beneath his hosts' taut exteriors. In other words, he was a man of vision, and not many of them have ever gotten into Pinewood or Shepperton. Given his background, it is hardly surprising that Losey was so successful at getting beneath the British skin; his American youth had been a political apprenticeship in ideological commitment and class-consciousness. He had started his career in the 1930s during the Soviet-friendly days of the Federal Theatre Project and the Living Newspaper; in 1947, he went further down the radical road when he directed the New York and Los Angeles stage productions of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo. These experiences meant that he knew all about the agitprop, the Brechtian Epic Theatre and the Marxist dialectics that were to have such a lasting influence on his Hollywood and British work and that Gardner applies, rather hectically, throughout. Yet, as this book also shows, it was the dislocation of exile that affected Losey the most. It taught him paranoia, the need to relish ruptures in time and history, and, above all, the importance of a self-conscious bravura style with the camera. Gardner quotes Edward Said: "wilfulness, exaggeration, overstatement...are characteristic styles of being an exile, methods of compelling the world to accept your vision." In time, this led Losey into what the study calls a "baroque" method of filmmaking. During his early years, though, a living had to be earned, and this meant grinding out British genre films. The 1950s saw Losey turn his hand to almost anything that got bread on the table, but he was never a hack; he brought something new to his thrillers, Gainsborough-style melodramas, and science fiction. In The Criminal (1960), for example, he tells the story of a habitual crook (Stanley Baker) who leaves prison and pulls off a big job only to find himself up against a powerful crime syndicate, which has no time for old-fashioned little men like him. Gardner reveals how Losey (and his screenwriter, Alun Owen) turned this humdrum plot into a powerful tale of prison corruption and [End Page 88] corporate greed in which the characters are dehumanised by the god of money and Marx's "exchange value"; the world outside the prison walls is as restricted as the one within. By contrast, The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1957), a Regency bodice-ripper jam-packed with leering landowners and over-sexed wenches, is said to be an astute analysis of a class system in transition. Still, this may be a case of auteurism being in the eye of the beholder; Gardner even sees significance in what sounds like a run-of-the-mill coach chase: "This [a pan from left to right] establishes—as a clever variation on Eisenstein—a kinaesthetic, dialectical juxtaposition, not between shots or sequences as in Potemkin, but within the spatio-integral integrity of the discreet take." (The director might have raised an eyebrow at this loquacity; he said that the film was "largely a piece of junk and I'd just as soon nobody saw it again".) For many viewers, however, Losey...

Using 'network' theory in the postnetwork era: fictional 9/11 US television discourse as a 'cultural forum'

It is likely that the appliance known as 'television' is too multifaceted, broad and contradictory ever to be understood as a coherent entity, despite efforts to theorize it as such. Shifts over the past two decades in the industrial operation, technological form and breadth of content of the box that is simultaneously a mere appliance and a cultural arbiter have appropriately inspired new reflections and retheorization. Whether described as a transition from a classical network system to a post- network era - as has been the dominant conversation in the USA - or theorized as a transition from an era of scarcity through one of availability to one of plenty, as suggested by one recent British work, 1 there appears to be agreement that the object of study is shifting in significant ways. These changes in television as an object of inquiry necessitate reassessment of the theoretical lenses through which we have viewed this significant industrial, technological and cultural artefact.

Cruikshank, Thackeray, and the Victorian Eclipse of Satire

Although some of the satiric energy of the 1790s carried over into the first decades of the following century, by 1850 satire had been eclipsed by other forms. This essay traces steps in the process by which satire ceased to be a genre-determining force in graphic art and in narrative, focusing first on George Cruikshank's contributions to the Comic Almanack (1835�53) and then on William Makepeace Thackeray's contributions to Punch (1843�48). Partly as a result of Thackeray's own actions, Vanity Fair (1847�48) was the last major British work for a generation that was primarily satiric.

Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760-1969 (review)

Canadian Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760-1969. Edited by Nancy Christie. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 381. $75.00 clothbound; $27.95 paperback.) Among historians of the English-speaking world studying the family and gender relations the now-standard interpretation of the transformation of gender relations in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, most fully articulated by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall in their landmark British work Family Fortunes that appeared in the late 1980's, goes something like this: the simultaneous rise of capitalism and evangelicalism led to the creation among the middle classes of a new form of marriage, the companionate marriage, a relationship that on the one hand valued individual identity and on the other intense affective ties among family members. This development was in turn accompanied by the emergence of separate spheres, the domestic sphere dominated by women, and that outside of the home by men. Recently, family and gender historians have developed substantial revisions to this interpretation, and the authors of this volume offer a major contribution to this endeavor in the Canadian context, beginning with the issue of the nuclear family and the rise of individualism. In his examination of the Roman Catholic parish in rural, French-speaking Quebec during the late seventeenth through to the early nineteenth century, Ollivier Hubert rebuts John Bossy's influential view that Tridentine Catholicism resulted in individualism. Rather, he argues the nuclear family was a prime agent through which the clergy inculcated Tridentine belief and practice, a strategy that relied upon communal pressure and traditional collective identities. Family ties also proved salient for religious behavior in the nineteenth century. In her statistical study of church affiliation as reported in the census returns for the mid-nineteenth-century parish of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Hannah M. Lane traces how denominational affiliation was no mere individual choice but instead followed family ties, a pattern that Christine Hudon reveals existed among a French-speaking Protestant community in Quebec's Eastern Townships. The concept of separate spheres, which it was argued mainly relegated women to maternal and domestic roles, has not fared so well either. J. I. Little discovers that for the Reverend James Reid, an Anglican ministering in Quebec's Eastern Townships in the early 1800's, a companionate marriage coexisted with the exercise of patriarchal authority, particularly when it came to the raising and education of children. Marguerite Van Die in her study of the small, mid-Victorian Ontario town of Brantford shows how women's participation in evangelical churches enabled them to secure a prominent place in the public life of their community. Likewise, Kenneth L. Draper examines women's interdenominational organizations in London, Ontario, and their engagement in urban moral reform and religious renewal. The ways in which various cultures understood gender also shaped how men and women responded to clerically defined religious norms and approved cultural practices. …

Critical Commentary: Process and outcomes: the 2001 ESRC recognition exercise

This article summarises the processes through which British social work postgraduate university training outlets applied to the Economic and Social Research Council for recognition in 2001–2002. The exercise raised issues of training diversity; inter-disciplinary vs. single discipline social work research training; the balance between training in methodology and in substantive topics; the relationship between training and research; and a number of questions about equity and due process.

British and Scottish Models for the American Genre Paintings of John Lewis Krimmel

German immigrant painter John Lewis Krimmel, America's first genre artist, was influenced, at least initially, by English artists such as William Hogarth and Scottish painters such as David Wilkie. Krimmel is documented to have painted a picture titled The Village Politicians, but in order to determine whether an unsigned canvas depicting Wilkie's Village Politicians, which was found in the New Orleans area in 2001, is Krimmel's slightly Americanized version of the famous Scottish scene, Krimmel scholar Dr. Anneliese Harding traces the Philadelphia‐based painter's development and finds direct influences of Wilkie and other British and Scottish painters' work on Krimmel's original designs.

New Evidence on Unions and Plant Closings: Britain in the 1990s

In this paper, we exploit the longitudinal element of the 1990 and 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Surveys for Britain to investigate the effect of unionism on establishment closings. Contrary to both recent U.S. research and long‐standing British work, we find a strong positive association between two measures of unionism—union recognition for collective bargaining purposes and union coverage—and plant closings. This association is robust to the inclusion of highly detailed industry controls but is driven by plants that are parts of multiestablishment entities. No such relationship obtains in the case of single‐plant enterprises. In explaining our findings, we address their consistency with the widely perceived reduction in the “disadvantages of (British) unionism” in recent years.

Negotiating the Contradictions between Competence and Creativity in Social Work Education

• Summary: Social work education in Britain has recently been dominated by a competence-based frame of reference, which has proved to be inadequate in preparing social workers for the professional judgements that have to be applied in practice. At the same time the concept of reflective practice, which emphasizes the need for professionals to demonstrate creativity in their practice, has gained currency. This article explores the possibility of reconciling the two principles of competence and creativity within social work education. • Findings: The article concludes that it is possible to see competence as a necessary stage to the development of the level of creativity that should characterize highly skilled social work practice. This implies the need for more systematic development of post-qualifying education that is directly aimed at the enhancement of practitioners' creativity. • Applications: At a time of flux in British social work education, this recognition needs to inform the strategic development of qualifying and post-qualifying education in the future. It has a similar application in respect of the development of social work education internationally.

BOOK REVIEW: Mark Jackson.THE BORDERLAND OF IMBECILITY: MEDICINE, SOCIETY AND THE FABRICATION OF THE FEEBLE MIND IN LATE VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN ENGLAND. pp. x + 273. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.

In Edwardian England eugenics was very topical. Guests at polite London dinner parties discussed the threat of the "unfit" and the virtues of the "lethal chamber." In Whitehall, Home Secretaries pondered the merits of sterilisation of "mental defectives" and by 1908 the massive Royal Commission into the Feeble-Minded, designed to answer questions about the nature of defectiveness and how to deal with this "threat," was under way. Given the volume of debate, and the important social policies that resulted from these deliberations, the relative lack of attention to the history of eugenics in Britain is surprising. There is a rich corpus of good articles, theses and chapters, and pioneering work by historians such as G. R. Searle, but in comparison to North America, where the historiography on eugenics is extensive, the volume of British work looks remarkably thin. Perhaps this state of affairs reflects the difference between a culture where sterilisation laws were enacted, and one where the campaign for sterilisation largely failed. Nevertheless why Britain preferred segregation to sterilisation is an important question, one that stands to tell us much about the nature of British culture and politics.

New Evidence on Unions and Plant Closings: Britain in the 1990s

In this paper, we exploit the longitudinal element of the 1990 and 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Surveys for Britain to investigate the effect of on establishment closings. Contrary to both recent U.S. research and long-standing British work, we find a strong positive association between two measures of unionism-union recognition for collective bargaining purposes and union coverage-and plant closings. This association is robust to the inclusion of highly detailed industry controls but is driven by plants that are parts of multiestablishment entities. No such relationship obtains in the case of single-plant enterprises. In explaining our findings, we address their consistency with the widely perceived reduction in the disadvantages of (British) unionism in recent years.