Kingdom Life Research Articles

A Mighty Inconvenience: How Covid-19 Tested a Nation's Continence

This paper reviews and reflects on how the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns became a unique period in the United Kingdom's life and the management of its continence when away from home. The lack of forethought and planning for public toilet provision would make local and national headlines during both lockdown and lockdown easing and remind people how essential such a service is to aff ording movement and participation in our built environment. This work charts the public perception of public toilet provision and its decline both before and during to the pandemic. It discusses how the shift of a majority of provision into the private sector resulted in reliance on a once public service that would fail in general lockdown, provoking debate on public toilet provision and its essential role in our built environments.

Foucault in Africa: the microphysics of a contemporary monarchy

The Mankon kingdom is located in the mountains of western Cameroon (the Grassfields). Although like many other African kingdoms it has since the 1980s been experiencing a revitalisation, the king is fully aware of all of the practices that have structured life in the kingdom for at least the past three centuries. His body contains substances that have been transformed into ancestral substances of life during offerings to his deceased ancestors, which he distributes to the entire kingdom. He thus embodies a pot‐king, a receptacle of the kingdom's life substances. The sensorimotor conduct and the material culture implemented by the monarch and his subjects lend themselves to a Foucauldian analysis in terms of subjectivising governmentality. The work of Foucault, formulated in the west, proves to be extremely relevant in shedding light on the microphysics of power in this kingdom. It also suggests the possibility of new comparative studies of such practices, which are hardly verbalised, and which constitute the essential aspects of devices of subjection and subjectivisation.

Actuarial Surplus Management in United Kingdom Life Insurance Firms

This study uses 1991–99 data gathered from the United Kingdom's life insurance industry to test empirically the notion that the reported annual surplus of a life insurer may be influenced by four firm‐specific characteristics: namely, reinsurance, output mix, organizational form and firm size. Consistent with expectations, the results indicate that the annual reported surplus is positively related to reinsurance and firm size and negatively related to the degree of product diversification. Contrary to our expectations, however, we find no evidence that proprietary (stock) life insurers tend to report higher annual surpluses than mutual life insurers.