Postwar Expansion Research Articles

Theorising and Analysing Academic Labour

The aim of this article is to contextualise universities historically within capitalism and to analyse academic labour and the deployment of digital media theoretically and critically. It argues that the post-war expansion of the university can be considered as medium and outcome of informational capitalism and as a dialectical development of social achievement and advanced commodification. The article strives to identify the class position of academic workers, introduces the distinction between academic work and labour, discusses the connection between academic, information and cultural work, and suggests a broad definition of university labour. It presents a theoretical model of working conditions that helps to systematically analyse the academic labour process and to provide an overview of working conditions at universities. The paper furthermore argues for the need to consider the development of education technologies as a dialectics of continuity and discontinuity, discusses the changing nature of the forces and relations of production, and the impact on the working conditions of academics in the digital university. Based on Erik Olin Wright’s inclusive approach of social transformation, the article concludes with the need to bring together anarchist, social democratic and revolutionary strategies for establishing a socialist university in a commons-based information society.

Theorising and Analysing Academic Labour

The aim of this article is to contextualise universities historically within capitalism and to analyse academic labour and the deployment of digital media theoretically and critically. It argues that the post-war expansion of the university can be considered as medium and outcome of informational capitalism and as a dialectical development of social achievement and advanced commodification. The article strives to identify the class position of academic workers, introduces the distinction between academic work and labour, discusses the connection between academic, information and cultural work, and suggests a broad definition of university labour. It presents a theoretical model of working conditions that helps to systematically analyse the academic labour process and to provide an overview of working conditions at universities. The paper furthermore argues for the need to consider the development of education technologies as a dialectics of continuity and discontinuity, discusses the changing nature of the forces and relations of production, and the impact on the working conditions of academics in the digital university. Based on Erik Olin Wright’s inclusive approach of social transformation, the article concludes with the need to bring together anarchist, social democratic and revolutionary strategies for establishing a socialist university in a commons-based information society.

The Discursive Marginalization of the Humanities: Debates on the “Humanist Problem” in the Early 1960s Swedish Welfare State

In the context of the great postwar expansion of higher education, the influential Swedish university commission of 1955 predicted that the future job market would not be able to absorb the increasing number of humanities graduates. These large cohorts of young people were not easily incorporated into the grand narratives of the Swedish social democratic welfare state, based on assumptions of rapid material and technological progress. In contrast to a clear demand for medical, technological, and social scientific knowledge, the humanities were associated with traditionalism and an outdated concept of Bildung. The threat of future unemployment became known as the “humanist problem” and was widely debated through the early 1960s. A platform for that debate was a magazine called Humanisten (The humanist), published by a new trade union for young people educated in the humanities. Humanisten made practical attempts to mobilize the humanities as a valuable resource for society. By analyzing these initiatives as responses to the university commission and to a general imperative of social relevance, I argue that the discursive practices of the debates contributed to a marginalization of the humanities by treating them as an anomaly and labeling them as a “social problem” for the welfare state. By approaching “the humanities” as an actors’ category, I hope this national case study will help develop a history of the humanities that looks beyond the condition of individual disciplines.

Study on postwar expansion planning of James-yama estate at Shioya, Kobe

Study on postwar expansion planning of James-yama estate at Shioya, Kobe

Producing space: post-war redevelopment as big business, Utrecht and Hannover 1962–1975

ABSTRACTThis contribution opens a new perspective on the politics of urban redevelopment in Dutch and German cities during the 1960s and early 1970s. More specifically, it examines the post-war expansion of Bredero, a Dutch private developer that forged public–private partnerships with the city councils of Utrecht and Hannover to get local urban redevelopment agendas of the ground. Within the period covered by this article, the political consensus was that the post-war economy, which was dominated by rising car ownership, business and consumerism, had to find its place and thrive in central urban areas. Developers such as Bredero were thought to dispose over the expertise and financial means to swiftly execute redevelopment schemes. Up until now, planning historians have largely neglected the role played by private developers in post-war urban redevelopment efforts. This contribution investigates how and why local administrators and private developers decided to work together in the first place, and how the expertise of Bredero in particular was translated into the development of Utrecht’s Hoog Catharijne and Hannover’s Raschplatz schemes. Through the innovate use of hitherto under-examined primary sources, this contribution sheds a new light on the allegedly recent phenomena of the internationalization and outsourcing of urban planning efforts.

Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism

The aim of this article is to contextualise universities historically within capitalism and to analyse academic labour and the deployment of digital media theoretically and critically. It argues that the post-war expansion of the university can be considered as medium and outcome of informational capitalism and as a dialectical development of social achievement and advanced commodification. The article strives to identify the class position of academic workers, introduces the distinction between academic work and labour, discusses the connection between academic, information and cultural work, and suggests a broad definition of university labour. It presents a model of working conditions that helps to systematically analyse the academic labour process and to provide an overview of working conditions at universities. The article furthermore argues for the need to consider the development of education technologies as a dialectics of continuity and discontinuity, discusses the changing nature of the forces and relations of production, and the impact on the working conditions of academics in the digital university. Based on Erik Olin Wright’s inclusive approach of social transformation, the article concludes with the need to bring together anarchist, social democratic and revolutionary strategies for establishing a socialist university in a commons-based information society.

Automotive surrender: The demise of industrial policy in the Australian vehicle industry

AbstractAustralia developed a strong and successful automotive manufacturing industry after the Second World War, based on active industrial policy. But in 2017, mass vehicle assembly in the country will cease altogether, as the last global automakers operating in the country close their final plants, with negative spillover effects along the automotive manufacturing supply chain. After 2017, Australia will be the only major industrial country with no vehicle assembly whatsoever. This article analyses the shifts in industrial policy that explain both the initial postwar expansion, and the subsequent decline and closures. Policy-makers incorrectly assumed that the critical goal of stimulating automotive exports could be achieved through trade liberalisation, but dismantling tariffs only stimulated vehicle imports without increasing overseas demand for Australian cars. Production declined in tandem with tariffs, and there was no clear industry policy strategy for facilitating the redirection of released resources to more productive manufacturing activity, when that outcome, predicted in neoliberal comparative advantage theory, failed to materialise. Financial market deregulation, resulting in financialisation of the economy, coupled with high commodity prices, resulted in an overvalued and volatile currency, attracting foreign investors to resources and asset speculation while appearing to increase manufacturing production costs. A clear contrast is drawn between Australia’s policy passivity in recent decades, and the continued policy activism visible in other jurisdictions of all political orientations – including countries which, particularly after the global financial crisis, faced economic and industrial challenges at least as daunting as Australia’s. In the 1970s, Australia had been among the world’s top 10 auto manufacturers; after 2017, it will be one of only two G20 countries completely lacking mass automotive manufacturing capacity. The industry’s disappearance from Australia is shown to have resulted from some unique policy choices: understanding them may help avert future similar policy errors.

Why the History of CUNY Matters: Using the CUNY Digital History Archive to Teach CUNY’s Past

This article describes the newly launched CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center. The CDHA is designed to provide open, online access to a rich array of digitized historical sources that detail the important history of the City University of New York (CUNY). The article reviews that history, focusing on the postwar expansion of the city’s tuition free municipal college system and the subsequent birth of the CUNY system in 1961. CUNY’s growth helped launch a student-led fight for open admissions at various CUNY campuses in 1969-70, which resulted in the dramatic expansion of the undergraduate student body, including the admission of large numbers of working-class students of color in the early 1970s. The article ends with a discussion of impact of New York City’s 1976 fiscal crisis, which led to the elimination of free tuition and a cutback in CUNY’s plans for expansion and growth, a consequence that CUNY still has to deal with.

Crisis and Redemption: The History of American Police Reform since World War II

This introduction to the special section on police and cities surveys the repeated rounds of exposure, disruption, and redemption urban American police departments have undergone since World War II. Rather than telling the history of modern law enforcement as a story of uninterrupted growth, this article emphasizes the crises in police legitimacy that punctuated the postwar period. New citizenship models, new social practices, and new understandings of democratic governance repeatedly forced urban police to re-authorize their power. Moreover, these challenges to police legitimacy sparked and steered much of the postwar expansion of police power. As a result of these past crises, modern police now root their authority in a racialized harm principle and in the seemingly contradictory ideologies of police professionalization and community partnership. This introduction concludes with a discussion of the special section’s essays, highlighting how each contributor uses the police to expand our understanding of urban governance. Collectively, the essays explore the vast range of urban actors—including community activists, academics, black mayors, liberal police chiefs, and rank-and-file officers—who attempted to use disruptions in police authority to reshape postwar law enforcement. The essays also consider different types of cities—including deindustrializing metropolises, small cities, and cities in America’s territories—to help us more accurately identify national trends. Together, the essays in this special section make clear the central role urban police have played in the histories of American citizenship and democracy.

An initial inventory of Australian foresters’ lives

ABSTRACTAn initial inventory of foresters’ lives was prepared by entering the digitised obituaries of 186 foresters onto the National Centre of Biography’s website, where they complemented the entries for a further 20 foresters in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Obituaries were taken from forestry journals, newsletters and newspapers. The inventory includes about 8–10% of the population of Australia’s past foresters, with obituaries dating from 1900 to 2015. The content of the inventory is discussed in four periods: establishing state forestry, building state forestry, post-war expansion, and fracturing. The possibility of extending the initial inventory using publications and oral histories, including those of living foresters, is discussed.

Educating tomorrow’s media workers: television instruction at American institutions of higher learning, 1945–1960

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the rise of programs in television instruction in the USA during broadcasting’s postwar expansion period. Beginning in professional schools, television training entered the university first through extension school courses, then in full degree programs. This transition to institutions of higher learning entailed key shifts in demographics, pedagogical orientation, and legitimation strategies, while embroiling television in larger struggles over the shifting boundaries of the postwar humanities. Studying the education of early television workers, I argue, raises key questions about processes of worker professionalization vital for developing research on media industries and media labor.

‘A Slight Degree of Tension’: Training the Archaeologists of the Future

This paper stems from a presentation given at the University of Winchester in 2012 entitled ‘Building People, Building Skills, Building Relationships and Building Jobs: Training the Archaeologists of the Future’, which was part of the one-day conference ‘21st Century Archaeologists: Innovation in Training for Applied Archaeology’. Developing the content of that original presentation, but keeping its fundamental structure and argument, this paper reviews the pedagogical development of the academic discipline of archaeology in Britain from the post-war expansion of university-led archaeological training to the present day; consideration is not made, except in passing, to pre-degree training (e.g. in schools or further education colleges). Analysis of a range of sources demonstrates a surprising lack of formal pedagogy in archaeology as compared to other, comparable academic disciplines. Placed within the context of the broader development of the profession of archaeology, the reasons for this paucity of pedagogical development are discussed, alongside proposals for improvements in the future.

A Climate for Science Policy

Led by the Meteorological Service of Canada, atmospheric research in Canada underwent a period of rapid growth after the end of the Second World War. Within this federal organization, and in response to operational challenges and staff shortages, there were significant investments in basic research and in research oriented toward external users within Canada. Specifically, new policies and programs were put in place to enable the organization to gain legitimacy within the scientific community and within the federal government. New links with stakeholders and, more importantly, the development of explicit policies to guide research were a prime focus. These formalized strategies for pursuing two parallel types of research generated some internal conflict, but also helped form a common scientific identity among personnel. There were concerted efforts to disseminate research products and reinforce links both with the scientific community and with external users of meteorological and climatological research. Borne out by quantitative data, this science policy–centered history sheds light on the development of research and research specializations in the field in Canada. Most importantly, it provides insight into the global postwar expansion of the atmospheric sciences, which is strongly tied to national contexts. Indeed, the quest for legitimacy and the close connection to government priorities is central to the history of the atmospheric sciences in the twentieth century. More broadly, this case study points to a possible new conception of government science driven by political, bureaucratic, and scientific imperatives, as a means to shed light on scientific networks and practices.

Whither philosophy of religion?

The post-war expansion of university faculties climaxed in the early 1970s. Since then, there have been more professional philosophers than ever before in history: a startling claim, but sober truth. In analytic philosophy, they have worked with more rigour and better training than even the Scholastics. It would take a surprising lack of talent among us, or perhaps argue some deep defect in the questions we ask, if the result werenotmore progress in philosophy than most periods can boast. And in fact, those who know what progress in philosophy looks like can see a lot of it: just compare Malcolm's 1960 piece on the ontological argument with Plantinga's 1974 treatment inThe Nature of Necessity, and then both with Oppy's book on the subject.

From the Airfield to the High Street: The Met Office’s Role in the Emergence of Commercial Weather Services

Abstract This paper explores the role of the United Kingdom’s National Meteorological Service, the Met Office (MO), in the early development (1945–65) of applied, and subsequently commercial, weather and climatological services in the United Kingdom. Through examination of archival records it shows how theoretical and technological developments led to the postwar expansion of services for the general public and new user groups, resulting in funding pressure on the organization and the proactive seeking of nongovernment funding sources. The paper then explores the influence of these early developments on the subsequent large-scale expansion of applied and commercial services at the MO, which were to be enshrined in the organization’s mandate when it became an executive agency under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s efficiency review in 1990. It is shown that the history of the Met Office’s role in applied weather services is important for understanding the organization’s position today as a civil agency that acts commercially, the broader process of “agentification” of the scientific civil service, and the United Kingdom’s prominence internationally in the private weather services market. By considering developments in the context of other National Meteorological Services and the international forum provided by the World Meteorological Organization, the development of weather services at the Met Office is shown to have been influenced by international best practice while remaining distinct in its approach to delivering a broad range of both public and commercial services.

‘A Slight Degree of Tension’: Training the Archaeologists of the Future

This paper stems from a presentation given at the University of Winchester in 2012 entitled ‘Building People, Building Skills, Building Relationships and Building Jobs: Training the Archaeologists of the Future’, which was part of the one-day conference ‘21st Century Archaeologists: Innovation in Training for Applied Archaeology’. Developing the content of that original presentation, but keeping its fundamental structure and argument, this paper reviews the pedagogical development of the academic discipline of archaeology in Britain from the post-war expansion of university-led archaeological training to the present day; consideration is not made, except in passing, to pre-degree training (e.g. in schools or further education colleges). Analysis of a range of sources demonstrates a surprising lack of formal pedagogy in archaeology as compared to other, comparable academic disciplines. Placed within the context of the broader development of the profession of archaeology, the reasons for this paucity of pedagogical development are discussed, alongside proposals for improvements in the future.

Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins and the Modern Conservative Identity

Walker Percy's novel Love in the Ruins (1971) reveals the complications of American suburban politics at the height of the Cold War and of the civil rights movement in the United States, a moment during which racial anxieties became disguised as political moderation. Written in the wake of Richard Nixon's successful 1968 run for the presidency, during which his campaign suggested sympathy with white southern suburban segregationists to gain popularity in the South (an area where candidates historically performed poorly), Love in the Ruins portrays a polarized suburban population in the South of a politically fractured United States: a mishmash of southerners and nonsoutherners, conservatives and liberals, living together united in their racism. The novel's suburban Cold War dystopia depicts a post-South in which political ideology, socioeconomic realities, and literary and popular media portrayals of southernness supplant any geographic or cultural understanding of place as the basis for southern identity. (1) Love in the Ruins not only portrays the postsouthern but also forecasts the current red state-blue state political map of the United States in its sheer politicization of nearly every individual and community in the novel, paralleling the spread of conservative politics to the white suburban middle class in the 1960s. This southern identity and politics became suburban identity and politics, uniting communities across the United States not by geography but by ideology, and suburban political moderation morphed into modern conservatism--moral and social conservatism coupled with financial neoliberalism. The novels emphasis on lampooning extreme political viewpoints and portraying racial strife (long associated with the South but present now in suburbs) as merely a symptom of such ideological extremes suggests an attempt to divorce geography from sensibilities and values long associated with the South. In the depiction of suburban politics, the book ultimately points toward Percy's own satirical but quite telling revision of the southern identity, one in which personal connections to ideologies play a prominent role once southern identity has been separated from concerns of place. Ultimately, Love in the Ruins paints portraits of Americans--not necessarily southerners--participating in cultures and practices associated with the United States South through media representations, televised events, real estate developments, and other reproductions of the South. Love in the Ruins satirizes devotion to hyperbolic political views through caricatures of materialistic suburban dwellers, throughout the novel Percy also expresses anxiety about current social trends, exhibiting a realization that the former foundations of the U.S. South are eroding. Michael Kobre argues that Percy really was of two minds and traditions. Percy was raised in the Old South and its traditional mores, yet Percy also recognized that the severe and honorable traditions he had inherited were increasingly outdated in a New South that was, in his own words, 'happy, victorious, Christian, rich, patriotic and Republican (4). Indeed, Percy's own vision of this New South is remarkably in line with historical studies that explore the roles suburbs played in the turn toward modern conservatism in the U.S. South in the twenty-five years after the end of World War II. During the postwar expansion of industry to the region, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Memphis became centers of commerce attracting more and more southerners--white and black alike--to their metropolitan regions, individuals who decided to give factory and office work a go as opposed to remaining to compete with increasingly larger commercial farms. Brown v. Board of Education undoubtedly influenced patterns of suburban growth as did the white flight from urban centers. Particularly relevant to Percy's imagined suburbs is historian Kevin Kruse's exploration of white flight out of Atlanta and the political identity that developed out of the manner in which whites fought to preserve segregation. …

Queer Sensations

This essay analyzes the cinematic genre convention of the “sensation scene” as a vehicle for the representation of queer crises in American juvenility during the postwar era. Through popular cinema, post-WWII America organized and communicated concerns about the production of “fit” masculine and heterosexual juveniles who would be capable of carrying out the postwar expansion of American democratic and capitalist ideologies. The sensation scene was deployed by popular films to mark queer and racialized masculinities in an aesthetic system that mirrored institutional efforts to prevent “unfit” juveniles from accessing the benefits of full social and political participation. Today, the genre device continues to structure popular film representations of and common thinking about the relative value of young, male American lives.

Acceptance of the 2013 Henry Baldwin Ward Medal: Standing on the Shoulders of Benevolent Giants

President Loker, American Society of Parasitologists members and guests, it is certainly a great honor to receive the Henry Baldwin Ward Medal, and I thank the society and its members for this recognition. I give special thanks to my nominator and colleague, Ramon Carreno, and to those who wrote supporting letters. After learning that I was this year’s recipient, I spent time reflecting on the path of my career. I’ve asked myself the question, how is it that I’ve been fortunate enough to achieve some measure of success? I’ll try to provide some answers to this question, in keeping with the tradition established by the first Ward medalist, Clark Reed. Many of you recognize that the title of my address derives from a famous quote by Sir Isaac Newton, who wrote: ‘‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’’ Having invoked Isaac Newton in my title, I want to begin by dispelling the idea that I’m suffering delusions of grandeur. Or to paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bentsen from a famous vice-presidential debate; clearly ‘‘I’m no Isaac Newton.’’ On the other hand, I do hope that I’m regarded as more than a ‘‘Dan Quayle.’’ So what do I mean when I refer to ‘‘benevolent giants?’’ Well, I mean that I wouldn’t have enjoyed a career in science if it were not for certain people who made special and selfless efforts that made my success possible. These individuals are my benevolent giants. With their help, I’ve had the opportunity to achieve my potential and see further. In his introduction, Ramon reviewed my professional history. Now I want to add a more personal perspective on my background and career. My parents grew up in St. Louis during the Great Depression. My mother had to leave school after the seventh grade to look after her 2 younger brothers, because both of her parents needed to work to support the family. Like many families during those years, they barely earned enough to make ends meet. My father grew up in a working-class family that also struggled during this period. He completed high school and then was drafted, serving in the army throughout the South Pacific during World War II. On the basis of the advice of his father, he took a bluecollar job after returning from war in 1945, rather then attending the University of Illinois on the G.I. bill. With the postwar expansion and strong labor unions, my parents achieved a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. But I believe they never got over the sense of uncertainty and insecurity they experienced during the Great Depression. Like many of their generation, they were risk-averse and rarely saw fit to reward themselves. Yet, like most parents, they wanted their children to achieve more, and used their earnings in support of our higher education. Their efforts in this regard were directed to my 2 older sisters, Amy and Becky, and me. I grew up in a very rural part of St. Louis County, just north of the Meramec River. The area was bordered by the Mississippi River bluffs to the east, with wooded hills, caves, and horse trails just a short distance from my house. I spent my youth fly fishing in farm ponds, spelunking, ice skating, swimming, shooting practically anything that made good target practice, and developing a severe sensitivity to poison ivy. I developed a great interest in mechanical devices; to the consternation of my parents, I was constantly taking things apart, but only sometimes succeeded in reassembling them in working condition. My mechanical interests were aided and abetted by a neighbor, Terry Oberer, who specialized in restoration of antique cars. Terry is one of my benevolent giants, and I will explain why a bit later. I grew up in a family where religion was central: I was raised a Roman Catholic. At the outset this was Catholicism of the old school, pre-Vatican II. My sisters attended the local Catholic elementary school, St. Francis, where instruction was still mainly from nuns. I began my education at St. Francis as well, but transferred to the public school system because my severe allergies and asthma often led to unconventional treatments by the school authorities at St. Francis. After entering public school, my greatgrandmother and grandmother made an extra effort to emphasize the importance of the Church and its teachings, providing me with DOI: 10.1645/13-358.1

‘The fieldworker not in the head's office’: an empirical exploration of the role of an English rural primary school within its village

This paper presents the findings of a project exploring the role of an English primary school inside its rural village. The fieldwork discovered that the school had lacked a full-time head teacher for a number of years and the paper explicates three dynamics to unravel why: (1) interpersonal issues (high staff turnover and the legacy of a former head); (2) the political–economic development of the village and its shifting local ‘squirearchy’; and finally (3) the construction of the spatial environment of the village (post-war expansion and the situation of amenities). These three dynamics possessed a synergy and this was key in seeing the complexities of this rural environment and its bearing upon social relations such as the absent head. It therefore supports recent theorising positioning interpersonal power alongside the temporal and spatial character of a local environment. The paper concludes by using this insight to consider what problems the school—and any new head teacher—might face in the immediate future. The research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2009–2011.Using a multi-strategy research approach, the paper draws upon participant observation, interview, documentary, visual and historical material in support of its analysis.