Coital Experience Among Adolescents in Three Social-Educational Groups in Urban Chiang Mai, Thailand

This article compares coital experience of Chiang Mai 17-20-year-olds who were: (1) out-of-school; (2) studying at vocational schools; and (3) studying at general schools or university. Four-fifths, two-thirds and one-third, respectively, of males in these groups had had intercourse, compared to 53, 62 and 15 per cent of females. The gender difference for general school/university students, but not vocational school students, probably reflects HIV/AIDS refocusing male sexual initiation away from commercial sex workers. Vocational school females may have been disproportionately affected. Loss of virginity was associated, for both sexes, with social-educational background and lifestyle, and was less likely in certain minority ethnic groups. Among males, it was also associated with age and parental marital dissolution, and among females, with independent living and parental disharmony. Within social-educational groups, lifestyle variables dominated, but among general school/university students, parental marital dissolution (for males) and disharmony (for females) were also important, and Chinese ethnicity deterred male sexual experimentation.     

ASSESSING THE REGIONAL IMPACT OF GRANTS ON FDI LOCATION: EVIDENCE FROM U.K. REGIONAL POLICY, 1985–2005

ABSTRACT The paper implements a methodology for assessing the regional impact of investment grants on foreign direct investment (FDI) location, taking data for U.K. regional policy over the period 1985–2005. Using a Generalized Methods of Moments estimator it finds that each £25 million of grant changes the regional location of about six inward FDI projects. On average, projects have 150 jobs and each job diverted costs £27,500 (1995 prices). It also finds that the size of the area designated for grants has a positive location effect. The effect is small in relation to the overall scale of FDI, which may explain the weak grant effect found in recent plant‐based location studies.     

Interpreting the expansion of sea fishing in medieval Europe using stable isotope analysis of archaeological cod bones

Archaeological fish bones reveal increases in marine fish utilisation in Northern and Western Europe beginning in the 10th and 11th centuries AD. We use stable isotope signatures from 300 archaeological cod (Gadus morhua) bones to determine whether this sea fishing revolution resulted from increased local fishing or the introduction of preserved fish transported from distant waters such as Arctic Norway, Iceland and/or the Northern Isles of Scotland (Orkney and Shetland). Results from 12 settlements in England and Flanders (Belgium) indicate that catches were initially local. Between the 9th and 12th centuries most bones represented fish from the southern North Sea. Conversely, by the 13th to 14th centuries demand was increasingly met through long distance transport – signalling the onset of the globalisation of commercial fisheries and suggesting that cities such as London quickly outgrew the capacity of local fish supplies.     

Dreaming of a Golden Bengal: Discontinuities of Place and Identity in South Asia

This article analyses five different representations of the homeland category “Bengal”. The region of Bengal was partitioned twice in the twentieth century and imagined in a multitude of forms at different historical moments. The article describes the conditions that allowed different territories and peoples to crystallise as “Bengal” and “the Bengalis”, and investigates why some versions of the Bengali homeland proved durable as others faded away. Rather than asking who is the real Bengali and where is the real Bengal, it investigates how particular identity categories become popularly practised and why particular images of the homeland come to be perceived as true, legitimate and authentic. It concludes that homeland categories are never fixed and finalised, but are rather always in a process of becoming, and are contested, reimagined and redefined as socio-political contexts change.     

White socio-spatial epistemology

Recent work by geographers concerned with the enduring presence of racism has called for an interrogation of the privileges and contingencies of whiteness. Central to this project of denaturalizing White Identity has been the disclosure of its co-constitution with a host of social practices. Building on the work of critical theorists in the humanities and social sciences concerned with masculinist and post-colonial epistemologies, this paper outlines a socio-spatial epistemology of whiteness. Whiteness's central tenets are an essentialist and non-relational construction of space and identity that underwrite its claims to be realized independent of an Other. Spatially, this refusal manifests itself in the deployment of discursive categories associated with scales, boundaries and extensivity in ways that reify space into discrete, unrelated parcels. We discuss some of the implications of this non-relational construction of space and identity in the context of residential segregation and spatial mobility. The paper concludes by noting that historically and geographically specific forms of whiteness have drawn upon a common socio-spatial framing and that further study in this field will benefit anti-racist activism by disclosing the workings of racialization in numerous human geographic contexts.     

Music in factories: a twentieth-century technique for control of the productive self

This paper discusses the historical use of music to produce more efficient, more committed, industrial workers. First emerging in academia early in the twentieth century, psychological interest in the industrial application of music had grown into a topic of popular interest and government investigation by the 1940s. Catalysed by the need for vast increases in production and the desire to cultivate ‘citizenship’ amongst industrial workers which the Second World War produced, consideration of how music could be employed as an affective soundtrack in factories—to raise employees' work rates, to increase their efficiency, to combat fatigue and boredom, to improve morale, to access and manipulate their emotions and loyalties—became a prominent area of psychological research. This paper examines that psychological research and its largest scale application in the BBC radio show Music While You Work, broadcast daily to millions of British factory workers from 1940 until 1967. The paper focuses particularly on conceptualizations of music's affective power and its utilization to exert ‘emotional control’ over spaces of work and the working self. This paper is centrally concerned with the practice of Music While You Work as a programme broadcasting specifically for factory spaces, and how this confronted the BBC's music policies for a national and domestic audience, impacting on the radical nature of the affective soundtrack to work which was produced.     

Stories of suburbia (Bournville,UK): from planning to people tales

In this paper we show that the avoidance or reduction of difference found in the popular history of Bournville was the result of storytellers situated in specific institutional contexts. During the initial development of Bournville a particular (sub)urban future was imagined and mediated by these storytellers, through processes of simplification and choice, which served to reduce the past to an imposed and arbitrary simplicity or organised saga. In this saga the voices of residents are silenced. Our approach is, first, to explore ways of conceptualising the construction of urban history and, second, to construct two different and deliberately conflicting representations of Bournville. The first account provides a critique of the common representation or town planning account of Bournville. In contrast, the second account works through the voices of residents providing an opportunity for them to construct a lived account of Bournville with specific reference to temperance and the consumption of alcohol. Our first story is about the construction of a particular urban space whilst the second is about the ways in which the space was partially ‘colonised’ by residents. By constructing conflicting accounts of the same place we aim to open the dominant discourses associated with Bournville to complexity and heterogeneity.