Are You in This Country? How “Local” Social Relations Can Limit the “Globalisation” of Customer Services Supply Chains

Abstract: The relocation of thousands of call centre and back office jobs from the UK to subcontractors in India in the early 2000s led to extensive speculation that the “globalisation” and “jobs flight” of service work was underway. Yet as this article illustrates some call centre customer services do not easily transfer to different local, social and cultural contexts. Call centre operations are embedded in local social relations and taken for granted skills that are difficult to reproduce outside of the locality which has produced them. Nevertheless the spatial dispersal of work can be as much a political process as it is an economic one. This article, which follows the journey of 1000 call centre jobs from the UK to India, illuminates how subcontracting service work “offshore” can facilitate a transformation of the employment relation and an escape from a difficult to discipline labour force.     

Hail ambiguous St Patrick: sounds of Ireland on parade in Birmingham

Birmingham's St Patrick's Day parade claims to be the largest of such events in the UK and the third best attended in the world. Despite resorting to universal advertising proclamations that for one day ‘everyone is a little bit Irish’, this annual march continues to foster the unique musical character of the local diaspora; a metanarrative for the wider, fractious journey of the Irish community into the West Midlands over the past sixty years. This paper examines the primary event in Birmingham's calendar by way of the sounds of the spectacle, considering the musical display that is presented in the processional mode to a static audience sharing city-centre streets one Sunday morning every March. By engaging with the theories on performance of Domenico Pietropaolo, Mikhail Bakhtin and Stephen Greenblatt, this paper argues that it is in the audible space of the parade that Birmingham creates Breda Gray's Ireland ‘of global flows’.     

Fallow deer (Dama dama dama) management in Roman South-East Britain

This paper presents new carbon, nitrogen and sulphur isotope data for European fallow deer (Dama dama dama) in Roman Britain and discusses results in light of evidence from classical texts, landscape archaeology, zooarchaeology and the limited available samples of metric data. The new isotope data presented here are from Fishbourne Roman Palace (Sussex), two sites on the Isle of Thanet (Kent) and a further two sites in London. In spite of small sample sizes the data make an important contribution to the very limited corpus of scientific research on the species and provide new resolution to the nature of fallow deer movement and management in Roman Britain.     

Hatching Feminisms: Czech Feminist Aspirations in the 1990s

This article explores a range of conversations in Czech that have been undertaken by popular and intellectual Czech feminists since 1989. These have attempted to ‘explain the usefulness of feminist thinking’ to frequently reticent Czech audiences. It examines feminists' claim that feminism and feminist social criticism have an important role to play in making a new social order in which what they describe as women's values and cultures would have a central place. It explores the often maternalist strategies that intellectuals have devised for working through the pall of ambivalence that surrounds feminism in the Czech Republic, and it examines how an enthusiastic defence of local feminisms and the desire to highlight intransigent attitudes towards the remaking of gender identities have become important hallmarks of contemporary Czech feminisms.