A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING AND ANALYZING ATTITUDES TOWARDS ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOUR

Encouraging environmental action by citizens in developed nations has become a major priority for governments who are seeking to reach environmental targets by exhorting individuals to participate in a range of behaviours to ameliorate the negative impact of their lifestyles. Such activities conventionally include energy saving, water conservation, waste management and forms of ‘green’ consumption. Current policy discourses are focused around a linear model of behaviour, which assumes that an awareness of environmental problems and knowledge of how to tackle them will lead to individual ameliorative actions. This paper explores these assumptions by applying a previously developed conceptual framework (Barr et al. 2001) to a range of environmental actions, to show how a variety of different factors influence environmental action. Using data from a major (UK) Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research project in Devon, United Kingdom, data on environmental actions collected during the project are interrogated to uncover the relationships between environmental actions and how these are influenced by values, personal situations and attitudes. The research demonstrates that environmental action is structured around people's everyday lifestyles (rather than a compartmentalized notion of behaviour) and that these have radically different antecedents.     

THE DYNAMICS OF SUBCENTER FORMATION: MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, 1861–1906

Midtown Manhattan is the largest business district in the country. Yet only a few miles to the south is another district centered at Wall Street. This paper aims to investigate when and why midtown emerged as a separate business district. We have created a new data set from historical New York City directories that provide the employment location, residence, and job type for several thousand residents in the late‐19th and early‐20th centuries. We supplement this data with additional records from historical business directories. The evidence suggests that early midtown firms appeared there in order to be closer to local residential customers who had been moving north on the island throughout the 19th century. Once several industries appeared in midtown, it triggered a spatial equilibrium readjustment in the 1880s, which then promoted the rise of skyscrapers in midtown around the turn of the 20th century. This process occurred several years before the opening of Grand Central Station in 1913.     

“sche hungryd ryth sor aftyr Goddys word”: Female Piety and the Legacy of the Pastoral Programme in the Late Medieval English Sermons of Bodleian Library MS Greaves 54

The pastoral programme guiding the content of most Middle English sermons had a gendered side effect: it encouraged treating female parishioners as individual souls rather than emphasising the subordinate status of women. A close study of Bodleian Library MS Greaves 54, a fifteenth‐century pastoral manual containing two sequences of Middle English sermons, shows how these sermons reached out to women through gender‐inclusive language, pastoral directives that regarded women as distinct from men, and didactic narratives that both encouraged female participation in devotional activities as well as highlighting women as exemplars for all Christians. Thus Greaves 54 models how Middle English sermons could have appealed to ordinary women and affected their piety, even to the extent of encouraging the extreme devotional behaviour of Margery Kempe.