Parental smoking and children's anxieties: an appropriate strategy for health education?

While the prevalence of smoking has declined in the UK in recent years, class differentials in smoking behaviour have become more marked and smoking is increasingly recognised as a causal factor in inequalities in health. Health education initiatives to support both smoking cessation and to teach children about the health risks of smoking remain key initiatives in reducing health inequalities. However, teaching children about the risks of smoking and the impact of parental smoking on their health is not straightforward for children from backgrounds who are more likely to encounter smoking at home and in their local communities. These children have to reconcile the key messages taught at school and reinforced in smoking cessation campaigns with the knowledge that their parents and other family members smoke. In this article we consider how children from smoking homes make sense of these education and health campaigns as observed by their parents, and the impact that this has on both parental smoking and relationships within the home. The article thus seeks to challenge assumptions about the delivery of health education and the need to acknowledge family diversity.     

Leonor of England,Plantagenet queen of King Alfonso VIII of Castile,and her foundation of the Cistercian abbey of Las Huelgas. In imitation of Fontevraud?

In 1187 Alfonso VIII of Castile and his queen, Leonor of England, founded a Cistercian nunnery, Santa Maria Regalis de Las Huelgas, on the outskirts of Burgos. Despite the clear allegiance of the foundation to the Cistercians from the outset, the idea that the abbey was inspired by and even modelled on the nunnery of Fontevraud in Anjou is an encroaching commonplace in accounts of medieval Spanish history and art history around 1200. This study re-evaluates the arguments for that perception and puts forward a different reading of the early years of Las Huelgas, not as a foreign importation but as a peculiarly Iberian, even Castilian, institution.     

The Queen and her ‘Minister of Fashion’: Gender,Credit and Politics in Pre–Revolutionary France

This article examines the economic, cultural, and political role of credit in Old Regime France through the career of the fashion merchant Rose Bertin. It addresses three aspects of Bertin’s credit practices: her involvement in networks of trade credit, her use of reputation as a form of credit, and the way critics used her credit relations with Marie–Antoinette to discredit the political economy of the Old Regime. Using Bertin as a case study, the article reveals women’s involvement in multiple facets of credit and underlines the practical and conceptual links between credit and other gendered forms of circulation, such as fashion and sex.     

Reshuffling Paperworkers: Technological Change and Experiences of Reorganization at a Québec Newsprint Mill

This article offers an historical-geographical account of how an aging newsprint mill located in Gatineau, in the Outaouais region of western Québec, with serious obstacles to cost-effective production, came to be chosen for a complete in situ technological reorganization project in the early 1990s. This apparent paradox is explained by locating the mill with respect to the production system and corporate strategy of its parent company, with respect to changing production and demand requirements, and with respect to its particular labour relations history. We focus on the process through which this drastic reorganization was implemented at the mill, showing how logistical considerations particular to this type of continuous-process industry, as well as procedures laid out in the labour contract, influenced the company's timetable and labour deployment strategies during this period. We show how the process of technological reorganization helped create the conditions for the subsequent implementation of functional flexibility. We also refer to the unpredictable contingencies that necessitated building flexibility into the timetable for downsizing the workforce by some 450 jobs. As well as considering the constraints faced by local management, we explore how the reorganization process was experienced by workers, especially those facing prolonged uncertainty as to their future at the mill. We examine the seeming paradox of the prevalence of overtime at the mill even as workers were being laid off. In conclusion, we critically discuss the appropriateness of concepts such as management strategy and numerical flexibility and point to the need for further concept development to facilitate analyses of labour deployment strategies adopted during periods of production reorganization.