Innocence and experience: sexuality among young people in modern France, c. 1750-1950

Prying into the sex lives of young people in the past has alwaysproved a challenging exercise. Historians have often ended uprelying on the testimony from adult observers or on the quantitativeevidence provided by illegitimacy rates. This article adoptsa more direct route by drawing on first-hand accounts of earlysexual experiences written by French people in diaries, childhoodreminiscences and autobiographies. As a preliminary, it analysesthe way various authorities depicted young people as sexual(or non-sexual) beings, and the state of sex education in Francebefore the mid-twentieth century. It then considers the waypeople depicted their first stirrings of sexuality during childhoodand adolescence. Finally, it examines evidence from the ‘egodocuments’ on sexual relations in the run-up to marriage.     

WILL ATTRACTING THE “CREATIVE CLASS” BOOST ECONOMIC GROWTH IN OLD INDUSTRIAL REGIONS? A CASE STUDY OF SCOTLAND

Attracting in-migration of the creative class has been argued by Florida (2002) to be a route to higher economic growth in the era of the knowledge economy. This paper critically evaluates this proposition in relation to old industrial regions using the example of Scotland. The paper presents an assessment of, in the first instance, to what extent there is a shortage of skilled, talented and entrepreneurial individuals and, in the second instance, whether a talent attraction strategy alone can hope to attract such people to Scotland. It is proposed that for most migrants the availability of appropriate economic opportunities is a prerequisite for mobility. However, despite uncertain evidence that place attractiveness is a catalyst to mobility among the so-called creative class, this is not a reason for dismissing talent attraction programmes. Instead it is argued that talent attraction programmes have the potential to contribute to old industrial economies, but their success will be greatest when talent attraction is carefully targeted and based on economic realities rather than the marketing of ethereal conceptions of place attractiveness.     

Geographical Variations in the Nature of Undeclared Work

Inspired by a stream of cultural economic geographical thought that has sought to deconstruct the view that monetary transactions are everywhere market-like and profit-motivated, this paper seeks to reread the nature of undeclared work. Conventionally, such work has been seen as epitomising unbridled profit-motivated market-like monetised exchange, and depictions of the geographical variations in its character have distinguished only between various types of profit-motivated informal employment in different area types. Drawing upon detailed empirical evidence from eleven deprived and affluent localities in urban and rural England, however, it is here displayed that universally portraying undeclared work as a form of profit-motivated informal employment over-simplifies and obscures its spatially variable nature and heterogeneous meanings. Although undeclared work in affluent locality types and urban areas is more likely to be market-like and conducted for profit-motivated purposes, undeclared work in deprived locality types and rural areas is revealed to be much more a form of mutual aid conducted for kin, neighbours and friends and embedded in non-market motives. The outcome is not only a refiguring of the geographical variations in the nature of undeclared work but also clear evidence of the need to investigate other mainstream economic spaces so as to explore further the heterogeneous and spatially variable nature of monetised transactions.