THE EFFECT OF ACCESSIBILITY ON PRODUCTIVITY IN SPANISH MANUFACTURING FIRMS

This paper evaluates the impact of accessibility on the productivity of Spanish manufacturing firms. We suggest the use of accessibility indicators of workers and commodities, integrating transport, land use, and individual components, computing real distances or traveling times using the Spanish full road network. Estimated firms’ total factor productivity is explained as a function of the accessibility indicators and additional control variables. Results evidence the crucial role on firms’ productivity to the accessibility of commodities and to a slightly lesser extent the workers.     

Gaining a “sense of place”: students’ affective experiences of place leading to transformative learning on international fieldwork

This paper reveals the extent to which undergraduate students demonstrate transformative learning whilst on international fieldwork in Barcelona, Spain. Groups of students create a series of discrete active learning situations that allow them and their peers to engage more fully with their locale and in turn experience a deeper understanding of “place”. Reflective field trip notebooks are used to capture the experiences of students. Results show that through the use of the affective domain (Krathwohl’s taxonomy) and applying cyclic experiential learning (Kolb) combined with critical reflection (Mezirow), students demonstrate progression and, in some cases, regression along Krathwohl’s taxonomy.     

Managing New Developments in the Gulf: Rosemary Hollis,editor

Book reviewed in this article: Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan: Michael Griffin     

Reading Religious Decline: Secularisation and Spiritual Self-Fashioning in the Fans of Malcolm Muggeridge,c. 1966–1982†

This article argues that Malcolm Muggeridge's fans used his religious writings to self-fashion their religious identity. This action was made in direct response to their belief, increasingly accepted in Britain and beyond during the 1960s and 1970s, that Christianity was in a state of inexorable decline. These letters provide near-unique access to non-elite readings of religion where readers crafted narratives of their spiritual lives, candidly disclosing their deepest apprehensions and concerns, hopes, and aspirations. They reveal the pervasive quality of the secularisation story regardless of social setting, and they illustrate the inchoate character of its popular reception. In this context, readers depended on Muggeridge's own presentation of a popularised secularisation thesis to crystallise the nebulous feelings about the vitality of religion that preoccupied their thoughts. Their concerns about the future of Christianity coalesced with their growing disenchantment with institutional Christianity, which they felt was either too ill-equipped or theologically bankrupt to engage adequately society's spiritual crisis. In response, readers sought alternative expressions of their faith that were unencumbered by the churches they held in suspicion. This analysis builds on recent attempts to historicise the “secularisation thesis” by showing it functioned as an agent in the events it purported to describe.     

Examining the effect of occupational structure on social mobility – an investigation of A Black Country village 1851–1901

This article continues research into social mobility in England in the nineteenth century by examining the links with different occupational structures, socio-economic and industry/occupation, for a specific location. This allows an examination of the impact of the characteristics of these structures on occupational and thence on social mobility. Occupational mobility has long been recognised as a major determinant of social mobility and has been the subject of a number of papers, usually to determine how much a specific variable affects the level and type of mobility observed. Rarely do these analyses consider the location’s occupational structure, and its changes, as a determinant of the level of mobility. This paper finds that much of the variability of occupational mobility of a locality is determined by the characteristics of the different industries and occupations in that location. Industries and occupations provide a context within which other factors, such as literacy, operate.