Mutuality, De-Mutualization and Communities: The Implications of Branch Network Rationalization in the British Building Society Industry

The paper examines the withdrawal of branches from local communities by financial institutions. It assesses whether mutually owned building societies are more adept than the former societies that have converted to public limited companies (plcs), or the high street banks, in serving disadvantaged communities. The paper shows that during the mid-1990s: mutual building societies were more likely than former societies that have converted to plcs to maintain their branch network; mutual societies were less likely than banks to withdraw from socially deprived locations and more likely to open branches in such places; differences between mutual societies and convertors are less marked, but mutual institutions appear less likely than convertors to close branches in deprived communities. Among the remaining mutual building societies there are differences of perspective, with more commercially-minded societies less positive than socially-concerned mutuals about the need to maintain or even expand branches in disadvantaged areas.     

Thorium-230 coral chronology of a late prehistoric Hawaiian chiefdom

Documenting the history of settlement in Hawaii during the last few centuries before European contact, is crucial to charting the evolution of the most complex chiefdom in Polynesia. It is precisely this period that Hawaii, and many Polynesian societies, underwent their most rapid changes in political, economic and social organisation. The last ∼500 to 300 years in the ¹⁴C calibration curve is problematic with wide fluctuations often rendering large age spans that do not precisely date single events, especially troubling with a culture-historical record of ∼1000 years duration. Here we present an extremely high precision ²³⁰Th chronology for archaeologically constrained coral samples from a range of occupancy sites. Our high precision dates allow the time of site use to be clearly demonstrated. They also provide the first dates for habitation sites in Hawaii that clearly show contemporaneous occupation—the major problem in settlement pattern archaeology. We demonstrate that two sites were occupied within the same year. Our refined chronology, provides new and exciting opportunities for tracking sociopolitical and economic developments during the last few centuries—the crucial period in the evolution and transformation of Polynesian societies.