The Strategic Significance of Workforce Diversity in Museums

This paper considers increasing international interest, both academic and professional, in the implications and strategic significance of workforce diversity. Drawing on research that has been undertaken principally within the field of human resource management, as well as the experiences of museum sectors internationally, the paper explores the rationale behind, and potential efficacy of, recent initiatives to enhance cultural diversity within the UK museum sector through an approach characterised by the use of positive or affirmative action. It is argued that workforce diversity will become increasingly important to the sector as, in response to changing socio-political agendas, museums are required to assume new roles as agents of social inclusion. The paper concludes by broadening the concept of ?diversity management' (which has emerged from the field of human resource management) to take account of the museum's unique goals and functions and presents a conceptual framework within which the dynamic interrelationships between diversity within a museum's workforce, audiences and programmes can be considered.     

Measuring Museum Visitor Preferences Towards Opportunities for Developing Social Capital: An Application of a Choice Experiment to the Discovery Museum

This study investigates preferences of visitors to the Discovery Museum (in North East England) with respect to opportunities to develop social capital. The extent to which museums generate social capital is largely unknown, but museums have potential opportunities to develop this type of capital. This study uses a stated preference choice experiment (CE) technique to estimate museum visitor preferences towards social capital opportunities. The findings indicate that visitors have a preference for visiting a museum with another individual(s); and that the provision of participatory activities, extended opening hours and locally related displays would generate more social capital among visitors and in society.     

Figuring space,marking time: Contested identities in Canada

Abstract

Conflicting concepts of identity have long exercised the Canadian imagination. The central focus of this paper is the role of institutionalised memory in promoting centralist patriotic sentiments. The association between the development of a consciousness and knowledge of the nation is illustrated by the founding of the Canadian Club, the Champlain Society and the Canadian Geographical Society. Attention is also directed to Canada's Historic Sites and Monuments Board, founded in 1919. Throughout its 75‐year history, the HSMB has commemorated events, places and people of historical significance for Canada in some 1600 sites. As may be expected, there have been shifts in emphasis in the national meta‐narratives over time, as is also demonstrated by the recent Charles Richard Bronfman Foundation's ‘Heritage Moments’. Taken together, these initiatives demonstrate a dynamic agenda of reconstituting national memory, national self‐knowledge, and national identity.     

The placing of matter: industrial water pollution and the construction of social order in nineteenth-century France

Set within a Douglasian framework, this paper explores the genesis and the social significance of the concept of environmental ‘pollution’ in late nineteenth-century France by drawing on printed scientific and medical sources and analysing archival material from administrations and industrial companies. ‘Pollution’ brought together various strands of water research (especially water analysis, bacteriology and hydrology) but also served as the foundation of a discourse on industrial responsibility. It was a response to the new material circulations created by industrial discharges in river. Paradoxically, it condoned industrial discharges in watercourses, which the hygienist community deemed less dangerous than domestic wastewaters. The co-production of pollution science and nineteenth-century industrial order explains why industrial water pollution was allowed to go unabated. The incapacity of the legal framework of the time to accommodate polluting discharges as legal objects and find legitimate places for them, the power politics at work around pollution and scientific controversies themselves made discharges very difficult to challenge in court. Accordingly, water pollution was regulated informally and industrialists were able to claim rivers as legitimate places for industrial matter against challenges brought up by other social actors.     

自杀社会意义的赋予——以邓世昌自杀情景的建构为例

邓世昌是我国近代著名的民族英雄,他在黄海海战自杀后,清廷虽不赞同他的这种行为,但从强化其政治权威的角度出发,在公开的场合给其极高的褒奖,极力突出其民族英雄的形象。同时,社会上的知识精英们面对着民族危机的日益加深,他们为了寻找一种对抗残酷现实的精神寄托,也将邓世昌的形象不断的加以戏剧化。这使得整个社会对那些不利于将邓世昌建构为＂理想化＂民族英雄的记述进行了有意识的＂遗忘＂。这样既可以消除人们对邓世昌自杀的负面看法,引发世人的同情甚至是崇敬之心,又有利于把人们引导进＂忠君报国＂的行动中来。各个不同的群体从各自的现实需要出发,通过对邓世昌自杀情景的不断建构,赋予邓世昌自杀的社会价值和意义,并将这种价值和意义不断＂放大＂。     

Beach ridges and other shore deposits in south‐west Jura

EUROPE

Planning Research. Edited by W. Pearson. 9¾ × 7¼. Pp XVI + 158. London: The Town planning Institute, 1961. 18s. 6d.

Highland Folk Ways. By I. F. Grant. 8½ × 5½. Pp. XIII + 377. 77 figures. 3 maps. London: Routledge &; Kegan Paul, 1960. 40s.

British Landscapes Through Maps. Edited by K. C. Edwards. No. 1. The English Lake District. By F. J. Monkhouse. 9¾ × 7½. Pp. 19. 18 plates. 3 figures. 1960. No. 2. The Yorkshire Dales. By C. A. M. King. 9¾ × 7½. Pp. 24. 18 plates. 3 figures. 1960. No. 3. Guernsey. By H. J. Fleure. 9¾ × 7½. Pp. 20. 16 plates. 4 figures. 1961. Sheffield: The Geographical Association. 4s. 6d. each.

ASIA AND AFRICA

Nepal. By P. P. Karan. 10¾ × 13¾. Pp. 101. 60 illustrations. 35 maps. Folded map in two colours. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1960. $10.00.

Physical Geography of Asiatic Russia. By S. P. Suslov. Translated by N. D. Gershevsky. Edited by J. E. Williams. 10¼ × 7½. Pp. XIV + 594. 50 maps. 11 diagrams. 16 drawings. 1 end‐paper map. London: W. H. Freeman, 1961. 105s.

Transportation in Ghana. Northwestern University Studies in Geography No. 5. By P. R. Gould. 9 × 6. Pp. X + 163. 13 tables. 4 plates. 113 figures. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Department of Geography, 1960.

CLIMATOLOGY

Précis de Climatologie. By C. P. Peguy. 9¾ × 7¼. Pp. 347.097 diagrams and maps. 3 folding maps. Paris: Masson, 1961. N.F. 42.

PHOTOGRAMMETRY

Photogrammetry. By F. H. Moffitt. 9¼ × 6¼. Pp. XI + 455. Numerous figures and tables. Scranton, Pennsylvania: International Textbook Co, 1959. $ 12.00.

Photogrammetry, Basic Principles and General Survey. By B. Hallert. 9¼ × 6¼. Pp. IX + 340. Numerous figures and tables. New York: McGraw‐Hill Book Co, 1960. $ 12.00.

GENERAL

Britain and Beyond: People of the World. Book one. By R. W. Morris. 7¾ × 5½. Pp. 209. 129 photographs. 18 maps. 24 diagrams. Glasgow: Blackie &; Son Ltd., 1960. 8s. 6d.     

Tracing the ‘chemyn de Portyngale’: English service and servicemen in fourteenth-century Portugal

Three Anglo-Portuguese campaigns took English servicemen into Portugal in the 1380s. Two were largely guided by Plantagenet interests, in 1381–2 and 1386–7, respectively under the earl of Cambridge and the duke of Lancaster. The other, which began in 1384 under the regent João of Avis (later João I), involved entirely volunteer English forces. While the Lancastrian-led expeditions were largely political and military failures, servicemen recruited by the Portuguese in England achieved greater success, including victory at the Battle of Aljubarrota. This article compares these expeditions for the first time. It looks at their political, diplomatic, military, social and economic contexts, exploring motivations for English service in Portugal in particular, from that of the common soldier to that of the governments. By looking at the itineraries in Portugal of English soldiers, their presence is mapped and their continuance debated. The Anglo-Portuguese examples demonstrate how foreign military intervention and mercenary activity might be a driving force in social and economic relations between regions of Europe during the Hundred Years War.     

Gifts of food in late medieval England

Gifts of food were an integral part of late medieval culture. Small items, such as fruit, might be given by anyone. As part of commensality, sociability, hospitality and charity, food gifts underpinned customary patterns of life; they developed networks of relationships, establishing good lordship, and played an important role in negotiations. Patterns of giving demonstrate the distinctiveness and appropriateness of some categories of foodstuff, and illuminate the purposes of donors. Changes over time can be identified: indiscriminate hospitality or large-scale food alms fell out of common practice after the Black Death and gifts of money were preferred in some circumstances. Giving choice foodstuffs, however, remained a constant.