The chapter demonstrates that investment competition was paradoxically the most important precondition for the emergence of cross-border trade union cooperation initiatives at Ford and General Motors. There were many attempts for cooperation already in the 1960s and 1970s, but it was only during the 1990s that risk perceptions flowing from investment competition became stronger and increasingly shared across borders, in turn translating into more determined cooperation efforts. However, the interest-driven nature of these initiatives also limited their scope.

In the decade after 1971, new social and political conceptualisations of lesbianism proliferated. Following the demise of Arena Three, a group of women, including Angela Chilton and Jackie Forster, established a new lesbian organisation and magazine, Sappho. The Hall Carpenter Oral History Archive, which represents the largest single archive of lesbian and gay personal narratives in the UK, exemplifies the connections between lesbian politics and history. Its history, and that of the larger archive of which it forms a part, is intimately connected with the development of lesbian and gay historical research in Britain and the place of oral history within it. The ambiguities in concepts such as 'tomboy' and 'bachelor girl', which enabled them to be deployed as indicators of sexual dissidence, also afforded a protection from the explicit naming of a deviant sexual identity.

Focusing on siblings points to ways in which siblings' power sometimes mitigated, sometimes ignored, and sometimes reinforced parents' power. Small children gradually learned extra-familial social roles and hierarchy, but first survival and thriving in family culture meant knowing their position and acting accordingly. In caring for one another, in education, and in play, siblings used childhood to learn external social hierarchies and to test the limits of equality prescribed to them. Some have even argued that prosperous families produced children, specifically girls, who were even less prepared than girls in labouring or trade families for the family separations of adulthood because they stayed longer in their natal home. As children entered adolescence and their daily routines increasingly took them away from one another, they found other ways to maintain their connections.

This chapter demonstrates how, through co-ordinated activity, through the experience of the cholera epidemic and through the elaboration of statistics, the medical practitioners of York constructed the social as a legitimate sphere of interest and activity. The cholera epidemic did not guarantee a uniform or consistent involvement by medical practitioners in the field of public health. In the immediate aftermath of the epidemic, a large number of medical practitioners used their experiences of the disease to locate themselves within a pan-national discourse of cholera and to contribute to debates about its nature, management and treatment. To a great extent, the visions of medical service were channelled through new forms of social organisation and formulated within new ideological frameworks, for the medicalisation of the social body. This was matched by a commensurate process: the socialisation of the medical body.

This chapter sees the application of the communicative imperatives to the decision-making process surrounding the use of force in Kosovo. The analysis focuses primarily on deliberations within the Security Council, at the Holbrooke negotiations in 1998, and at the Rambouillet Conference in 1999 and offers an evaluation of the communicative practices adopted to justify the use of force. The interpretive power of the communicative imperatives unsettles conventional interpretations of the military intervention in 1999 through its contestation of the degree to which the communicative practices surrounding the decision to intervene were legitimate. Crucially, the communicative ethics framework challenges the enabling justification of last resort and highlights key moments of illegitimate dialogue which paved the way for the use of force.

The establishment of convents was the first major step towards the wide-spread overhaul of Catholicity in Scotland. This chapter provides an introduction to the women religious who spearheaded the cultural change. It charts the recruitment of four teaching communities of women religious to Scotland's two cities: the Ursulines of Jesus and the Sisters of Mercy in Edinburgh and the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception and the Sisters of Mercy in Glasgow. According to Canon Law, there were three types of religious institutes: contemplative, active and mixed. The Ursulines of Jesus and the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception were mixed communities, whereas the Sisters of Mercy were active. The chapter investigates how gender and ethnicity influenced the development of these communities. Clerics regularly interfered with convent affairs, because they were uncomfortable with women who crossed traditional boundaries and 'modified' gender limitations to acquire moral authority.

This chapter examines the twists and turns of the British Communist Party’s (CPGB) policy on Zionism and Palestine. During the 1930s and 1940s it contested Zionist accounts of developments in Palestine, highlighting the sectarian practices of the Labour Zionist movement. The CPGB’s analysis always felt short, however, of grasping the internal dynamics of settler colonialism. After the 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union, the party, in trying to win the support of the Jewish community for a broad anti-fascist alliance, toned down its criticism of Zionism and in 1947, in line with Moscow, reversed its earlier opposition to the setting up of a Jewish state. In the crucial period of 1947-49, the Arab point of view had no significant protagonist in Britain.

Nationalist guardians were quick to realise that their powers under the Evicted Poor Protection Act could be used to support participants in the land campaign. This chapter presents two case studies. The first examines an attempt by the New Ross Board of Guardians to relax workhouse rules in order to accommodate evicted tenants. The second focuses on the decision of the Athy Board of Guardians to expend large sums on outdoor relief to evicted tenants and then to reimburse surcharged guardians from union funds. The outcome in each case had relevance for the prosecution of the land campaign and for the wider nationalist movement. The New Ross guardians were subverting the poor law by providing a certain level of comfort for the Ely tenants, enabling them to remain as long as they needed. Under the vice-guardians' administration, expenditure, particularly on outdoor relief, was reduced, and workhouse rules were strictly enforced.

This chapter discusses how persuasive and pervasive market influence interpellates the subject, through various forms of corporate communication, including organisational structure, practices and languages, to become a new kind of worker, a new kind of citizen. A corporate priority is to use communications to maintain and manage relationships with various parties (stakeholders) that have an interest in its business. The chapter argues that the public sector alliance with market principles fundamentally alters the culture and diminishes the rewards of proper service on which, in large part, the identity of public servants rests. Corporate empowerment rhetoric urging employees' self-responsibility allows the organisation to externalise any unfortunate outcomes of its actions. This locates the fault in individual weakness in some unnamed and impersonal force outside any control, as we have seen is often the case where management avoids taking responsibility.

This chapter covers the history of literary culture over the next twenty-eight years, 1961–89, which showed more of a common internal pattern than that whole period shared with the opening years. Each phase's character marked it out from the preceding and following phases: 1961–67 saw the cultural authorities' main focus on the reader, rather than the writer; in 1967–76 the focus shifted to literature's social context, namely both an internal Cuban context and an external context, in the Third World; and in 1977–89, the focus shifted to the book itself, and to publishing, while correcting the neglect of the writer. However, nothing changed the overall emerging emphasis of the strategy for a literary culture, largely determined from 1961 and following the same principles until the crisis of 1989–94, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Based on the fundamental premise that experience and the self cannot be understood in a social vacuum, Chapter Two historicises the research locale, immersing the reader into the ethnographic setting. It introduces the specific research settings of public and private domains of everyday life, multiple sites that inform older people’s sense of self, and the various vantage points for considering social interactions that this affords. Rather than simply describing social activity, this chapter considers the subjective experiences of older age from the perspectives of the people with whom the ethnography is based. The chapter considers daily life, examining what are described as sources of pleasure as well as reasons for frustration. Not surprisingly, these experiences stem from a complicated mixture of factors. Whilst some of these are attributed specifically to ageing and older age by the people who participated in the research, many others are not. They arise instead from the experience of human life and are not at all specific to older age per se. Thus the experience of ‘old age’ as a social label and category is not equivalent to the experience of daily life as an older person. This underlying contradiction informs the chapters to come.

The decline of the grain trade, high population growth, and the threat of military service in the Russian army led ‘Volga Germans’ from the 1860s onwards to consider emigration. From the mid-1870s, 4,000 Volga Germans went to Brazil to seek better opportunities in the Americas. This chapter discusses the migratory movement of the Volga Germans in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It describes the experiences of these Russian refugees and illustrates the complexity of the nature of their migration patterns.