Academic literature on the topic 'Fall River Trade and Industry Association'

The Constitution of Kenya specifically recognizes the freedom of association to form and belong to trade unions. However, despite the adoption of the Labour Relations Act, union practice is still hampered by excessive restrictions. The EPZ companies are labor intensive requiring a large amount of labor to produce its goods or service and thus, the welfare of the employees play a key role in their functions. This study sought to determine the effect of trade union practices on employees’ welfare at export processing zones industries in Athi River, Kenya. The specific objectives sought to determine the effect of collective bargaining agreements, industrial action, dispute resolution and trade union representation on employees’ welfare at export processing zones industries in Athi River, Kenya. The study employed a descriptive research design. Primary data was collected by means of a structured questionnaire. The target population of the study was employees in EPZ companies in Athi River, Kenya with large employees enrolled in active trade unions. The unit of observation was the employees in the trade unions. The findings indicated that collective bargaining agreements had a positive and significant coefficient with employees’ welfare at the EPZ industries. Industrial action had a positive but non-significant effect with employees’ welfare at Export Processing Zones industries. Dispute resolution had a positive and significant coefficient with employees’ welfare at the EPZ industries. Trade union representation had a positive and significant coefficient with employees’ welfare at the EPZ industries. The study recommended that trade union should avoid the path of confrontation but continue dialogue through the collective bargaining process and demands should be realistic in nature with what is obtainable in the related industry. An existence of a formal two way communication between management and trade unions will ensure that right message is properly understood and on time too. Keywords: Collective Bargaining Agreements, Industrial Action, Dispute Resolution, Trade Union Representation, Employees Welfare & Export Processing Zones

Most of the South Asian countries, namely Bangladesh, Bhutan,1 India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka formed a loose association SARC (South Asian Regional Cooperation) in the year 1980. Through various meetings and conferences spread over five years under the banner of SARC, an agreement was signed in December 1985 for the formation of SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. SAARC member-countries have chosen some areas of cooperation like, agriculture, rural development, meteorology, telecommunication, scientific and technical cooperation, health and cooperation activities, transport, postal services and sports, arts and culture. The most recent development that has taken place concerns the meeting of Group of Planners on a yearly basis to review the studies made under the aegis of SAARC in the following areas2 (i) Analysis of trade regimes vis-a-vis industrial protection policies of member countries; (ii) Quantification of the benefits of intra-regional trade expansion including transit problems of land-locked countries and mechanism for financing short duration trade imbalances; (iii) Studies to explore the possibilities of joint ventures in agriculture, industry and energy; and (iv) Studies of existing national systems of industrial promotion and regulation including assessment of design and consultancy capabilities and post-harvest technologies. Inspite of these, the subject of cooperation for intra-regional trade expansion still remains outside the SAARC programme. There is little cooperation in the SAARC region in the sphere of trade. Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka (among other Asian countries) are signatories to the Bangkok Agreement under which each member country gives certain preferential treatment to the co-signatories in the field of trade. This Preferential Trade Agreement signed in July 1975, under the auspicies of ESCAP covered multilateral trade cooperation but has made very limited impact on expanding intra-regional trade among the three countries listed above. Apart from this, the SAARC countries are the members of Asian Clearing Union (ACU), set up in 1975, with a limited coverage of membership, transactions and credit facilities in this region. In spite of SAARC countries' participation in two major schemes of multilateral trade cooperation, the region lagged behind the rest of the world in expanding their trade. Over a period of time, the share of intra-regional trade in this region declined in comparison to world trade. The fall in the share of infra-regional trade can also be seen in a relative sense. Thus, the dependence of these countries upon developed countries has increased and foreign trade has failed to act as an engine of growth in this region. The aim of this paper is to examine: (i) Declining export and import growth rates of SAARC countries; (ii) SAARC countries' aggregate exports and imports share in world exports and imports and its burgeoning trade balances', and (iii) Intra-regional exports and imports share of SAARC countries and SAARC share in its total exports and imports to the rest of the world.

The purpose of this paper is to present a science-based narrative of the impact of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) on the supply chains of the major commodities of Liberia. Scientific literatures from appropriate journals, newspapers, trade data of applicable ministries and governmental agencies, data on Ebola from websites of World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), Center for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC), World Bank, the International Monetary Funds (IMF) and other relevant institutions are used extensively while also employing a market chain approach to represent the overall supply chains of these products. The review reveals, among others, the significant disruption to the flow of goods and the decrease in output of the main export commodities of Liberia. It also shows a fall in the real GDP growth rate of the Mano River Basin (MRB) countries during the Ebola years. The paper identifies that the specific mechanisms through which the supply chains were disrupted were as a result of fear and government’s regulation. Additionally, it provides a practical conduit for the diversification of the rubber industry. Given the complex web of supply chains of just a single product, this effort is in no way an exhaustive review on the impact of the EVD on supply chains of commodities dealt with herein, let alone the overall impact of EVD on the country as a whole. Obviously, this review is also limited in terms of scope and extent. This review is a useful introduction to investigators who might want to commit to research in this particular aspect of the impact of the EVD vis-a-vis its impact on supply chains in Liberia or on a broader level, the MRB Countries.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to reassert the persistent association of the decline in collective bargaining with the increase in income inequality, the fall in the share of wages in national income and deterioration in macroeconomic performance in the UK; and second, to present case studies affirming concrete outcomes of organisational collective bargaining for workers, in terms of pay, job quality, working hours and work-life balance.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based upon two methodological approaches. First, econometric analyses using industry-level and firm-level data for advanced and emerging economies testing the relationship between declining union density, collective bargaining coverage and the fall in the share of wages in national income. Second, it reports on ten in-depth case studies of collective bargaining each based upon analysis of collective bargaining agreements plus in-depth interviews with the actors party to them: in total, 16 trade union officers, 16 members and 11 employer representatives.FindingsThere is robust evidence of the effects of different measures of bargaining power on the labour share including union density, welfare state retrenchment, minimum wages and female employment. The case studies appear to address a legacy of deregulated industrial relations. A number demonstrate the reinvigoration of collective bargaining at the organisational and sectoral level, addressing the two-tier workforce and contractual differentiation, alongside the consequences of government pay policies for equality.Research limitations/implicationsThe case studies represent a purposive sample and therefore findings are not generalisable; researchers are encouraged to test the suggested propositions further.Practical implicationsThe paper proposes that tackling income inequality requires a restructuring of the institutional framework in which bargaining takes place and a level playing field where the bargaining power of labour is more in balance with that of capital. Collective bargaining addresses a number of the issues raised by the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices as essential for “good work”, yet is at odds with the review’s assumptions and remedies. The case studies reiterate the importance of the development of strong workplace representation and bargaining at workplace level, which advocates for non-members and provides a basis for union recruitment, organisation and wider employee engagement.Originality/valueThe paper indicates that there may be limits to employer commitment to deregulated employment relations. The emergence of new or reinvigorated collective agreements may represent a concession by employers that a “free”, individualised, deinstitutionalised, precarious approach to industrial relations, based on wage suppression and work intensification, is not in their interests in the long run.

Nickel ore export ban has been imposed by Indonesia as the leading actor on the global nickel supply chain which created a disruption and has not been perceived well by other countries, especially the European Union (EU) countries. This paper will analyze the implications caused by the export ban to EU countries and the actions following it, including the enactment of the palm oil ban. Starting with the World Trade Organization (WTO) panel, the EU’s strategy of forcing Indonesia to lift the export ban has not yet succeeded. With the tit-for-tat strategy, this paper identifies the EU’s palm oil ban as a form of retaliation for the Indonesian nickel ore export ban. Although the tit-for-tat strategy often is used in a positive-sum game, the conflict between Indonesia and the EU is a negative-sum game with both parties putting their economies at risk. Keywords: nickel ore export ban, palm oil ban, tit-for-tat strategy, Indonesia, European Union REFERENCES Adam, B., & Ahamat, H. (2022). Indonesia’s Mineral Export Prohibition and Legality of Export Duties Under the GATT Rules. Sriwijaya Law Review, 6(2), 239. https://doi.org/10.28946/slrev.vol6.iss2.1661.pp239-253 Bloomberg. (2022, September 30). Export ban triples nickel investment in Indonesia’s Morowali. Mining Weekly. https://www.miningweekly.com/article/export-ban-triples-nickel-investment-in indonesias-morowali-2022-09-30 BNamericas - Why nickel prices are rising – and will rema... (2022, March 28). BNamericas.com. https://www.bnamericas.com/en/interviews/why-nickel-prices-are-rising--and-will-remain high#:~:text=The%20main%20point%20that%20will Codingest. (2023, January 16). Threats in Europe, for Indonesian Palm Oil in 2023. BPDP. https://www.bpdp.or.id/en/threats-in-europe-for-indonesian-palm-oil-in 2023#:~:text=The%20EU Commodity Watch Indonesia: Zooming In On Nickel, A Valuable Metal With A Bright Future | Indonesia Investments. (2022, June 7). Www.indonesia-Investments.com. https://www.indonesia investments.com/business/business-columns/commodity-watch-indonesia-zooming-in-on-nickel a-valuable-metal-with-a-bright-future/item9521 Decena, K. (2019, May 9). Chinese firms lay out processing facility plans after Indonesian ore export ban. Www.spglobal.com. https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news insights/trending/l19hkna_dqquro-fmklifa2 Dunne, T., Kurki, M., & Smith, S. (2021). International relations theories : discipline and diversity (5th ed., p. 119). Oxford University Press. EU Needs Nickel, But Discriminates Palm Oil. (2021, March 8). Indonesian Palm Oil Association (GAPKI IPOA). https://gapki.id/en/news/19858/eu-needs-nickel-but-discriminates-palm-oil European Steel in Figures 2022. (n.d.). In EUROFER. EUROFER. Retrieved January 10, 2023, from https://www.eurofer.eu/assets/publications/brochures-booklets-and-factsheets/european steel-in-figures-2022/European-Steel-in-Figures-2022-v2.pdf Fahalmesta, F. (2022). Indonesia Nickel Crucial metal for low-carbon future (pp. 1–5). Korea Investment & Sekuritas Indonesia. https://kisi.co.id/storage/researchanalysis/August2022/ZuWoIYdDKyucPZU6Zurg.pdf Halm, I. van. (2023, January 10). The nickel price rollercoaster of 2022. Mining Technology. https://www.mining-technology.com/features/nickel-price-surge-2022-markets/ Home, A. (2022, September 30). Column: Indonesia’s nickel surge bad news for price and pricing. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/indonesias-nickel-surge-bad news-price-pricing-2022-09-29/ Huber, I. (2021, December 8). Indonesia’s Nickel Industrial Strategy. Www.csis.org. https://www.csis.org/analysis/indonesias-nickel-industrial-strategy Idris, M. (2021, January 15). Uni Eropa, Gigih Tolak Sawit Indonesia, Tapi Butuh Nikelnya Halaman all. KOMPAS. https://money.kompas.com/read/2021/01/15/203805526/uni-eropa-gigih-tolak-sawit indonesia-tapi-butuh-nikelnya?page=all Kelapa sawit, ancaman perang dagang RI-Uni Eropa dan enam hal lainnya. (2019, March 23). BBC News Indonesia. https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/indonesia-47663602 Lim, B., Kim, H. S., & Park, J. (2021). Implicit Interpretation of Indonesian Export Bans on LME Nickel Prices: Evidence from the Announcement Effect. Risks, 9(5), 93. https://doi.org/10.3390/risks9050093 Nainggolan, B., Wijayati, A., Panjaitan, H., Saputra, D. F., & Rahim, R. (2021). ICLHR 2021: Proceedings from the 1st International Conference on Law and Human Rights, ICLHR 2021, 14- 15 April 2021, Jakarta, Indonesia. In Google Books. European Alliance for Innovation. https://books.google.co.id/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5a1jEAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA226&dq=indonesia+nickel+ban+policy+european+union&ots=qdPe9VZPqw&sig=InXkmX Hqfja4EHtRaVncINgkc&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=indonesia%20nickel%20ban%20policy%20european%20union&f =false Nickel for Life. (2019). BKPM. https://www.bkpm.go.id/en/publication/detail/news/nickelforlife#:~:text=Nickel%20potential%20in%20Indonesia Nickel monthly price worldwide 2023. (n.d.). Statista. Retrieved May 25, 2023, fromhttps://www.statista.com/statistics/260799/monthly-price-of-nickel-at-lme Organization, W. T. (n.d.-a). WTO Analytical Index GATT 1994 - Article X (Jurisprudence). Retrieved January 10, 2023, from https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/publications_e/ai17_e/gatt1994_art10_jur.pdf Organization, W. T. (n.d.-b). WTO Analytical Index GATT 1994 - Article XI (Practice). Retrieved January 9, 2023, from https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/publications_e/ai17_e/gatt1994_art11_oth.pdf Pickrell, E. (2022, March 31). Russia-Ukraine War Helps Drive Nickel Prices, EV Headaches. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/uhenergy/2022/03/31/russia-ukraine-war-helps-drive-nickel-prices ev-headaches/?sh=59f5c7eb57cd Post, T. J. (2022, December 13). Indonesia appeals WTO ruling in nickel dispute against EU. The Jakarta Post. https://www.thejakartapost.com/business/2022/12/13/indonesia-appeals-wto-ruling-in nickel-dispute-against-eu.html Prasetyo, E. (n.d.). Questioning Indonesia’s Ban on Export of Ore Policy Under International Investment and Trade Law. PUSHEP. (2021, February 3). Why does Indonesia’s nickel export ban upset the EU? Pusat Studi Hukum Energi Dan Pertambangan. https://pushep.or.id/why-does-indonesias-nickel-export-ban-upset-the eu/ Staff, R. (2022, December 12). Indonesia appeals WTO ruling in nickel dispute against EU.Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/indonedia-eu-nickel-idUSKBN2SW1PR Taufan Adharsyah. (2019, March 20). RI Bakal Rugi Miliaran Dolar Akibat Larangan Sawit Uni Eropa. Market; cnbcindonesia.com. https://www.cnbcindonesia.com/market/20190320173153-17- 61904/ri-bakal-rugi-miliaran-dolar-akibat-larangan-sawit-uni-eropa TRADING ECONOMICS | 20 Million Indicators for 196 Countries. (n.d.). Tradingeconomics.com. Retrieved May 25, 2023, from https://tradingeconomics.com/european union/imports/russia/nickel. Uni Eropa | Portal Kementerian Luar Negeri Republik Indonesia. (2018).Kemlu.go.id. https://kemlu.go.id/portal/en/read/149/halaman_list_lainnya/uni-eropa Warburton, E. (2018). Nationalism, developmentalism and politics in Indonesia’s mining sector. Winona, C. V. (n.d.). Indonesia’s Nickel Industry in the Aftermath of Trade Dispute with the European Union. Https://Cwts.ugm.ac.id. Retrieved January 9, 2023, from https://cwts.ugm.ac.id/en/2022/11/03/indonesias-nickel-industry-in-the-aftermath-of-tradedispute-with-the-european-union/#:~:text=Indonesia%20produces%201%20million%20metric WTO | dispute settlement - DS592: Indonesia - Measures Relating to Raw Materials. (n.d.). World Trade Organization. Retrieved January 9, 2023, from https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds592_e.htm WTO panel rules against Indonesia’s export limitations on raw materials. (2022, November 30). European Commission. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_7314 Xinhua. (2022, November 17). China-invested industrial parks bring boom to Indonesia’s nickel industry - Global Times. Global Times. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202211/1279768.shtml Yeo, R. (n.d.). Europe stainless steel prices fall further, no relief until September – sources – British Stainless Steel Association. British Stainless Steel Association. Retrieved January 10, 2023, from https://bssa.org.uk/europe-stainless-steel-prices-fall-further-no-relief-until-september-sources/

Abstract Non‐native species can spread rapidly through aquatic ecosystems in association with both natural and anthropogenic mechanisms, but the relative importance of these two mechanisms in determining the spread of a species is not always clear. The red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) has been introduced to multiple continents, including waterbodies in the United States where both natural and anthropogenic dispersal are likely to have contributed to its current distribution. The present study combined comparisons of historical and contemporary distributions of P. clarkii and several high conservation priority crayfish species, regional field sampling, and microsatellite‐based genetic approaches from the Pee Dee River basin in North Carolina and South Carolina to understand the dispersal patterns of P. clarkii and its potential effects on native crayfishes. Field sampling and microsatellite analyses revealed widespread populations of P. clarkii throughout the study area with catchment‐specific patterns of population genetic structure, wherein more distinct genetic structures were found in the basin with historic aquaculture activities and a longer period of occurrence. The rapid spread of P. clarkii has occurred concurrently with extirpations of populations of native crayfishes, namely the Waccamaw crayfish (Procambarus braswelli), the Carolina Sandhills crayfish (Procambarus pearsei) and the coastal plain crayfish (Procambarus ancylus). The rapid spread of P. clarkii and coincident extirpation of native crayfishes calls for more extensive regulatory controls to help prevent the intentional or accidental release of non‐native crayfishes through aquaculture practices, bait releases, the pet trade and the environmental education industry.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and most particularly since 9/11, the government of the United States has used its security services to enforce the order it desires for the world. The US government and its security services appreciate the importance of creating the ideological environment that allows them full-scope in their activities. To these ends they have turned to the movie industry which has not been slow in accommodating the purposes of the state. In establishing the parameters of the War Against Terror after 9/11, one of the Bush Administration’s first stops was Hollywood. White House strategist Karl Rove called what is now described as the Beverley Hills Summit on 19 November 2001 where top movie industry players including chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, Jack Valenti met to discuss ways in which the movie industry could assist in the War Against Terror. After a ritual assertion of Hollywood’s independence, the movie industry’s powerbrokers signed up to the White House’s agenda: “that Americans must be called to national service; that Americans should support the troops; that this is a global war that needs a global response; that this is a war against evil” (Cooper 13). Good versus evil is, of course, a staple commodity for the movie industry but storylines never require the good guys to fight fair so with this statement the White House got what it really wanted: Hollywood’s promise to stay on the big picture in black and white while studiously avoiding the troubling detail in the exercise extra-judicial force and state-sanctioned murder. This is not to suggest that the movie industry is a monolithic ideological enterprise. Alternative voices like Mike Moore and Susan Sarandon still find space to speak. But the established economics of the scenario trade are too strong for the movie industry to resist: producers gain access to expensive weaponry to assist production if their story-lines are approved by Pentagon officials (‘Pentagon provides for Hollywood’); the Pentagon finances movie and gaming studios to provide original story formulas to keep their war-gaming relevant to emerging conditions (Lippman); and the Central Intelligence Agency’s “entertainment liaison officer” assists producers in story development and production (Gamson). In this context, the moulding of story-lines to the satisfaction of the Pentagon and CIA is not even an issue, and protestations of Hollywood’s independence is meaningless, as the movie industry pursues patriotic audiences at home and seeks to garner hearts and minds abroad. This is old history made new again. The Cold War in the 1950s saw movies addressing the disruption of world order not so much by Communists as by “others”: sci-fi aliens, schlock horror zombies, vampires and werewolves and mad scientists galore. By the 1960s the James Bond movie franchise, developed by MI5 operative Ian Fleming, saw Western secret agents ‘licensed to kill’ with the justification that such powers were required to deal with threats to world order, albeit by fanciful “others” such as the fanatical scientist Dr. No (1962). The Bond villains provide a catalogue of methods for the disruption of world order: commandeering atomic weapons and space flights, manipulating finance markets, mind control systems and so on. As the Soviet Union disintegrated, Hollywood produced a wealth of material that excused the paranoid nationalism of the security services through the hegemonic masculinity of stars such as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal and Bruce Willis (Beasley). Willis’s Die Hard franchise (1988/1990/1995) characterised US insouciance in the face of newly created terrorist threats. Willis personified the strategy of the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations: a willingness to up the ante, second guess the terrorists and cower them with the display of firepower advantage. But the 1997 instalment of the James Bond franchise saw an important shift in expectations about the source of threats to world order. Tomorrow Never Dies features a media tycoon bent on world domination, manipulating the satellite feed, orchestrating conflicts and disasters in the name of ratings, market share and control. Having dealt with all kinds of Cold War plots, Bond is now confronted with the power of the media itself. As if to mark this shift, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) made a mockery of the creatively bankrupt conventions of the spy genre. But it was the politically corrupt use to which the security services could be put that was troubling a string of big-budget filmmakers in the late 90s. In Enemy of the State (1998), an innocent lawyer finds himself targeted by the National Security Agency after receiving evidence of a political murder motivated by the push to extend the NSA’s powers. In Mercury Rising (1998), a renegade FBI agent protects an autistic boy who cracks a top-secret government code and becomes the target for assassins from an NSA-like organisation. Arlington Road (1999) features a college professor who learns too much about terrorist organisations and has his paranoia justified when he becomes the target of a complex operation to implicate him as a terrorist. The attacks on September 11 and subsequent Beverley Hills Summit had a major impact on movie product. Many film studios edited films (Spiderman) or postponed their release (Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage) where they were seen as too close to actual events but insufficiently patriotic (Townsend). The Bond franchise returned to its staple of fantastical villains. In Die Another Day (2002), the bad guy is a billionaire with a laser cannon. The critical perspective on the security services disappeared overnight. But the most interesting development has been how fantasy has become the key theme in a number of franchises dealing with world order that have had great box-office success since 9/11, particularly Lord of the Rings (2001/2/3) and Harry Potter (2001/2/4). While deeply entrenched in the fantasy genre, each of these franchises also addresses security issues: geo-political control in the Rings franchise; the subterfuges of the Ministry for Muggles in the _Potter _franchise. Looking at world order through the supernatural lens has particular appeal to audiences confronted with everyday threats. These fantasies follow George Bush’s rhetoric of the “axis of evil” in normalising the struggle for world order in term of black and white with the expectation that childish innocence and naïve ingenuity will prevail. Only now with three years hindsight since September 11 can we begin to see certain amount of self-reflection by disenchanted security staff return to the cinema. In Man on Fire (2004) the burned-out ex-CIA assassin has given up on life but regains some hope while guarding a child only to have everything disintegrate when the child is killed and he sets out on remorseless revenge. Spartan (2004) features a special forces officer who fails to find a girl and resorts to remorseless revenge as he becomes lost in a maze of security bureaucracies and chance events. Security service personnel once again have their doubts but only find redemption in violence and revenge without remorse. From consideration of films before and after September 11, it becomes apparent that the movie industry has delivered on their promises to the Bush administration. The first response has been the shift to fantasy that, in historical terms, will be seen as akin to the shift to musicals in the Depression. The flight to fantasy makes the point that complex situations can be reduced to simple moral decisions under the rubric of good versus evil, which is precisely what the US administration requested. The second, more recent response has been to accept disenchantment with the personal costs of the War on Terror but still validate remorseless revenge. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill franchise (2003/4) seeks to do both. Thus the will to world order being fought out in the streets of Iraq is sublimated into fantasy or excused as a natural response to a world of violence. It is interesting to note that television has provided more opportunities for the productive consideration of world order and the security services than the movies since September 11. While programs that have had input from the CIA’s “entertainment liaison officer” such as teen-oriented, Buffy-inspired Alias and quasi-authentic The Agency provide a no-nonsense justification for the War on Terror (Gamson), others such as 24, West Wing _and _Threat Matrix have confronted the moral problems of torture and murder in the War on Terrorism. 24 uses reality TV conventions of real-time plot, split screen exposition, unexpected interventions and a close focus on personal emotions to explore the interactions between a US President and an officer in the Counter Terrorism Unit. The CTU officer does not hesitate to summarily behead a criminal or kill a colleague for operational purposes and the president takes only a little longer to begin torturing recalcitrant members of his own staff. Similarly, the president in West Wing orders the extra-judicial death of a troublesome player and the team in Threat Matrix are ready to exceeded their powers. But in these programs the characters struggle with the moral consequences of their violent acts, particularly as family members are drawn into the plot. A running theme of Threat Matrix is the debate within the group of their choices between gung-ho militarism and peaceful diplomacy: the consequences of a simplistic, hawkish approach are explored when an Arab-American college professor is wrongfully accused of supporting terrorists and driven towards the terrorists because of his very ordeal of wrongful accusation. The world is not black and white. Almost half the US electorate voted for John Kerry. Television still must cater for liberal, and wealthy, demographics who welcome the extended format of weekly television that allows a continuing engagement with questions of good or evil and whether there is difference between them any more. Against the simple world view of the Bush administration we have the complexities of the real world. References Beasley, Chris. “Reel Politics.” Australian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide, 2004. Cooper, Marc. “Lights! Cameras! Attack!: Hollywood Enlists.” The Nation 10 December 2001: 13-16. Gamson, J. “Double Agents.” The American Prospect 12.21 (3 December 2001): 38-9. Lippman, John. “Hollywood Casts About for a War Role.” Wall Street Journal 9 November 2001: A1. “Pentagon Provides for Hollywood.” USA Today 29 March 2001. http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/2001-05-17-pentagon-helps-hollywood.htm>. Townsend, Gary. “Hollywood Uses Selective Censorship after 9/11.” e.press 12 December 2002. http://www.scc.losrios.edu/~express/021212hollywood.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stockwell, Stephen. "The Manufacture of World Order: The Security Services and the Movie Industry." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/10-stockwell.php>. APA Style Stockwell, S. (Jan. 2005) "The Manufacture of World Order: The Security Services and the Movie Industry," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/10-stockwell.php>.

Abstract: Nowadays, Vietnamese women are participating actively in parts of the economy that were previously deemed male domain. Women are involved in business activities at all levels in Vietnam, making significant contributions to the economic development of the country. By December 2011, there were 81,226 small and medium enterprises headed by women, accounting for 25% of the total number of enterprises in the country (GSO, 2013). In Vietnam, despite recent economic development, socio-cultural and legal barriers are still very difficult for women since the general perception in society is that a woman’s main duty is to be a good housewife and mother and they are also often perceived as weak, passive and irrational (VWEC, 2007). Even though the studies related to women entrepreneurship development are quite extensive, amongst them only a limited number of researches on the role of legal and socio - cultural barriers on women entrepreneurs in the context of Vietnam have been investigated. Thus, supported by the World Trade Institute (WTI) in Bern, Switzerland, the researchers have chosen this as the subject of this study. Based on a quantitative survey of 110 companies in Hanoi and adjacent areas, the research has taken legal and socio - cultural barriers and explored their effect on the development of women entrepreneurship in the context of Vietnam in order to indicate how women entrepreneurs perceive the impact of socio-cultural factors, economic impacts, and policy reforms on their entrepreneurial situations and initiatives, and to then provide policy implications for promoting women’s entrepreneurship and gender equality in Vietnam. Keywords Entrepreneurship, female entrepreneurs, gender equality, Vietnam References Acs, Z. & Varga, A. (2005) ‘Entrepreneurship, agglomeration and technological change’, Small Business Economics, 24, 323---334. Avin, R.M & Kinney, L.P (2014). Trends in Female Entrepreneurship in Vietnam Preliminary paper presented at the 23th Annual Conference on Feminist Economics sponsored by IAFFE, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana, June 27-29, 2014.Avin, R.-M., & Kinney, L. P. (2014) ‘Trends in Women entrepreneurship in Vietnam’, 23rd Annual Conference on Feminist Economics, Ghana: 27 – 29 June.Bruton, G. D., Ahlstrom, D., & Obloj, K. (2008). Entrepreneurship in emerging economies: where are we today and where should the research go in the future. Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 32(1), 1–14.Bunck, J. M. (1997) Women and Post Cold War Socialism: the cases of Cuba and Vietnam, 7th Annual Meeting, Association for the Study of Cuban Economy, University of Miami, Knight Center, Hyatt Hotel, August 7-9 1997 Central Population and Housing Census Steering Committee (2010), The 2009 Vietnam Population and Housing Census: Completed Results, Statistical Publishing House, available at: http://vietnam.unfpa.org/webdav/site/vietnam/shared/Census%20publications/3_Completed-Results.pdf Chari, M. D., & Dixit, J. (2015). Business groups and entrepreneurship in developing countries after reforms. Journal Of Business Research,68, 1359-1366.Djankov, S. , R. L. Porta , F. Lopez-de-Silanes and A. Schleifer (2002) The Regulation of Entry, Quarterly Journal of Economics CXVII (1): 1-37Food and Agricultural Organisation and United Nations Development Programme (2002) ‘Gender Differences in the Transitional Economy of Vietnam: Key Gender Findings – Second Vietnam Living Standards Survey, 1997 – 1998’. 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(2010), “Rural employment and life: challenges to gender roles in Vietnam’s agriculture at present”, paper presented at the FAO-IFAD-ILO Workshop on Gaps, Trends and Current Research in Gender Dimensions of Agricultural and Rural Employment: Differentiated Pathways Out of Poverty Rome, 31 March-2 April 2009, available at: www.fao-ilo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/fao_ilo/pdf/Papers/16_march/Thinh_final.pdf Hoang, C., Hoang, C.L.T.S, Nguyen, T.P.C, Ngo, T.P.L, Tran, T.N, Vu, T.L (2013), The women’s access to land in contemporary Vietnam. UNDP Report 2013Hoskisson, R. E., Eden, L., Lau, C.M., &Wright, M. (2000). Strategy in emerging economies. Academy of Management Journal, 43(3), 249–267.ILO (2011) ‘Creation of an enabling environment for women entrepreneur in Vietnam: Mainstreaming gender issues in government policy on enterprise development’, Hanoi.International Finance Corporation (2006) A National Survey of Women Business Owners in Vietnam. 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Vietnam development report 2012: Market economy for a middle- income Vietnam, Washington DC: The World Bank.World Bank (2012), Vietnam Country Gender Assessment, World Bank Country Office, HanoiWorld Bank (2015), World Bank Database, Available at: http://data.worldbank.org/country/vietnam [Accessed 9 December 2015].World Development Indicators (WDI) (2012), The World Bank, Washington, DC.Zhu, L., Kara, O., Chu, H.M.,Chu, A. (2015), ‘Women entrepreneurship: Evidence from Vietnam’, Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 103-128 lity in Vietnam.

When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. London: Collins, 1942.Brannigan, John. “‘England Am I …’ Eugenics, Devolution and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” The Palgrave Macmillan Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature. Eds. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Cannadine, David. In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2002.Cavaliero, Glen. The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900-1939. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Ford, Ford Madox. The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land. London: Alston Rivers, 1906.Gervais, David. Literary Englands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Giles, J., and T. Middleton, eds. Writing Englishness. London: Routledge, 1995.Haddow, Elizabeth. “The Novel of English Country Life, 1900-1930.” Dissertation. London: University of London, 1957.Hamilton, Robert. W.H. Hudson: The Vision of Earth. New York: Kennikat Press, 1946.Keith, W.J. Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965.Lewis, Roy, and Angus Maude. The English Middle Classes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998.Morris, Margaret. The General Strike. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Morton, H.V. In Search of England. London: Methuen, 1927.Peach, H. Let Us Tidy Up. Leicester: The Dryad Press, 1930.Perry, C.R. “In Search of H.V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy.” Twentieth Century British History 10.4 (1999): 431-56.Roberts, Cecil. Pilgrim Cottage. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933.———. Gone Rustic. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934.Taylor, A.J.P. England 1914-1945. The Oxford History of England XV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Taylor, John. War Photography: Realism in the British Press. London: Routledge, 1991.Wiener, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Williamson, Henry. The Village Book. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.Wright, Patrick. A Journey through Ruins: A Keyhole Portrait of British Postwar Life and Culture. London: Flamingo, 1992.

Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. 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