Academic literature on the topic 'Labor supply – Effect of education on – Great Britain'

In 1738, the English evangelist George Whitefield traveled to the new colony of Georgia intending to establish “a house for fatherless children.” Inspired by both August Hermann Francke, the German Pietist who had great success educating and maintaining poor orphans in Halle, and by charity schools established in Great Britain, Whitefield's orphan house and charity school, named Bethesda, opened its doors early in 1740. For years, Whitefield devoted himself tirelessly to ensuring the success of the Bethesda school, preaching throughout Britain and North America on its behalf. Whitefield's preaching tour on behalf of his beloved Bethesda is well known for its role in catalyzing the religious revivals known collectively as the Great Awakening. The tour also marked an important shift in the history of education in America. News of the establishment of the orphanage at Bethesda coincided with new efforts to school the poor throughout the colonies. Drawing on both the British and German models of charity schooling that were highly influential for Whitefield, eighteenth-century Americans began or increased commitments to charity schooling for poor children. But the European models were not adopted wholesale. Instead, local administrators of the schooling experiments deviated from these models in a striking way. In America, elites offered some children the opportunity for extensive charity instruction, but not necessarily children at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This article will argue that the execution of these charity schooling programs was contingent upon local social conditions, specifically what appears to have been local elites' desire to maintain a certain social order and ensure a continued supply of cheap labor.

In 2020, nine major UK shooting and rural organisations proposed a voluntary transition from the use for hunting of lead shotgun ammunition to non-lead alternatives. The major food retailer Waitrose & Partners has announced its intention to move to not supplying game meat products from animals killed using any kind of lead ammunition and the National Game Dealers Association announced a plan for a similar policy to be implemented in 2022. The SHOT-SWITCH research project, which is intended to monitor the progress of these voluntary initiatives, began in the 2020/2021 shooting season. The project monitors changes in the proportions of wild-shot common pheasants Phasianus colchicus available to consumers in Great Britain that had been killed using lead and non-lead shotgun ammunition, as assessed by using inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry to identify the composition of shotgun pellets recovered from carcasses. In 2020/2021, 99.4% of the pheasants sampled had been killed using lead ammunition. We report here further results from this study for the 2021/2022 season. We found that 99.5% of the 215 pheasants from which shotgun pellets were recovered had been killed using lead ammunition. We conclude that the shooting and rural organisations’ joint statement and two years of their considerable efforts in education, awareness-raising and promotion, have not yet had a detectable effect on the ammunition types used by hunters who supply pheasants to the British game meat market.

In the article new approaches are considered in the study of socio-political dangers related to the formation of drug dependence on opiates and opioids, in institutions of higher education in the process of teaching "Safety Life and Labor Protection in Industry" due to more effective compilation and presentation of the appropriate lecture material with the help of the system of multimedia presentations. It is shown that on the one hand, endogenous opioids (enkephalins, endorphins, dinorphins, endomorphins) are of great benefit, because they work every second inside our brain, and created opioids of the morphine series (morphine, heroin, tramadol, fentanyl, desomorphine, etc.) are an important group of analgesic drugs, but at the same time they are the most terrible of the drugs that have taken and are taking the lives of millions of people. Peculiarities of material supply due to the causes, mechanisms and consequences of the effects of narcotic opiates and opioids on the human nervous system are considered. It is shown that the two main effects of morphine are: 1) reduction of pain sensitivity (analgesia) due to inhibition of pain signals in the spinal cord and brain (instead of endogenous opioids, which themselves constantly block the transmission of weak signals in the spinal cord from minor injuries, and can to block stronger pain impulses at the level of a thalamus that gives the chance, literally, not to pay attention to pain); 2) calm, euphoria due to the weakening of the activity of inhibitory neurons that inhibit the work of the centers of positive emotions in the hypothalamus and basal ganglia - in fact, the inhibitory block is removed from positive emotions and they become much more. With the help of morphine, you can cause hyperactivation of all opioid centers, that is, "exclude" any pain, even the strongest from severe physical injuries, burns, and oncology. And since the opioid block (inhibition) is only above the pain channels, the skin and temperature sensitivity do not overlap, that is, the person continues to tactilely feel his body (and not as with novocaine). But, for 5-10 times, if morphine is used frequently, there is addiction (need to increase the dose to get the same effect) and dependence (when you suddenly stop taking the drug - develops withdrawal syndrome - the system swings in the other direction, that is, if you take painkillers, you will have severe pain, if psychostimulants and antidepressants - depression), because any synapse, if overstimulated, begins to change compensatory. In the case of morphine, the formation of the opioid withdrawal syndrome is the fastest of all known systems. At the same time, after abrupt cessation of use there is a very powerful pain withdrawal syndrome - "breaking", when even a small touch causes severe pain, or even pain "in an empty place" - small pain signals now pass unhindered and "the whole body hurts" as if "burns with fire", "pulls out pieces of skin", the heart beats at 200 beats per minute and a person can die.

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

Despite the fact that the coronavirus pandemic caused an economic crisis and a significant reduction in demand and supply, it gave a strong impetus to the development and massive use of information technology, in the beginning of a new long wave of the economic cycle. The pandemic is not a challenge only to the world community, but it also tests it - to what extent it is able to quickly and efficiently digitize the economy, transfer production to a new technological level, and ultimately, implement the fourth technological revolution. The Internet, telecommunications already have the opportunity to improve their qualifications in their own or promising specialties of interested persons through appropriate online courses. In countries with developed market economies and before the pandemic, the number of students in such courses was almost equal to the number of university students, and in the coming years, in all likelihood, it will significantly exceed it. This fully fits into the life-long learning trend caused by rapid technological changes, which nullifies the "eternal status" of the acquired profession. In less than a year since the beginning of the global coronavirus pandemic, there have been significant changes in the organization of forms of study and teaching in universities. The latter have to seriously revise their teaching methods in the "rapid chess" mode and abandon outdated forms of teaching. COVID-19 has paved the way for distance learning and work, online lessons, lectures, video conferences. However, the distance, online form of training and work has not only advantages, but also disadvantages, the ultimate level of efficiency. At the same time, at present, not all students, students and even educational institutions have the technical and material capabilities to provide online learning. Knowledge is a multifunctional tool with the help of which a person copes with certain tasks. Taking this into account, the university should equip young people with such knowledge that will have not only informational load, but also great applied value. In the context of the pandemic, universities are faced with serious challenges, most of them are like a downward spiral orbit: on the one hand, online teaching saves money on the maintenance and operation of classrooms, but on the other hand, this means reducing the costs of students (their parents, sponsors, etc. etc.), the appropriate adjustment of their mobility plans, which makes the administration and the state the need to pursue a new, changed educational and economic policy. In the context of a pandemic, the implementation of these tasks faces a serious danger: traditional forms of study and knowledge transfer are disrupted and the market requirements become not entirely clear due to its significant narrowing. The question of the need to reduce the dependence of the cost of studying at universities on the contributions of the students themselves (their parents, sponsors, etc.) is becoming increasingly acute. Such expenses in state universities should be completely borne by the state, which will practically reduce to zero the motivation of the universities to maintain undisciplined students within the walls of the university and will significantly increase the demand towards them (and, accordingly, the quality of education). Which place can online learning take in a pandemic period? In general (without taking into account the mention in the context of the pandemic), the advantage of online education is unambiguous for those specialties, the perspective of which presupposes predominantly the same format. However, it should be remembered that the online format is a specific, actually surrogate form of social relations and professional and personal self-confidence and communication skills are practically not based on it. So, instead of a tug of war between online and offline forms, it is necessary to find the optimal balance between the forms of their complementarity and not interchangeability. Online courses for stakeholders are no less mobilizing. Listening to a lecture in this format is possible at a convenient time (at home, while traveling, while waiting for a bus or waiting in line for purchases, etc.). These courses are a subjective choice of everyone and are not a forced form for gaining some number of so-called credits. Due to high motivation, the degree of development is more stable and higher. Over time, the knowledge gained through such courses will become more valuable in the selection of an employee for a vacant position. Distance learning, in spite of the fact that it has a number of advantages (convenient, economical - it saves costs on transport, time, egalitarian, etc.) is still a substitute - it only partially replaces, but does not replace fully relations between the lecturer and student (as well as between academic staff). It does not replace such aspects of full-fledged student life as the living relations of students, their joint participation in public events. In the online format, it is possible to transfer knowledge, but not the nuances of culture, behavior, creativity, national and regional sensitivity, humor, etc. Online learning and relationships is, figuratively speaking, a movie shot on a flat screen, while classroom learning is a movie in 3D. The focus on distance learning has one very significant side effect: it creates a danger to the level and frequency of mutual communication of academic staff. Because of this, departments and social and professional unions can undergo a serious deformation of their significance. Accordingly, this will increase the degree of alienation of the academic staff from the universities that provided them with jobs. The problem of socialization, from a slightly different perspective, is also faced by persons engaged exclusively in scientific work - how will scientific links, "chained" by common ideas and goals, be formed? The final effectiveness of the chosen training format (online vs. offline format) is determined by the effectiveness of the training process. The latter is largely determined by compliance with the requirements of the labor market. In turn, this compliance is largely predetermined by the systemic (instead of episodic) contact of potential employers with universities. The coronavirus pandemic is directly reflected in the scale and format of employment - it reduces the overall contingent and significantly changes the employment situation, "throws" a significant part of the employees who have retained their jobs online. Remote forms of work, which were already pioneered by higher and general education schools, will develop even more, new, more sophisticated forms of intensification of work of employees employed at remote locations will appear. Here, as in other spheres of economic and social life, the boundaries between the traditional division of working and non-working (free) time will actually be erased. However, online work has refrained level of efficiency. For example, it is very problematic to create a workplace at home - not everyone has the opportunity to organize a separate office, a desk for such work, which creates psychological and, often, physical discomfort. The fact is that online work has a concomitant negative effect. It causes the atomization of the collective, the corrosion of its unity. To the extent that representatives of higher education and the academic sphere can lead the students who have switched online, not only in their studies, but also in the development of skills and feelings of socialization and empathy in them, the future and the maturity of civil society will largely depend on this. It is necessary to find a kind of "golden mean" of relations both between students and academic staff, and with representatives of "their own cluster", in which direct live relationships may not be as intense and daily as before. The rest of the time will be completely transferred to their self-organizing and self-fulfilling "box of time". The final victory over the pandemic will eliminate or significantly alleviate most of the above problems, however, the need to adapt everyday life, study, work to the online format of relationships will remain highly relevant.

During World War II, the Soviet Union’s food supply was in a state of crisis. Hitler’s army had occupied the agricultural heartlands of Ukraine and Southern Russia in 1941 and, as a result, agricultural production for the entire nation had plummeted. Soldiers in Red Army, who easily ate the best rations in the country, subsisted on a daily allowance of just under a kilogram of bread, supplemented with meat, tea, sugar and butter when and if these items were available. The hunger of the Red Army and its effect on the morale and strength of Europe’s eastern warfront were causes for concern for the Soviet government and its European and American allies. The one country with a food surplus decided to do something to help, and in 1942 the United States agreed to send thousands of pounds of meat, cheese and butter overseas to help feed the Red Army. After receiving several shipments of the all-American spiced canned meat SPAM, the Red Army’s quartermaster put in a request for a more familiar canned pork product, Russian tushonka. Pound for pound, America sent more pigs overseas than soldiers during World War II, in part because pork was in oversupply in the America of the early 1940s. Shipping meat to hungry soldiers and civilians in war torn countries was a practical way to build business for the U.S. meat industry, which had been in decline throughout the 1930s. As per a Soviet-supplied recipe, the first cans of Lend-Lease tushonka were made in the heart of the American Midwest, at meatpacking plants in Iowa and Ohio (Stettinus 6-7). Government contracts in the meat packing industry helped fuel economic recovery, and meatpackers were in a position to take special request orders like the one for tushonka that came through the lines. Unlike SPAM, which was something of a novelty item during the war, tushonka was a food with a past. The original recipe was based on a recipe for preserved meat that had been a traditional product of the Ural Mountains, preserved in jars with salt and fat rather than by pressure and heat. Thus tushonka was requested—and was mass-produced—not simply as a convenience but also as a traditional and familiar food—a taste of home cooking that soldiers could carry with them into the field. Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that the arrival of tushonka was instrumental in helping the Red Army push back against the Nazi invasion (178). Unlike SPAM and other wartime rations, tushonka did not fade away after the war. Instead, it was distributed to the Soviet civilian population, appearing in charity donations and on the shelves of state shops. Often it was the only meat product available on a regular basis. Salty, fatty, and slightly grey-toned, tushonka was an unlikely hero of the postwar-era, but during this period tushonka rose from obscurity to become an emblem of socialist modernity. Because it was shelf stable and could be made from a variety of different cuts of meat, it proved an ideal product for the socialist production lines where supplies and the pace of production were infinitely variable. Unusual in a socialist system of supply, this product shaped production and distribution lines, and even influenced the layout of meatpacking factories and the genetic stocks of the animals that were to be eaten. Tushonka’s initial ubiquity in the postwar Soviet Union had little to do with the USSR’s own hog industry. Pig populations as well as their processing facilities had been decimated in the war, and pigs that did survive the Axis invasion had been evacuated East with human populations. Instead, the early presence of tushonka in the pig-scarce postwar Soviet Union had everything to do with Harry Truman’s unexpected September 1945 decision to end all “economically useful” Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union (Martel). By the end of September, canned meat was practically the only product still being shipped as part of Lend-Lease (NARA RG 59). Although the United Nations was supposed to distribute these supplies to needy civilians free of cost, travelers to the Soviet Union in 1946 spotted cans of American tushonka for sale in state shops (Skeoch 231). After American tushonka “donations” disappeared from store shelves, the Soviet Union’s meat syndicates decided to continue producing the product. Between its first appearance during the war in 1943, and the 1957 announcement by Nikita Khrushchev that Soviet policy would restructure all state animal farms to support the mass production of one or several processed meat products, tushonka helped to drive the evolution of the Soviet Union’s meat packing industry. Its popularity with both planners and the public gave it the power to reach into food commodity chains. It is this backward reach and the longer-term impacts of these policies that make tushonka an unusual byproduct of the Cold War era. State planners loved tushonka: it was cheap to make, the logistics of preparing it were not complicated, it was easy to transport, and most importantly, it served as tangible evidence that the state was accomplishing a long-standing goal to get more meat to its citizenry and improving the diet of the average Soviet worker. Tushonka became a highly visible product in the Soviet Union’s much vaunted push to establish a modern food regime intended to rival that of the United States. Because it was shelf-stable, wartime tushonka had served as a practical food for soldiers, but after the war tushonka became an ideal food for workers who had neither the time nor the space to prepare a home-cooked meal with fresh meat. The Soviet state started to produce its own tushonka because it was such an excellent fit for the needs and abilities of the Soviet state—consumer demand was rarely considered by planners in this era. Not only did tushonka fit the look and taste of a modern processed meat product (that is, it was standard in texture and flavor from can to can, and was an obviously industrially processed product), it was also an excellent way to make the most of the predominant kind of meat the Soviet Union had the in the 1950s: small scraps low-grade pork and beef, trimmings leftover from butchering practices that focused on harvesting as much animal fat, rather than muscle, from the carcass in question. Just like tushonka, pork sausages and frozen pelmeny, a meat-filled pasta dumpling, also became winning postwar foods thanks to a happy synergy of increased animal production, better butchering and new food processing machines. As postwar pigs recovered their populations, the Soviet processed meat industry followed suit. One official source listed twenty-six different kinds of meat products being issued in 1964, although not all of these were pork (Danilov). An instructional manual distributed by the meat and milk syndicate demonstrated how meat shops should wrap and display sausages, and listed 24 different kinds of sausages that all needed a special style of tying up. Because of packaging shortages, the string that bound the sausage was wrapped in a different way for every type of sausage, and shop assistants were expected to be able to identify sausages based on the pattern of their binding. Pelmeny were produced at every meat factory that processed pork. These were “made from start to finish in a special, automated machine, human hands do not touch them. Which makes them a higher quality and better (prevoskhodnogo) product” (Book of Healthy and Delicious Food). These were foods that became possible to produce economically because of a co-occurring increase in pigs, the new standardized practice of equipping meatpacking plants with large-capacity grinders, and freezers or coolers and the enforcement of a system of grading meat. As the state began to rebuild Soviet agriculture from its near-collapse during the war, the Soviet Union looked to the United States for inspiration. Surprisingly, Soviet planners found some of the United States’ more outdated techniques to be quite valuable for new Soviet hog operations. The most striking of these was the adoption of competing phenotypes in the Soviet hog industry. Most major swine varieties had been developed and described in the 19th century in Germany and Great Britain. Breeds had a tendency to split into two phenotypically distinct groups, and in early 20th Century American pig farms, there was strong disagreement as to which style of pig was better suited to industrial conditions of production. Some pigs were “hot-blooded” (in other words, fast maturing and prolific reproducers) while others were a slower “big type” pig (a self-explanatory descriptor). Breeds rarely excelled at both traits and it was a matter of opinion whether speed or size was the most desirable trait to augment. The over-emphasis of either set of qualities damaged survival rates. At their largest, big type pigs resembled small hippopotamuses, and sows were so corpulent they unwittingly crushed their tiny piglets. But the sleeker hot-blooded pigs had a similarly lethal relationship with their young. Sows often produced litters of upwards of a dozen piglets and the stress of tending such a large brood led overwhelmed sows to devour their own offspring (Long). American pig breeders had been forced to navigate between these two undesirable extremes, but by the 1930s, big type pigs were fading in popularity mainly because butter and newly developed plant oils were replacing lard as the cooking fat of preference in American kitchens. The remarkable propensity of the big type to pack on pounds of extra fat was more of a liability than a benefit in this period, as the price that lard and salt pork plummeted in this decade. By the time U.S. meat packers were shipping cans of tushonka to their Soviet allies across the seas, US hog operations had already developed a strong preference for hot-blooded breeds and research had shifted to building and maintaining lean muscle on these swiftly maturing animals. When Soviet industrial planners hoping to learn how to make more tushonka entered the scene however, their interpretation of american efficiency was hardly predictable: scientifically nourished big type pigs may have been advantageous to the United States at midcentury, but the Soviet Union’s farms and hungry citizens had a very different list of needs and wants. At midcentury, Soviet pigs were still handicapped by old-fashioned variables such as cold weather, long winters, poor farm organisation and impoverished feed regimens. The look of the average Soviet hog operation was hardly industrial. In 1955 the typical Soviet pig was petite, shaggy, and slow to reproduce. In the absence of robust dairy or vegetable oil industries, Soviet pigs had always been valued for their fat rather than their meat, and tushonka had been a byproduct of an industry focused mainly on supplying the country with fat and lard. Until the mid 1950s, the most valuable pig on many Soviet state and collective farms was the nondescript but very rotund “lard and bacon” pig, an inefficient eater that could take upwards of two years to reach full maturity. In searching for a way to serve up more tushonka, Soviet planners became aware that their entire industry needed to be revamped. When the Soviet Union looked to the United States, planners were inspired by the earlier competition between hot-blooded and big type pigs, which Soviet planners thought, ambitiously, they could combine into one splendid pig. The Soviet Union imported new pigs from Poland, Lithuania, East Germany and Denmark, trying valiantly to create hybrid pigs that would exhibit both hot blood and big type. Soviet planners were especially interested in inspiring the Poland-China, an especially rotund specimen, to speed up its life cycle during them mid 1950s. Hybrdizing and cross breeding a Soviet super-pig, no matter how closely laid out on paper, was probably always a socialist pipe dream. However, when the Soviets decided to try to outbreed American hog breeders, they created an infrastructure for pigs and pig breeding that had a dramatic positive impact of hog populations across the country, and the 1950s were marked by a large increase in the number of pigs in the Soviet union, as well as dramatic increases in the numbers of purebred and scientific hybrids the country developed, all in the name of tushonka. It was not just the genetic stock that received a makeover in the postwar drive to can more tushonka; a revolution in the barnyard also took place and in less than 10 years, pigs were living in new housing stock and eating new feed sources. The most obvious postwar change was in farm layout and the use of building space. In the early 1950s, many collective farms had been consolidated. In 1940 there were a quarter of a million kolkhozii, by 1951 fewer than half that many remained (NARA RG166). Farm consolidation movements most often combined two, three or four collective farms into one economic unit, thus scaling up the average size and productivity of each collective farm and simplifying their administration. While there were originally ambitious plans to re-center farms around new “agro-city” bases with new, modern farm buildings, these projects were ultimately abandoned. Instead, existing buildings were repurposed and the several clusters of farm buildings that had once been the heart of separate villages acquired different uses. For animals this meant new barns and new daily routines. Barns were redesigned and compartmentalized around ideas of gender and age segregation—weaned baby pigs in one area, farrowing sows in another—as well as maximising growth and health. Pigs spent less outside time and more time at the trough. Pigs that were wanted for different purposes (breeding, meat and lard) were kept in different areas, isolated from each other to minimize the spread of disease as well as improve the efficiency of production. Much like postwar housing for humans, the new and improved pig barn was a crowded and often chaotic place where the electricity, heat and water functioned only sporadically. New barns were supposed to be mechanised. In some places, mechanisation had helped speed things along, but as one American official viewing a new mechanised pig farm in 1955 noted, “it did not appear to be a highly efficient organisation. The mechanised or automated operations, such as the preparation of hog feed, were eclipsed by the amount of hand labor which both preceded and followed the mechanised portion” (NARA RG166 1961). The American official estimated that by mechanizing, Soviet farms had actually increased the amount of human labor needed for farming operations. The other major environmental change took place away from the barnyard, in new crops the Soviet Union began to grow for fodder. The heart and soul of this project was establishing field corn as a major new fodder crop. Originally intended as a feed for cows that would replace hay, corn quickly became the feed of choice for raising pigs. After a visit by a United States delegation to Iowa and other U.S. farms over the summer of 1955, corn became the centerpiece of Khrushchev’s efforts to raise meat and milk productivity. These efforts were what earned Khrushchev his nickname of kukuruznik, or “corn fanatic.” Since so little of the Soviet Union looks or feels much like the plains and hills of Iowa, adopting corn might seem quixotic, but raising corn was a potentially practical move for a cold country. Unlike the other major fodder crops of turnips and potatoes, corn could be harvested early, while still green but already possessing a high level of protein. Corn provided a “gap month” of green feed during July and August, when grazing animals had eaten the first spring green growth but these same plants had not recovered their biomass. What corn remained in the fields in late summer was harvested and made into silage, and corn made the best silage that had been historically available in the Soviet Union. The high protein content of even silage made from green mass and unripe corn ears prevented them from losing weight in the winter. Thus the desire to put more meat on Soviet tables—a desire first prompted by American food donations of surplus pork from Iowa farmers adapting to agro-industrial reordering in their own country—pushed back into the commodity supply network of the Soviet Union. World War II rations that were well adapted to the uncertainty and poor infrastructure not just of war but also of peacetime were a source of inspiration for Soviet planners striving to improve the diets of citizens. To do this, they purchased and bred more and better animals, inventing breeds and paying attention, for the first time, to the efficiency and speed with which these animals were ready to become meat. Reinventing Soviet pigs pushed even back farther, and inspired agricultural economists and state planners to embrace new farm organizational structures. Pigs meant for the tushonka can spent more time inside eating, and led their lives in a rigid compartmentalization that mimicked emerging trends in human urban society. Beyond the barnyard, a new concern with feed-to weight conversions led agriculturalists to seek new crops; crops like corn that were costly to grow but were a perfect food for a pig destined for a tushonka tin. Thus in Soviet industrialization, pigs evolved. No longer simply recyclers of human waste, socialist pigs were consumers in their own right, their newly crafted genetic compositions demanded ever more technical feed sources in order to maximize their own productivity. Food is transformative, and in this case study the prosaic substance of canned meat proved to be unusually transformative for the history of the Soviet Union. In its early history it kept soldiers alive long enough to win an important war, later the requirements for its manufacture re-prioritized muscle tissue over fat tissue in the disassembly of carcasses. This transformative influence reached backwards into the supply lines and farms of the Soviet Union, revolutionizing the scale and goals of farming and meat packing for the Soviet food industry, as well as the relationship between the pig and the consumer. References Bentley, Amy. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. Where: University of Illinois Press, 1998. The Book of Healthy and Delicious Food, Kniga O Vkusnoi I Zdorovoi Pishche. Moscow: AMN Izd., 1952. 161. Danilov, M. M. Tovaravedenie Prodovol’stvennykh Tovarov: Miaso I Miasnye Tovarye. Moscow: Iz. Ekonomika, 1964. Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1970. 178. Long, James. The Book of the Pig. London: Upcott Gill, 1886. 102. Lush, Jay & A.L. Anderson, “A Genetic History of Poland-China Swine: I—Early Breed History: The ‘Hot Blood’ versus the ‘Big Type’” Journal of Heredity 30.4 (1939): 149-56. Martel, Leon. Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War: A Study of the Implementation of Foreign Policy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1979. 35. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 59, General Records of the Department of State. Office of Soviet Union affairs, Box 6. “Records relating to Lend Lease with the USSR 1941-1952”. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative reports 1940-1954. USSR Cotton-USSR Foreign trade. Box 64, Folder “farm management”. Report written by David V Kelly, 6 Apr. 1951. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative Reports 1955-1961. Folder: “Agriculture” “Visits to Soviet agricultural installations,” 15 Nov. 1961. Skeoch, L.A. Food Prices and Ration Scale in the Ukraine, 1946 The Review of Economics and Statistics 35.3 (Aug. 1953), 229-35. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Fond R-7021. The Report of Extraordinary Special State Commission on Wartime Losses Resulting from the German-Fascist Occupation cites the following losses in the German takeover. 1948. Stettinus, Edward R. Jr. Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory. Penguin Books, 1944.

Critique of Ability In July 2008, we could be on the eve of an enormously important shift in disability in Australia. One sign of change is the entry into force on 3 May 2008 of the United Nations convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which will now be adopted by the Rudd Labor government. Through this, and other proposed measures, the Rudd government has indicated its desire for a seachange in the area of disability. Bill Shorten MP, the new Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services has been at pains to underline his commitment to a rights-based approach to disability. In this inaugural speech to Parliament, Senator Shorten declared: I believe the challenge for government is not to fit people with disabilities around programs but for programs to fit the lives, needs and ambitions of people with disabilities. The challenge for all of us is to abolish once and for all the second-class status that too often accompanies Australians living with disabilities. (Shorten, “Address in reply”; see also Shorten, ”Speaking up”) Yet if we listen to the voices of people with disability, we face fundamental issues of justice, democracy, equality and how we understand the deepest aspects of ourselves and our community. This is a situation that remains dire and palpably unjust, as many people with disabilities have attested. Elsewhere I have argued (Goggin and Newell) that disability constitutes a systemic form of exclusion and othering tantamount to a “social apartheid” . While there have been improvements and small gains since then, the system that reigns in Australia is still fundamentally oppressive. Nonetheless, I would suggest that through the rise of the many stranded movements of disability, the demographic, economic and social changes concerning impairment, we are seeing significant changes in how we understand impairment and ability (Barnes, Oliver and Barton; Goggin and Newell, Disability in Australia; Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson; Shakespeare; Stiker). There is now considerable, if still incomplete, recognition of disability as a category that is constituted through social, cultural, and political logics, as well as through complex facets of impairment, bodies (Corker and Shakespeare), experiences, discourses (Fulcher), and modes of materiality and subjectivity (Butler), identity and government (Tremain). Also there is growing awareness of the imbrication of disability and other categories such as sex and gender (Fine and Asch; Thomas), race, age, culture, class and distribution of wealth (Carrier; Cole; Davis, Bending over Backwards, and Enforcing Normalcy; Oliver; Rosenblum and Travis), ecology and war (Bourke; Gerber; Muir). There are rich and wide-ranging debates that offer fundamental challenges to the suffocating grip of the dominant biomedical model of disability (that conceives disability as individual deficit — for early critiques see: Borsay; Walker), as well as the still influential and important (if at times limiting) social model of disability (Oliver; Barnes and Mercer; Shakespeare). All in all,there have been many efforts to transform the social and political relations of disability. If disability has been subject to considerable examination, there has not yet been an extended, concomitant critique of ability. Nor have we witnessed a thoroughgoing recognition of unmarked, yet powerful operations of ability in our lives and thought, and the potential implications of challenging these. Certainly there have been important attempts to reframe the relationship between “ability” and “disability” (for example, see Jones and Mark). And we are all familiar with the mocking response to some neologisms that seek to capture this, such as the awkward yet pointed “differently-abled.” Despite such efforts we lack still a profound critique of ability, an exploration of “able”, the topic that this special issue invites us to consider. If we think of the impact and significance of “whiteness”, as a way to open up space for how to critically think about and change concepts of race; or of “masculinity” as a project for thinking about gender and sexuality — we can see that this interrogation of the unmarked category of “able” and “ability” is much needed (for one such attempt, see White). In this paper I would like to make a small contribution to such a critique of ability, by considering what the concept of innovation and its contemporary rhetorics have to offer for reframing disability. Innovation is an important discourse in contemporary life. It offers interesting possibilities for rethinking ability — and indeed disability. And it is this relatively unexplored prospect that this paper seeks to explore. Beyond Access, Equity & Diversity In this scene of disability, there is attention being given to making long over-due reforms. Yet the framing of many of these reforms, such as the strengthening of national and international legal frameworks, for instance, also carry with them considerable problems. Disability is too often still seen as something in need of remediation, or special treatment. Access, equity, and anti-discrimination frameworks offer important resources for challenging this “special” treatment, so too do the diversity approaches which have supplemented or supplanted them (Goggin and Newell, “Diversity as if Disability Mattered”). In what new ways can we approach disability and policies relevant to it? In a surprisingly wide range of areas, innovation has featured as a new, cross-sectoral approach. Innovation has been a long-standing topic in science, technology and economics. However, its emergence as master-theme comes from its ability to straddle and yoke together previously diverse fields. Current discussions of innovation bring together and extend work on the information society, the knowledge economy, and the relationships between science and technology. We are now familiar for instance with arguments about how digital networked information and communications technologies and their consumption are creating new forms of innovation (Benkler; McPherson; Passiante, Elia, and Massari). Innovation discourse has extended to many other unfamiliar realms too, notably the area of social and community development, where a new concept of social innovation is now proposed (Mulgan), often aligned with new ideas of social entrepreneurship that go beyond earlier accounts of corporate social responsibility. We can see the importance of innovation in the ‘creative industries’ discourses and initiatives which have emerged since the 1990s. Here previously distinct endeavours of arts and culture have become reframed in a way that puts their central achievement of creativity to the fore, and recognises its importance across all sorts of service and manufacturing industries, in particular. More recently, theorists of creative industries, such as Cunningham, have begun to talk about “social network markets,” as a way to understand the new hybrid of creativity, innovation, digital technology, and new economic logics now being constituted (Cunningham and Potts). Innovation is being regarded as a cardinal priority for societies and their governments. Accordingly, the Australian government has commissioned a Review of The National Innovation System, led by Dr Terry Cutler, due to report in the second half of 2008. The Cutler review is especially focussed upon gaps and weaknesses in the Australian innovation system. Disability has the potential to figure very strongly in this innovation talk, however there has been little discussion of disability in the innovation discourse to date. The significance of disability in relation to innovation was touched upon some years ago, in a report on Disablism from the UK Demos Foundation (Miller, Parker and Gillinson). In a chapter entitled “The engine of difference: disability, innovation and creativity,” the authors discuss the area of inclusive design, and make the argument for the “involvement of disabled people to create a stronger model of user design”:Disabled people represented a market of 8.6 million customers at the last count and their experiences aren’t yet feeding through into processes of innovation. But the role of disabled people as innovators can and should be more active; we should include disabled people in the design process because they are good at it. (57) There are two reasons given for this expertise of disabled people in design. Firstly, “disabled people are often outstanding problem solvers because they have to be … life for disabled people at the moment is a series of challenges to be overcome” (57). Secondly, “innovative ideas are more likely to come from those who have a new or different angle on old problems” (57). The paradox in this argument is that as life becomes more equitable for people with disabilities, then these ‘advantages’ should disappear” (58). Accordingly, Miller et al. make a qualified argument, namely that “greater participation of disabled people in innovation in the short term may just be the necessary trigger for creating an altogether different, and better, system of innovation for everyone in the future” (58). The Demos Disablism report was written at a time when rhetorics of innovation were just beginning to become more generalized and mainstream. This was also at a time in the UK, when there was hope that new critical approaches to disability would see it become embraced as a part of the diverse society that Blair’s New Labor Britain had been indicating. The argument Disablism offers about disability and innovation is in some ways a more formalized version of vernacular theory (McLaughlin, 1996). In the disability movement we often hear, with good reason, that people with disability, by dint of their experience and knowledge are well positioned to develop and offer particular kinds of expertise. However, Miller et al. also gesture towards a more generalized account of disability and innovation, one that would intersect with the emerging frameworks around innovation. It is this possibility that I wish to take up and briefly explore here. I want to consider the prospects for a fully-fledged encounter between disability and innovation. I would like to have a better sense of whether this is worth pursuing, and what it would add to our understanding of both disability and innovation? Would the disability perspective be integrated as a long-term part of our systems of innovation rather than, as Miller et al. imply, deployed temporarily to develop better innovation systems? What pitfalls might be bound up with, or indeed be the conditions of, such a union between disability and innovation? The All-Too-Able User A leading area where disability figures profoundly in innovation is in the field of technology — especially digital technology. There is now a considerable literature and body of practice on disability and digital technology (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability; National Council on Disability), however for my purposes here I would like to focus upon the user, the abilities ascribed to various kinds of users, and the user with disability in particular. Digital technologies are replete with challenges and opportunities; they are multi-layered, multi-media, and global in their manifestation and function. In Australia, Britain, Canada, the US, and Europe, there have been some significant digital technology initiatives which have resulted in improved accessibility for many users and populations (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; National Council on Disability) . There are a range of examples of ways in which users with disability are intervening and making a difference in design. There is also a substantial body of literature that clarifies why we need to include the perspective of the disabled if we are to be truly innovative in our design practices (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, “Disability, Identity and Interdependence”). I want to propose, however, that there is merit in going beyond recognition of the role of people with disability in technology design (vital and overlooked as it remains), to consider how disability can enrich contemporary discourses on innovation. There is a very desirable cross-over to be promoted between the emphasis on the user-as-expert in the sphere of disability and technology, and on the integral role of disability groups in the design process, on the one hand, and the rise of the user in digital culture generally, on the other. Surprisingly, such connections are nowhere near as widespread and systematic as they should be. It may be that contemporary debates about the user, and about the user as co-creator, or producer, of technology (Haddon et al.; von Hippel) actually reinstate particular notions of ability, and the able user, understood with reference to notions of disability. The current emphasis on the productive user, based as it is on changing understandings of ability and disability, provides rich material for critical revision of the field and those assumptions surrounding ability. It opens up possibilities for engaging more fully with disability and incorporating disability into the new forms and relations of digital technology that celebrate the user (Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability). While a more detailed consideration of these possibilities require more time than this essay allows, let us consider for a moment the idea of a genuine encounter between the activated user springing from the disability movement, and the much feted user in contemporary digital culture and theories of innovation. People with disability are using these technologies in innovative ways, so have much to contribute to wider discussions of digital technology (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra). The Innovation Turn Innovation policy, the argument goes, is important because it stands to increase productivity, which in turn leads to greater international competitiveness and economic benefit. Especially with the emergence of capitalism (Gleeson), productivity has strong links to particular notions of which types of production and produce are valued. Productivity is also strongly conditioned by how we understand ability and, last in a long chain of strong associations, how we as a society understand and value those kinds of people and bodies believed to contain and exercise the ordained and rewarded types of ability, produce, and productivity. Disability is often seen as antithetical to productivity (a revealing text on the contradictions of disability and productivity is the 2004 Productivity Commission Review of the Disability Discrimination Act). When we think about the history of disability, we quickly realize that productivity, and by extension, innovation, are strongly ideological. Ideological, that is, in the sense that these fields of human endeavour and our understanding of them are shaped by power relations, and are built upon implicit ‘ableist’ assumptions about productivity. In this case, the power relations of disability go right to the heart of the matter, highlighting who and what are perceived to be of value, contributing economically and in other ways to society, and who and what are considered as liabilities, as less valued and uneconomical. A stark recent example of this is the Howard government workplace and welfare reforms, which further disenfranchised, controlled, and impoverished people with disability. If we need to rethink our ideas of productivity and ability in the light of new notions of disability, then so too do we need to rethink our ideas about innovation and disability. Here the new discourses of innovation may actually be useful, but also contain limited formulations and assumptions about ability and disability that need to be challenged. The existing problems of a fresh approach to disability and innovation can be clearly observed in the touchstones of national science and technology “success.” Beyond One-Sided Innovation Disability does actually feature quite prominently in the annals of innovation. Take, for instance, the celebrated case of the so-called “bionic ear” (or cochlear implant) hailed as one of Australia’s great scientific inventions of the past few decades. This is something we can find on display in the Powerhouse Museum of Technology and Design, in Sydney. Yet the politics of the cochlear implant are highly controversial, not least as it is seen by many (for instance, large parts of the Deaf community) as not involving people with disabilities, nor being informed by their desires (Campbell, also see “Social and Ethical Aspects of Cochlear Implants”). A key problem with the cochlear implant and many other technologies is that they are premised on the abolition or overcoming of disability — rather than being shaped as technology that acknowledges and is informed by disabled users in their diverse guises. The failure to learn the lessons of the cochlear implant for disability and innovation can be seen in the fact that we are being urged now to band together to support the design of a “bionic eye” by the year 2020, as a mark of distinction of achieving a great nation (2020 Summit Initial Report). Again, there is no doubting the innovation and achievement in these artefacts and their technological systems. But their development has been marked by a distinct lack of consultation and engagement with people with disabilities; or rather the involvement has been limited to a framework that positions them as passive users of technology, rather than as “producer/users”. Further, what notions of disability and ability are inscribed in these technological systems, and what do they represent and symbolize in the wider political and social field? Unfortunately, such technologies have the effect of reproducing an ableist framework, “enforcing normalcy” (Davis), rather than building in, creating and contributing to new modes of living, which embrace difference and diversity. I would argue that this represents a one-sided logic of innovation. A two-sided logic of innovation, indeed what we might call a double helix (at least) of innovation would be the sustained, genuine interaction between different users, different notions of ability, disability and impairment, and the processes of design. If such a two-sided (or indeed many-sided logic) is to emerge there is good reason to think it could more easily do so in the field of digital cultures and technologies, than say, biotechnology. The reason for this is the emphasis in digital communication technologies on decentralized, participatory, user-determined governance and design, coming from many sources. Certainly this productive, democratic, participatory conception of the user is prevalent in Internet cultures. Innovation here is being reshaped to harness the contribution and knowledge of users, and could easily be extended to embrace pioneering efforts in disability. Innovating with Disability In this paper I have tried to indicate why it is productive for discourses of innovation to consider disability; the relationship between disability and innovation is rich and complex, deserving careful elaboration and interrogation. In suggesting this, I am aware that there are also fundamental problems that innovation raises in its new policy forms. There are the issues of what is at stake when the state is redefining its traditional obligations towards citizens through innovation frameworks and discourses. And there is the troubling question of whether particular forms of activity are normatively judged to be innovative — whereas other less valued forms are not seen as innovative. By way of conclusion, however, I would note that there are now quite basic, and increasingly accepted ways, to embed innovation in design frameworks, and while they certainly have been adopted in the disability and technology area, there is much greater scope for this. However, a few things do need to change before this potential for disability to enrich innovation is adequately realized. Firstly, we need further research and theorization to clarify the contribution of disability to innovation, work that should be undertaken and directed by people with disability themselves. Secondly, there is a lack of resources for supporting disability and technology organisations, and the development of training and expertise in this area (especially to provide viable career paths for experts with disability to enter the field and sustain their work). If this is addressed, the economic benefits stand to be considerable, not to mention the implications for innovation and productivity. Thirdly, we need to think about how we can intensify existing systems of participatory design, or, better still, introduce new user-driven approaches into strategically important places in the design processes of ICTs (and indeed in the national innovation system). Finally, there is an opportunity for new approaches to governance in ICTs at a general level, informed by disability. New modes of organising, networking, and governance associated with digital technology have attracted much attention, also featuring recently in the Australia 2020 Summit. Less well recognised are new ideas about governance that come from the disability community, such as the work of Queensland Advocacy Incorporated, Rhonda Galbally’s Our Community, disability theorists such as Christopher Newell (Newell), or the Canadian DIS-IT alliance (see, for instance, Stienstra). The combination of new ideas in governance from digital culture, new ideas from the disability movement and disability studies, and new approaches to innovation could be a very powerful cocktail indeed.Dedication This paper is dedicated to my beloved friend and collaborator, Professor Christopher Newell AM (1964-2008), whose extraordinary legacy will inspire us all to continue exploring and questioning the idea of able. References Abberley, Paul. “The Concept of Oppression and the Development of a Social Theory of Disability.” Disability, Handicap & Society 2.1 (1987): 5–20. Annable, Gary, Gerard Goggin, and Deborah Stienstra, eds. “Accessibility and Inclusion in Information Technologies.” Special issue of The Information Society 23.3 (2007): 145-147. Australia 2020 Summit. Australia 2020 Summit — Initial Report. Commonwealth of Australia 20 April 2008. 15 May 2008 ‹http://www.australia2020.gov.au/docs/2020_Summit_initial_report.doc›. Barnes, Colin, and Geoff Mercer, eds. Implementing the Social Model of Disability: Theory and Research. Leeds: The Disability Press, 2004. Barnes, Colin, Mike Oliver, and Len Barton, eds. Disability Studies Today. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Borsay, Anne. “Personal Trouble or Public Issue? Toward a Model of Policy for People with Physical and Mental Disabilities.” Disability, Handicap and Society 1.2 (1986): 179-195. Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge, 1993. Campbell, Fiona. “Selling the Cochlear Implant.” Disability Studies Quarterly 25.3 (2005). ‹http://www.dsq-sds-archives.org/_articles_html/2005/summer/campbell.asp›. Carrier, James G. Learning Disability: Social Class and the Construction of Inequality in American Education. New York: Greenword Press, 1986. Cole, Mike, ed. Education, Equality and Human Rights: Issues of Gender, ‘Race’, Sexuality, Disability and Social Class. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Corker, Mairean, and Tom Shakespeare, eds. Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. London: Continuum, 2002. Davis, Lennard J. Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and other Difficult Positions. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2002. ———. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body. London: Verso, 1995. Fine, Michelle, and Adrienne Asch, eds. Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Fulcher, Gillian. Disabling Policies? London: Falmer Press, 1989. Gerber, David A., ed. Disabled Veterans in History. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Gleeson, Brendan. Geographies of Disability. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Goggin, Gerard, and Christopher Newell. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. ———. Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005. ———, eds. “Disability, Identity, and Interdependence: ICTs and New Social Forms.” Special issue of Information, Communication & Society 9.3 (2006). ———. “Diversity as if Disability Mattered.” Australian Journal of Communication 30.3 (2003): 1-6. ———, eds. “Technology and Disability.” Special double issue of Disability Studies Quarterly 25.2-3 (2005). Haddon, Leslie, Enid Mante, Bartolomeo Sapio, Kari-Hans Kommonen, Leopoldina Fortunati, and Annevi Kant, eds. Everyday Innovators: Researching the Role of Users in Shaping ICTs. London: Springer, 2005. Jones, Melinda, and Anne Basser Marks Lee, eds. Disability, Divers-ability and Legal Change. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1999. McLaughlin, Thomas. Street Smarts and Critical Theory: Listening to the Vernacular. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. McPherson, Tara, ed. Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Meekosha, Helen. “Drifting Down the Gulf Stream: Navigating the Cultures of Disability Studies.” Disability & Society 19.7 (2004): 721-733. Miller, Paul, Sophia Parker, and Sarah Gillinson. Disablism: How to Tackle the Last Prejudice. London: Demos, 2004. ‹http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/disablism›. Mulgan, Geoff. “The Process of Social Innovation.” Innovations 1.2 (2006): 145-62. Muir, Kristy. “‘That Bastard’s Following Me!’ Mentally Ill Australian Veterans Struggling to Maintain Control.” Social Histories of Disability and Deformity. Ed. in David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg. New York: Routledge. 161-74. National Council on Disability (NCD). Design for Inclusion: Creating a New Marketplace. Washington: NCD, 2004. Newell, Christopher. “Debates Regarding Governance: A Disability Perspective.” Disability & Society 13.2 (1998): 295-296. Oliver, Michael. The Politics of Disablement: A Sociological Approach. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Passiante, Giuseppina, Valerio Elia, and Tommaso Massari, eds. Digital Innovation: Innovation Processes in Virtual Clusters and Digital Regions. London: Imperial College Press, 2003. Productivity Commission. Review of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992. Melbourne: Productivity Commission, 2004. ‹http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/dda/docs/finalreport›. Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs. New York: Routledge, 2006. Shorten, Bill. Address-in-Reply, Governor-General’s Speech. Hansard 14 Feb. 2008: 328-333. ———. “Speaking Up for True Battlers.” Daily Telegraph 12 March 2008. ‹http://www.billshorten.com.au/press/index.cfm?Fuseaction=pressreleases_full&ID=1328›. Snyder, Sharon L., Brenda Brueggemann, and Rosemary Garland-Thomson, eds. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. Stienstra, Deborah. “The Critical Space Between: Access, Inclusion and Standards in Information Technologies.” Information, Communication & Society 9.3 (2006): 335-354. Stiker, Henri-Jacques. A History of Disability. Trans. William Sayers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Thomas, Carol. Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability. Buckingham: Open University, 1999. Rosenblum, Karen E., and Toni-Michelle C. Travis, eds. The Meaning of Difference: American Constructions of Race, Sex and Gender, Social Class, Sexual Orientation, and Disability. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Von Hippel, Eric. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Walker, Alan. “The Social Origins of Impairment, Disability and Handicap.” Medicine and Society 6.2-3 (1980): 18-26. White, Michele. “Where Do You Want to Sit Today: Computer Programmers’ Static Bodies and Disability.” Information, Communication and Society 9.3 (2006): 396-416.

The ideas put forth here do not fit perfectly or entirely into the genre and form of what has established itself as the scholarly journal article. What is put forth, instead, is a juxtaposition of lines of thinking about the scholarly and popular in publishing, past, present and future. As such it may indeed be quite appropriate to the occasion and the questions raised in the call for papers for this special issue of M/C Journal. The ideas put forth here are intended as pieces of an ever-changing puzzle of the making public of scholarship, which, I hope, may in some way fit with both the work of others in this special issue and in the discourse more broadly. The first line of thinking presented takes the form of an historical overview of publishing as context to consider a second line of thinking about the current status and future of publishing. The historical context serves as reminder (and cause for celebration) that publishing has not yet perished, contrary to continued doomsday sooth-saying that has come with each new medium since the advent of print. Instead, publishing has continued to transform and it is precisely the transformation of print, print culture and reading publics that are the focus of this article, in particular, in relation to the question of the boundaries between the scholarly and the popular. What follows is a juxtaposition that is part of an investigation in progress. Presented first, therefore, is a mapping of shifts in print culture from the time of Gutenberg to the twentieth century; second, is a contemporary snapshot of the editorial mandates of more than one hundred member journals of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ). What such juxtaposition is able to reveal is open to interpretation, of course. And indeed, as I proceed in my investigation of publishing past, present and future, my interpretations are many. The juxtaposition raises a number of issues: of communities of readers and the cultures of reading publics; of privileged and marginalised texts (as well as their authors and their readers); of access and reach (whether in terms of what is quantifiable or in a much more subtle but equally important sense). In Canada, at present, these issues are also intertwined with changes to research funding policies and some attention is given at the end of this article to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and its recent/current shift in funding policy. Curiously, current shifts in funding policies, considered alongside an historical overview of publishing, would suggest that although publishing continues to transform, at the same time, as they say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Republics of Letters and Ghosts in Machines Republics of Letters that formed after the advent of the printing press can be conjured up as distant and almost mythical communities of elite literates, ghosts almost lost in a Gutenberg galaxy that today encompasses (and is embodied in) schools, bookshelves, and digital archives in many places across the globe. Conjuring up ghosts of histories past seems always to reveal ironies, and indeed some of the most interesting ironies of the Gutenberg galaxy involve McLuhanesque reversals or, if not full reversals, then in the least some notably sharp turns. There is a need to define some boundaries (and terms) in the framing of the tracing that follows. Given that the time frame in question spans more than five hundred years (from the advent of Gutenberg’s printing press in the fifteenth century to the turn of the 21st century), the tracing must necessarily be done in broad strokes. With regard to what is meant by the “making public of scholarship” in this paper, by “making public” I refer to accounts historians have given in their attempts to reconstruct a history of what was published either in the periodical press or in books. With regard to scholarship (and the making public of it), as with many things in the history of publishing (or any history), this means different things in different times and in different places. The changing meanings of what can be termed “scholarship” and where and how it historically has been made public are the cornerstones on which this article (and a history of the making public of scholarship) turn. The structure of this paper is loosely chronological and is limited to the print cultures and reading publics in France, Britain, and what would eventually be called the US and Canada, and what follows here is an overview of changes in how scholarly and popular texts and publics are variously defined over the course of history. The Construction of Reading Publics and Print Culture In any consideration of “print culture” and reading publics, historical or contemporary, there are two guiding principles that historians suggest should be kept in mind, and, though these may seem self-evident, they are worth stating explicitly (perhaps precisely because they seem self-evident). The first is a reminder from Adrian Johns that “the very identity of print itself has had to be made” (2 italics in original). Just as the identity of print cultures are made, similarly, a history of reading publics and their identities are made, by looking to and interpreting such variables as numbers and genres of titles published and circulated, dates and locations of collections, and information on readers’ experiences of texts. Elizabeth Eisenstein offers a reminder of the “widely varying circumstances” (92) of the print revolution and an explicit acknowledgement of such circumstances provides the second, seemingly self-evident guiding principle: that the construction of reading publics and print culture must not only be understood as constructed, but also that such constructions ought not be understood as uniform. The purpose of the reconstructions of print cultures and reading publics presented here, therefore, is not to arrive at final conclusions, but rather to identify patterns that prove useful in better understanding the current status (and possible future) of publishing. The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries—Boom, then Busted by State and Church In search of what could be termed “scholarship” following the mid-fifteenth century boom of the early days of print, given the ecclesiastical and state censorship in Britain and France and the popularity of religious texts of the 15th and 16th centuries, arguably the closest to “scholarship” that we can come is through the influence of the Italian Renaissance and the revival and translation (into Latin, and to a far lesser extent, vernacular languages) of the classics and indeed the influence of the Italian Renaissance on the “print revolution” is widely recognised by historians. Historians also recognise, however, that it was not long until “the supply of unpublished texts dried up…[yet for authors] to sell the fruits of their intellect—was not yet common practice before the late 16th century” (Febvre and Martin 160). Although this reference is to the book trade in France, in Britain, and in the regions to become the US and Canada, reading of “pious texts” was similarly predominant in the early days of print. Yet, the humanist shift throughout the 16th century is evidenced by titles produced in Paris in the first century of print: in 1501, in a total of 88 works, 53 can be categorised as religious, with 25 categorised as Latin, Greek, or Humanist authors; as compared to titles produced in 1549, in a total of 332 titles, 56 can be categorised as religious with 204 categorised as Latin, Greek, or Humanist authors (Febvre and Martin 264). The Seventeenth Century—Changes in the Political and Print Landscape In the 17th century, printers discovered that their chances of profitability (and survival) could be improved by targeting and developing a popular readership through the periodical press (its very periodicity and relative low cost both contributed to its accessibility by popular publics) in Europe as well as in North America. It is worthwhile to note, however, that “to the end of the seventeenth century, both literacy and leisure were virtually confined to scholars and ‘gentlemen’” (Steinberg 119) particularly where books were concerned and although literacy rates were still low, through the “exceptionally literate villager” there formed “hearing publics” who would have printed texts read to them (Eisenstein 93). For the literate members of the public interested not only in improving their social positions through learning, but also with intellectual (or spiritual or existential) curiosity piqued by forbidden books, it is not surprising that Descartes “wrote in French to a ‘lay audience … open to new ideas’” (Jacob 41). The 17th century also saw the publication of the first scholarly journals. There is a tension that becomes evident in the seventeenth century that can be seen as a tension characteristic of print culture, past and present: on the one hand, the housing of scholarship in scholarly journals as a genre distinct from the genre of the popular periodicals can be interpreted as a continued pattern of (elitist) divide in publics (as seen earlier between the oral and the written word, between Latin and the vernacular, between classic texts and popular texts); while, on the other hand, some thinkers/scholars of the day had an interest in reaching a wider audience, as printers always had, which led to the construction and fragmentation of audiences (whether the printer’s market for his goods or the scholar’s marketplace of ideas). The Eighteenth Century—Republics of Letters Become Concrete and Visible The 18th century saw ever-increasing literacy rates, early copyright legislation (Statute of Anne in 1709), improved printing technology, and ironically (or perhaps on the contrary, quite predictably) severe censorship that in effect led to an increased demand for forbidden books and a vibrant and international underground book trade (Darnton and Roche 138). Alongside a growing book trade, “the pulpit was ultimately displaced by the periodical press” (Eisenstein 94), which had become an “established institution” (Steinberg 125). One history of the periodical press in France finds that the number of periodicals (to remain in publication for three or more years) available to the reading public in 1745 numbered 15, whereas in 1785 this increased to 82 (Censer 7). With regard to scholarly periodicals, another study shows that between 1790 and 1800 there were 640 scientific-technological periodicals being published in Europe (Kronick 1961). Across the Atlantic, earlier difficulties in cultivating intellectual life—such as haphazard transatlantic exchange and limited institutions for learning—began to give way to a “republic of letters” that was “visible and concrete” (Hall 417). The Nineteenth Century—A Second Boom and the Rise of the Periodical Press By the turn of the 19th century, visible and concrete republics of letters become evident on both sides of the Atlantic in the boom in book publishing and in the periodical press, scholarly and popular. State and church controls on printing/publishing had given way to the press as the “fourth estate” or a free press as powerful force. The legislation of public education brought increased literacy rates among members of successive generations. One study of literacy rates in Britain, for example, shows that in the period from 1840–1870 literacy rates increased by 35–70 per cent; then from 1870–1900, literacy increased by 78–261 per cent (Mitch 76). Further, with the growth and changes in universities, “history, languages and literature and, above all, the sciences, became an established part of higher education for the first time,” which translated into growing markets for book publishers (Feather 117). Similarly the periodical press reached ever-increasing and numerous reading publics: one estimate of the increase finds the publication of nine hundred journals in 1800 jumping to almost sixty thousand in 1901 (Brodman, cited in Kronick 127). Further, the important role of the periodical press in developing communities of readers was recognised by publishers, editors and authors of the time, something equally recognised by present-day historians describing the “generic mélange of the periodical … [that] particularly lent itself to the interpenetration of language and ideas…[and] the verbal and conceptual interconnectedness of science, politics, theology, and literature” (Dawson, Noakes and Topham 30). Scientists recognised popular periodicals as “important platforms for addressing a non-specialist but culturally powerful public … [they were seen as public] performances [that] fulfilled important functions in making the claims of science heard among the ruling élite” (Dawson et al. 11). By contrast, however, the scholarly journals of the time, while also increasing in number, were becoming increasingly specialised along the same disciplinary boundaries being established in the universities, fulfilling a very different function of forming scholarly and discipline-specific discourse communities through public (published) performances of a very different nature. The Twentieth Century—The Tension Between Niche Publics and Mass Publics The long-existing tension in print culture between the differentiation of reading publics on the one hand, and the reach to ever-expanding reading publics on the other, in the twentieth century becomes a tension between what have been termed “niche-marketing” and “mass marketing,” between niche publics and mass publics. What this meant for the making public of scholarship was that the divides between discipline-specific discourse communities (and their corresponding genres) became more firmly established and yet, within each discipline, there was further fragmentation and specialisation. The niche-mass tension also meant that although in earlier print culture, “the lines of demarcation between men of science, men of letters, and scientific popularizers were far from clear, and were constantly being renegotiated” (Dawson et al 28), with the increasing professionalisation of academic work (and careers), lines of demarcation became firmly drawn between scholarly and popular titles and authors, as well as readers, who were described as “men of science,” as “educated men,” or as “casual observers” (Klancher 90). The question remains, however, as one historian of science asks, “To whom did the reading public go in order to learn about the ultimate meaning of modern science, the professionals or the popularizers?” (Lightman 191). By whom and for whom, where and how scholarship has historically been made public, are questions worthy of consideration if contemporary scholars are to better understand the current status (and possible future) for the making public of scholarship. A Snapshot of Scholarly Journals in Canada and Current Changes in Funding Policies The here and now of scholarly journal publishing in Canada (a growing, but relatively modest scholarly journal community, compared to the number of scholarly journals published in Europe and the US) serves as an interesting microcosm through which to consider how scholarly journal publishing has evolved since the early days of print. What follows here is an overview of the membership of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ), in particular: (1) their target readers as identifiable from their editorial mandates; (2) their print/online/open-access policies; and (3) their publishers (all information gathered from the CALJ website, http://www.calj-acrs.ca/). Analysis of the collected data for the 100 member journals of CALJ (English, French and bilingual journals) with available information on the CALJ website is presented in Table 1 (below). A few observations are noteworthy: (1) in terms of readers, although all 100 journals identify a scholarly audience as their target readership, more than 40% of the journal also identify practitioners, policy-makers, or general readers as members of their target audience; (2) more than 25% of the journals publish online as well as or instead of print editions; and (3) almost all journals are published either by a Canadian university or, in one case, a college (60%) or a scholarly or professional society (31%). Table 1: Target Readership, Publishing Model and Publishers, CALJ Members (N=100) Journals with identifiable scholarly target readership 100 Journals with other identifiable target readership: practitioner 35 Journals with other identifiable target readership: general readers 18 Journals with other identifiable target readership: policy-makers/government 10 Total journals with identifiable target readership other than scholarly 43 Journals publishing in print only 56 Journals publishing in print and online 24 Journals publishing in print, online and open access 16 Journals publishing online only and open access 4 Journals published through a Canadian university press, faculty or department 60 Journals published by a scholarly or professional society 31 Journals published by a research institute 5 Journals published by the private sector 4 In the context of the historical overview presented earlier, this data raises a number of questions. The number of journals with target audiences either within or beyond the academy raises issues akin to the situation in the early days of print, when published works were primarily in Latin, with only 22 per cent in vernacular languages (Febvre and Martin 256), thereby strongly limiting access and reach to diverse audiences until the 17th century when Latin declined as the international language (Febvre and Martin 275) and there is a parallel to scholarly journal publishing and their changing readership(s). Diversity in audiences gradually developed in the early days of print, as Febvre and Martin (263) show by comparing the number of churchmen and lawyers with library collections in Paris: from 1480–1500 one lawyer and 24 churchmen had library collections, compared to 1551–1600, when 71 lawyers and 21 churchmen had library collections. Although the distinctions between present-day target audiences of Canadian scholarly journals (shown in Table 1, above) and 16th-century churchmen or lawyers no doubt are considerable, again there is a parallel with regard to changes in reading audiences. Similarly, the 18th-century increase in literacy rates, education, and technological advances finds a parallel in contemporary questions of computer literacy and access to scholarship (see Willinsky, “How,” Access, “Altering,” and If Only). Print culture historians and historians of science, as noted above, recognise that historically, while scholarly periodicals have increasingly specialised and popular periodicals have served as “important platforms for addressing a non-specialist but culturally powerful public…[and] fulfill[ing] important functions in making the claims of science heard among the ruling élite” (Dawson 11), there is adrift in current policies changes (and in the CALJ data above) a blurring of boundaries that harkens back to earlier days of print culture. As Adrian John reminded us earlier, “the very identity of print itself has had to be made” (2, italics in original) and the same applies to identities or cultures of print and the members of that culture: namely, the readers, the audience. The identities of the readers of scholarship are being made and re-made, as editorial mandates extend the scope of journals beyond strict, academic disciplinary boundaries and as increasing numbers of journals publish online (and open access). In Canada, changes in scholarly journal funding by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada (as well as changes in SSHRC funding for research more generally) place increasing focus on impact factors (an international trend) as well as increased attention on the public benefits and value of social sciences and humanities research and scholarship (see SSHRC 2004, 2005, 2006). There is much debate in the scholarly community in Canada about the implications and possibilities of the direction of the changing funding policies, not least among members of the scholarly journal community. As noted in the table above, most scholarly journal publishers in Canada are independently published, which brings advantages of autonomy but also the disadvantage of very limited budgets and there is a great deal of concern about the future of the journals, about their survival amidst the current changes. Although the future is uncertain, it is perhaps worthwhile to be reminded once again that contrary to doomsday sooth-saying that has come time and time again, publishing has not perished, but rather it has continued to transform. I am inclined against making normative statements about what the future of publishing should be, but, looking at the accounts historians have given of the past and looking at the current publishing community I have come to know in my work in publishing, I am confident that the resourcefulness and commitment of the publishing community shall prevail and, indeed, there appears to be a good deal of promise in the transformation of scholarly journals in the ways they reach their audiences and in what reaches those audiences. Perhaps, as is suggested by the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing (CCSP), the future is one of “inventing publishing.” References Canadian Association of Learned Journals. Member Database. 10 June 2008 ‹http://www.calj-acrs.ca/>. Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing. 10 June 2008. ‹http://www.ccsp.sfu.ca/>. Censer, Jack. The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Routledge, 1994. Darnton, Robert, Estienne Roche. Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Dawson, Gowan, Richard Noakes, and Jonathan Topham. Introduction. Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature. Ed. Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, and Jonathan Topham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 1–37. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983 Feather, John. A History of British Publishing. New York: Routledge, 2006. Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800. London: N.L.B., 1979. Jacob, Margaret. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Hall, David, and Hugh Armory. The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987. Kronick, David. A History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals: The Origins and Development of the Scientific and Technological Press, 1665–1790. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1961. ---. "Devant le deluge" and Other Essays on Early Modern Scientific Communication. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Mitch, David. The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private choice and Public Policy. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Granting Council to Knowledge Council: Renewing the Social Sciences and Humanities in Canada, Volume 1, 2004. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Granting Council to Knowledge Council: Renewing the Social Sciences and Humanities in Canada, Volume 3, 2005. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Moving Forward As a Knowledge Council: Canada’s Place in a Competitive World. 2006. Steinberg, Sigfrid. Five Hundred Years of Printing. London: Oak Knoll Press, 1996. Willinsky, John. “How to be More of a Public Intellectual by Making your Intellectual Work More Public.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 3.1 (2006): 92–95. ---. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. ---. “Altering the Material Conditions of Access to the Humanities.” Ed. Peter Trifonas and Michael Peters. Deconstructing Derrida: Tasks for the New Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 118–36. ---. If Only We Knew: Increasing the Public Value of Social-Science Research. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Photo by Mehdi Imani on Unsplash ABSTRACT Non-Profit and Non-Governmental Organizations (NPOs/NGOs) often receive research funds from private for-profit corporations through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Harm industries such as tobacco and alcohol have utilized this opportunity to clear themselves of any blame in contributing to the disease burden, thus obscuring the real danger of their products. The association of public health institutions with such harmful industries has given rise to both financial and non-financial Conflicts of Interest (COIs). To resolve conflicts that arise out of this association, institutions have sought prohibition and full disclosure models. This article highlights the necessity to expand conflict of interest and include industries of implicit harm (fast fashion, mining, cosmetics, and sugary drinks) and not limit itself to just tobacco and alcohol. Simultaneously, the article underlines the hurdles in such an expansion. In conclusion, the article provides a hybrid model for conflict assessment that attempts to account for the limitations of a prohibition model as well as a full disclosure model. INTRODUCTION As public health research lacks funding, corporations fill a funding gap by allocating money to non-governmental organizations and non-profits.[1] However, the financial involvement of private corporations in public health research raises questions about conflicts of interest and research integrity.[2] Conflicts of interest must be a consideration in the philosophical framework that public health institutions ought to adopt. The recent focus on promoting a “socially conscious capitalistic environment” has led to the inception of corporate social responsibility[3] or an obligation of corporations to address social concerns their products or operations might bring about. Corporations engage in responsible actions to improve transparency and be more accountable for their actions.[4] Some corporations are motivated to be good corporate citizens through ethically profitable practices; they recognize a self-imposed obligation to use their resources to protect, and benefit society and they adhere to a social contract.[5] Corporate social responsibility has strong parallels with entrepreneurial philanthropy. By investing in research, that benefits the socio-economically disadvantaged, social responsibility initiatives further social goals.[6] There are two distinct problems with corporate social responsibility models: First, they attempt (but fail) to make up for a poor corporate endeavor like selling cigarettes. Some companies abuse their responsibilities and produce unhealthy goods or engage in practices that are contrary to social good. Furthermore, their philanthropic engagement may be ill-motivated. It enables them to access the socio-political domain, benefit from tax breaks, and profit directly from the “generosity” label without changing their core practices.[7] Second, corporate social responsibility leads to conflicts of interest in public research. Corporations fund public health research as a way to “act” responsible and to further a social goal.[8] Corporations that fund research at academic institutions, and non-profits pose financial conflicts of interest.[9] l. Conflict of Interest: Funding Effect and Ethical Engagement Arguably, tobacco and alcohol industries are in stark contrast to the goals of public health.[10] Their involvement in and contribution towards public health research may be motivated by a desire to improve their reputation. Harm industries engaging in public health research create a fundamental ethical tension.[11] Many scholars have defined conflict of interest in a variety of ways. In this article, we take the definition of conflict of interest as "a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgement or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary or a competing interest" [12] Thus, a financial conflict of interest occurs when funding leads to the risk of compromising the research project that is financed by the corporation. "Funding Effect" was coined after a study showed significant differences in research outcomes of private and public-funded drug efficiency safety studies.[13] Private-industry-sponsored research produced commercially favorable outcomes in comparison to publicly sponsored studies.[14] Research sponsored by the tobacco industry had scientists produce biased data, often making the best case for industrial interests.[15] Receiving funds from for-profit corporations has also led to reduced dissemination of unfavorable results and under-reporting of negative findings.[16] There is not enough research to assess the value of corporate funding to those in academics.[17] Qualitative and quantitative empirical research may help shape best practices when engaging with private corporations. Corporate social responsibility creates an illusion of righteousness. Tobacco companies have funded public health research designed to influence tobacco control policies.[18] Corporations have used research to further the narrative that personal responsibility plays an outsized role in alcohol consumption, thereby ignoring the social determinants of addiction and programs that include alcohol supply reduction.[19] A similar narrative has pervaded the sugary drinks discussion.[20] While there are many considerations, there is no homogenous policy to help tackle conflicts of interest in public health research.[21] Academic journals mandate declaring financial conflicts of interest. [22] However, declarations should attempt to incorporate an institutional view of values and not restrict themselves to personal convictions. Rather than approaching each conflict of interest and using declarations, journals should evaluate conflicts of interest in terms of risk. Such an evaluation also would address embedded research practices that may appear ethical on the surface but represent unrecognized bias.[23] The Mohammed Ali effect is a good example of this phenomenon. Self-reporting of ethical research behavior by scientists is under representative of actual occurrences of misconduct simply because peers are held to different standards than self.[24] ll. The Prohibition Model – A Deontological Framework The prohibition model discards any research in association with industries that would create a conflict of interest.[25] Academic institutions or journals that prohibit research by industry limit the ability of harm industries to engage in philanthropic public health research that may reflect pro-industry bias. The non-association with harm industries draws from Kant’s categorical imperative. In From the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant[26] believes that moral behavior exists a priori. If we consider ethics a posteriori, we only deal with what we ‘already did,’ which is not the basis for a moral system. In a Kantian analysis, non-association with harm industries is the starting point of ethical behavior. Furthermore, in Metaphysics of Morals, Kant[27] outlines the motivations to act. He posits that ethical actions are motivated by duty and not by self-interest or immediate inclination. Thus, the prohibition model grounds itself in strong ethical imperatives. However, it would limit public health research funding. lll. The Disclosure Model: Conflicts of Interest are Inevitable The disclosure model claims that transparent disclosure procedures are enough to manage conflicts of interest. Often, a placating response to any concern is the disclosure of otherwise unavailable information.[28] Any disclosure should include enough information about the nature, scope, duration, and monetary forces within the for-profit organizational web to allow institutions to assess the risk to their own reputation of engaging in partnership or publishing research conducted by corporations.[29] In addition to transparency, disclosure allows for weighing risks and benefits by assessing proportionality. The proportionality principle requires that the benefits of the association or accepting funds from for-profits be great to justify the conflict of interest.[30] As a result of full disclosure, there is scope for increased accountability from private corporations and public health scholars to ensure that values are upheld throughout the association. However, disclosure is not always effective as it does not prevent or remedy a conflict of interest.[31] Disclosure rests on a presumption of wrongdoing and can deter prospective corporate engagement in public health research. However, the risk of deterring research participation is not a concern strong enough to loosen the values a public health institution must strive to achieve. Values such as transparency, proportionality, precautionary measures, and accountability make it easier to navigate disclosure requirements. Disclosure as a standalone method is not a foolproof technique.[32] Thus, a tailor-made model that can switch between the prohibition model and the disclosure model on a case-by-case basis might be more effective. Furthermore, academics need to ensure reasonable confidence that corporations would disclose financial conflicts of interest as the disclosure requirement often acts on an honor system. In case of non-compliance, either terminating the ties or establishing a legal recourse could be sought as alternatives. lV. The Case for Expanding the Definition of Conflicts of Interests Many industries are explicitly harmful to people. Tobacco and alcohol corporations engage in actions and create products that work against the ideals of public health. Industries like fast fashion, cosmetics, and many others that are seemingly harmless contribute significantly to the deterioration of public health through their treatment of workers, environmental impacts, and lobbying efforts that include relaxing laws meant to protect consumers and workers. The fashion industry produces large amounts of inexpensive clothing by outsourcing labor to lower- and middle-income countries,[33] creating environmental and occupational hazards for their citizens. Many countries lack institutional structures to prevent abuse of workers.[34] Fast fashion also leads to the production of solid waste that ends up in landfills with no efficient mechanism for its disposal.[35] The cosmetic industry releases a great number of micro-plastics into aquatic systems through face products which lead to a shift in their chemical composition.[36] The gambling industry harms health as gambling is addictive and can financially harm individuals, families, and interpersonal relationships.[37] The mining industry has occupational hazards such as inhaling of toxic substances as well as environmental hazards.[38] The sugary drink industry increases the burden of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.[39] A prohibition model works well with industries that explicitly harm. Thus, non-association with the tobacco and alcohol industry becomes obvious. The difficulty in deciphering conflict of interest through association arises when public health institutions are looking to expand their non-association to industries of implicit harm. When looking to expand non-association into industries such as mining, fast fashion, sugary drinks, etc., we need to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach. Disclosure is not enough as it does not resolve the risk of bias; it merely provides transparency. Yet, a prohibition model would require academic institutions and journals to research funding relationships as well as harmful practices and would lead to less funding for research. V. The Traffic Light Model: A tailor-made hybrid of prohibition and disclosure Academic institutions, non-profits, and public health organizations might shape market practices and unearth latent intentions to contradict the social determinants of health if they are able to eliminate bias in public health research. This section presents a hybrid model for conflict-of-interest assessment and resolution that takes the metaphor of a traffic light. Figure 1 represents a schematic of the hybrid. Figure 1: A Schematic of the Traffic Light Hybrid As the schematic represents, industries that project values against public health, such as tobacco and alcohol, fall under the red light and hence can be put under non-association, i.e., the prohibition model. Expanding non-association to industries implicit in their harms, such as fast fashion, sugary drinks, mining, companies that exploit labor, would require us to proceed with the disclosure model. As mentioned before, disclosure would require assessing the conflict of interest in terms of proportionality, transparency, accountability, and ensuring that the precautionary principle has been met. Providing a legal recourse at every significant point during research might be helpful to eliminate conflicts that surface during the intermediate stages of research. The entire disclosure model falls under the yellow light urging us to go slow and err on the side of caution. The green light comprises pro-public health values corporations and exercises impactful operational methods that do not devalue public health goals. However, this should not be taken for face value. Any suspicion of conflict must be dealt with disclosure, and risk-based assessment should precede every funding decision. The three categories serve as a starting point for public health researchers to invest more in building a framework that helps assess such conflicts. Conflicts of interest are rather dynamic and require constant attention. Examining research practices and funder objectives is crucial. The impact of private corporations on public health research needs to be widely discussed in the academic community. Although the hybrid provides a starting point in designing a more dynamic and flexible framework, the presence of an institutional conflict of interest policy and committee with independent review and oversight of research is also a necessity.[40] Considering decreased federal funding, scholars have argued the necessity for corporate funding. Besides meeting the financial demand, corporate funding has brought in benefits such as employment opportunities, access to otherwise unavailable tools and technology, and turning academic research into commercially viable practice.[41] Although the goals of public health research, such as the creation of public goods, affordable and safe housing, access to vaccines, etc., may seem utilitarian, it is important to understand that corporations influence research practices that are more deontological in nature. Research integrity has to do with ethical conduct of research and shaping best practices. Thus, an efficient way to deal with research practice and bias is by invoking the Kantian categorical imperative grounded in procedural ethics rather than consequentialist ethics. A Kantian perspective allows considering conflicts of interest as an institutional value. In addition to focusing on individual research practices, public health institutions need to develop an institutional conflict of interest framework where the values of a public health institution shape corporate engagement. Another closely related discourse that has a significant bearing on corporate involvement is commercial determinants of health. It considers corporations as contributors to disease burden and holds them as part of a structural problem.[42] By shaping research practices and investing in designing conflicts of interest policies, public health institutions can redefine the narrative of accountability. By actively evaluating financial links within the corporation and assessing risks of bias and influence in research, public health institutions can check the power imbalance that corporations tend to misuse.[43] More importantly, furthering a narrative that defines disease burden in terms of corporate contribution signals support to those who fight against the injustices perpetrated by large-scale corporations. People from lower- and middle-income countries and several indigenous communities have been forced out of their neighborhoods for corporate expansion.[44] As a public health institution, it is important to support vulnerable groups outpowered and forced into poor living conditions by global corporations. CONCLUSION The consumption of tobacco, alcohol, polluting motor vehicles, and other products of disease-promoting corporations have presented a significant struggle in improving public health. Engaging with such corporations through corporate social responsibility ventures into the highly contentious ethical territory. From a fundamental difference in the values endorsed, for-profit corporations present a conflict of interest in public health research. Public health institutions should be wary of the influence of corporate funding provided through social responsibility programs. Academic bias and the use of corporate social responsibility as a backdoor to legitimizing questionable practices are problematic. The prohibition and disclosure models independently do not perform efficiently against the dynamic nature of conflicts of interest. The hybrid model for institutional conflict-of-interest policy incorporates both the prohibition and disclosure models and allows for switching between them on a case-by-case basis. Managing corporate power requires dealing with conflict of interests broadly and as a risk-susceptibility issue rather than an occurrence issue. - [1] Denier, Y. (2008). Mind the gap! Three Approaches to Scarcity in Health Care. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 11(1), 73-87. [2] Gupta, A., Holla, R., & Suri, S. (2015). Conflict of Interest in Public Health: Should There be a Law to Prevent It? Indian J Med Ethics, 12(3), 172-7. [3] de Vries, H. (2016). Invited Commentary: Corporate Social Responsibility and Public Health: An Unwanted Marriage; Resnik, D. B. (2019). Institutional Conflicts of Interest in Academic Research. Science and Engineering Ethics, 25(6), 1661-1669. [4] Lee, K., & Bialous, S. A. (2006). Corporate Social Responsibility: Serious Cause for Concern. Tobacco Control, 15(6), 419-419. [5] Macassa, G., da Cruz Francisco, J., & McGrath, C. (2017). Corporate social responsibility and population health. Health Science Journal, 11(5), 1-6. [6] Harvey, C., Gordon, J., & Maclean, M. (2021). The Ethics of Entrepreneurial Philanthropy. Journal of Business Ethics, 171(1), 33-49. [7] Harvey, C., Gordon, J., & Maclean, M. (2021). The Ethics of Entrepreneurial Philanthropy. Journal of Business Ethics, 171(1), 33-49. [8] Resnik, D. B. (2019). Institutional Conflicts of Interest in Academic Research. Science and Engineering Ethics, 25(6), 1661-1669. [9] Royo Bordonada, M., & García López, F. (2018). What Is and What Is Not a Conflict of Interest in Public Health Research. European Journal of Public Health, 28(suppl_4), cky213-750. [10] de Vries, H. (2016). Invited Commentary: Corporate Social Responsibility and Public Health: An Unwanted Marriage. [11] Lee, K., & Bialous, S. A. (2006). Corporate Social Responsibility: Serious Cause for Concern. Tobacco Control, 15(6), 419-419. [12] Gupta, A., Holla, R., & Suri, S. (2015). Conflict of Interest In Public Health: Should There Be A Law To Prevent It?. Indian J Med Ethics, 12(3), 172-7. [13] Krimsky, S. (2013). Do Financial Conflicts of Interest Bias Research? An Inquiry into The “Funding Effect” Hypothesis. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 38(4), 566-587. [14] Ibid. [15] Ibid. [16] Nakkash, R. T., Mugharbil, S., Alaouié, H., & Afifi, R. A. (2017). Attitudes of Public Health Academics Toward Receiving Funds from For-Profit Corporations: A Systematic Review. Public Health Ethics, 10(3), 298-303. [17] Nakkash, R. T., Mugharbil, S., Alaouié, H., & Afifi, R. A. (2017). Attitudes of Public Health Academics Toward Receiving Funds From For-Profit Corporations: A Systematic Review. Public Health Ethics, 10(3), 298-303. (An attempt to review the research failed as there was not data on the “Attitudes of Public Health Academics towards receiving funds from for-profit corporations.”) [18] de Vries, H. (2016). Invited Commentary: Corporate Social Responsibility and Public Health: An Unwanted Marriage. [19] Yoon, S., & Lam, T. H. (2013). The illusion of Righteousness: Corporate Social Responsibility Practices Of The Alcohol Industry. BMC Public Health, 13(1), 1-11. [20] Gupta, A., Holla, R., & Suri, S. (2015). Conflict of interest in Public Health: Should There Be A Law To Prevent It?. Indian J Med Ethics, 12(3), 172-7. [21] Shamoo, A. S., & Resnik, D. B. (2015). Responsible Conduct of Research (3rd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. [22] Resnik, D. B. (2019). Institutional Conflicts of Interest in Academic Research. Science And Engineering Ethics, 25(6), 1661-1669. [23] Field, M. J., & Lo, B. (Eds.). (2009). Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, And Practice. [24] Fanelli, D. (2009). How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Of Survey Data. PloS one, 4(5), e5738. [25] Field, M. J., & Lo, B. (Eds.). (2009). Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice. [26] Kant, I. (2008). Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Yale University Press. [27] Kant, I. (2008). Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Yale University Press. [28] Field, M. J., & Lo, B. (Eds.). (2009). Conflict of Interest In Medical Research, Education, And Practice. [29] IbId. [30] Childress, James F., R. Gaare Bernheim, R. J. Bonnie, and A. L. Melnick. "Introduction: A Framework For Public Health Ethics." Essentials Of Public Health Ethics 1 (2015): 1-20. [31] Fleishman, J. L. (1981). The Disclosure Model and Its Limitations. Hastings Center Report, 15-17. [32] Ibid. [33] Bick, R., Halsey, E., & Ekenga, C. C. (2018). The Global Environmental Injustice of Fast Fashion. Environmental Health, 17(1), 1-4. [34] Anguelov, N. (2015). The Dirty Side of The Garment Industry: Fast Fashion and Its Negative Impact on Environment and Society. CRC Press. [35] Wicker, A. Fast Fashion Is Creating an Environmental Crisis. Newsweek. September 1, 2016; Available from: https://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/ 09/old-clothes-fashion-waste-crisis-494824.html. Accessed 13 Aug 2021 [36] Alabi, O. A., Ologbonjaye, K. I., Awosolu, O., & Alalade, O. E. (2019). Public and Environmental Health Effects of Plastic Wastes Disposal: A Review. J Toxicol Risk Assess, 5(021), 1-13. [37] Wardle, H., Reith, G., Langham, E., & Rogers, R. D. (2019). Gambling and Public Health: We Need Policy Action to Prevent Harm. BMJ, 365. [38] Hendryx, M. (2015). The Public Health Impacts of Surface Coal Mining. The Extractive Industries and Society, 2(4), 820-826. [39] Flynn, A., & Okuonzi, S. A. (2016). Coca-Cola's Multifaceted Threat to Global Public Health. The Lancet, 387(10013), 25. [40] Resnik, D. B. (2019). Institutional Conflicts of Interest in Academic Research. Science And Engineering Ethics, 25(6), 1661-1669. [41] Bayer, R., & Sampat, B. N. (2016). Corporate Funding for Schools of Public Health: Confronting the Ethical and Economic Challenges. American Journal of Public Health, 106(4), 615-618. [42] McKee, M., & Stuckler, D. (2018). Revisiting The Corporate and Commercial Determinants of Health. American Journal of Public Health, 108(9), 1167-1170. [43] Daube, M. (2018). Shining a Light on Industry Research Funding. American Journal of Public Health, 108(11), 1441. [44] Munarriz, G. (2008). Rhetoric and Reality: The World Bank Development Policies, Mining Corporations, and Indigenous Communities in Latin America. International Community Law Review, 10(4), 431-443.

Creators and Creation Creation is a troubling word today, because it suggests an impossible act, indeed a miracle: the formation of something out of nothing. Today we no longer believe in miracles, yet we see all around us myriad acts which we routinely define as creative. Here, I am not referring to the artistic performances and works of gifted individuals, which have their own genealogy of creativity in the lineages of Western art. Rather, I am referring to the small, personal events that we see within the mediated spaces of the everyday (on the television screen, in magazines and newspapers) where lives are suddenly changed for the better through the consumption of products designed to fulfil our personal desires. In this paper, I want to explore the implications of thinking about everyday creativity as a modern cultural form. I want to suggest that not only is such an impossible possibility possible, but that its meaning has been at the centre of the desire to name, to gain status from, and to market the products of modern industrialisation. Furthermore I want to suggest that beyond any question of marketing rhetoric, we need to attend to this desire as the ghost of a certain kind of immanence which has haunted modernity and its projects from the very beginning, linking the great thoughts of modern philosophy with the lowliest products of modern life. Immanence, Purity and the Cogito In Descartes' famous Discourse on Method, the author-narrator (let's call him Descartes) recounts how he came about the idea of the thinking self or cogito, as the foundation of worldly knowledge: And so because sometimes our senses deceive us, I made up my mind to suppose that they always did. . . . I resolved to pretend that everything that had ever entered my mind was as false as the figments of my dreams. But then as I strove to think of everything false, I realized that, in the very act of thinking everything false, I was aware of myself as something real. (60-61) These well known lines are, of course, the beginnings of a remarkable philosophical enterprise, reaching forward to Husserl and beyond, in which the external world is bracketed, all the better to know it in the name of reason. Through an act of pretence ("I resolved to pretend"), Descartes disavows the external world as the source of certain knowledge, and, turning to the only thing left: the thought of himself—"I was aware of myself as something real"—makes his famous declaration, "I think therefore I am". But what precisely characterises this thinking being, destined to become the cogito of all modernity? Is it purely this act of self-reflection?: Then, from reflecting on the fact that I had doubts, and that consequently my existence was not wholly perfect, it occurred to me to enquire how I learned to think of something more perfect than myself, and it became evident to me that it must be through some nature which was in fact more perfect. (62) Descartes has another thought that "occurred to me" almost at the same moment that he becomes aware of his own thinking self. This second thought makes him aware that the cogito is not complete, requiring yet a further thought, that of a perfection drawn from something "more perfect than myself". The creation of the cogito does not occur, as we might have first surmised, within its own space of self-reflection, but becomes lodged within what might be called, following Deleuze and Guattari, a "plane of immanence" coming from the outside: "The plane of immanence is . . . an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world: it is immanence" (59). Here we are left with a puzzling question: what of this immanence that made him aware of his own imperfection at the very moment of the cogito's inception? Can this immanence be explained away by Descartes' appeal to God as a state of perfection? Or is it the very material upon which the cogito is brought into existence, shaping it towards perfection? We are forced to admit that, irrespective of the source of this perfection, the cogito requires something from the outside which, paradoxically, is already on the inside, in order to create itself as a pure form. Following the contours of Descartes' own writing, we cannot account for modernity purely in terms of self-reflection, if, in the very act of its self-creation, the modern subject is shot through with immanence that comes from the outside. Rather what we must do is describe the various forms this immanence takes. Although there is no necessary link between immanence and perfection (that is, one does not logically depend on the other as its necessary cause) their articulation nevertheless produces something (the cogito for instance). Furthermore, this something is always characterised as a creation. In its modern form, creation is a form of immanence within materiality—a virtualisation of material actuality, that produces idealised states, such as God, freedom, reason, uniqueness, originality, love and perfection. As Bruno Latour has argued, the "modern critical stance" creates unique, pure objects, by purging the material "networks" from which they are formed, of their impurities (11-12). Immanence is characterised by a process of sifting and purification which brings modern objects into existence: "the plane of immanence . . . acts like a sieve" (Deleuze and Guattari 42). The nation, the state, the family, the autonomous subject, and the work of art—all of these are modern when their 'material' is purged of impurities by an immanence that 'comes from the outside' yet is somehow intrinsic to the material itself. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, the modern nation exists by virtue of a capacity to convert strangers into citizens; by purging itself of impurities inhabiting it from within but coming from the outside (63). The modern work of art is created by purging itself of the vulgarities and impurities of everyday life (Berman 30); by reducing its contingent and coincidental elements to a geometrical, punctual or serialised form. The modern nuclear family is created by converting the community-based connections between relatives and friends into a single, internally consistent self-reproducing organism. All of these examples require us to think of creativity as an act which brings something new into existence from within a material base that must be purged and disavowed, but which, simultaneously, must also be retained as its point of departure that it never really leaves. Immanence should not be equated with essence, if by essence we mean a substratum of materiality inherent in things; a quality or quiddity to which all things can be reduced. Rather, immanence is the process whereby things appear as they are to others, thereby forming themselves into 'objects' with certain identifiable characteristics. Immanence draws the 'I' and the 'we' into relations of subjectivity to the objects thus produced. Immanence is not in things; it is the thing's condition of objectivity in a material, spatial and temporal sense; its 'becoming object' before it can be 'perceived' by a subject. As Merleau-Ponty has beautifully argued, seeing as a bodily effect necessarily comes before perception as an inner ownership (Merleau-Ponty 3-14). Since immanence always comes from elsewhere, no intensive scrutiny of the object in itself will bring it to light. But since immanence is already inside the object from the moment of its inception, no amount of examination of its contextual conditions—the social, cultural, economic, institutional and authorial conditions under which the object was created—will bring us any closer to it. Rather, immanence can only be 'seen' (if this is the right word) in terms of the objects it creates. We should stop seeking immanence as a characteristic of objects considered in themselves, and rather see it in terms of a virtual field or plane, in which objects appear, positioned in a transversally related way. This field does not exist transcendentally to the objects, like some overarching principle of order, but as a radically exteriorised stratum of 'immaterial materiality' with a specific image-content, capable of linking objects together as a series of creations, all with the stamp of their own originality, individuality and uniqueness, yet all bound together by a common set of image relations (Deleuze 34-35). If, as Foucault argues, modern objects emerge in a "field of exteriority"—a complex web of discursive interrelations, with contingent rather than necessary connections to one another (Foucault 45)—then it should be possible to map the connections between these objects in terms of the "schema of correspondence" (74) detected in the multiplicities thrown up by the regularities of modern production and consumption. Commodities and Created Objects We can extend the idea of creation to include not only aesthetic acts and their objects, but also the commodity-products of modern industrialisation. Let's begin by plunging straight into the archive, where we might find traces of these small modern miracles. An illustrated advertisement for 'Hudson's Extract of Soap' appeared in the Illustrated Sydney News, on Saturday February 22nd, 1888. The illustration shows a young woman with a washing basket under her arm, standing beside a sign posted to a wall, which reads 'Remarkable Disappearance of all Dirt from Everything by using Hudson's Extract of Soap' (see Figure 1). The woman has her head turned towards the poster, as if reading it. Beneath these words, is another set of words offering a reward: 'Reward !!! Purity, Health, Perfection, Satisfaction. By its regular daily use'. Here we are confronted with a remarkable proposition: soap does not make things clean, rather it makes dirt disappear. Soap purifies things by making their impurities disappear. The claim made applies to 'everything', drawing attention to a desire for a certain state of perfection, exemplified by the pure body, cleansed of dirt and filth. The pure exists in potentia as a perfect state of being, realised by the purgation of impurities. Fig 1: Hudson's Soap. Illustrated Sydney News, on Saturday February 22nd, 1888 Here we might be tempted to trace the motivation of this advertisement to a concern in the nineteenth century for a morally purged, purified body, regulated according to bourgeois values of health, respectability and decorum. As Catherine Gallagher has pointed out, the body in the nineteenth century was at the centre of a sick society requiring "constant flushing, draining, and excising of various deleterious elements" (Gallagher 90). But this is only half the story. The advertisement offers a certain image of purity; an image which exceeds the immediate rhetorical force associated with selling a product, one which cannot be simply reduced to its contexts of use. The image of perfection in the Hudson's soap advertisement belongs to a network of images spread across a far-flung field; a network in which we can 'see' perfection as a material immanence embodied in things. In modernity, commodities are created objects par excellence, which, in their very ordinariness, bear with them an immanence, binding consumers together into consumer formations. Each act of consumption is not simply driven by necessity and need, but by a desire for self-transformation, embodied in the commodity itself. Indeed, self-transformation becomes one of the main creative processes in what Marshal Berman has identified as the "third" phase of modernity, where, paraphrasing Nietzsche, "modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence and emptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance of possibilities" (Berman 21). Commodification shifts human desire away from the thought of the other as a transcendental reality remote from the senses, and onto a future oriented material plane, in which the self is capable of becoming an other in a tangible, specific way (Massumi 35 ff.). By the end of the nineteenth century, commodities had become associated with scenarios of self-transformation embedded in human desire, which then began to shape the needs of society itself. Consumer formations are not autonomous realms; they are transversally located within and across social strata. This is because commodities bear with them an immanence which always exceeds their context of production and consumption, spreading across vast cultural terrains. An individual consumer is thus subject to two forces: the force of production that positions her within the social strata as a member of a class or social grouping, and the force of consumption that draws her away from, or indeed, further into a social positioning. While the consumption of commodities remained bound to ideologies relating to the formation of class in terms of a bourgeois moral order, as it was in Britain, America and Europe throughout the nineteenth century, then the discontinuity between social strata and cultural formation was felt in terms of the possibility of self-transformation by moving up a class. In the nineteenth century, working class families flocked to the new photographic studios to have their portraits taken, emulating the frozen moral rectitude of the ideal bourgeois type, or scrimped and saved to purchase parlour pianos and other such cultural paraphernalia, thereby signalling a certain kind of leisured freedom from the grind of work (Sekula 8). But when the desire for self-transformation starts to outstrip the ideological closure of class; that is, when the 'reality' of commodities starts to overwhelm the social reality of those who make them, then desire itself takes on an autonomy, which can then be attached to multiple images of the other, expressed in imaginary scenarios of escape, freedom, success and hyper-experience. This kind of free-floating desire has now become a major trigger for transformations in consumer formations, linked to visual technologies where images behave like quasi-autonomous beings. The emergence of these images can be traced back at least to the mid-nineteenth century where products of industrialisation were transformed into commodities freely available as spectacles within the public spaces of exhibitions and in mass advertising in the press, for instance in the Great Exhibition of 1851 held at London's Crystal Palace (Richards 28 ff.) Here we see the beginnings of a new kind of object-image dislocated from the utility of the product, with its own exchange value and logic of dispersal. Bataille's notion of symbolic exchange can help explain the logic of dispersal inherent in commodities. For Bataille, capitalism involves both production utility and sumptuary expenditure, where the latter is not simply a calculated version of the former (Bataille 120 ff.) Sumptuary expenditure is a discharge of an excess, and not a drawing in of demand to match the needs of supply. Consumption thus has a certain 'uncontrolled' element embedded in it, which always moves beyond the machinations of market logic. Under these conditions, the commodity image always exceeds production and use, taking on a life of its own, charged with desire. In the late nineteenth century, the convergence of photography and cartes-de-visites released a certain scopophilic desire in the form of postcard pornography, which eventually migrated to the modern forms of advertising and public visual imagery that we see today. According to Suren Lalvani, the "onset of scopophilia" in modern society is directly attributable to the convergence of photographic technology and erotic display in the nineteenth century (Lalvani). In modern consumer cultures, desire does not lag behind need, but enters into the cycle of production and consumption from the outside, where it becomes its driving force. In this way, modern consumer cultures transform themselves by ecstasis (literally, by standing outside oneself) when the body becomes virtualised into its other. Here, the desire for self-transformation embodied in the act of consumption intertwines with, and eventually redefines, the social positioning of the subject. Indeed the 'laws' of capital and labour where each person or family group is assigned a place and regime of duties, are constantly undone and redefined by the superfluity of consumption, gradually gathering pace throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These tremendous changes operating throughout all capitalist consumer cultures for some time, do not occur in a calculated way, as if controlled by the forces of production alone. Rather, they occur through myriad acts of self-transformation, operating transversally, linking consumer to consumer within what I have defined earlier as a field of immanence. Here, the laws of supply and demand are inadequate to predict the logic of this operation; they only describe the effects of consumption after desire has been spent. Or, to put this another way, they misread desire as need, thereby transcribing the primary force of consumption into a secondary component of the production/labour cycle. This error is made by Humphrey McQueen in his recent book The Essence of Capitalism: the origins of our future (2001). In chapter 8, McQueen examines the logic of the consumer market through a critique of the marketeer's own notion of desire, embodied in the "sovereign consumer", making rational choices. Here desire is reduced back to a question of calculated demand, situated within the production/consumption cycle. McQueen leaves himself no room to manoeuvre outside this cycle; there is no way to see beyond the capitalist cycle of supply/demand which accelerates across ever-increasing horizons. To avoid this error, desire needs to be seen as immanent to the production/consumption cycle; as produced by it, yet superfluous to its operations. We need therefore to situate ourselves not on the side of production, but in the superfluity of consumption in order to recognise the transformational triggers that characterise modern consumer cultures, and their effects on the social order. In order to understand the creative impulse in modernity today, we need to come to grips with the mystery of consumption, where the thing consumed operates on the consumer in both a material and an immaterial way. This mystification of the commodity was, of course, well noted by Marx: A commodity is . . . a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. (Marx 43, my emphasis) When commodities take on such a powerful force that their very presence starts to drive and shape the social relations that have given rise to them; that is, when desire replaces need as the shaping force of societies, then we are obliged to redefine the commodity and its relation to the subject. Under these conditions, the mystery of the commodity is no longer something to be dispelled in order to retrieve the real relation between labour and capital, but becomes the means whereby "men's labour" is actually shaped and formed as a specific mode of production. Eric Alliez and Michel Feher (1987) point out that in capitalism "the subjection framework which defines the wage relation has penetrated society to such an extent that we can now speak not only of the formal subsumption of labor by capital but of the actual or 'real' subsumption by capital of society as a whole" (345). In post-Fordist economic contexts, individuals' relation to capital is no longer based on subjection but incorporation: "space is subsumed under a time entirely permeated by capital. In so doing, they [neo-Fordist strategies] also instigate a regime in which individuals are less subject to than incorporated by capital" (346). In societies dominated by the subjection of workers to capital, the commodity's exchange value is linked strongly to the classed position of the worker, consolidating his interests within the shadow of a bourgeois moral order. But where the worker is incorporated into capital, his 'real' social relations go with him, making it difficult to see how they can be separated from the commodities he produces and which he also consumes at leisure: "If the capitalist relation has colonized all of the geographical and social space, it has no inside into which to integrate things. It has become an unbounded space—in other words, a space coextensive with its own inside and outside. It has become a field of immanence" (Massumi 18). It therefore makes little sense to initiate critiques of the capital relation by overthrowing the means of subjection. Instead, what is required is a way through the 'incorporation' of the individual into the capitalist system, an appropriation of the means of consumption in order to invent new kinds of selfhood. Or at the very least, to expose the process of self-formation to its own means of consumption. What we need to do, then, is to undertake a description of the various ways in which desire is produced within consumer cultures as a form of self-creation. As we have seen, in modernity, self-creation occurs when human materiality is rendered immaterial through a process purification. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, I have characterised this process in terms of immanence: a force coming from the outside, but which is already inside the material itself. In the necessary absence of any prime mover or deity, pure immanence becomes the primary field in which material is rendered into its various and specific modern forms. Immanence is not a transcendental power operating over things, but that which is the very motor of modernity; its specific way of appearing to itself, and of relating to itself in its various guises and manifestations. Through a careful mapping of the network of commodity images spread through far-flung fields, cutting through specific contexts of production and consumption, we can see creation at work in one of its specific modern forms. Immanence, and the power of creation it makes possible, can be found in all modern things, even soap powder! References Alliez, Eric and Michel Feher. "The Luster of Capital." Zone 1(2) 1987: 314-359. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Penguin, 1982. Bataille, George. "The Notion of Expenditure." George Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Trans. Alan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp.116-129. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method. Trans. Arthur Wollaston, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock, 1972. Gallagher, Catherine. "The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew." The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987: 83-106. Lalvani, Suren. "Photography, Epistemology and the Body." Cultural Studies, 7(3), 1993: 442-465. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Karl. Capital, A New Abridgement. David McLellan (Ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Massumi, Brian. "Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear" in Brian Massumi (Ed.). The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 3-37. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1968. McQueen, Humphrey. The Essence of Capitalism: the Origins of Our Future. Sydney: Sceptre, 2001. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive." October, 39, 1986: 3-65.

Les conséquences des chocs économiques négatifs sur les ménages ont été documentés extensivement, mais on en sait beaucoup moins sur la manière dont ces chocs sont transmis aux individus à travers la médiation du ménage. Le ménage contribue-il à modérer l'effet des chocs négatifs ? Dans quelle mesure le choc économique pèse-t-il dans la négociation familiale ? À partir de données sur la crise économique argentine de 2001, je montre d'abord que les femmes en couple ont une plus grande probabilité de devenir actives si leur mari a fait l'expérience d'un choc de revenu. Ensuite, je montre que le cycle économique importe dans les décisions d'investissement en capital humain. Sur le long terme, les profils de salaire et d'employabilité des hommes argentins sont affectés de manière persistante par les conditions économiques initiales au moment de l'obtention du diplôme. Enfin, je considère la dimension “man-cession” de la crise économique de 2009 en Espagne et montre que la part des ressources du ménage reçues par les femmes pour leur consommation privée augmente avec la diminution de l'écart des taux de chômage hommes-femmes, confortant l'hypothèse que les chocs négatifs modifient le pouvoir de négociation des individus au sein du ménage
The consequences of adverse aggregate shocks on households have been repeatedly documented, but far less has been said on the way they are passed over to individuals through the mediation of the household. Does the household contribute in mitigating the effects? Or does the economic shock rather invite itself at the family negociating table? Using the Argentine 2001 economic crisis as a natural experiment, I first show that married women are more likely to enter the labor market if their husband experienced a loss in income, giving credit to the insurance mechanism. Then, I show that the business cycle matters for investments in education, and that long run labor outcomes of Argentine men are persistently affected by the initial conditions upon graduation. Finally, I consider the “Mancession” dimension of the Great Recession in Spain and demonstrate that the resource share accruing to wives for own consumption increases together with the decreasing unemployment gap, which comes in support to the bargaining hypothesis

Defence date: 23 May 2016
Examining Board: Professor Hans-Peter Blossfeld, European University Institute; Professor Fabrizio Bernardi, European University Institute; Professor Angela M. O'Rand, Duke University; Professor Cristina Iannelli, The University of Edinburgh
The UK's comparatively open and flexible education system provides more options for individuals from less advantaged backgrounds to participate, and has a high uptake of tertiary and adult education. However, individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds remain proportionately under-represented at the highest levels of post-compulsory education. The complex relationship between expansion, the diversification of educational systems and freedom of choice in modern liberal societies means that the background from which students are drawn remains highly relevant to their progression. Multiple options and qualitative differences between courses and institutions puts the onus on students and parents to make correct career decisions - if students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are found more often in less prestigious educational pathways, then prestigious higher level institutions are likely to remain exclusive. The major contribution of my dissertation is the development of an overview of UK educational and labour market pathway formation and its influence on individuals' educational trajectories and social positions. More specifically, I expand on Kerckhoff's (1993) work on "Diverging Pathways: Social Structure and Career Deflections", taking into account changes since the introduction of the comprehensive system, gender differences and adult education. I further the distinction between a pathway and a trajectory in life-course research and elaborate on the debated question of "persistent inequality", taking the theoretical perspective of "effectively maintained inequality" (Lucas 2001) into account. Finally, I consider the role of interactions between different types of inequality (cumulatingdimensions). This thesis finds that students from more educated backgrounds are more likely to choose academic subjects and pathways early, which influences their performance and further progression opportunities. It also finds that men and women differ regarding educational pathways, that vertical gender inequalities and horizontal gender differences at first labour market entry have remained relatively stable over the latter half of the 20th century. And finally, that adult education and learning is subject to a "Matthew effect" (Merton 1968).