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ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change

Theme 3 Research Projects

(1) Selling Risk: The Making of Life Assurance Markets 1774-1911

Liz McFall

This inquiry adopted two lines of investigation. The first centered upon the promotion of life assurance through devices including the use of agents, sales promotion, publicity and corporate promotion. Archival research revealed an array of devices including advertisements, prospectuses, trade press and handbooks while photographic evidence was collected to record the use of architecture as promotional spectacle. The second line of investigation concentrated on the changing character of insurance as a technique of liberal government through analysis of primary sources including government reports, journal articles, newspaper correspondence and company histories. This revealed a generality of form enabling insurance to ‘fit’ both socialised and privatised actuarial schemes matched by large companies’ ability to adapt to changing governmental priorities.

(2) The State of Freedom

Patrick Joyce

This inquiry related to a larger book exploring how the liberal British state historically became embedded in techno-social forms. It considered the techno-social forms of the state in terms of the example of the historical emergence of communications systems, centered on the British Post Office. This has given rise to a CRESC online working paper, entitled Postal communication and the making of the British technostate.

(3) Reinventing Oxbridge and the Public School

Patrick Joyce

This inquiry concerned the successive and successful reinventions of two primary locations of power and influence in British society: the public school and the Oxbridge college. The first period covered is the late 19th century, the second post-1945 Britain. Attention was paid to the curriculum, teaching methods, discipline, and the corporate identity and spatial forms of institutions, the emphasis being placed on the inculcation of the capacity to govern and to ‘lead’. The emphasis is on the materialities of pedagogy throws up new understandings of how power operated in British society, and therefore new possibilities for re-interpreting the course of British history.

(4) The Built Environment and the Formation of Liberal Elites in England and Germany around 1900

Maiken Umbach

This offered a comparative analysis of the formation of liberal subjectivities in Britain and Germany at the outset of the twentieth century, arguing that the German notion of Bürgerlichkeit not be read as an expression of German middle–class consciousness, but as a political project, which ran parallel with the emergence of liberal governmentality in Britain. This analogy was the result of a significant entanglement of developments in both countries. This complicates a more detailed comparison, as no two cases can be analytically isolated and then compared: for example, the performance and disciplining of the liberal self were primarily associated with the domestic sphere in fin-de-siècle Germany, yet more typically carried out by and through public spaces and practices, such as school classrooms and team sports, in Britain.

(5) Reconfiguring 'Global Citizenship' and 'Global Governance': The Role of Boundaries, Frontiers, Territories, Jurisdictions and Distances

Grahame Thompson

This inquiry examined what the two main monotheist religious fundamentalisms – Islam and Christianity - have had to say about the international system, and in particular their attitudes towards, and visions of, ‘globalisation’. It explored the attitudes of these positions towards the idea of ‘territory’ since this is one of those categories that is more widely at stake in the general discussion of globalisation and its consequences, and assessed the impact of these doctrines on the conduct of international relations.

(6) The Architecture of Administration: Building the Liberal State, c 1750-1950

Francis Dodsworth

The first stage of the project involved study of the construction of William Kent’s Treasury building under the Walpole administration in the 1730s. This was the first purpose-built government office in London and established the dominance of Palladianism in public building at this time. The intellectual drive behind this project was to push analysis of political culture beyond the textual statements usually studied by historians of politics and political thought into the material domain. Further work is developing in the field of the administrative structures and civic spaces of local government, from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century.

(7) Liberalism and Police: Biopolitics and the Government of Conduct in Britain, c. 1750-1850

Francis Dodsworth

The initial stages of this project saw exploration of the persona idealised for the parish constable before the creation of the new police and the way this ideal was transformed under the impact of the creation of paid policemen. Later work focused on the definition of the concept of the prevention of crime in the late eighteenth century, analysing the way individual vice was defined as a public problem, the solution to which was moral regulation of the environment. Further work explores the idea of police as a broad mechanism of uniform, co-ordinated urban regulation designed to manage this issue.

(8) Cultural Diversity: New Sporting Identities?

Kath Woodward

This study of the operation of diversity policies and practices in football, demonstrated some of the tensions and contradictions of diversity, suggesting the emergence new identifications, along a continuum, from the human rights discourse of activists, the utilitarian positions of football club ‘community’ workers and administrators and the charity situated identities, which are largely indicative of the pastiche of multi-culture. Diversity politics, however can open up possibilities and challenge the negativity of some contemporary critics.

(9) Technologies of Racial and Cultural Diversity

Peter Wade

In years 1-3, on-going research on the intersection of public knowledge of genetics and biotechnology with ideas of racial-ethnic difference revealed the persistence in popular usage of established discourses of ‘blood’, accompanied by new possibilities for reckoning kinship and genetic/blood connections (through IVF and transnational adoption) that both reinforced and unsettled established ways of thinking about race. No single trend was found. This research has led into an enquiry - currently in progress - on the intersection of race and sexuality as mutually constituting domains in changing modes of governance in Latin America. - A1.19, A1.2.19, A2.77, A2.2.38.

(10) Cosmopolitan Cultures and Urban Governance

Sophie Watson

The focus of this inquiry was a study of the relationship between migrant cultures and established churches in the local area of Marrickville Sydney. An ethnographic study was carried out of 6 religious sites. Priests and pastors were interviewed from the different religious traditions to investigate their role in forging links with local communities, in building networks, and in providing a site where cultural traditions from a place of origin could be adapted and enacted in the absence of local public facilities. Participant observation was also carried out. The study found a variable level of shifts in dominant practices and of interaction with migrant groups. The study concluded that churches had the potential to operate as an important site of community, belonging, and the performance of significant cultural practices for migrants in the locality.

(11)  Legal Knowledges, Citizenship and Cultural Change in the People' Republic of China

Susanne Brandtstädter

This inquiry focused on 'law activists' in China, who use legal mechanisms to 'get their right' in cases of government abuse. What emerged was that activists reinterprete legal processes as political processes and form new forms of social relations around 'law'. The relevance of law for these activists lies as much in emphasising and demonstrating problems of government. Law is used to 'rebalance' relations between local communities and the government, with attaining justice and the improvement of rural livelihood being part of this process, rather than simply the result of court decisions.

(12) Making Culture, Changing Society

Tony Bennett

By drawing on assemblage theory this inquiry has developed a distinctive theoretical approach to the historical development of a ‘culture complex’ comprising a network of institutions in cultural resources are assembled in ways that format the social in ways that conducive to particular ways if intervening in and managing and directing.  The argument has been developed empirically in relation to the role of anthropological collection in colonial administration during the early development of the fieldwork phase in anthropology.

(13) Ordering Differences: Museum Practices and Cultural Diversity

Tony Bennett

This inquiry has focused on identifying different visual grammars of difference in contemporary museum practice and their relevance to contemporary debates concerning the relations between museums and cultural diversity. The cases examined include new exhibitions at the British Museum and the Bunjilaka Gallery in the Museum of Melbourne. A theoretical and historical aspect of the inquiry has examined the operation of different forms of ‘civic seeing’ associated with the historical development of the modern museum.

(14) Shaping Citizens? An Investigation into Visitor Learning in Manchester Museums

Helen Rees Leahy

The project addressed two main questions: 1) what kinds of knowledges (including embodied skills and competences) are instrumentalised via the collecting, display and interpretative practices of art exhibitions and museums, and; 2) how do these ‘official’ knowledges relate to, and/or take account of, the ‘unofficial’ knowledges of museum visitors? The 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition was developed as a case study, based on archival research in Manchester and London, so as to elucidate the production of an urban public for art, based on analysis of the socio-cultural encounters of diverse visitors.  In turn, research findings on the 19th century inculcation of techniques of exhibition visiting were used to inform the centrality of bodily relations to the museum’s potential as an agent and site of social change.

Publications contributed to this theme by Visiting Fellows:

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