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The article discusses the report and research papers published by the Great Britain Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations, pertaining to industrial relations. The Commission was set up on April 8, 1965 and reported in June 1968. In addition to its report, it published between June 1966 and May 1968 thirteen substantial research papers. The report is closely argued and its recommendations proceed logically from the argument. It begins with certain assumptions. Those who hoped to see the Commission indict the unions and impose legal restraints upon them have been disappointed. The Report as a whole is thus a consistent, restrained, dignified document concerned equally with realities and civilized standards. Reading the Report and the research papers, one is struck by the concordance between the approaches of the researchers and that of the Commission. The first part of the paper is mainly cast in the form of a lecture to management. The studies of Employers' Associations make one wonder why they were included in the terms of reference of the Commission. For occupational psychologists it could be the practical introduction to all those aspects of industry, which are left outside their syllabus.

In a previous paper [12], an attempt was made to show how spectral techniques could be used to compare the effects of two seasonal adjustment procedures on the series to which they were applied. The two procedures compared were: (a) the technique currently used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for seasonally adjusting employment, unemployment, and labor force monthly statistics, and (b) the so-called "residual" method, proposed by Brittain [2], Samuelson [16], and others. Spectra of the original and the seasonally adjusted series and the cross spectrum of the two were used to aid in the assessment of whether either procedure removed more than could be considered seasonal, introduced spurious regularities, and/or distorted temporal relationships. It was concluded that both techniques removed more than seasonal effects from, and produced some temporal distortion in, the series to which they were applied. Neither method appeared to be superior to the other. It is the purpose of this paper to carry the previous analysis one step further and to compare the BLS procedure with a modified version of the regression method of seasonal adjustment suggested by Cowden [3] and Mendershausen [11], and recently revived by Harman [9, 10] in an exceptionally sophisticated form. In addition to Hannan's work along the lines suggested, Nettheim [13] and Rosenblatt [15] have made studies. Rosenblatt [15] has carried out analyses similar to those reported here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the type of interpretation of the successful political incorporation of the British working class in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which stresses normative factors-'deference', craving for respectability, bourgeoisification, religious feelings etc. It corrects misleading statements in some of these accounts and uses historical evidence to stress the importance of objective, structural constraints on working class ability to mobilize on a class basis in the political system prior to 1918. Following this interpretation some points are made about the British political culture on theoretical grounds stemming from Durkheim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]