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This paper examines the question of how the high non-completion rates found amongst ethnic minority students in UK higher education should be interpreted. US studies examining the nexus between academic performance, ethnicity and social background have concluded that ethnicity-related performance differences are not just the by-product of social class. This study examines the nature of these linkages in the UK where the composition of the ethnicity mix and the nature of the socioeconomic environment are both markedly different from the US. The paper is based on a detailed case study of a cohort from a UK university that recruits a high proportion of its students from ethnic minority backgrounds. Prima facie evidence is found which questions the assumption that the under-performance of minorities should be treated predominantly as an ethnicity issue. It is found that after controlling for socioeconomic background, minority student non-completion rates are found to be very similar to those of their White peers. Further evidence is also uncovered which suggests that in practice there are considerable complexities in the ways in which ethnic differences impact on non-completion rates. From an educational policy perspective, it is argued that more effective results might be obtained if student support initiatives aimed at reducing the non-completion rates among minority student place a greater emphasis on issues relating to their socioeconomic background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women’s experiences of sexual harassment in the UK workplace from the perspective of frequency and types of sexual harassment and characteristics of the harasser; ethnic and cultural influences; power, fear of reprisals, and reporting behavior. Using a snowballing technique, in depth interviews with 17 BAME women who had experienced or witnessed BAME sexual harassment reported that they were frequently sexually harassed by men from the same ethnic background. The fear of job loss, reprisals from male family members and negative organizational consequences resulted in over three quarters of the women not reporting incidents. Key questions regarding the factors and influences that are inherent in racialized sexual harassment are integrated into a model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the controversy faced by climate scientist Phil Jones after he received electronic mail messages regarding his discovery of a mysterious drop of sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic Sea. It states that Jones was accused of scientific misconduct for allegedly attempting to put up an autocratic government by propagating false hysteria regarding global warming. It adds that Great Britain's parliament also did investigations on him, and declared that he was innocent.

The extent to which UK universities are ‘gay friendly’ has received some attention in the press. Whilst there are a number of published studies exploring campus climate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) students and/or staff, these are primarily localised studies undertaken in State Universities and Baccalaureate Colleges in the US. The present study is a nationwide UK study of campus climate, based on survey data collected from a sample of 291 LGBT students from 42 universities across the UK. The findings show that despite the increased implementation of an equality agenda (e.g. equal access; widening participation) in UK Higher Education, homophobia on campus is still a significant problem and therefore universities are not perceived nor experienced by LGBT students as ‘safe spaces’ in which to be open about sexual orientation/gender identity. The implications of the findings for university policy and practice in relation to LGBT (and indeed all) students is also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents author's response to comments on social history made in the paper "A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians," by Tony Judt. The author says that Judt's real heroes are that minority of social historians who remain committed to the proper pursuit of history. They made their reputation by writing about the Worker's Struggle. The author considers that the concept is an appeal to return to the history of the class struggle. He says that the real grievance is that the New Social History subject tells us nothing of the Class Struggle. The author criticizes Judt's work by saying that its real agenda is to destroy the principal competitor to his own marxist-leninist model, which is also a model of modernization.

Poverty is often thought of as an inevitable social condition, and the blame for any shortcomings in governmental welfare policies is frequently placed upon the failings of individuals, markets, and demography. By exploring the influence of neoliberal politics on archaeologies of slum-life this article makes the case that less emphasis should be placed upon the perceived failings of individuals and more effort should be placed on recovering the complex social networks which sustained community-life within Hungate and other so-called urban slums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cold War conflict brought about a rivalry of two opposing camps in different fields and the ideological one belonged to those that came to the fore. Fighting for the minds of people, convincing them to the idea of the new, allegedly better world was crucial to raise the chances of winning the conflict. This is where propaganda came in useful. This article deals with this direct product of the East-West hostility in Polish newspapers and focuses on the propagandists' presentation of the Anglo-American relationships as driven by constant conflicts. Consequently, competition between the allies or rather the struggle by the British to maintain their position in the world is shown. Criticising both countries was of particular interest for Polish journalists. The US was the leader of the 'rotten' capitalist camp and the UK its staunch ally. What is more, damaging the image of co-operation between the leaders of the capitalist camp was meant to undermine the unity of the whole Western bloc and thus proclaim the self-destruction of the latter as a result of 'hostile contradictions' between its members, leaving the 'socialist' camp in the privileged position of the winner. Press was a particularly good tool for propagandists in Poland at that time because television broadcasting was not yet well developed. Thus newspapers became a 'transmission belt' for the communist party and a useful instrument for achieving the unity of knowledge in the country. Apart from the press articles, cartoons from a satirical magazine are analysed to show a broader scale of the propaganda's influence and to prove that its output was not only verbal but also visual one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of the professions do not sufficiently explain how individuals with different and often ill-defined interests can organize themselves into a group coherent enough to undertake a “professional project.” I suggest that concepts from institutional and organizational theory can help fill this gap and apply such concepts to one of the first professional projects, that of English doctors. In the early nineteenth century, two groups sought to become the organizational representative of the incipient profession. The first rapidly organized a sizeable fraction of practitioners and achieved some legislative success, but could not transform its early accomplishments into a position as the doctors' representative. The second had only moderate impact in its early years and was dismissed as politically irrelevant, but eventually united the profession and continues to this day as the British Medical Association. The professions literature, most of which is pitched at a broader level of analysis, does not provide theoretical tools to explain these divergent outcomes. I argue that they can be accounted for by analyzing English medicine as an institutional field. The groups' different structural locations within the field affected their trajectories, and a novel organizational model borrowed from an adjacent field helped the latter group keep doctors mobilized and achieve legitimacy. As a result, an unlikely–looking group of outsiders with limited resources was eventually able to lead a successful professional project, while an initially promising group fell by the wayside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a model to account for the relationship between particular forms of collective action and particular types of regions, and the application of this model to Great Britain, France and Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. European revolts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have engendered one of the longest debates in social history. The central issue is whether these rebellions were essentially spontaneous outbreaks and expressions of class conflict or were instigated by nobility and officials who made common cause with peasants against royal fiscality and centralism. This debate over the meaning of revolts will remain unresolved as long as each side continues to refer only to the historical cases that support its position. The historical record indicates that both class-conflict rebellions and class-collaboration rebellions occurred. One argument is that each form of rebellion corresponds to a particular kind of region. Regions with commercial modes of production were likely to have class conflict, while regions with subsistence modes of production were likely to have class collaboration. Mode of production is defined as an economic base of society, for instance, the social and technical ways and means by which its production is carried out, on the one hand, and its property rights, on the other.