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The history of the industrial capitalism in Great Britain is examined against the context of Joseph Schumpeter's theory of long wave economic development. This theory postulates that economic developments focus on widely separated turning points.

This study of Raleigh Industries, one of the leading bicycle manufacturers in the world in the immediate post-war years, argues that its business strategy was in part shaped by a managerial commitment to a dominant company culture which was deeply embedded in Raleigh's history. Using the notion of culture as metaphor, the paper examines the way that core values in the company acted as a guide in the setting of organisational goals and, intended or unintended, impinged upon company performance. In many respects, the culture guided the company well, but our study shows a number of ambiguities, tensions and contradictions between culture and strategy which had negative effects on company behaviour. Thus, Raleigh's attachment to personal capitalism constrained its capacity expansion programme, and, while it adopted what appeared to be a progressive education and training policy, it in effect trained workers for the past rather than the future., In the immediate post-war years Raleigh Industries was one of the leading bicycle manufacturers in the world, and from the late 1940s it embarked upon an ambitious business strategy which [...]

A double concentric premixed swirl burner is used to examine the structure of two different methane-air premixed flames. Direct flame photography together with local temperature data provides an opportunity to investigate the effects of swirl number distribution in each annulus on the global and local flame structure, flame stability and local distribution of thermal signatures. An R-type thermocouple compensated for high-frequency response is used to measure the local distribution of thermal signatures in two different flames, each of which represents a different combination of swirl number in the swirl burner. In order to improve the accuracy of the temperature data at high-frequency conditions, information on the thermocouple time constant are also obtained under prevailing conditions of local temperature and velocity' by compensating the heat loss from the thermocouple sensor bead. These results assist in quantifying the degree of thermal nonuniformities in the flame signatures as affected by the distribution of swirl and to develop strategies for achieving uniform distribution of temperatures in flames.