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The author uses the diaries and autobiographical writings of Lady Anne Clifford, Baroness de Clifford to explore the notion of widows and widowhood in seventeenth century Great Britain. It considers her memories of the 1613 court wedding of Lady Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), daughter of King James I, later known as Elizabeth of Bohemia, to German prince Frederick V (1596–1632), the Elector Palatine of the Rhine and later the short-lived King of Bohemia. Lady Anne was herself twice widowed and the relationship between herself and Elizabeth of Bohemia, as well as attitudes among the English nobility toward Elizabeth's status as widow, are explored.

Serious alarm about female masturbation first emerged during a transitional period for beliefs on female sexuality. This article examines the gender history of masturbation through the shifting constructions of femininity at work in early anti‐masturbation discourse. While the founding work of the anti‐masturbation campaign (Onania, 1716) portrayed female autoeroticism as a significant concern, existing scholarship pays limited attention to how anti‐masturbation sentiment interacted with early modern femininities. This article explores this conflicted relationship in the early years of the movement, with a comparative analysis of how Onania and one of its most vocal critics portrayed female masturbation. Onania, which stemmed from a traditional paradigm of negative femininity, regarded all women as innately lustful and likely to masturbate. Onania Examined, and Detected, a critical tract embracing the increasingly dominant paradigm of positive femininity, denounced these claims as an unacceptable slur on female virtue. Nevertheless, its characterisation of the female masturbator reveals the continuing influence of traditional misogyny, with negative femininity repurposed as a deviation from a naturalised virtuous norm. This close analysis of early anti‐masturbation discourse reveals the cultural process of navigating a transitional phase in the construction of gender, which addressed old anxieties by incorporating them into a new paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic affected the legal transition and foreign relations of Great Britain following Brexit or the British withdrawal from the European Union (EU). Topics discussed include the representation of Great Britain in EU institutions during the transition period, the reported economic and social impact of the pandemic on Great Britain, and the ratification of the trade and cooperation agreement between the EU and Great Britain.

The article explores legal issues concerning the creation of graffiti in public places during the implementation of lockdown protocols by the British government due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Topics discussed include the notable recognition earned by street artists such as Banksy and Rebel Bear, the way these artworks depict and express gratitude to frontline workers during the pandemic, and the classification of graffiti under the Criminal Damage Act 1971.

Governments responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have included drastic public health measures that restrict personal freedoms on a scale not seen outside of war times. Less attention has been devoted to their impact rights to an adequate standard of living, social security, housing, education, and even the right to health ('social rights'). This piece explores this less debated but nonetheless important and complex relationship between pandemics and social rights, focusing on the disproportionately negative impact that pandemics and their responses have on the poorer's health and socio-economic well-being (part I), and on what social rights have to offer, if anything, to address or at least minimise this impact (part II). It concludes that improving social rights and reducing inequalities in normal times is not only a moral and legal duty of governments and societies but also an effective pandemic preparedness measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the policing of mass gatherings in public places in Great Britain in the midst of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Topics discussed include the ban on public gatherings prior to the implementation of national lockdown protocols, the fixed penalty notice system enforced for varying levels of offences, and the social distancing maintained by participants of the protest event held in Brighton, England in June 2020.

Brexit has unveiled previously hidden aspects of United Kingdom (UK) society, law and politics. It provides a valuable opportunity to investigate the social reception of law, and in particular the mediation of the law and constitution in the press. The distinctive constitutional arrangements and histories of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England have given rise to different territorial interpretations of the UK state. These asymmetries have parallels in the UK's territorial media landscape, yet we have little understanding of how this landscape contributes to constitutional discourses. This article offers quantitative content and thematic analysis of UK-wide media coverage of major court judgments which have served as critical junctures in the Brexit process. The analysis reveals striking territorial variation in the volume and substance of coverage. Here, the media appears to reinforce divergent understandings of the constitution: while English reporting chimed with a more unitary account of the constitution, reporting elsewhere was more consistent with a vision of the UK as union-state. In the light of these findings, we argue that media analysis can make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the law and the constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconfigures our understanding of female service in early modern England by examining the roles and spaces female servants occupied not only within their employers homes but outside and within the wider community. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to categorise and analyse the spaces in which female servants were recorded in church court depositions from the dioceses of Exeter, Gloucester and Winchester between 1550 and 1650, it argues that female servants were not confined to the domestic sphere either in their work or their social interactions. And further, it shows that female servants' links to the wider community gave them power and agency – limited perhaps, but significant nonetheless ‐ in their dealings with their employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses new wage series for men, women and children in combination with an established cost of living index and standard assumptions about family size to construct a measure of family welfare in England, 1280–1850. It asks whether this family could achieve a standard of living historically defined as 'respectable'. It extracts information from primary and secondary sources to make adjustments for the participation rates of women and children, the varying number of days worked over time, the changing involvement of married women in paid work, and the evolving occupational structure. The resulting series is the first to depict the living standard of a representative working family over the very long run. Prior to the Black Death, this family existed just above subsistence; afterwards shortage of labour brought substantial albeit not unassailable gains. Tudor-era turmoil and constraints on women's work pushed the family below the 'respectable' standard. From the mid 1600s however, the gradual transformation of the economy coincided with improved welfare. Over these centuries, it was rare for men's work alone to sustain the family at a respectable level; women and children's earnings were necessary. This article calls for a re-evaluation of the chronology, causes and consequences of long-run growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the history of a number of German scholars who fled to Great Britain in the years after German leader Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Topics covered include how these scholars have adjusted to the intellectual and social conditions of the intellectual culture of Britain that they found themselves in, the personal situations of these scholars during the war, and the organisations established to help these academic refugees.

This paper examines the issue of whether the UK displays high levels of interregional inequality or only average levels of inequality. The question arises due to major differences in public perceptions. Following on from recent UK public debates, the UK evidence is examined in the context of 28 different indicators and 30 different Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Answering this question involves a careful consideration of the ways in which we use different spatial units of analysis, different measures of prosperity and different indices of inequality in order to understand interregional inequality, and the issues that arise are common to all countries. In the specific case of the UK, the result is clear. The UK is one of the most regionally unbalanced countries in the industrialized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategic group research originated in the 1970s and a number of notable studies centered on the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. Results were, however, conflicting. This paper explores the nature of strategic groups in the U.K. pharmaceutical industry. The study confirms the presence of between six and eight strategic groups across the period studied, 1998–2002. The study also demonstrates a statistically significant relationship between these strategic groups and performance using three performance measures. The paper then compares strategic groups with competitive groups and concludes that the distinction is important and may explain the contradictory findings in earlier strategic group research. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, resilience has emerged as a key priority linking disparate areas of British policy. Yet research to date has focused heavily on resilience as a dimension of international development and security agendas. This article maps the movement of resilience into British social policy. It finds that, as in other areas of policy, resilience in social policy functions to depoliticise, placing the structural determinants of gender, racial, and other inequalities beyond the reach of policymakers. Yet, in a departure from academic accounts of resilience, in social policy, resilience appears to play another role: that of regulating social deviance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humane societies emerged in considerable numbers throughout the transatlantic world in the late eighteenth century. These charities promoted innovative methods for resuscitating the apparently drowned, drawing upon advances in the medical understanding of resuscitation and scientific innovations in life-saving techniques. Humane societies constituted a transnational philanthropic movement, in that member societies corresponded with each other and drew upon the work of fellow life-saving charities. Medical gentlemen, especially physicians and surgeons, were at the forefront of this movement and contributed greatly to the foundation of these societies, as well as to the vibrant transnational discourse on resuscitation techniques. This paper will explore the proliferation of humane societies as constituting a transnational movement of voluntary organisations, and will pay particular attention to British and Irish life-saving charities in the early decades of this movement (1770-c. 1820). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we build on our earlier work on underemployment using data from the UK. We focus on the effects on well-being of worker dissatisfaction with hours of work. We make use of five main measures of well-being: happiness; life satisfaction; whether life is worthwhile; anxiety and depression. The more that actual hours differ from preferred hours the lower is a worker's well-being. This is true for those who say they want more hours (the underemployed) and those who say they want less (the over employed). We find strong evidence of a rise in depression and anxiety in the years since the onset of austerity in 2010 in the UK that is not matched by declines in happiness measures. The fear of unemployment obtained from monthly surveys from the EU for the UK has also been on the rise since 2015. We report an especially large rise in anxiety and depression among workers in general and the underemployed in particular. The underemployed don't want to be underemployed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 21 January 1716, a woman named Sarah Savage suffered a tremendous loss in the early and unexpected death of the person closest to her: her friend Jane Hunt. Hunt’s passing was so painful to Savage that she dreamt repeatedly of hearing her deceased friend’s voice, sharing conversations that were, to Savage’s sorrow, revealed as fantasy when she awoke. Savage craved Hunt’s company. She combed through Hunt’s papers and recalled moments that the two had shared. She began writing to her deceased friend, quoting Hunt from memory and then responding to the dead woman’s ideas as if the two confidants – one living and one dead – were having a conversation. And Savage referred to this practice quite consciously, explaining that it was through ‘Mrs. H’s Papers in which she being dead yet speaketh’. This article considers love and bereavement in eighteenth-century Britain. It provides a case-study of one middling-sort British woman, Sarah Henry Savage and demonstrates how, via her experiences of loss, she came to remember a deceased friend on the written page. Sarah Savage’s story provides us with a close, unparalleled view into the ways that eighteenth-century people thought and wrote about the deaths of those they loved. For while much excellent scholarly work has been done on ideologies and experiences of death and dying in the eighteenth century, we know relatively little about what happened to the survivors of loss after shrouds had been sewn, graves dug and funeral sermons were brought to a close. Sarah Savage’s texts help to reveal the texture and praxis of eighteenth-century relationships via a new paradigm: queer intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enthusiasm for creating new histories of social mobility has grown at a moment when sociologists in Britain have been engaged in a high-profile project to update the models of class they have used for more than 50 years. These endeavours share the same intellectual ambition: to show class and social mobility are multi-dimensional phenomena. However, as this article shows, these developments recall the infancy of British social mobility research, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, when the relationships between disciplines, institutions and ideas had yet to take the shape we now recognise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses visualisations of life trajectories drawn from the 1958 National Child Development Survey to show how this generation refused linear narratives of mobility in favour of jags and turning points. We argue that these visualisations demonstrate the limitations of conventional class-based interpretations of social mobility.. We show how these jags represent moments of switching between public and private lives, demonstrating the interruptions which this generation display. We argue that these visualisations are consistent with the distinctive historical conditions ofthis generation, especially its female members, We conclude that more studiesof popular identities of social mobility are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work proposes the term 'naval elites' in order to provide a new interpretation of social change in the eighteenth century from a comparative perspective. Naval elites, a social group formed by a part of the naval officer corps and midshipmen, are here defined as a historical instrument, the particular and intriguing features of which may be useful in the revision of some perspectives on social change. In particular, the authors analyse shifting power relationships through the reconsideration of naval patronage and bureaucracy, revisit the process of naval professionalization and the transformation of the concept of merit, and suggest that naval elites embodied new notions of social distinction and exclusiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tackling the many negative health effects of social isolation has been identified as a policy priority in the UK and consequently many local authorities are developing strategies to ascertain its prevalence through the development of social indices. This paper provides a novel assessment of the emerging approach of developing indices to identify social isolation. It provides an overview of a selection of indices being developed by local authorities across England; considers the validity of such quantitative indices; and explores the extent to which more in-depth qualitative data collected at a neighbourhood level is additionally required. It draws on evidence of a social isolation index for older people created by a northern English local authority, assessing its validity through a qualitative sense check; an innovative approach which has not been attempted elsewhere. The paper contributes important knowledge to the growing literature in this field by further developing understanding around the most effective ways of identifying, measuring, and understanding social isolation at a local level. Our findings indicate that an index, alone, is insufficient to fully capture the multifaceted nature of social isolation as relevant indicators, unique to local spaces, which cannot easily be measured quantitatively, are often excluded. The paper offers a significant and original contribution to the debate for both academics who wish to gain a greater understanding of the role indices can play in identifying those most at risk of social isolation, as well as for policy makers and practitioners who are currently grappling with this challenging concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of a legal foundation form, and with differing national legal contexts, researching U.K. foundations presents major conceptual and practical challenges. This article maps and critically discusses the U.K. foundation landscape; it highlights the blurred boundaries of foundations as an organizational form and outlines the different expressions of charity laws that foundations face across the U.K.’s constituent parts. Examining data on foundation characteristics, the article shows that although data on foundations indicate that the organizational characteristics and activities of U.K. foundations resemble those in Germany and the United States, there remains an urgent need for more, and for more robust, data and insights on U.K. foundations to allow for meaningful comparison. Pointing to increased socio-economic challenges and changes in political perspectives on foundations, the article explores the shifting attitudes towards, and expectations and roles of, U.K. foundations and reflects on the issues ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the experiences of newly arrived and settled Eritrean immigrants currently in the UK. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with ten newly arrived (seven years) participants, recruited through an Eritrean café and using snowball sampling. Thematic analysis identified three themes: (1) Wanting freedom, expectations of the UK and the desire for safety, (2) Integration and becoming part of the British community, (3) Personal development, which involved growth and aspirations. Transcending these themes was the notion of balance, and the co-existence of past and present. It is argued that Eritreans in the UK wish to become part of British community whilst at the same time remembering and celebrating their Eritrean culture. This is explained within the context of a dual identity and it is argued that rather than being a hindrance, a dual rather than single identity facilitates the process of integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jack London (1876–1916) was America's leading novelist and short story writer at the dawn of the twentieth century. He was also a brilliant essayist and feature-writing journalist and a crusading socialist, an impassioned and articulate spokesman for the underclasses. In his essays and in much of his fiction, London was determined to demonstrate the squalid living conditions of the working class. His most poignant work is his 1903 book The People of the Abyss, which brilliantly portrays the economic and social misery of the poor living in London's great East End slum. London's thesis is not a condemnation of the wealthy capitalist class per se; instead, he points out the irony that tens of thousands of British subjects were still living and working in conditions of abject degradation in what was supposedly the wealthiest city in the world. London maintained this theme when he traveled to Japan and Korea during the winter and spring of 1904 to report on the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst newspaper chain. His twenty-two feature articles and accompanying photographs portray the squalor and degradation of the Korean people. As was the case the previous year in Great Britain, London's goal was not to condemn Korea's ruling class but to showcase the misery of Korea's mammoth lower classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a fresh perspective on the evolution of energy consumption in Britain from the 1920s to the 1970s. The twentieth century witnessed a series of energy transitions – from wood and coal to gas, electricity, and oil – that have transformed modern lives. The literature has primarily followed supply, networks, and technologies. We need to know more about people and their homes in this story, because it was here where energy was used. The article investigates the forces that shaped domestic demand by focusing on working-class households in public housing. It examines the interaction between political frameworks, public housing infrastructures, and the changing norms and practices of people's daily lives. It connects social and political history with material culture and compares the different paths taken in London, Stocksbridge, and Stevenage in the provision of gas, electricity, and heating. Evidence collected by local authorities is used to analyse the uptake, use, and resistance to changes in domestic infrastructures, such as gas-lit coke ovens and central heating. The case-studies make a more general pitch for a new historical study of energy that places people's lifestyles, their ideas of comfort, and political attempts to change them more squarely at the centre of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article directs close attention to women's riot and arson campaigns in early twentieth-century Britain. While the Second International insisted that women's rights must wait until after a larger revolution of the proletariat, certain strains of the women's movement refused this injunction to wait, instead turning to the transformation of public space and social relations in the present tense. As a way to locate precursors for the occupation of highways and airports so visible as a form of contestation in our current moment, this article formulates new reading practices to reconsider early twentieth-century women's riot campaigns through the rubric of tactics, rather than demands. These reading practices emerge as a way to wend our way through a massive but little-known archive of arrest records, police blotters, meeting schedules, tables of contents, and suffrage life writing. Across this archive, the plot of the women's revolution does not develop towards some future gain, like the vote or marriage. For N. K. Chernyshevsky, Anney Kenney, Rebecca West, and others, recursive, often repetitive plots create a "long middle" of ongoing public protest and police repression. This reconsideration of feminism's first wave offers a theory of collective direct action more widely, through a focus on the remaking of public space and social relations in the process of struggle, rather than the achievement of discrete demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abstract for your paper is included below. This will appear online only. After a briefly prominent career in Chartism, Robert Kemp Philp (1819–82) became one of the most widely published authors in Victorian Britain, promoting self-help and self-improvement through education. From a background in magazine journalism, he moved to producing serialised reference works which, when completed, were re-published in book form. This hybridisation of periodical journalism and the non-fiction book created a genre distinct from popular novels, non-fiction and magazines, yet one which was indebted to all three. The best known, Enquire Within Upon Everything (1856) sold almost 1.3 million copies by 1900 and remained in print until 1973. However, Philp has not enjoyed an enduring reputation: almost all his work was published anonymously, while the consumption of popular non-fiction has been largely overlooked in histories of the printed word. John Denman (fl. 1863–9) inhabited the shadier world of horse racing, where he was a high-stakes gambler and promoted off-course betting after it was criminalised. The article establishes a profound connection between the apostle of self-improvement and the mercurial man of the Turf: Denman was Philp's alias. Their careers are reconstructed and analysed. Social ambition and a desire for fame impelled Philp to be a profligate author; but both he and his alter ego claimed to systematise hitherto opaque, confusing and inaccessible fields of knowledge. Philp took significant risks legally, financially and with his family's reputation and well-being. This contrasts sharply with the picture of domestic contentment Philp assiduously promoted as a writer, but ideals of self-improvement underpinned them both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article addresses UK society's relationship with meat and specifically explores the extent to which a process of ‘de‐meatification’ is underway in this context and one of the mechanisms involved. It does so through analysis of reporting of the Meat Free Mondays (MFM) campaign in the national and regional British print news media. MFM offers a convenient yet powerful vehicle for trying to understand shifting meanings of meat not least because it directly challenges, and generates debate about the dominant – meat based – diet. The article concludes by arguing that a shift is taking place in the status of meat within UK society with the print news media acting as a mechanism that is working in support of de‐meatification. However, these conclusions are qualified in a number of important ways, including the anthropocentrism of the (de)meatification debate, its geographical variability and its weakly politicised character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an interdisciplinary research methodology across three archaeological and historical case studies, this article explores “family archives.” Four themes illustrate how objects held in family archives, curation practices, and intergenerational narratives reinforce a family’s sense of itself: people–object interactions, gender, socialization and identity formation, and the “life course.” These themes provide a framework for professional archivists to assist communities and individuals working with their own family archives. We argue that the family archive, broadly defined, encourages a more egalitarian approach to history. We suggest a multiperiod analysis draws attention to historical forms of knowledge and meaning-making practices over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long Victorian period has often been interpreted through the lens of 'separate spheres', a notion that compartmentalizes markers such as gender and class into discrete areas. However, the margins surrounding class and gender were full of fissures and scholars have argued for more nuanced research involving specific case studies at a micro-level to uncover the breadth and boundaries of female experience. Adopting this micro-approach by using archives and biographical methods to investigate the communities of women involved in swimming-related careers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries yields new insights into the complexities of 'separate spheres' ideologies. Serious swimming became acceptable for women of all social classes after facilities expanded following the Baths and Washhouses Acts of 1846 and 1878, and a moral imperative, which required women to be attended to only by women, meant that gender-specific career routes gradually emerged. The class origins and familial connections of female natationists, swimming teachers, and baths employees are explored, to place them within the contemporary social context and to draw some tentative conclusions about the influence of patriarchy on female occupational choices. Reflections on the potential for combining different biographical methods to produce a 'blended approach' are then offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article Lionel Blue recalls his introduction to the UK Reform Jewish movement, at the time the 'Association of Synagogues of Great Britain'. His work with the youth groups coincided with a pioneering engagement with a post-war German generation, something considered problematical at the time, and similarly the beginning of a Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogue. The movement at the time increased its support for Israel and joined with the American Reform Jewish movement in the World Union for Progressive Judaism both of which had their influence on its development. But missing were important spiritual questions: Did God still exist for us and how; Where did we locate Him in the horror of the Holocaust? Despite criticisms of some developments of the movement, what remains important is the friendliness, care and concern of the members, its humanity and preferring people as they are to ideological templates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances geographical perspectives on household sustainability by extending the range of insights from consumption scholarship that are brought to bear on the issue. Research that links consumption to the dynamics of variously sustainable practices currently dominate, resulting in a particular and partial reading of material culture. I suggest that geographical approaches to the social life of things may yield new insights into materiality and household sustainability. Specifically, I argue that "following the thing"-which is typically focused on commodity chains -could usefully be extended into people's homes. This is not introduced as a way to acknowledge the connections between points in a network, rather, it is positioned as a set of theoretical and methodological resources that can be utilised to explore the movement and placing of things as they move through a critical juncture - in this case the household. To illustrate, I present material drawn from two empirical studies of households in the UK. The first is an ethnographically-informed study of how food becomes waste; the second is a quantitative survey of laundry habits. Attention is paid to the ways in which the ongoing categorisation and valuation of things shape their trajectories and move them in directions that give rise to (adverse) environmental impacts. To conclude I sketch out an agenda for future studies, consider how a focus on households can yield more comprehensive biographies of things and address the implications of this analysis both for consumption scholarship and for engagement with sustainability research and policy beyond human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Madness is a common theme in avant-garde and counter-cultural writing. Many groups have even attempted to deploy it as a revolutionary tactic. This chapter examines one such attempt made by the British anti-psychiatrists in the 1960s. It explores how the anti-psychiatrists first came to see the revolutionary potential of madness and how they attempted to use it as a tactic to challenge or even overthrow bourgeois society. Building on these explorations this chapter will argue that while the deployment of madness provides an interesting critical approach to society, it inevitably fails as a sustainable revolutionary position. Madness is a historically unstable subject, its meaning changes according to prevailing ideologies, power structures, and discourses. This is its attraction for counter-cultural writers, but it is also its fatal weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents author's views on use of electronic cigarettes (EC) among population of Great Britain and approach of international tobacco control community. Topics discussed include evidences of ECs published by the Public Health England (PHE); Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); and ethical dimensions.

Exceptions to discrimination law reveal both tensions and telling compromises regarding the boundaries of the equality principle. Drawing on case studies of exceptions to age discrimination law in Australia and the UK, this article considers the normative position on age equality law that emerges from these legal boundaries. It argues that broad exceptions to age discrimination law reflect a deprioritising of age equality, and a preference for the instrumental or economic aims underlying age equality law. The restrictive boundaries of age discrimination law risk undermining the effectiveness of equality law in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political discourse surrounding Sir Robert Walpole's Norfolk Congresses—extended social gatherings held at his Norfolk residence of Houghton throughout his political ascendancy (1721–1742). By analyzing both pro-government and oppositional accounts, the article seeks to complicate traditional stereotypes of Court Whig corruption, revealing Walpole as a problematically hospitable figure and demonstrating how conflicting traditions of Whig sociability struggled for dominance in textual representations of the events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents updates to the journal related to sociology in Great Britain. It states the achievement in receiving the highest impact factors and maintaining top quartile position in sociology journal rankings. It mentions the consistent high numbers of articles submitted and the new members invited from wider international sociological community.

Occupations traditionally played a central role in stratification accounts. In the wake of the Great Recession, debates regarding the extent and nature of occupational stratification have been reinvigorated. An exploration of occupational wage stratification patterns defined by both detailed occupational unit groups and the broader occupational class categories of the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) reveals the proportion of wage inequality between occupations and occupational classes has remained broadly stable 1997 to 2015. No compelling evidence is found for growing wage inequalities between detailed occupations within NS-SEC categories. This article underlines the continued utility of occupations and particularly the NS-SEC grouping of them in describing the structure of stratification in contemporary Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw on 120 years of biographical data (N = 120,764) contained within Who’s Who—a unique catalogue of the British elite—to explore the changing relationship between elite schools and elite recruitment. We find that the propulsive power of Britain’s public schools has diminished significantly over time. This is driven in part by the wane of military and religious elites, and the rise of women in the labor force. However, the most dramatic declines followed key educational reforms that increased access to the credentials needed to access elite trajectories, while also standardizing and differentiating them. Notwithstanding these changes, public schools remain extraordinarily powerful channels of elite formation. Even today, the alumni of the nine Clarendon schools are 94 times more likely to reach the British elite than are those who attended any other school. Alumni of elite schools also retain a striking capacity to enter the elite even without passing through other prestigious institutions, such as Oxford, Cambridge, or private members clubs. Our analysis not only points to the dogged persistence of the “old boy,” but also underlines the theoretical importance of reviving and refining the study of elite recruitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the government’s programme of welfare reform Personal Independence Payment (PIP) is replacing Disability Living Allowance (DLA) for people of working age. This will have a significant impact on a wide range of disability benefit claimants. This article examines the government’s rationale for replacing DLA with PIP, the key technical differences between the two benefits and the role that disability benefits can play in reducing poverty. The introduction of PIP has led to considerable debate in the social welfare law sector about the scope, purpose and assessment of social security benefits for the disabled. These issues are explored with reference to the first Gray Review of PIP (2014) and the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Inquiry (2016) into the impact of the UK Government’s policies on disabled people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The examination of foundations in the United Kingdom makes clear that centuries-old traditions continue to persist, but also that UK foundations do not participate as much in societal debate as in other countries. They regard themselves as parts of a large sector in which they chiefly take supporting roles. As a result, UK foundations – despite their partially substantive size - are less subject of debate and criticism than elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]