scholarly journals Global and Local: Retail Transformation and the Department Store in Britain and Japan, 1900–1940

2018 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rika Fujioka ◽  
Jon Stobart

Department stores are often seen as transformative of both retail and wider social practices. This article offers a comparative analysis of department stores in early twentieth-century Britain and Japan to assess the extent to which there were universal qualities defining the operation, practices, and experience of department stores and to explore the ways in which they might be seen as transforming retailing in the two countries. Despite similarities in their origin, organization, and service to customers, we highlight the greater diversity of British department stores and their incremental development. Japanese stores were a far more powerful force for change because they formed part of a concerted and conscious program of modernization.

Author(s):  
Traci Parker

In this book, Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department store as a key site for the inception of a modern black middle class, and demonstrates the ways that both work and consumption were battlegrounds for civil rights.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luiz Carlos Barreira

Este artigo focaliza as ações de um grupo de intelectuais portugueses no início do século XX que se apresentava como anarcossindicalista. Autodenominado Grupo Lumen, suas ações visavam à formação do ser social. Dentre tais ações, o texto destaca a criação de uma revista, intitulada Lumen, por meio da qual o Grupo publicou suas teses sobre o educar e o instruir, tendo como referência as experiências da Escola Oficina Nº 1 de Lisboa e da Escola Moderna de Ferrer y Guardia, em Barcelona. A perspectiva de análise adotada pelo autor situa a imprensa no terreno da história social, no âmbito do qual ela é concebida como um conjunto de práticas constitutivas do social. Por meio da imprensa, o Grupo Lumen propôs um programa de instrução laica, científica e livre como condição necessária à criação de uma sociedade ácrata.Palavras-chave: Anarcossindicalismo, Formação libertária, Revista Lumen. Portugal. AbstractThis article focuses on the actions of a group of Portuguese intellectuals in the early twentieth century who presented itself as anarcho-syndicalist. Calling itself Lumen Group, its actions aimed at the formation of the human being. Among such actions, the text highlights the creation of a magazine, entitled Lumen, through which the Group published its thesis on educating and instructing, choosing as a reference the experiences of the Escola Oficina Nº 1 of Lisbon and the Escola Moderna, directed by Ferrer y Guardia, in Barcelona. The analytical perspective adopted by the author puts the press in the field of social history, under which it is conceived as a set of constitutive social practices. Through the press, the Lumen Group proposed a secular, scientific and free education program as a necessary component to create a self-governed (stateless) society.Keywords: Anarcho-syndicalism, Libertarian formation, Lumen Magazine. Portugal.ResumenEste artículo se centra en las acciones de un grupo de intelectuales portugueses a principios del siglo XX que se presentaba como anarcosindicalista. Autodenominado Grupo Lumen, sus acciones apunta a la formación del ser social. Entre estas acciones, el texto destaca la creación de una revista, titulada Lumen, por medio de la cual el Grupo publicó sus tesis sobre el educar y el instruir, eligiendo como referencia las experiencias de la Escuela Oficina Nº 1 de Lisboa y de la Escuela Moderna de Ferrer y Guardia, en Barcelona. La perspectiva de análisis adoptada por el autor sitúa a la prensa en el terreno de la historia social, en el marco del cual ella es concebida como un conjunto de prácticas constitutivas de lo social. A través de la prensa, el Grupo Lumen propuso un programa de instrucción laica, científica y libre como condición necesaria a la construcción de una sociedad ácrata.Palabras clave: Anarcosindicalismo; Formación libertaria, Revista Lumen. Portugal.


2019 ◽  
pp. 117-145
Author(s):  
Abigail McGowan

This essay explores the emergence of new forms of retail in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bombay, an era which saw the development of new shopping districts, department stores, showrooms, and retail culture in the city. In a city known for its market density and commercial vibrancy, elite retailers tried to reach out to consumers in new ways, enticing them in from the street with window displays, standardized product lines, and novel assemblages of goods, while also contacting consumers directly through catalogues, flyers, designs sent on request, and home deliveries. Focusing on major department stores like the Army and Navy Stores and Whiteaway Laidlaw, major nationalist concerns like the Bombay Swadeshi Store and Godrej and Boyce, as well as smaller showrooms featuring fewer ranges of goods, the essay argues that novel retail strategies efforts helped to shape not just how things were sold but what was desired in Bombay—noting in particular how efforts to sell domestic furnishings promoted new ideas about what the home should be.


1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Kane ◽  
Michael Mann

The pre-world war I period decisively structured modern class relations in Europe and the United States. Farmers, the largest population group, greatly influenced the development of capitalism and states. Scholars have demonstrated farmers’ significance in particular areas (e.g., Blackbourn in Germany and Esping-Andersen in Scandinavia), but there has been little comparative analysis. Farmer politics, and thus modern class relations in general, have been inadequately theorized. Most existing work on agrarian classes has also been economistic, neglecting politics. We fill the gaps by analyzing agrarian politics in the United States, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.


Author(s):  
Valerii Sergeevich Agapov ◽  
Liubov Georgievna Ovda

The article presents the generalized results of a comparative empirical study of the manifestation of desires and ideals in the structure of the value sphere of the personality of younger school choldren in secular (n=218) and orthodox (n=212) schools. The orientation of meeting the needs of younger schoolchildren and its classification is shown. The analysis of the identified ideals and role models of modern younger schoolchildren is compared with the results of a study of the ideals of children in Germany and America conducted in the early twentieth century. General and specific results of comparative analysis of empirical data are presented. The author proves the need to develop and implement in the practice of spiritual and moral education programs of psychological and pedagogical support for the development of the structure of the value sphere of the personality of younger schoolchildren in cooperation with the school, family and Church. At the same time, the methodological significance of the anthropological principle of education with its religious-philosophical, psychological and pedagogical aspects is emphasized.


2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 137-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.J. Pearce

Abstract The present study bears out an early twentieth-century suggestion that the twelfth-century Andalusi physician, translator, merchant and lexicographer Judah ibn Tibbon quoted directly from the Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn, the theological magnum opus of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, in the ethical will he wrote to his son Samuel. In addition to demonstrating, through a consideration of lexicographical evidence, that a sentence from that summa was indeed quoted, in Hebrew translation, in the text of the ethical will, the present article will set that quotation into its context as a part of the Tibbonid drive toward literal, word-for-word translation from Arabic into Hebrew. It will further consider the significance of the authorial decision by Judah ibn Tibbon, who fled Granada for Provence following the advent of Almohad rule in Iberia to include, alongside Andalusi sources, direct quotation from al-Ghazālī, a text that formed part of the intellectual underpinning of the Almohad movement.


Urban History ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Catherine Lawrence

Over the past decade a number of scholars have examined the rise of the mass production and distribution of goods, and the concurrent emergence of a nineteenth- and twentieth-century consumer society or ‘culture of consumption’. This body of work has featured the department store prominently in several roles: as a venue for the distribution of consumer goods; as a material fantasyland in which women were encouraged to play out their dreams of conspicuous consumption; and as a place of white-collar employment for working-class clerks. Whatever their focus, these accounts generally view all department stores as homogeneous middle-class institutions, located in a similarly consistent ‘downtown’ in any (and all) large American and European cities. There are serious flaws in such a portrayal. Very real distinctions between department stores in a given city and the social implications of these differences in terms of social status and class are not addressed. Further, the contribution of the built environment and urban topography to the shaping of these status and class distinctions and, ultimately, women's shopping experience, is likewise overlooked. This article examines a set of surveys and marketing reports prepared in 1932 for the Higbee Company of Cleveland, Ohio, in order to situate more precisely one department store within its urban context. These sources document the relationship of the Higbee Company to the city's other department stores and in so doing reveal some of the ways in which stratification between and among classes was interpreted in terms of geographical and social space. Examination of the hierarchy of stores that existed in what was at the time the nation's sixth largest city provides a corrective to the image of the department store as a homogeneous democratic phenomenon, and thus provides an invaluable basis for a reinterpretation of the department store as an urban institution in early twentieth- century America.


2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 463-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Pearson

AbstractThis article analyzes the introduction of police dogs in early twentieth-century Paris, which formed part of the transnational extension of police powers and their specialization. Within a context of widespread fears of crime and new and contested understandings of animal psychology, police officers, journalists, and canophiles promoted the dogs as inexpensive yet effective agents who could help the police contain the threat posed by criminals. This article responds to a growing number of studies on nonhuman agency by examining how humans in a particular place and time conceptualized and harnessed animal abilities. I argue that while nonhuman agency is an illuminating and important analytical tool, there is a danger that it might become monolithic and static. With these concerns in mind, I show how examining historical actors' conceptualizations of animal abilities takes us closer to the historical stakes and complexities of mobilizing purposeful and capable animals, and provides a better understanding of the constraints within which animals act. Attitudes toward police dogs were entwined with broader discussions of human and animal intelligence. Concerns that dogs' abilities and intelligence were contingent and potentially reversible qualities resembled contemporary biomedical fears that base instincts, desires, and impulses could overwhelm human intelligence and morality, resulting in individual and collective degeneration. To many, it seemed that police dogs' intelligence had not tamed their aggressive instincts, and these worries partly explain the demise of the first wave of police dogs in Paris after World War I.


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