Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2022.2051485
Laura Cofield, Ben Mechen, M. Worley
ABSTRACT The 1970s saw representations of sex become ever more visible in Britain. This special issue is designed to stimulate further research into how shifts in cultural politics, media and society facilitated and responded to cultural depictions of sex and sexuality. To this end, our short introduction surveys some of the literature and offers a glimpse of what might be stacked along History's top shelf.
{"title":"History from the top shelf: the cultural politics of sex in post-war Britain","authors":"Laura Cofield, Ben Mechen, M. Worley","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2022.2051485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2022.2051485","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The 1970s saw representations of sex become ever more visible in Britain. This special issue is designed to stimulate further research into how shifts in cultural politics, media and society facilitated and responded to cultural depictions of sex and sexuality. To this end, our short introduction surveys some of the literature and offers a glimpse of what might be stacked along History's top shelf.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"36 1","pages":"165 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48031954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2022.2051488
Laura Cofield
ABSTRACT This article considers how pornographers negotiated the ‘permissive moment’ in Britain in the 1970s. It examines, as a case study, the publication Sexpertise: Shaved Pubes Special to discuss how editors grappled with changing definitions of obscenity and sexual liberation through the content of their magazines. Sexpertise’s focus on the fetishisation of female pubic hair removal was a way for the magazine’s editors to locate themselves at the forefront of sexual radicalism and innovation at a time when pubic hair was seen as becoming increasingly respectable. I argue that the magazine’s embrace of pubic hairlessness was not only a way for it to appear cutting edge but also reveals anxieties about the changing sexual landscape in Britain and the effects of this on the pornography market. Attempts to sustain a sense of relevance manifested in Sexpertise’s engagement with the historical ‘roots’ of hairlessness and the erotic. This article concludes by examining more broadly the function of nostalgia within pornographic texts and considers how historians might utilise pornographic discourses as texts and archives which recycle ideas about the sexual past in order to make sense of the present.
{"title":"‘The way we were razed’: pubic hair and permissiveness in 1970s Britain","authors":"Laura Cofield","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2022.2051488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2022.2051488","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article considers how pornographers negotiated the ‘permissive moment’ in Britain in the 1970s. It examines, as a case study, the publication Sexpertise: Shaved Pubes Special to discuss how editors grappled with changing definitions of obscenity and sexual liberation through the content of their magazines. Sexpertise’s focus on the fetishisation of female pubic hair removal was a way for the magazine’s editors to locate themselves at the forefront of sexual radicalism and innovation at a time when pubic hair was seen as becoming increasingly respectable. I argue that the magazine’s embrace of pubic hairlessness was not only a way for it to appear cutting edge but also reveals anxieties about the changing sexual landscape in Britain and the effects of this on the pornography market. Attempts to sustain a sense of relevance manifested in Sexpertise’s engagement with the historical ‘roots’ of hairlessness and the erotic. This article concludes by examining more broadly the function of nostalgia within pornographic texts and considers how historians might utilise pornographic discourses as texts and archives which recycle ideas about the sexual past in order to make sense of the present.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"36 1","pages":"207 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48247081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2022.2051486
Ben Mechen
ABSTRACT This article considers the shift in 1970s Britain towards a pornography based not only on popular consumption but popular participation too. Focusing on the ‘Readers’ Wives’ genre of magazine features, it suggests that the making of soft-core pornography offered readers the possibility, through home photography, to document a ‘liberated’ sexual domesticity with growing cultural currency. This process involved the eroticisation of a broader turn to ordinariness in British culture, as well as the public transgression of the zone of sexual privacy carved out by the Wolfenden Report and the liberal sexual settlement of the 1950s and 1960s. The article therefore tracks the emergence in the late twentieth century of a new model of sexual selfhood that could be sparked into being through new ways of looking and being looked at. Especially for women, ‘Readers’ Wives’ linked sexual objectification and subjectification in a new and profound way. Overall, the development of a pornography of participation and a new erotics of ordinariness are framed in the article as constitutive of the sexual visuality of the ‘Sexual Revolution’.
{"title":"“Instamatic living rooms of sin”: pornography, participation and the erotics of ordinariness in the 1970s","authors":"Ben Mechen","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2022.2051486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2022.2051486","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article considers the shift in 1970s Britain towards a pornography based not only on popular consumption but popular participation too. Focusing on the ‘Readers’ Wives’ genre of magazine features, it suggests that the making of soft-core pornography offered readers the possibility, through home photography, to document a ‘liberated’ sexual domesticity with growing cultural currency. This process involved the eroticisation of a broader turn to ordinariness in British culture, as well as the public transgression of the zone of sexual privacy carved out by the Wolfenden Report and the liberal sexual settlement of the 1950s and 1960s. The article therefore tracks the emergence in the late twentieth century of a new model of sexual selfhood that could be sparked into being through new ways of looking and being looked at. Especially for women, ‘Readers’ Wives’ linked sexual objectification and subjectification in a new and profound way. Overall, the development of a pornography of participation and a new erotics of ordinariness are framed in the article as constitutive of the sexual visuality of the ‘Sexual Revolution’.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"36 1","pages":"174 - 206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44753492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-20DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2022.2045199
S. Snow, Angela Whitecross
ABSTRACT Only since the 2010s have historians become interested in dimensions of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) histories beyond institutional, policy, and political narratives and the seventieth anniversary of the Service in 2018 gave additional impetus to work in this area. This paper argues for the need for a new interpretative framework for NHS histories that better reflects its multiple identities and social meanings. Drawing on a UK-wide programme of work it explores the processes of creating digital archive of NHS history using concepts and methodologies that foreground the institution’s social and dynamic nature and are underpinned by a commitment to inclusivity of perspectives and actors. It considers the challenges of working across academic, health, and heritage sectors and the need for historians to adapt to sharing power and agency when working alongside volunteers and interviewees. It concludes that the history produced through these ways of working is rich and insightful and has the potential to reshape historical practice and scholarship around NHS histories and beyond.
{"title":"Making history together: the UK’s National Health Service and the story of our lives since 1948","authors":"S. Snow, Angela Whitecross","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2022.2045199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2022.2045199","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Only since the 2010s have historians become interested in dimensions of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) histories beyond institutional, policy, and political narratives and the seventieth anniversary of the Service in 2018 gave additional impetus to work in this area. This paper argues for the need for a new interpretative framework for NHS histories that better reflects its multiple identities and social meanings. Drawing on a UK-wide programme of work it explores the processes of creating digital archive of NHS history using concepts and methodologies that foreground the institution’s social and dynamic nature and are underpinned by a commitment to inclusivity of perspectives and actors. It considers the challenges of working across academic, health, and heritage sectors and the need for historians to adapt to sharing power and agency when working alongside volunteers and interviewees. It concludes that the history produced through these ways of working is rich and insightful and has the potential to reshape historical practice and scholarship around NHS histories and beyond.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"36 1","pages":"403 - 429"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44126909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-23DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2022.2033618
Gillian Murray
ABSTRACT Building on scholarship that has sought to trace how moral economies interact and change over time, and their value for understanding Scotland’s experience of deindustrialisation in particular, this article investigates the formative experiences of Scotland’s community business pioneers and how they shaped a moral economy response to deindustrialisation and Thatcherism. The working-class moral economy terms of ‘economic security’ and ‘control of resources’ remained central to this episode of moral economy action. However, a ‘new’ crowd, drawing on the values of co-operation brought community and workplace activist traditions together to protect expectations of justice and fairness. Oral histories recorded with community business pioneers, provide insight into how the skills and built environment of the industrial past were used by the community business movement as community assets to build new futures. Building an ‘ownership consciousness’ around local assets was crucial to community repair, not only materially, but also in terms of their narrative representations of these areas. Just as the transference of the working-class moral economy had political consequences, the history of Scotland’s community business pioneers reveals how the moral economy was finding expression in civil society and driving the shape of Scotland’s social economy in the process.
{"title":"Working through industrial absence: Scotland’s community business movement and the moral economies of deindustrialisation in the 1980s and 1990s","authors":"Gillian Murray","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2022.2033618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2022.2033618","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Building on scholarship that has sought to trace how moral economies interact and change over time, and their value for understanding Scotland’s experience of deindustrialisation in particular, this article investigates the formative experiences of Scotland’s community business pioneers and how they shaped a moral economy response to deindustrialisation and Thatcherism. The working-class moral economy terms of ‘economic security’ and ‘control of resources’ remained central to this episode of moral economy action. However, a ‘new’ crowd, drawing on the values of co-operation brought community and workplace activist traditions together to protect expectations of justice and fairness. Oral histories recorded with community business pioneers, provide insight into how the skills and built environment of the industrial past were used by the community business movement as community assets to build new futures. Building an ‘ownership consciousness’ around local assets was crucial to community repair, not only materially, but also in terms of their narrative representations of these areas. Just as the transference of the working-class moral economy had political consequences, the history of Scotland’s community business pioneers reveals how the moral economy was finding expression in civil society and driving the shape of Scotland’s social economy in the process.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"36 1","pages":"380 - 402"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46539237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-07DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2022.2035725
E. Turner-Kilburn
range of researchers, and reflected in popular culture. Those looking for an exploration of personal accounts of midlife crisis might wonder at the ‘intimate’ in the title as this work focuses more on the development of ideas and the work of those elaborating them through research than on an examination of the experience of midlife crisis through personal testimony. Insight into women’s transitional crises, the lives of working-class men and women or minority groups is mostly absent, as they were ignored or marginalised by the many researchers, marriage guidance counsellors, politicians and academics who developed and deployed the concept and whose work features throughout the book. The experience of midlife crisis was only available to those with the luxury of time and the resources to indulge in the realisations of unfulfilled dreams and ambitions in middle age. Despite the inclusion of female researchers, authors and cultural figures, the story of midlife crisis is effectively a cis, white, male, middle-class one. Nevertheless, readers will find in this book a rich and clearly articulated examination of an idea that has persisted across more than a century but took root in the circumstances, changes and challenges of post-war Western society. It is an idea that continues to thrive and, with the current popular and political focus on menopause, will perhaps find a new more inclusive focus and reframing that will ensure its continued relevance in the coming decades.
{"title":"Screening queer memory: LGBTQ pasts in contemporary film and television","authors":"E. Turner-Kilburn","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2022.2035725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2022.2035725","url":null,"abstract":"range of researchers, and reflected in popular culture. Those looking for an exploration of personal accounts of midlife crisis might wonder at the ‘intimate’ in the title as this work focuses more on the development of ideas and the work of those elaborating them through research than on an examination of the experience of midlife crisis through personal testimony. Insight into women’s transitional crises, the lives of working-class men and women or minority groups is mostly absent, as they were ignored or marginalised by the many researchers, marriage guidance counsellors, politicians and academics who developed and deployed the concept and whose work features throughout the book. The experience of midlife crisis was only available to those with the luxury of time and the resources to indulge in the realisations of unfulfilled dreams and ambitions in middle age. Despite the inclusion of female researchers, authors and cultural figures, the story of midlife crisis is effectively a cis, white, male, middle-class one. Nevertheless, readers will find in this book a rich and clearly articulated examination of an idea that has persisted across more than a century but took root in the circumstances, changes and challenges of post-war Western society. It is an idea that continues to thrive and, with the current popular and political focus on menopause, will perhaps find a new more inclusive focus and reframing that will ensure its continued relevance in the coming decades.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"37 1","pages":"158 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47006453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-31DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2021.1968838
Amy Gower
formerly been neglected in historiography that focused on the more numerous migrants to North America in the post-Famine period. This book will be of interest to all scholars of oral history methodologies, memory studies and the Irish in Britain, and given the depth of theoretical work, is more appropriate for the academic, rather than the general reader. Hazley has analysed the interview material and integrated it thematically whilst preserving the words of his respondents through lengthy quotes throughout the book. He notes the pauses, tonal shifts, hesitancy and exuberance of his interviewees, analysis that is missing in other books that have attempted to capture oral histories of this cohort. As such, it extends earlier work in this vein and guides the reader to a deeper analysis of meaning in the words of the respondents. This appears to be sensitively done, and while we do not know what the interviewees themselves would make of such linguistic analysis, it is a helpful guide to the reader and makes real the interview process, as well as providing testimony that others can use and analyse in comparative studies. Furthermore, the Appendix, which details the biographical profile of the sample interviews and the wider cohort, makes this an ideal book for interested students, particularly those at undergraduate level.
{"title":"Cultural history of school uniform","authors":"Amy Gower","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2021.1968838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2021.1968838","url":null,"abstract":"formerly been neglected in historiography that focused on the more numerous migrants to North America in the post-Famine period. This book will be of interest to all scholars of oral history methodologies, memory studies and the Irish in Britain, and given the depth of theoretical work, is more appropriate for the academic, rather than the general reader. Hazley has analysed the interview material and integrated it thematically whilst preserving the words of his respondents through lengthy quotes throughout the book. He notes the pauses, tonal shifts, hesitancy and exuberance of his interviewees, analysis that is missing in other books that have attempted to capture oral histories of this cohort. As such, it extends earlier work in this vein and guides the reader to a deeper analysis of meaning in the words of the respondents. This appears to be sensitively done, and while we do not know what the interviewees themselves would make of such linguistic analysis, it is a helpful guide to the reader and makes real the interview process, as well as providing testimony that others can use and analyse in comparative studies. Furthermore, the Appendix, which details the biographical profile of the sample interviews and the wider cohort, makes this an ideal book for interested students, particularly those at undergraduate level.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"36 1","pages":"647 - 649"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49375651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-17DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2021.2019583
Richard Carr
ABSTRACT This article considers two overlapping phenomena: the huge popularity of the Australian soap opera Neighbours in Britain during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the failure of the Labour Party to mount a successful electoral challenge until the leadership of Tony Blair. It argues that Neighbours’ appeal—community focussed, friendly, classless, unthreatening, a mixed economy, and in some ways small ‘c’ conservative—was precisely the platform that Labour needed to convince voters (particularly women and those living in suburbs) that it failed to reach between 1983 and 1992. Neighbours offered an albeit imagined and fictionalised window into Bob Hawke’s Australia that many of the British electorate found attractive, but until the Labour party tapped into such support, significant numbers of ‘floating voters’ would continue to back the Social Democratic Party and, subsequently, John Major’s Conservatives. There were generational dynamics at play here—with the 8 in 10 12–15 year olds who watched the show in 1990 unable to vote at earlier elections, but joining the franchise in time for the first Blair landslide of 1997. Neighbours was of course not the only influence on such voters, but it was a meaningful one.
{"title":"Labour’s Neighbours: reconceptualising the Ramsay Street boom and British politics from Thatcher to Blair","authors":"Richard Carr","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2021.2019583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2021.2019583","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article considers two overlapping phenomena: the huge popularity of the Australian soap opera Neighbours in Britain during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the failure of the Labour Party to mount a successful electoral challenge until the leadership of Tony Blair. It argues that Neighbours’ appeal—community focussed, friendly, classless, unthreatening, a mixed economy, and in some ways small ‘c’ conservative—was precisely the platform that Labour needed to convince voters (particularly women and those living in suburbs) that it failed to reach between 1983 and 1992. Neighbours offered an albeit imagined and fictionalised window into Bob Hawke’s Australia that many of the British electorate found attractive, but until the Labour party tapped into such support, significant numbers of ‘floating voters’ would continue to back the Social Democratic Party and, subsequently, John Major’s Conservatives. There were generational dynamics at play here—with the 8 in 10 12–15 year olds who watched the show in 1990 unable to vote at earlier elections, but joining the franchise in time for the first Blair landslide of 1997. Neighbours was of course not the only influence on such voters, but it was a meaningful one.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"36 1","pages":"516 - 551"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48875197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-28DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2021.1996234
Bex Lewis, G. Warnaby
ABSTRACT In 1942, the British government placed large posters addressing the ‘problem’ of venereal disease (VD) in prominent public spaces, as an attempt to manage this ‘threat’ exacerbated by war. Utilising extensive archival research, this article uses the VD campaign as a lens to examine the way that the state sought to change attitudes and behaviour, and the role of posters in such attempts. With posters reflecting the most publicly acceptable discourses relating to VD, the article investigates state action and public responses, through themes of ‘The People’s War’, medical and moral messages, and discourses of shadows and the home.
{"title":"The contribution of posters to the venereal disease campaign in Second World War Britain","authors":"Bex Lewis, G. Warnaby","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2021.1996234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2021.1996234","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 1942, the British government placed large posters addressing the ‘problem’ of venereal disease (VD) in prominent public spaces, as an attempt to manage this ‘threat’ exacerbated by war. Utilising extensive archival research, this article uses the VD campaign as a lens to examine the way that the state sought to change attitudes and behaviour, and the role of posters in such attempts. With posters reflecting the most publicly acceptable discourses relating to VD, the article investigates state action and public responses, through themes of ‘The People’s War’, medical and moral messages, and discourses of shadows and the home.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"36 1","pages":"487 - 515"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44023733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-17DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2021.1996235
L. Andrews
ABSTRACT Despite more than 20 years of Welsh democratic devolution, the Welsh Government, and Welsh Ministers particularly, have not generally been an object of academic study. There has been little systematic historical analysis of the new institution of the Welsh Government, its structures, operations and practices. In recent years, a variety of insider accounts by former Welsh Ministers and former First Ministers have started to appear in print, and 1997 Cabinet papers relating to the making of devolution policy have been released. This paper performs two functions. It will explore the learning so far, examining the limited ‘insider accounts’ which have appeared in the context of the documentary evidence, and the light that they shine on everyday life in Welsh Government, its hidden wiring and emergent cultural practices, addressing questions such as internal power structures, the governance innovations of the Welsh Government, and the continuities and contrasts with Westminster and Whitehall traditions. The paper also attempts a contextual, integrated and thematic overview of the making of Welsh Government over this period.
{"title":"Performing Welsh Government 1999–2016: how insider narratives illuminate the hidden wiring and emergent cultural practices","authors":"L. Andrews","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2021.1996235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2021.1996235","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Despite more than 20 years of Welsh democratic devolution, the Welsh Government, and Welsh Ministers particularly, have not generally been an object of academic study. There has been little systematic historical analysis of the new institution of the Welsh Government, its structures, operations and practices. In recent years, a variety of insider accounts by former Welsh Ministers and former First Ministers have started to appear in print, and 1997 Cabinet papers relating to the making of devolution policy have been released. This paper performs two functions. It will explore the learning so far, examining the limited ‘insider accounts’ which have appeared in the context of the documentary evidence, and the light that they shine on everyday life in Welsh Government, its hidden wiring and emergent cultural practices, addressing questions such as internal power structures, the governance innovations of the Welsh Government, and the continuities and contrasts with Westminster and Whitehall traditions. The paper also attempts a contextual, integrated and thematic overview of the making of Welsh Government over this period.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"36 1","pages":"124 - 156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41696877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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