Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1,500 titles.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter provides an overview of the origins and complexities of Salvation Army retail operations in the period before the First World War. Criticisms at the time and since identified a captive workforce and market, arguing retailing was a distraction from its spiritual aims. In response, the scope of retail operations evolved while the Salvation Army used its own publications to articulate, justify and advertise the production and consumption of Salvationist-made goods as a material embodiment of belonging to the social and spiritual community.
This chapter charts the development of today’s familiar model of the British charity shop. It shifts our attention away from the elusive charitable consumer and onto the charities and their local branches as fundraising retailers. The beginnings of the fair trade movement, the creation of trading companies and the hiring of professional trading directors were all less important to the charity shop’s early phases of mass expansion than older philanthropic and volunteering traditions which informed the associational culture of second-hand selling in local communities.
This chapter presents a transcultural analysis of the commodification of Japanese culture at a charity bazaar in the late-Victorian North East of England. Despite the local area’s steel industry connections with modern Japan, the organizers of the Mikado Festival opted for an idealized fairyland misrepresentation of a pre-industrial Old Japan village in order to create a respectable environment for a Church fundraising event. The bazaar and the Japanese Shop opened two years later were both transcultural contact zones where imperialistic and cosmopolitan narratives co-existed.
This chapter explores the operational difficulties Cecil Jackson-Cole faced when attempting to export his successful British model of Oxfam and Help the Aged shops to South Africa in the 1970s. It considers both the underestimated differences in cultures of gift-giving, volunteering and second-hand retailing, as well as controversies over leadership and management stemming from a reluctance to relinquish overall control. British charity retail – like its relief programming counterparts – is seen to have maintained distinctive neo-colonial characteristics long into the 20th century.
This chapter unpacks the interconnected narratives, mythologies and empirical realities of what is known as the Asian corner shop. It adopts a race-critical sociological approach to understanding the postcolonial encounter at the counter since the 1970s, facilitating more complex and nuanced discussions of the social embeddedness of retail in Britain as a connection to wider global histories. Both the shop and the shopkeeper, as a familiar stranger, were and remain always in production, as an interplay of migration histories, societal changes and contemporary cultural community processes.
This chapter uses two case studies to explore community support from retailers during protracted industrial disputes: the 1984/1985 British Miners’ Strike and the 1951 New Zealand Waterfront Lockout. Across separate but connected societies, the consistency of retailer support in working-class communities demonstrates the socially embedded nature of their business. Credit, donations and access to business premises all demonstrate the interrelated social and economic relationships between retailers and their communities, and the moral understanding that framed those relationships.
This chapter uses the case study of a late-Victorian tailor to explore the giving of credit and the payment of debts from both economic and social perspectives. Trust, rooted in social relationships, was central to credit relations as the firm responded to a rising level of unrecoverable debt and an increase in the time taken to make repayments. Personal connections between the male and middle-class clientele and partners ensured a high degree of customer loyalty that was crucial to the survival of the business.
This chapter focuses on the separate retail subculture that existed within the Salvation Army’s rescue work with fallen women. In response to internal frictions with the main Trade Department, the social wing’s Victorian rescue homes endeavoured to find methods of production and distribution that befitted its Christian ethos and goals of moral and social reform, while also acting as a counterpoint and an alternative to the problematic aspects of wider commercial capitalism.
This chapter draws upon museology and social-historical perspectives on clothing, women and retailing to explore how independent, family-owned women’s clothing retailers were at the heart of early 20th-century working-class communities. The consumer credit offered through payment clubs and the use of gossip as a business strategy were both vital to the community functions of these shops. It focuses on two cases studies: E.A. and F.S. Hodson General and Fancy Drapers and E. Minett’s and their representations at the Black Country Living Museum.
This chapter uses the John Lewis Partnership archive to explore racialized definitions of workers, customers and citizens during the postwar period of mass migration from the Commonwealth. Tensions emerged at the department store and grocery chain between a rhetoric of equality and the power given to the imagined White female shopper’s opinions on Black sales staff. This case study of recruitment policy offers the opportunity to both examine contested ideas of citizenship and to recover the Black working lives that are too often missing or marginalized in retail history.
