Journal articles: 'Pennsylvania Central Transportation Company' – Grafiati (2024)

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The increase in volume of explosives and other hazardous materials transported by rail during the nineteenth century resulted in a growing number of accidents. In response, the Pennsylvania Railroad developed some of the first regulations governing the transport of such materials. In the twentieth century, a combination of enforcement difficulties and competitive pressures led the company, working through the American Railway Association, to press for industry-wide rules and enforcement, which resulted in the Association's, Bureau of Explosives. Similar motives impelled the carriers to seek federal regulation, which began in 1908. The Interstate Commerce Commission provided the legal authority in this public–private partnership, whilethe bureau took the lead in inspecting shipments, encouraging improvements in shipping techniques, and developing rules that formed the basis of all modern regulations of hazardous shipments.

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On November 21, 1903, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that its north-south through trains would no longer enter Broad Street Station in downtown Philadelphia and would stop instead at West Philadelphia. Nor would the company sell tickets from that station to downtown. These schedule changes, which seemed minor to the company and were intended to reduce congestion in the central city, threatened downtown merchants and manufacturers who worried that buyers would shift to more accessible cities. Philadelphia had been sidetracked, theNorth Americanreported. The result was an eruption of boycotts, protests, and petitions that pitted nearly every local trade association against the railroad. Encouraged by theNorth American's editorials, partisan reporting, and stinging cartoons, the protesters forced the Pennsylvania to back down, and in March 1904, through trains returned to Broad Street. The newspaper cloaked this local business dispute in the language of antimonopoly, linking the fears of small businessmen to national anti-railroad concerns. The sidetrack episode also helped launch modern corporate public relations, as the Pennsylvania—stung by this threat to corporate autonomy—soon hired Ivy Lee as its first publicity agent.

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This research re-examines Walter Christaller (1933)’s central place theory paradigm to explain the emergence of a network of floating markets in the Mekong River Delta’s dense network of rivers and canals. Because road transportation is underdeveloped, floating markets play an important role for local people. They provide access to transportation and opportunities to trade, especially for the region’s diverse agricultural products. Furthermore, the floating markets support inland infrastructures. This research challenges Christaller’s (1933) assumptions about population thresholds and geographical range, and Mulligan et al.’s (2012) understanding of interaction among consumer choices, company aggregation and functional hierarchy. It finds that riverine traders employ flexible transaction strategies.

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A new approach to technology transfer (T2) under way at the Pennsylvania Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) is presented. The approach arose from a need to increase T2 efficiency and effectiveness. The model and processes draw from functional theories and methods within the areas of business, education, evaluation, and organization. T2 is a dynamic and complex process often treated and associated with the more concrete disciplines of training and education. Until recently, little existed to conceptualize and apply a systematized deployment and assessment of T2 intended for infrastructure improvement in transportation. The processes and models presented offer creative responses to pertinent issues in this area. Strategic planning principles based on Bryson’s model for public and nonprofit organizations, coupled with network-based decision-making software used by the Pennsylvania LTAP center, are described. Strategic objectives common to other key organizations were identified to arrive at a partnering scheme that penetrates three organizational functions: strategic operations, product/service development, and implementation/marketing. Central to this partnering scheme is a new T2 integration model. This customer-driven model provides a framework for integrating strategic objectives among partners, a basis for guiding shared research and development activities, a systematic and economic approach to T2, and a methodology for evaluating T2 effects. Critical issues in transportation T2 are addressed, and proactive responses and practical steps now under way in Pennsylvania are offered.

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The distribution of fertilizers in Central Sulawesi Province has not been efficient due to the large transportation costs in March 2016, the distribution of fertilizers could not go directly to retailers because the distance between regencies was far enough so that fertilizer was sent to distributors before to retailers to minimize costs to be incurred. company. Transhipment problems are in the form of indirect distribution problems because the products sent must go through several stages before reaching the consumer. This study will compare the Vogel Approximation method in previous studies with the completion of linear programming with Lingo software tools. Transportation costs using the Vogel Approximation method in previous studies compared with transportation costs using the Lingo software tool have the same cost of IDR 508,289,000, but there are several different fertilizer distributions. Lingo software simplifies data processing so that the results obtained are more accurate than the Vogel Approximation method. Companies can use lingo software to minimize costs by working effectively and efficiently.

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Abstract The article presents the activities of selected company - biomass manufacturer and user - with regard to environmental impact of biomass supply chain solutions. The biomass production facility of Biomass User Company is one of the most modern plant in Central Europe. It uses wooden and agricultural biomass to produce heat in biomass-fired steam boiler. The objective of the paper is to investigate the environmental impact with the use of life cycle assessment method. In our study, we define different scenarios for biomass transportation, concerning its supply as well as distribution. Life cycle assessment method is used to estimate environmental impact and to perform sensitivity analysis on transport modes, fuel mix structure and destination of self-cropped biomass. LCA ReCiPe endpoint indicator is used to measure environmental performance. As the results show, transport efforts are not significant factor while environmental impacts are concerned but are rather impact intensive type of activity and should be addressed with company environmental policies.

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Just-in-time deliveries and lower inventories have led to more frequent deliveries of goods and services, markedly increasing urban congestion. The Goods Movement in the New York Metropolitan Area study’s goal was to develop a research methodology for capturing urban freight mobility data and to collect cost and time data on freight moving into New York City’s central business district (CBD). The methodology developed and its implementation are discussed. Problems with access and collecting data from industry executives are also addressed. In industry-sector focus groups, senior logistics executives discussed urban freight mobility issues, especially barriers to goods movement into the CBD. Barriers consistently identified in order of greatest frequency of mention from 13 focus groups were congestion, inadequate docking space, inadequate curb space for commercial vehicles, security, and excessive ticketing of high-profile companies. The Freight Mobility Interview form asked logistics/transportation/distribution managers to provide company-specific information about the following categories: transportation services and distribution channels used and related cost, time, and barriers to freight mobility. Analysis of the interview data revealed that major barriers to freight mobility identified by both shippers and carriers were consistent with those cited by focus group participants. The combined qualitative and quantitative data collected identified the processes industry uses to manage urban congestion.

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The presented research paper demonstrates the dynamic development of political and economic relations between Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates as well as their importance for projects involving the implementation of the Lublin Triangle. The results and findings of the research show that without taking into account the state-owned company from Dubai DP World, the success of the strategic cooperation between Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania in transportation, as well as in the energy sector, will be limited. For this reason, it is necessary to include the Emirate company in some projects of the Lublin Triangle. Moreover, strategic alliances of the United Arab Emirates with states and international organizations of the Euro-Atlantic community, including the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, should be noted. In this context, the strategic importance of the UAE’s partnership with Central and Eastern Europe should be taken into account. Moreover, a close, deep alliance with the United Arab Emirates will contribute to increasing the impact of the Lublin Triangle states on transatlantic partners. In addition, the UAE, being an economic and trade hub where the interests of Europe, the United States of America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia intersect, can contribute to increasing the role of Central and Eastern Europe in the global dimension. The Emirati company DP World is one of the largest global corporations, with around 150 branches in the world and working for seaports, terminals, industrial parks, logistics and economic zones. So, this Emirati economic entity has great potential in ensuring Central and Eastern Europe an effective supply chain and stable development of trade in the upcoming increasingly aggressive economic wars.

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<p>Brazil currently exports 73% of the sugar produced at harvest. Approximately 75% of those exports are transported to the port of Santos and 18% to the port of Paranaguá for oversea shipment. Transportation to the two ports is mainly through the use of outsourced road transport vehicles. This study analyzes the impact of vertically integrating road transportation operations on the cost to transport raw sugar to the ports. Specifically, the study consists of an evaluation of the economic costs and benefits arising from sugar shippers using their own fleet of vehicles to transport their product to Santos and Paranaguá. Many papers have reduced logistics costs using strategies that involve a change in transport mode, most often to the railways. Although a change in modality may reduce logistics costs, vertically integrating the transport fleet into the producing company may also effectively lower costs. This article aims to (i) assess economic impacts on sugar export logistics in Brazil’s South-Central region if agro-industry shippers (mills) vertically integrated their road transport and (ii) identify the optimal regional allocation of vertically integrated logistics operations. The analysis was conducted using a linear programming model designed to identify minimum, multimodal sugar export logistics costs taking into account private and outsourced shipping fleets. The model was programmed and processed with the GAMS modeling system using a CPLEX solver. The results indicate: (i) the competitive economic transportation radius using a mill’s private trucking fleet is 420 km or less, (ii) the best strategy to minimize road transportation export logistics costs in Brazil’s South-Central region was obtained by using a private fleet 46.30% of the time, which, if all road shipping services had been outsourced, would reduce road transport costs 5.01%, and (iii) there are a number of sugar-producing meso-regions in which the use of vertically integrated transportation operations reduced logistics costs by over 10%, even if all road transportation services were vertically integrated. The results are expected to be used to promote sugar transportation through the optimized use of private shipping fleets and stimulate further discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of vertically integrated product transport operations.</p>

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Abstract Introduction/Background The Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) recently released the “Global climate change and health of Canadian Children” statement. As climate rapidly evolves from “change” to “crisis” there is an increasing pressure toward sustainable conferencing. Knowing the value of attending meetings, the growing body of literature evaluating travel-related carbon cost and convention sustainability can inform environmental harm minimization. Conferences can pressure venues to increase sustainability by choosing sites and venues wisely and communicating their requirements to rejected venues. They can also offer carbon offset purchase through credible companies (e.g. Gold Standard). Over the last 10 years the CPS has conducted its Annual General Meeting (AGM) at host cities that reflect Canada’s large geographic footprint. Venues included both hotel and standalone conference centers. There is no published evaluation of sustainable practices for CPS meetings. Objectives Evaluate the past 10 CPS Annual General Meetings (AGMs) for: Design/Methods Travel-related carbon cost was estimated with a round-trip calculator for economy seating the most direct available flights (https://co2.myclimate.org/en/offset_further_emissions). Cities of origin for attendee were the 11 CaRMS-matched pediatric residency training programs (https://www.carms.ca/match/psm/program-descriptions/). Venues were evaluated based on current publicly available self-reported information using conference sustainability criteria suggested through a literature review and public rating tools (Green Key, Quality Standards of the International Association of Convention Centres). Ground transportation from the airport was scored /3 by: public transport from airport (1), formal shared transport (1), fee deterrence for parking (1). Venue type was split by hotel-associated (H) and standalone convention centre (CC) meeting facilities. Sustainability of meeting facilities was divided into supports /2 (rentable supports, links to local vendors, catering and personnel) for exhibitors (1) and event planners (1), policies /3 by: sustainability, promotion of a green community (1), and waste management (1), and walkability from accommodation /1. Results The last 10 CPS AGMs were held in western (3; Vancouver 2010, Edmonton 2013, Vancouver 2017), eastern (1; Charlottetown 2016) and central (6; Quebec City 2011, London 2012, Montreal 2014, Toronto 2015, Quebec City 2018, Toronto 2019) provinces; in 2020 it is in Vancouver. Central Canada sites had the lowest air travel carbon cost per attendee. Average air travel-related carbon cost per attendee for different host cities ranged from 0.479 (London) to 0.919 (Vancouver) tonnes, with Ontario and Quebec sites averaging 0.518, Charlottetown 0.654 and Edmonton 0.756 tonnes. Ground transportation scores differed by city from Montreal (3/3 with public transit, formal transportation share and parking fees to dissuade driving) to London (0/3), with more favorable public transit options in larger cities. Venues differed when divided by hotel with meeting facilities (H) vs standalone conference center (CC), with CC outranking H for clearly posted sustainability plans (1.6 vs 1.2/2; 2=venue-specific, 1=company chain policy, 0=no plan), green and sustainable community building plans (1.6 vs 1.2/2; 2=greening local communities, 1=company chain policy, 0=no plan) and green waste management policies (1.2 vs 0/2; 2=venue-specific, 1=company chain policy, 0=no plan). Walkable accommodation was equal and present for all venues, with attached accommodation for all but one CC (Montreal), which had immediately adjacent hotels available. Conclusion As expected, the carbon cost of air transportation per attendee was lower in central provinces. Ground transportation from the airport was better in larger host cities. Standalone conference centres had more sustainable event support and locally focused policies regarding sustainability, environmentally friendly community building initiatives and waste management solutions, three major components of “greening” conferences. Based on the available resources across Canada, we recommend that the CPS considers these sustainability criteria in planning future events.

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Route optimization has become an increasing problem in the transportation and logistics sector within the development of smart cities. This article aims to demonstrate the implementation of a genetic algorithm adapted to a Vehicle Route Problem (VRP) in a company based in the city of Covilhã (Portugal). Basing the entire approach to this problem on the characteristic assumptions of the Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (m-TSP) approach, an optimization of the daily routes for the workers assigned to distribution, divided into three zones: North, South and Central, was performed. A critical approach to the returned routes based on the adaptation to the geography of the Zones was performed. From a comparison with the data provided by the company, it is predicted by the application of a genetic algorithm to the m-TSP, that there will be a reduction of 618 km per week of the total distance traveled. This result has a huge impact in several forms: clients are visited in time, promoting provider-client relations; reduction of the fixed costs with fuel; promotion of environmental sustainability by the reduction of logistic routes. All these improvements and optimizations can be thought of as contributions to foster smart cities.

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This study aims to provide clear explanation and answer based on the research gap of previous studies that studied about the relationship between managerial trait from family business and managerial performance. This study also investigates the phenomenon about low managerial performance that triggered low continuity of bus industry belonged to family business in Indonesia. Justification of this research is the first research about manager from family in bus transportation industry in Indonesia, considering the previous research conducted by Sudibyo (2011) related to succession of CEO leadership of Indonesian family company-according to the successor perspective and Sobirin et al., (2013) in batik industry in small scope in City of Pekalongan, Central Java. The model used for testing in this study is multivariate analyses with Structural Equation Model (SEM), which is based on AMOS program. The sample in this study is the manager that holds a position as supervisor and managerial controller of 505 persons. The number of samples is determined by proportion (%) of managers in the bus ownership industry. The questionnaires were distributed through direct distribution and by letter in June, July and August 2015. Of the distributed questionnaires, there are left 283 questionnaires. After being selected, there are 262 questionnaires that can be retested using SEM AMOS 22.0. Based on the result for 9 proposed hypotheses, there are 6 accepted hypotheses and 3 rejected ones. The accepted hypotheses are as follows: the influence of managerial trait in family business on soft governance capability which has coefficient value of 0.517 that shows positive and significant relationship since CR value is 2.705 and significant at 0.007, the influence of soft governance capability on managerial performance which has coefficient value as 0.506 that shows positive relationship since CR value is 6.183 and significant at 0.000. These results prove that soft governance capability has an ability to mediate the relationship between casualties of managerial trait variable on bus transportation industry in Jakarta, and it is significant with alpha value 5%

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This study considers the distribution network of a well-known perishable food manufacturer and its franchises in Turkey. As the countrywide number of stores is increasing fast, the company is facing problems due to its central distribution of products from a single factory. The objective is to decrease the cost of transportation while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. Hence, the focus is on the vehicle routing problem (VRP) of this large franchise chain within each city. The problem is defined as a rich VRP with heterogeneous fleet, site-dependent and compartmentalized vehicles, and soft/hard time windows. This NP-hard problem is modelled and tried with real data on a commercial solver. A basic heuristic procedure which can be used easily by the decision makers is also employed for obtaining quick and high-quality solutions for large instances.

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Disruption of information technology has threatened several jobsin the informal sector. As a result, the income gap between the rich and the poor can get wider. In Purwokerto, Central Java, the emergence of online application-based transportation has disrupted the work of becak drivers. This research used actionresearch method. In action research, researcher conduct research and at the same time make changes and interventions to the object. In the first stage, diagnosis,it was found that becak drivers' work was no longer competitive. Therefore, the intervention made with establishing a start-up worker co-operativesmodel, an online-based worker-cooperative for former becak drivers. In this model, becak drivers are directed to work in service sectors, such as cleaning service, gardener, plumber, and other service works.Orderingprocess can bemade through online application which can be downloaded for free in android devices.There are two implications in this study. First, in theory, this study offers a relatively new model, start-up worker co-operative. This model enables all workers to be owners in their co-operative company. Second, in practice, if successfully implemented, this model can be replicated for other sectors and other regions. As a result, start-up worker co-operative can be one solution to overcome income inequality.

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Abstract This paper explores relations between Western Indian cities and the supply areas connected to them. It begins with a discussion of the term “hinterland,” frequently used to describe these relations. As we shall see, the term greatly simplifies a complex set of relationships between cities, smaller towns, and rural villages. We will consider three case studies of money advanced against future assets. The first concerns the relation of thirteenth-century Jewish traders to their indigenous spice suppliers on the Malabar Coast; the second, the relation of eighteenth-century East India Company traders to cloth producers; and the third, the relation of Pune investors to taxation areas against which they loaned money to the Maratha government. In a time of slow communications and transportation the central problem was “trust at a distance”; the operative relationships were as much emotional and moral as economic. Finally, I will suggest a new way to conceptualize cities and their hinterlands.

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Shipment consolidation is one of main initiatives to reduce CO2 emissions and transportation cost. It reduces the number of shipments per customer and reduces transportation costs by using larger shipments. This paper investigates the temporal consolidation process in a central consolidation center in a make-to-order supply chain. This research was motivated by a case study of a design furniture company that has many suppliers and customers in large parts of Europe. Simulation was used to check the effect of a new and a special time-based temporal consolidation on the response time in outbound logistics. A soft delivery deadline that is less than the average lead time was used because of the long lead time. Arena Software was used to model the supply chain in order to find the best circ*mstances to use consolidation. Results showed that temporal consolidation could be more effective when order preparation time is with larger variability. The useful waiting is more when there is at least one order every four days. A formula that approximates the percent of reduced shipments was found. Furthermore, many shipments can be reduced without severely affecting the average response time. The value of the study is that it investigates consolidation problems in a high-mix low-volume environment that was overlooked by previous research.

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By 1926 Manitoba had a population one-third that of Minnesota, and yet the bank resources it accumulated to that year represented only one-tenth that of Minnesota banks. What can explain the much higher generation of banking resources in Minnesota and Minneapolis as compared with a much lower generation of resources in Manitoba and Winnipeg? A study of the number of branches in Manitoba and the level of cheque clearances in Winnipeg reveal that these branches were as vigorous as the number of unit banks and cheque clearances in Minnesota. However, by comparing the growth of Minneapolis industries with those in Winnipeg, it becomes apparent that Winnipeggers did not, as Minneapolis entrepreneurs did, develop the specialized manufacturing for export, the consequent company head offices, and the transportation services necessary to generate endogenous capital resources. Rather Winnipeg branches were the result of a banking system transported from Montreal and Toronto which, at the same time, it supplied financial resources for Manitobans, also served the goals of its Central Canadian directors and shareholders, and therefore, proceeded to integrate Winnipeg commercial resources into this central urban network. The Minneapolis industrial entrepreneurs, by contrast, established banks which generated their own financial resources and banking procedures. This meant that the Minneapolis bank owners were determined to shape the investment and growth of their metropolitan region. In Winnipeg, however, the branches served their Montreal and Toronto owners who were determined to encase Winnipeg businesses firmly within that Central Canadian urban system.

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Public transportation has been regarded as one of the most sustainable forms of transport in Indonesia. Indonesian Railways serves as one of choice transportation mode and the biggest transportation service company. Gambir Central Station is the busiest railway platform where large number of people spend considerable amount of time, while waiting to board a train, alighting from a train, to receive/ send off a passenger, or to buy a ticket. The passengers must have a satisfactory experience of the amenities available at platforms, irrespective of their duration or purpose of stay at a railway station. This study aims to assess the satisfaction level of the passengers and to improve the existing service quality of the station. The integrated model of fuzzy SERVQUAL, IPA and QFD is applied in this study. The fuzzy SERVQUAL is used to assess the level of passengers’ satisfaction. Furthermore, the Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) method is used to find out the attributes that must be improved. The Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method is used to determine the appropriate efforts/strategies to improve those attributes. To meet the passengers’ needs, Gambir Central Station should install a hygiene signboard, conduct training of officers, and add greening areas. Keywords: Service quality, Fuzzy SERVQUAL, IPA, QFD, Railway station AbstrakAngkutan umum telah dianggap sebagai salah satu bentuk transportasi paling berkelanjutan di Indonesia. Kereta Api Indonesia menjadi salah satu moda transportasi pilihan dan perusahaan transportasi terbesar. Stasiun Gambir adalah stasiun tersibuk di mana banyak orang menghabiskan banyak waktu, menunggu untuk naik kereta, turun dari kereta, keluar/masuk penumpang, atau membeli tiket. Penumpang harus memiliki pengalaman yang memuaskan tentang fasilitas yang tersedia di stasiun, terlepas dari durasi atau tujuan mereka tinggal di stasiun kereta api. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menilai tingkat kepuasan penumpang dan meningkatkan kualitas pelayanan stasiun yang ada. Model terintegrasi fuzzy SERVQUAL, IPA dan QFD diterapkan dalam penelitian ini. Fuzzy SERVQUAL digunakan untuk menilai tingkat kepuasan penumpang. Selanjutnya, Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) digunakan untuk mengetahui atribut-atribut yang harus ditingkatkan. Metode Quality Function Deployment (QFD) digunakan untuk menentukan upaya/strategi yang tepat untuk memperbaiki atribut tersebut. Untuk memenuhi kebutuhan penumpang, Stasiun Gambir harus memasang papan tanda kebersihan, melakukan pelatihan petugas stasiun, dan melakukan penambahan area penghijauan.

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The examination of stone-tool edges for blood-antigen residue is a relatively new technique in the archaeological analysis of lithic material. To date, a number of different methods have been employed to determine the species of origin of residual blood, such as Ouchterlony double-diffusion (Ouchterlony 1968) and radioimmunoassays (RIAs) (Lowenstein 1985, 1986). These techniques have been of limited use due to problems of sensitivity, cost, and applicability to archaeological field conditions. Enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) utilizing a nitrocellulose protein-binding membrane have shown that it is possible to retain both specificity and sensitivity in a technique that can endure the rigors of archaeological field work and the vicissitudes of differential preservation (Tersak and Hyland 1988). However, due to cross-reactivity, species identification of blood residue using immunological techniques can be problematic when it is necessary to distinguish individual species within a single genus or family. Recent work has shown that careful refinement of antisera can eliminate cross-reactivity, thereby increasing specificity (Berkeley Antibody Company, personal communication 1987). This refinement is accomplished by absorbing any antibodies from the antisera that may cross-react with antigenic sites held in common by closely related species. The ramifications of the successful implementation of this technique are discussed in terms of Paleoindian artifact function as well as paleoeconomic, paleoenvironmental, and paleodietary reconstruction using a case study from the Shoop site in central Pennsylvania.

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This article analyses the early Chilean State experience in the management of its flag-carrying airline, Línea Aérea Nacional. Drawing on Línea Aérea Nacional documents as well as newspapers, laws, and parliamentary debates, the article reconstructs the development of the company between 1929 and 1945. The central argument of this article is that, although Línea Aérea Nacional was created as an instrumental State-owned enterprise to ensure national sovereignty, the airline lived through three stages, each one of them dependent on the economic policy priorities of the different governments. The first stage started with Línea Aérea Nacional's initial activities; the second stage covers the period 1932–40 and was characterised by a financial and operational crisis. During the third stage (1941 onwards) a scheme of long-lasting State financing was granted. It allowed Línea Aérea Nacional to renew its fleet, expand – nationally and internationally – its routes, and improve its financial and operational outcomes.

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This study aims to explore the significant benefits gained from the implementation of the Warehouse Management System in 3rd Party Logistics Service Provider. A qualitative research approach been adopted by conducting an in-depth case study in one of Halal third-party logistics (3PLs) company located in central Malaysia, offering most of the logistics services, including transportation and warehousing. Information obtained from the warehouse operations managers in understanding the overall benefit of the warehouse management system. As a result of the highly competitive in 3rd party logistics market, environment companies are continuously forced to improve their warehousing operations into a system based applications. Many 3rd party logistics companies have also customized their value proposition to meet better customer demands, which has led to changes in the role of warehouses. The findings of this study have significant implications for both academicians and the 3PLs organizations to further explore the theories, practices, and the implementation of the Warehouse Management System in the warehouse operations. The future studies may lead to an investigation of the relationship of the warehouse management system with 3PL business competitiveness among the 3PL&rsquo;s organization.

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Abstract In 1884, Charles Webb, a European employee of a steam transportation company in Assam, sexually assaulted and killed Sukurmani, a woman who had left Bengal with her family to work on a tea plantation. The district magistrate dismissed most of the charges against Webb, assessing only a modest fine for wrongful confinement, and, though the case was appealed and brought to the attention of the viceroy, ultimately this verdict was upheld. The Webb case, as it became known in the Indian press, galvanized public opinion in India, as discussion of the case overlapped with discussion of the controversial Ilbert Bill of the previous year. This article traces the Webb case as it made its way through the courts and newspapers, arguing that a close study of this case reveals the ways that hierarchies of race, class, caste, and gender were constructed and were manifest in daily life. This article further argues that the treatment of the Webb case by the courts and later by the vernacular press indicates that sexual violence was a central element in nineteenth-century contests over colonial rule in India.

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Car-sharing program, like Car2go, is an innovative urban transportation mode where the car-sharing company provides a car fleet to offer people with the short-term access of car traveling. As a new traveling service, car-sharing platforms have been struggling hard to trigger initial users and speed up their diffusion process. Unlike new product spreading via geographical proximity people, car-sharing users usually drive sharing cars to different destinations and influence people there, and potential user decision also depends on previous user activity at all their destinations. Car-sharing user connections are mainly affected by their traveling behaviors. The influence of user traveling network on new service/product spreading process has been rarely studied before. Here, we find that the infective rate between users with the same destination is critical to the minimum user base of car-sharing diffusion. Moreover, a city with central user network is more appropriate for car-sharing. It leads to a small critical infective rate for diffusion, and a large stable market size of car-sharing service. Our study can impact car-sharing market strategies ranging from market expansion in one city to optimal market selection among different cities.

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Subject area Marketing, entrepreneurship, operations management, and transportation/logistics. Study level/applicability The case is suitable for junior, senior undergraduate and first-year graduate business classes. It can be used entirely in business classes in marketing, entrepreneurship, operations management, and transportation/logistics, and parts of it can be used for discussions in classes related to emerging economies/markets, environmental management, sustainability, and technology management. Case overview The case builds on the expansion plan considered by a young software company, called Hangzhou Omnipay located in the city of Hangzhou, China. Mr Chao, Vice President (VP) of Omnipay, is the main character of the case. He was aware of the current car-sharing industry leader – Zipcar headquartered in Boston and also identified multiple stakeholders in the city for decision making. By collaborating with a global student project team, Mr Chao collected a great deal of information and data. This teaching case provides students and educators ample opportunities to examine, from a multitude of aspects, the viability of a car-sharing service in Hangzhou. Expected learning outcomes The central goal is to help students gain a comprehensive understanding of the role of car-sharing service in a country's development in sustainability, socio-economy, environmental commitment, and new urban life style, as well as in a technological company's active pursuit of business expansion opportunity. In addition, students will not only understand the social, cultural, technological and strategic perspectives of car-sharing service implementation, but also develop and enhance analytic skills needed to conduct fundamental cost analysis, determine a base-line pricing scheme, and service location network design. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available, please contact your librarian for access.

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The purpose of this article is to contribute the conceptual knowledge of the railway policy issue in Mongolia. The paper presented an overview of the current transport situation of Mongolian Railway. It analyzes the statistical indicators of freight and passenger traffic as well as capability analysis of the railway transport. Moreover, it highlights its further development prospects and its importance for country’s economic. In last but not least, it formulates the future prospects of sustainable development of railway sector.Findings of this research are: a) by analyzing statistic data the high correlation (R=0.87) between GDP and freight transportation of Mongolia has been confirmed. The type of cargo analyzed and the economically efficient type of cargo within Mongolia has been highlighted. b) The GDP and passenger turnover has a very weak relationship. c) In the regional context, Mongolia’s transport statistics main indexes performance somewhat in the middle and there has room to increase the freight operation in the future.The research method is based on the analysis of strategic documents, secondary data, including statistical data obtained from the Central Statistical Office in Mongolia, Statistical Office in UBTZ (Ulaanbaatar Railway Mongolian-Russian Joint-stock Company), OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) official site, International Union of Railway (UIC) official site and World Bank official site.

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The magnitude 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake, at 5.04 pm on 17 October 1989, caused deaths, damage to properties and disrupted transportation, utilities and communications. Electricity and gas in the area affected by the earthquake were supplied by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) Company which served more than 10 million people in northern and central California. The company's 1988 annual report showed a total sale of 68537 GWh of electricity. The earthquake caused considerable damage to power generation facilities at Metcalf, San Mateo and Moss Landing. Facilities at Potrero and Hunter Points also experienced minor damage. Damage occurred to old items of equipment which were not designed to PG&E's current seismic specifications. Those which were located on sites near the epicentre of the earthquake suffered the most damage. According to PG&E's report, issued soon after the earthquake, about 1.4 million PG&E customers lost electric power, some for up to 48 hours, and a total cost of damage between US $30 millions and US $50 millions has been estimated. There were other smaller power generation plants in the area besides those owned by PG&E. Most were built recently and, to the author's knowledge, they suffered little damage during the earthquake.

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<p>Data acquisition and communication technologies give the possibility of receiving and storing a huge amount of data from machinery and plants in operation. From these data it is possible to create a set of Key Maintenance Indicators (KMI) useful for optimizing the maintenance policy. Raw data from the field are to be processed and filtered for obtaining effective KMIs to use in algorithms aimed at discovering anomalies or abnormal operation of one or more machineries or plants.</p><p>This paper presents a roadmap towards the Condition Based Maintenance of a fleet of railway vehicles. The paper associates to each maintenance policy its benefits and its requirements in terms of technological infrastructure and operating costs. Bombardier Transportation Italy started this roadmap a few years ago, for moving from a reactive maintenance policy to a proactive policy.</p><p>Increasing the effectiveness of maintenance implies the <em>sensorization</em> of the machines and the creation of a network for funneling information from the machineries to the central maintenance room. A Company must find an equilibrium point between complexity and expected benefits.</p><p>Results achieved by means of a specifically developed tool for data analysis applied to some sub-systems of the vehicles are presented.</p>

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Research aim is to reduce the costs of a mining company and the number of accidents by increasing the efficiency of the use of equipment and eliminating the human factor. Research methodology: analysis of possible areas of application of autonomous mining dump trucks and problems associated with this process. Results. Mining is carried out in difficult mining conditions, which makes the presence of people in the working area of the quarry problematic. Mining companies are looking to cut costs and make jobs safer, especially in developed countries with high labor costs. The use of dump trucks with remote and autonomous control systems in open pits makes it possible to increase the safety and efficiency of open pit mining, reduce the influence of the human factor and increase the productivity of mining machines. While human drivers can do their job well, autonomous trucks can drive the exact route every time without getting bored, tired or resting. The car does not need clean air, good visibility and a lunch break. At the same time, mining autonomous dump trucks can be used in remote-controlled, semi-autonomous and autonomous modes, and the driver in them is replaced by a central controller and a local self-management system. The robot does not get tired and does not make mistakes, it can work 24 hours a day. Eliminating human error and regular training improves safety and increases the productivity of a mining operation. Such companies as BelAZ, Komatsu and Caterpillar are the leaders in the production of autonomous mining dump trucks. Conclusions. The introduction of autonomous transportation allows the mining company to actually reduce its operating costs. While autonomous technologies are still in their infancy, they continue to evolve. Complex solutions will be of great interest - centralized systems that allow working with a fleet of autonomous vehicles and other mining equipment. Therefore, this direction today is the most developing and promising, and the use of autonomous dump trucks in the mining industry is no longer a distant prospect, but a reality of today

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AbstractA novel simulator for distribution scheduling in downstream of the oil industry is introduced in this work to identify inconsistencies in the proposed short term schedule. The simulation system is actively used in the MOL Plc which is a major regional oil company in Central Europe. It takes into account production and storage sites, tanks (mobile and immobile part), and of course the pipelines. The pipeline network features branching points, the pipe diameter may change between two sites, there are parallel pipelines between two sites, and the direction of a pipe can be reversed. Different products, next to each other, are transported through a single pipe. The movement of the product in the pipeline is driven by the recently pumped product. The exact locations of the products within the pipes are calculated by this custom simulator. The simulation has three phases: providing the initial data and the input, such as the actual contents of the pipes, tanks, and the planned product transfers; the simulation itself; and the presentation of the results. The initial data come from human operators and other IT systems. The simulator highlights the potential error in the schedule. The changing content of each pipe and the levels of the tanks can be displayed. If inconsistency occurs, the schedule has to be modified and the simulation has to be restarted. The simulator is extended to be able to handle barge and train transportation, and spots errors regarding foreign inventory.

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Learning outcomes This case study focuses on four main areas. By the end of the study, the students are expected to meet the following objectives by answering several assignment questions: understand the general business of a maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) company and why this business is a central player in the air transportation industry; understand and integrate certain strategy analysis tools, particularly Porter’s Generic Strategies, Ansoff Matrix, GE/McKinsey Matrix and International Market Entry Modes, to use later as justification for any recommendations about strategy; and prepare a systematic elaboration to use to recommend the company’s strategic plan. Case overview/synopsis This case study discusses PT GMF Aero Asia, Tbk. (GMF), a company that is based in Tangerang, Indonesia, and involved in the MRO for airlines. At the time of writing this case, the CEO was Iwan Joeniarto. The case elaborates on GMF’s competitive business operations in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, with the main focus being a discussion of Iwan’s visions for GMF’s expansion into the Middle East. This case study challenges students to think critically on the strategy level about the expansion plans of a local company into the international market. The main research questions the study attempts to answer are: What is an MRO in the aviation business? How does it relate to airport megahubs? Is the option for business expansion into the Middle East feasible for GMF? If not, are there any alternatives for that international expansion? Moreover, what recommendations can this study provide Iwan for entering that international market successfully? The students are expected to gain exposure to the international market entry in an MRO business. The students are also expected to understand and integrate the different strategy analysis concepts and tools, such as Porter’s Generic Strategies, Ansoff Matrix, GE/McKinsey Matrix and International Market Entry Modes. Complexity academic level This case study can be used as teaching material in several programs, including – but not limited to – the followings: Bachelor’s Degree program in Management, Business and Marketing (usually final year students), Master’s Degree in Business Management or Business Administration and Executive Education Program/Workshop/Seminar/Training for Business Development/Marketing Managers, VPs, Directors and Aviation Management Professionals. This case study can be used in the following classes/subjects: strategic management, strategic marketing management, international marketing, international business, global marketing, operations management and aviation management. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code CSS 11: Strategy.

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Subject area Strategic management, sustainable development, business economics, construction management, energy management. Study level/applicability Undergraduate and Master's level business and management programmes with a focus on environmental or strategic management. Case overview Fewer than two percent of Guinea Bissau's rural households had access to electricity from the grid. Efforts by the state monopoly to improve that figure by expanding the grid have had little effect, in part because the rural population was sparse. Central Electronics Limited, a public sector based company in India, was assigned to develop economic solar systems as a safe and eco-friendly substitute for the diesel gensets under IBSA (a trilateral, developmental initiative among India, Brazil, and South Africa) with the help of United Nations Development Program. The case provides an opportunity to examine the strategy of a small and poor nation to meet the needs of modern energy sources needed for improvement in health, education, transportation, and commercial development. The case focuses on Guinea Bissau's use of a trilateral partnership to achieve its rural electrification objectives despite several push backs. Expected learning outcomes Students will demonstrate ability to analyse, comprehend, and evaluate the essence of solar energy as an alternate for costly grid energy in the initial stage of development. It will also provide students to converse with the specific advantages of solar systems over conventional power generating systems and construct a novel solution that serves the needs of various stakeholders at the bottom of the income pyramid. Supplementary materials Teaching note.

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As a result of rapid urbanization and motorization in China, numerous mega-cities have emerged, and large numbers of people live and work in the city centers. Consequently, developing a public transport-oriented urban structure and promoting sustainable development are major planning strategies for the country. To understand the impact of rail transit on motorization in a high-density city center, we conduct a household travel survey in three neighborhoods around metro stations in the central area of Shanghai. We examine the car buying and commuting behavior of those Shanghai “original” residents who lived there when the city began growing, engulfing them in the center. Studies have shown that 40 percent of commuters in the city center commute outward, following a virtually reversed commute pattern, and the factors significantly affecting their car purchasing choice include their attitude toward cars and transit, household incomes, ownership of the apartments they live in, and the distance between family members’ workplaces and nearest metro stations. Despite easy access to the metro from their home in the city center, those who purchase their apartment units also likely own a car, while those who rent their apartment units are less likely to own a car; however, these odds are still higher than for those who live in an apartment unit inherited from their relatives or provided by their company. In the city center, if a family owns a car, then that car would almost certainly be used for daily commuting. A multinomial logistic model is applied to examine the factors influencing the tendency for using cars. The results show that people’s choices of commuting by alternative modes rather than cars are also shaped by their attitude toward public transportation, but other factors can also subtly change people’s commuting behavior under certain conditions. The commuting distance discourages people from walking and taking buses (but not metro). As the egress distance to the workplace increases, the metro becomes less appealing than cars. Mixed land use encourages people to walk or take buses instead of driving. Older people prefer riding buses and walking to driving, and female respondents tend to prefer walking, cycling, and riding the metro to driving compared to male respondents. These findings contribute to understanding the behavior of people who are familiar with public transportation and how to encourage them to switch from driving cars to alternative transport modes.

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The increased requirements for the quality of natural gas transported and used in industrial and domestic purposes have significantly increased the role of the analytical laboratory in the production process, since if the results of analyzes that determine the quality of products depend on the entire work of the gas transportation company as a whole, then the quality and reliability of the analysis results themselves are determined by the work of the testing laboratory. The basis of consumer confidence in the purchased products is ensured by the reliability of confirmation of the conformity of products established in the requirements of technical regulations and standards. Confirmation of the quality of products constantly requires the analytical laboratory to implement methods and techniques for monitoring the quality of analyzes. The research base is Gazprom Transgaz Kazan LLC, one of the gas transmission subsidiaries of Gazprom PJSC serving the Uzhgorod and Novopskov gas trunkline corridors, the Nizhnyaya Tura–Perm–Gorky 1,2 gas pipelines, Orenburg–Zainsk, Kazan–Nizhny Novgorod, etc. The object of the study is the analytical control of the quality of natural gas, the subject is organizational and methodological issues for its implementation. This article proposes a method for calculating the frequency of gas sampling using automated algorithms taking into account data on changes in the composition and properties of gas streams for the reporting period. The description of the method is presented on the example of calculating the frequency of determining the calorific value of the lowest (actual calorific value) and density of natural gas. The central chemical-analytical laboratory of the Gazprom Transgaz Kazan’s engineering and technical center and the points of gas sampling at the gas distribution stations of the main gas pipelines in the service area of the сompany are used as objects of the method implementation

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Bibliographical Notes: Kouroush Jenab is a senior member of IEEE, received the B.Sc. degree from the IE Department at Isfahan University of Technology (1989), the M.Sc. degree from the IE Department at Tehran Polytechnic (1992), and the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Ottawa (2005). He served as a senior engineer/manager in auto, and high-tech industries for 18 years. He joined the National Research Council Canada as a research officer where he participated in several international research projects. In 2006, he joined the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Ryerson University, Toronto as assistant professor. Currently, Dr. Jenab is Faculty of the College of Aeronautics at Embry-riddle Aeronautical University, FL, USA. He has published over 110 papers in international scientific journals based on his experiences in industries.Nikita Ottosen is a current Systems Engineering graduate student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. She received her undergraduate degree from ERAU in Aeronautics and is currently working as an Assistant Campus Director at the Crestview, FL campus. She gained valuable knowledge previously working for the Boeing Company and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, known as The Port of Seattle, in Seattle, Washington. During her time at The Port of Seattle she worked alongside the Wildlife Management department to conduct a study on effective wildlife management strategies. Her study will become a part of a future Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) publication, sponsored by the FAA’s Transportation Research Board of the National Academies.Saeid Moslehpour is a full professor and department chair in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in the College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture at the University of Hartford. He holds Ph.D. (1993) from Iowa State University and Bachelor of Science (1989) and Master of Science (1990) degrees from University of Central Missouri. His research interests include failure analysis, logic design, CPLDs, FPGAs, Embedded electronic system testing and distance learning.

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Learning outcomes The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a business idea can be successful in the long run in a rapidly changing environment. Students could learn about the carsharing market and the world of start-ups. During the lesson, students could practice business modelling based on “Value proposition Canvas”. With this model, they can understand the real needs of the customers and the services, with which companies can provide gains for the clients and decrease users’ pain. Beside business modelling, the case provides the opportunity to learn about the concept of First Mover Advantage, which describes the possible advantages of being first on a market. Three different sources can provide first mover advantage: technological leadership; pre-emption of scarce assets; and customer loyalty. Start-ups should systematically think about acquiring some of the above to sustain their advantage. Case overview/synopsis This case is about a carsharing start-up GreenGo, which was the first company introducing the concept of carsharing in Hungary. GreenGo was founded in November 2016 in Budapest. Until today, it has approximately 170 cars and could establish a solid customer base with 6,000 subscribers. After one year of monopoly, GreenGo got a competitor, when MOL (one of the largest companies of the Central European region) entered the market with its new carsharing service: MOL Limo (Limitless Mobility). MOL Limo is using the same business model and marketing mix as GreenGo and started to operate with 300 cars. The case describes the urban transportation of Budapest, the business model and value proposition of GreenGo and MOL Limo in depth. It also presents some possible options for GreenGo to react to the new market situation. Complexity academic level Master in management, MBA. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code CSS: Strategy, Case study organisation: GreenGo.

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PurposeUsing a case study method, the article investigates the impact New Public Management (NPM), through outsourcing has had on the management of government information at the Swedish Transport Agency. In April 2015 the Agency outsourced its IT-operations to IBM company. Some of the IBM sub-contractors had not been cleared by the Swedish Security Service. This exposed the Agency’s information to risk. By outsourcing the IT operations, the General Director of the Agency deviated from the laws governing government information such as the Swedish Security Protection Act, the Personal Data Act and the Publicity and Secrecy Act.Design/methodology/approachThe researcher has applied a case study method as the investigation focuses on a phenomenon in a real-life setting. The case study method entails the use of past studies, which facilitates the exploration and understanding of a complex issue. The phenomenon under investigation is NPM’s impact, through outsourcing, on the management of public information at the Swedish Transportation Agency.FindingsOutsourcing should be foregone by well-formulated contracts that should put into consideration the management of government information and the involvement of all stakeholders such as records managers/archivists, IT personnel, heads of departments, lawyers and business analysts. Outsourcing risks to compromise the two tenets of democracy that is, accountability and transparency which are central to Swedish public administrations’ operations.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is limited by the fact that it only presents the views of the archivists. This was, however, purposely done because their voice was missing during the discussions that followed after the data breach scandal had become public knowledge. Additionally, archivists are supposed to play a major role in the management of government information at Swedish institutions. Further research that will involve different categories of employees might give a deeper and better understanding of the impact that NPM, through outsourcing, is having on the management of government information and what implications this might have on issues of trust, transparency and accountability.Practical implicationsThe study demonstrates the need for well-formulated outsourcing contracts that will include information management clauses. It is of crucial importance in a democratic society that access to government information is not compromised as institutions endeavor to achieve efficiency and high-quality service delivery.Social implicationsIt is government information that gives citizens knowledge about the various processes of government institutions. It is therefore of paramount importance that government information is not left in the hands of unauthorized companies that are involved in the outsourcing activity but should be securely managed and guarded, as the opposite might pose privacy and national security challenges and hence undermine the trust that citizens have in government institutions.Originality/valueThe search that the author conducted confirmed paucity in research that discusses issues related to NPM, outsourcing and the management of government information. This paper is therefore a contribution to the discourse from an archives and information management perspective.

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-Chuck Meide, Kathleen Deagan ,Columbus's outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2002. x + 294 pp., José María Cruxent (eds)-Lee D. Baker, George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A short history. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. x + 207 pp.-Evelyn Powell Jennings, Sherry Johnson, The social transformation of eighteenth-century Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. x + 267 pp.-Michael Zeuske, J.S. Thrasher, The island of Cuba: A political essay by Alexander von Humboldt. Translated from Spanish with notes and a preliminary essay by J.S. Thrasher. Princeton NJ: Markus Wiener; Kingston: Ian Randle, 2001. vii + 280 pp.-Matt D. Childs, Virginia M. Bouvier, Whose America? The war of 1898 and the battles to define the nation. Westport CT: Praeger, 2001. xi + 241 pp.-Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Antonio Santamaría García, Sin azúcar no hay país: La industria azucarera y la economía cubana (1919-1939). Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Universidad de Sevilla y Diputación de Sevilla, 2001. 624 pp.-Charles Rutheiser, Joseph L. Scarpaci ,Havana: Two faces of the Antillean Metropolis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. x + 437 pp., Roberto Segre, Mario Coyula (eds)-Thomas Neuner, Ottmar Ette ,Kuba Heute: Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Vervuert, 2001. 863 pp., Martin Franzbach (eds)-Mark B. Padilla, Emilio Bejel, Gay Cuban nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xxiv + 257 pp.-Mark B. Padilla, Kamala Kempadoo, Sun, sex, and gold: Tourism and sex work in the Caribbean. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. viii + 356 pp.-Jane Desmond, Susanna Sloat, Caribbean dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How movement shapes identity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xx + 408 pp.-Karen Fog Olwig, Nina Glick Schiller ,Georges woke up laughing: Long-distance nationalism and the search for home. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001. x + 324 pp., Georges Eugene Fouron (eds)-Karen Fog Olwig, Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's two great waves of immigration. Chelsea MI: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. xvi + 334 pp.-Aviva Chomsky, Lara Putnam, The company they kept: Migrants and the politics of gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xi + 303 pp.-Rebecca B. Bateman, Rosalyn Howard, Black Seminoles in the Bahamas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xvii + 150 pp.-Virginia Kerns, Carel Roessingh, The Belizean Garífuna: Organization of identity in an ethnic community in Central America. Amsterdam: Rozenberg. 2001. 264 pp.-Nicole Roberts, Susanna Regazzoni, Cuba: una literatura sin fronteras / Cuba: A literature beyond boundaries. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Vervuert, 2001. 148 pp.-Nicole Roberts, Lisa Sánchez González, Boricua literature: A literary history of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2001. viii + 216 pp.-Kathleen Gyssels, Ange-Séverin Malanda, Passages II: Histoire et pouvoir dans la littérature antillo-guyanaise. Paris: Editions du Ciref, 2002. 245 pp.-Sue N. Greene, Simone A. James Alexander, Mother imagery in the novels of Afro-Caribbean women. Columbia MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001. x + 215 pp.-Gert Oostindie, Aarón Gamaliel Ramos ,Islands at the crossroads: Politics in the non-independent Caribbean., Angel Israel Rivera (eds)-Katherine E. Browne, David A.B. Murray, Opacity: Gender, sexuality, race, and the 'problem' of identity in Martinique. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. xi + 188 pp.-James Houk, Kean Gibson, Comfa religion and Creole language in a Caribbean community. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xvii + 243 pp.-Kelvin Singh, Frank J. Korom, Hosay Trinidad: Muharram performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. viii + 305 pages.-Lise Winer, Kim Johnson, Renegades: The history of the renegades steel orchestra of Trinidad and Tobago. With photos by Jeffrey Chock. Oxford UK: Macmillan Caribbean Publishers, 2002. 170 pp.-Jerome Teelucksingh, Glenford Deroy Howe, Race, war and nationalism: A social history of West Indians in the first world war. Kingston: Ian Randle/Oxford UK: James Currey, 2002. vi + 270 pp.-Geneviève Escure, Glenn Gilbert, Pidgin and Creole linguistics in the twenty-first century. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002. 379 pp.-George L. Huttar, Eithne B. Carlin ,Atlas of the languages of Suriname. Leiden, The Netherlands: KITLV Press/Kingston: Ian Randle, 2002. vii + 345 pp., Jacques Arends (eds)

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Abstract Background: Ibrutinib is an irreversible inhibitor of Bruton's tyrosine kinase (BTK) that induces durable remissions in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). In other systems, ibrutinib has also been shown to have an immune modulating effect on T-cells through inhibition of interleukin-associated tyrosine kinase (ITK). Our group and then others have reported that ibrutinib enhances antibacterial and antitumor T cell immune response in murine models. ITK has been demonstrated to be involved in TCR-induced up-regulation of FAS Ligand (FAS-L) and activation induced cell death (AICD) of T cells. In murine models, ITK deficiency or inhibition by specific kinase inhibitors lead to impaired AICD and a much greater persistence and accumulation of activated T cells. We therefore postulate that ibrutinib, by its capability to irreversibly inhibit ITK, may have similar effect on recusing activated T cells from AICD. To date, a comprehensive analysis of the effects on cellular immunity in humans treated with ibrutinib, or more selective BTK inhibitors has not been reported. Methods: PBMCs from previously treated CLL patients enrolled on clinical trials (NCT01589302 and NCT02029443) of ibrutinib (a BTK and ITK inhibitor) and acalabrutinib (ACP-196, a selective BTK inhibitor) were collected at baseline and during treatment at the completion of 2 months( cycle 3) and 5 months (cycle 6). Patients with persistent lymphocytosis post treatment were chosen to allow comparable tumor burden before and after therapy. T cell immune function and the immunosuppressive capacity of CLL cells were evaluated with detailed immunologic and functional studies. Mechanistic studies examining AICD with ibrutinib and acalabrutinib treatment were performed. Results: A total of 25 patients treated with ibrutinib (n=17) and acalabrutinib (n=8) were studied. Ibrutinib, but not acalabrtinib treatment promoted a significant increase (3-5 fold) in absolute CD4(P<0.01) and CD8(p=0.001) T cell numbers in CLL patients that was more prominent in effector/effector memory subsets and less in naïve and central memory subsets (Figure 1). While the number of regulatory T cells (Treg cells) remained unchanged, the ratio of Treg cells to CD4 T cells was reduced by approximately two fold (p<0.001) after ibrutinib treatment. Detailed ex vivo studies demonstrated significantly diminished activation induced cell death of activated T-cells when pre-treated with ibrutinib, but not acalabrutinib (Figure 2). Treatment with ibrutinib or acalabrutinib significantly reduced T cell PD-1 (p<0.01 for CD8 T cells, p<0.05 for CD4 T cells and CTLA-4 (p< 0.05 for CD8 T cells, p<0.001 for CD4 T cells) expression, most prominent in central memory T cell compartment. Ibrutinib and acalabrutinib both significantly decreased CD200 (p<0.001) and BTLA (p<0.001) surface expression as well as IL-10 production by CLL cells after prolonged "B10-Pro" conditioning (p<0.001 for ibrutinib, p<0.05 for acalabrutinib). Conclusions:These findings collectively differentiate ibrutinib as a therapeutic that can both expand activated T-cells and also ameliorate T-cell exhaustion thorough reversal of CLL tumor cell mediated immune suppression. While acalabrutinib reverses CLL cell mediated immune suppression, it lacks ability to expand activated T-cells. Collectively, these data provide support for dual BTK/ITK inhibitor therapeutics when applied to enhance the therapeutic efficacy of adoptive immunotherapy (e.g.chimeric antigen receptor T cells) or tumor vaccines for CLL and potentially other types of hematologic and solid cancers. Figure 1 Ibrutinib but not acalabrutinib treatment of CLL patients increases total T cell numbers: (A) Absolute numbers of CD8 T cells before and during ibrutinib treatment (n=18). (B) Absolute numbers of CD8 T cells before and during acalabrutinib treatment (n=8). Each cycle is 4 weeks. "Cycle 3" day 1 indicates 8 weeks into treatment, and "cycle 6" day 1 indicates 20 weeks into treatment. Figure 1. Ibrutinib but not acalabrutinib treatment of CLL patients increases total T cell numbers: (A) Absolute numbers of CD8 T cells before and during ibrutinib treatment (n=18). (B) Absolute numbers of CD8 T cells before and during acalabrutinib treatment (n=8). Each cycle is 4 weeks. "Cycle 3" day 1 indicates 8 weeks into treatment, and "cycle 6" day 1 indicates 20 weeks into treatment. Figure 2 Ibrutinib treatment of human T cells protects against activation induced cell death and reduces FAS-L mRNA expression in a dose dependent manor. T cells were isolated from healthy donors blood samples, stimulated in vitro with CD3/CD28 for 3 days, rested for 11 days, then were restimulated with CD3 for 6 hours (as in A. and B.) or 3 hours (as in C.) in the presence of IL2 to induce AICD in the presence or absence of ibrutinib. Figure 2. Ibrutinib treatment of human T cells protects against activation induced cell death and reduces FAS-L mRNA expression in a dose dependent manor. T cells were isolated from healthy donors blood samples, stimulated in vitro with CD3/CD28 for 3 days, rested for 11 days, then were restimulated with CD3 for 6 hours (as in A. and B.) or 3 hours (as in C.) in the presence of IL2 to induce AICD in the presence or absence of ibrutinib. Disclosures Jones: AbbVie: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Janssen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Pharmacyclics, LLC, an AbbVie Company: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding. Andritsos:Hairy Cell Leukemia Foundation: Research Funding. Awan:Novartis Oncology: Consultancy; Innate Pharma: Research Funding; Pharmacyclics: Consultancy. Fraietta:Novartis: Patents & Royalties: Novartis, Research Funding. June:Novartis: Honoraria, Patents & Royalties: Immunology, Research Funding; Tmunity: Equity Ownership, Other: Founder, stockholder ; University of Pennsylvania: Patents & Royalties; Immune Design: Consultancy, Equity Ownership; Pfizer: Honoraria; Johnson & Johnson: Research Funding; Celldex: Consultancy, Equity Ownership. Maus:Novartis: Patents & Royalties: inventor on patents related to ibrutinib use in T cell therapies. Woyach:Karyopharm: Research Funding; Morphosys: Research Funding; Acerta: Research Funding.

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Federal Environmental Justice directives require transportation agencies responsible for planning and programming federal funds, including state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), to identify and address disproportionately high and adverse human health and environmental impacts on minority and low-income populations. Despite issuance of federal and state guidance and training programs, many MPOs nationwide continue to seek clarity on effective environmental justice (EJ) approaches and procedural considerations. The South Central Pennsylvania Unified EJ Process and Methodology study was a year-long effort undertaken by a consortium of MPOs in Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) District 8 to identify a unified and replicable approach to implementing EJ in transportation planning. PennDOT, Federal Highway Administration PA Division, and Federal Transit Administration Region III provided technical assistance and support to the effort. The consortium engaged a technical assistance consultant to facilitate a collaborative process to identify a process framework, a set of analytical methodologies, and effective strategies for advancing EJ in the regional transportation planning process. The study demonstrated a model for convening regional, state, and federal partners to reach consensus around an effective EJ process and methodology. This paper provides an overview of the study process, findings related to the concerns of the participating MPOs, and a brief description of the recommended analytical approaches. The paper discusses lessons learned during the course of the study and considers additional work required to further enhance the EJ process.

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ABSTRACTThe Pennsylvania Power & Light Company, in cooperation with the Electric Power Research Institute, is studying leachate generation at a large outdoor test cell of compacted coal combustion fly ash constructed at the Montour Steam Electric Station in north-central Pennsylvania. The test cell design is identical to that of the plant's active dry fly ash disposal facility. Leachate initially generated at the test cell contained concentrations of chromium and selenium approximately ten times above EPA's assigned Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCL's) for drinking water. Concentrations of these two parameters have since decreased approximately five-fold. Similar reductions have occurred in the concentrations of several of the other trace metals measured in the leachate. The dominant reaction mechanisms controlling leachate composition were examined in an attempt to explain these and other observations. Deterministic chemical modeling was performed to aid in the interpretation of the data. The dynamics of leachate generation were also examined through an evaluation of the infiltration and redistribution of moisture.

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Since January 2015 the government has begun to abolish some product subsidies, especially for the marketing area of Java Bali and Madura. This opens up opportunities for new players to enter the oil and gas sector given the increasingly promising profits. the emergence of this new competitor adds to fierce competition between outlets, and to maintain cost efficiency a flexibility strategy and innovation strategy are implemented, especially related to the distribution of products from the company to all outlets where transportation equipment is adjusted so that it can transport various types of products to several outlets at a time . This condition is accompanied by a policy that a conveyance may send to various outlets at a time. Initially, business performance improved rapidly but with the increasing number of outlets there were several product distribution accidents, subsidized deposits, customers switching to other outlets including those owned by foreign companies, and backlog transaction constraints. The problem is that the partner's trust has declined including customers to the company as a result of very strict supervision in the midst of environmental changes as a result of changes in government policies and regulations lately. The sample became the object of research is customer stations in Central Java and Yogyakarta as many as 200 customer in the Gas Station Central Java and Yogyakarta. Methods of data analysis used in this study is a quantitative analysis method where quantitative data analysis method is a method of analysis in the form of figures and calculations using statistical methods. In simplify the analysis process, will be used SEM, AMOS. Keywords : Product Cohesiveness, Quality Business Strategy, Business Performance, Competitive Advantage

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This paper helps investigate the integration of information technology (IT) and simulation in order to help understand how to set reliable delivery dates in manufacturing-logistics networks. This integration is necessary to assist organizations involved in the network to help plan and control their operations more efficiently. The authors reviewed previous work in the areas of IT-oriented logistics, real time simulation, and due date assignment. We describe a general architecture for a real-time simulation-based system and create a prototype based on our architecture. An application of the prototype in a small manufacturing company is employed. The prototype implemented was for a local manufacturer of made-to-order safety windows with three manufacturing plants and a one office location, all within a 50-mile radius. The prototype for this company was developed utilizing a Boreland’s Delphi 3 application development tool. The reason that a distributed simulation model was not implemented was that we focused on validating the most critical components of our architecture using a simple prototype as our initial validation effort. The following possible advantages of our architecture were identified: * The architecture can use the most up-to-date operational data to make decisions regarding delivery date assignment and network management.* The architecture can support both central and distributed environments. * The prototype developed based on the architecture could assign tight delivery dates.* The prototype could be used to maintain or increase the level of on-time deliveries by monitoring the operations.* The prototype could generate options on delivery dates and cost based on routings/priority and transportation service options.

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Because of the importance of fuel oil for community needs both for household, business, transportation and industrial sectors. As the largest oil and gas company in Indonesia, even globally, Pertamina certainly has a specific strategy to market its products. Competition in the retail business of non-subsidized fuels is strongly influenced by government policies in terms of determining the price of shared fuels. The marketing of PT Pertamina Sulutenggo Cabang VII Daerah has the duty to market fuel oil to all areas of Sulutenggo and also the company carries out various strategies to survive on the market. In October 2018 Pertamina had just raised non-subsidized fuel prices throughout Indonesia, the prices set were not so much different from other regions, except for areas affected by natural disasters such as NTB and Central Sulawesi for the time being they did not rise. For now PT Pertamina Marketing Sulutenggo Branch focuses on the marketing strategy of non-subsidized fuels by holding various events, recently PT Sulutenggo Branch Marketing in commemoration of the national customer day on September 4, 2018, Pertamina held an event at the gas station. Coco Samrat by distributing gifts to customers who buy non-subsidized fuel, such an event is also part of the prtamina strategy in marketing non-subsidized products. With this analysis carried out with the title of marketing strategy so that it aims to determine the implementation of marketing strategies for Non-Subsidized BBM PT Pertamina Marketing Sulutenggo Branch. The analysis used in this strategy is the marketing mix, which is "4P".Keywords: Marketing Strategy for Non-Subsidized Retail Oil Fue

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Central within the discourses that have surrounded the commercial internet during its emergence has been an underlying promise of disorder. The claims for consumer empowerment with which e-commerce was promoted and discussed within industry and academic literature (Flamberg; Gates; Horton; Levine et al. for instance), coupled with recurring claims that the emergence of e-commerce was as profound a shift as that occasioned by the Industrial Revolution (Dancer; Sullivan; Lynch for instance), established an underlying sense of chaotic upheaval – a clear and present danger to the established order. And on the surface it would appear as if the commercial internet does serve as a challenge to established authority. User interfaces function by offering a degree of autonomy and informal control to the user. However, the infrastructure supporting e-commerce is multi-layered. It is here that the friendly interface cedes to a vast data structure: an ordered and ordering database. Using an August 2002 sample of the corporate portal ninemsn extensively analysed as part of a broader PhD project, this paper explores the tension between front end disorder and back end order. Its goal is to indicate how the surface forms of this site are superimposed on a machinery which orders, or perhaps disciplines, consumer activity. The ninemsn Interface The ninemsn website is typified by a dominance of written text over graphic images. It is constituted primarily by complex noun phrases (the most commonly occurring utterance type) followed by imperative formations. Less often used are statements and interrogatives. The preponderance of noun phrases is readily explained by the metafunction of these utterances as hypertext anchors. Content analyses conducted by Haas and Grams indicate a typical use of noun phrases as anchor text on websites. But it is the fact that all of the phrase types are used on the ninemsn website as hypertext which renders the distinction between utterance types redundant. Despite their different surface forms, the status of the utterances as hypertext anchors makes them similar in terms of function. All of the utterances become actionable, open to activation and engagement by the consumer, thereby challenging their function as direct commands or statements. By inviting the act of linking, hypertext presupposes that there is ‘something else’ which lies behind those pieces of text. They are, therefore, never merely utterances which can be interpreted solely at their surface but are marked by the immanent existence of what Chomsky calls deep structure, layers of significance beyond that revealed in the surface form. None of the linguistic features previously identified is therefore a simple utterance. Each has an alternative form and function by virtue of the fact that it is constituted within a logic of hypertext. On ninemsn all the utterances have the performative (illocutionary) force (Austin) of offers. The surface forms can be read as the result of a transformation (Chomsky) of this underlying linguistic structure. The base form best associated with a commercial institution operating within a hypertextual medium is the interrogative “would you like …?” Consequently, the noun phrase “Bust-shaping bodysuit” (ninemsn Home Page 12 Aug 2002) is a transformation of the underlying interrogative “Would you like a bust-shaping bodysuit?”, or the humble statement “I [ninemsn] offer you [the user] a bust-shaping bodysuit”. But what is significant is that for the site to make sense and serve as something other than a random collection of statements and imperatives, this underlying form must be recovered by the user. And it would be a naïve user indeed who did not recognise the polite offers of hypertext which underpin the commands appearing at the surface of the ninemsn website. These transformative effects mitigate the power, or control, being obviously exerted by the company over the user’s experience of ninemsn. Firstly they do this by transforming commands and bold declaratives into polite inquiries. But the very nature of hypertext alone works to this end. As Miles has argued, the illocutionary force of hypertext, in this case the act of offering, is contained within the relationship between anchor text and the destination site. “It is not in the nodes that hypertext ‘happens’, but in the causal connections and pathways made between nodes” (Miles “Cinematic Paradigms” n.pag.). Thus, for Miles, what becomes important in a hypertextual document is the ‘event of connection’ (“Hypertext Structure” n.pag.) – an act performed by the user. Thus, hypertext and the performative power it extends to the statements on the ninemsn website, make the user the key active agent in the determination of meaning on the site rather than the company. By denying control of the site, both in the form of user activated hypertext and through the underlying invitational nature of its utterances, ninemsn opens itself to random and chaotic interaction. It becomes a site not for the direct and strict ordering of users – neither in the form of direct imperatives nor in the form of control of practice. Rather it is a site for the de-control of user activity. The interactivity enabled by hypertext here becomes a tool for disorder. The ninemsn Database However thus far we have only examined the surface structures of the site, the user-friendly interface of the corporate entity that is ninemsn. Below this lies the infrastructure of the site: the database. ninemsn is a database in two senses. Firstly it is a collection of sites, pages, and links which cohere under the ninemsn brand umbrella. Pages which are marked with the ninemsn brand, and to which links are directly offered from the site, do not constitute the entire World Wide Web. This occurs despite the site’s description as a portal implying that it functions as a window onto the system. At this level, ninemsn can be conceived as a particular ordering through selection and collation of the information system that is the Web. But it is also an active ordering of the activities of the user. By only offering a limited set of links to strategic partners, and offering paid listings foremost in its Web-wide search function, the site delimits the autonomy which it appears to offer at the hypertextual interface. At the level of the database, it becomes an attenuated autonomy, ordered by strategic hyperlinking (Jackson). But ninemsn is also a database of consumers and consumer traffic patterns which are then onsold to advertisers and strategic partners. The site invites users to personalise the interface by entering preferences which effectively expose their consumer behaviour. They are offered memberships which result in extra rewards but involve filling in a proforma listing personal details remarkably similar to the demographic information the site offers advertisers about its consumers. By entering data into the system in these ways – a voluntary act of choice lured by the personalisation options it enables – the consumer becomes ordered. Online consumer activity here becomes organised into a set of pre-ordained fields which constitute that user for the purposes of that transaction (Poster). They become known, not through the self-directed, disorderly conduct of surfing, but through the pre-defined and orderly fields of the marketing database. This effect can be traced further in the commercial Web. By similarly mapping the behaviours of users, cookies and other forms of more passively activated ‘spyware’ also reduce the behaviour of users to pre-constituted fields of value. As the consumer interacts with the system following the polite invitations of hypertext, the system orders this trail into valuable marketing data. Thus, it is the same hypertext which offers the illusion of autonomy at the site interface which enables the increasing surveillance and ordering of consumers at the lower levels of the database. Interactivity as an Ordering Practice Interactivity and its e-commerce companion, the promise of personalisation, here become disciplining practices, seductively drawing the consumer further into the ordering machinery of the site. They encourage the user to submit more and more of their Self – their interests, the trajectory of their logic – to the ordering gaze of the market. Using Virilio’s terms, we can therefore understand interactivity in e-commerce as both an accelerator and a brake on human movement, in this instance the movement of hypertext as the manifestation of individual choice. It is both a technology which ‘empowers’ the user to move in their personally determined disordered fashion, mimicking the radical potential of dynamic bodies, and a delimiting of that potential into the regimented service of commerce. But this is not to argue that consumers necessarily accept this role, nor to imply any (over)- determining role for hypertextual environments. Foucault himself recognises the immanent potential for resistance within any disciplining practice. It is however, to point to the ordered disordering that constitutes the new media environment, particularly in its commercial forms. Like Featherstone on consumer culture we can read interactive media as a site for the ‘controlled de-control’ of emotion. We can see it as a site where disorder is not necessarily the weapon of the revolutionary or the radical, but is also, and simultaneously, in the service of the order it ostensibly challenges. References Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. 2nd edition. Eds. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1965. Dancer, Helen. “Riding the Storm”. The Bulletin 1 Feb 2000: 64-5. Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991. Flamberg, Danny. “Understanding the Empowered E-Consumer”. iMarketing News 1.9 (19 Nov 1999): 32. Foucault, Michel. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. Trans. Robert Hurley. Originally published 1976. Gates, Bill, with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson. The Road Ahead. Revised edition. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Originally published 1995. Haas, Stephanie W., and Erika S. Grams. “Page and Link Classifications: Connecting Diverse Resources”. Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 1998: 99-107. 2 Oct 2002 http://portal.acm.org>. Haas, Stephanie W., and Erika S. Grams. “Readers, Authors and Page Structure: A Discussion of Four Questions Arising from a Content Analysis of Web Pages.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51.2 (2000): 181-92. Horton, Matthew. “The Internet and the Empowered Consumer: From the Scarcity of the Commodity to the Multiplicity of Subjectivities.” Media International Australia 91 (May 1999): 111-23. Jackson, Michele H. “Assessing the Structure of Communication on the World Wide Web”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3.1 (Jun 1997). 8 Aug 2002 http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/> Levine, Rick, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. South Yarra: Hardie Grant Books, 2000. Lynch, Adrian. “Revolution Gives Power to Consumers.” The Australian 30 May 2000: IT section 17. Miles, Adrian. “Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext.” Presented at Digital Arts & Culture conference, Bergen, Norway, 26-28 Nov 1998. 3 Oct 2002 http://cmc.uib.no/dac98/> Miles, Adrian. “Hypertext Structure as the Event of Connection.” Journal of Digital Information 2.3 (2002). Originally presented at ACM Hyperlink 2001 conference in Aarhus, Denmark. 5 Sep 2002 http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk>. Poster, Mark. The Second Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Sullivan, Andrew. “Dotcommo e-Volution”. The Australian 19 Jun 2000: 40. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: Essays on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Originally published 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Jarrett, Kylie. "Ordering Disorder: ninemsn, Hypertext and Databases." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/07-jarrett.php>. APA Style Jarrett, K. (Jan. 2005) "Ordering Disorder: ninemsn, Hypertext and Databases," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/07-jarrett.php>.

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“Oh, look at the size of that abalone!”“The beef looks really tasty!”“I really want to eat some!” I am standing in front of a glass case framing the entrance of a food court at Incheon International Airport, South Korea (henceforth Korea). I overhear these exclamations as I watch three teenage girls swarm around me to press their faces against the glass. The case is filled with Korean dishes served in the adjacent food court with brief descriptions and prices. My mouth waters as I lay my eyes on dishes such as bibimbap (rice mixed with meat, vegetables, and a spicy pepper paste called gochujang) and bulgogi (thinly sliced marinated beef) over the teenagers’ shoulders. But alas, we are all deceived. The dishes we have been salivating over are not edible. They are in fact fake, made from plastic. Why have inedible replicas become normalized to stand in for real food? What are the consequences of the proliferation of fake food models in the culinary landscape? And more importantly, why do plastic foods that fall outside the food cycle of production, preparation, consumption, and waste have authority over the way we produce, prepare, and consume food? This paper examines Korean plastic food models as tastemakers that standardize food production and consumption practices. Plastic food both literally and figuratively orders gustatory and aesthetic taste and serves as a tool for social distinction within Korean culinary culture. Firstly, I will explore theoretical approaches to conceptualizing plastic food models as tastemakers. Then, I will examine plastic food models within the political economy of taste in Korea since the 1980s. Finally, I will take a close look into three manufacturers’ techniques and approaches to understand how plastic foods are made. This analysis of the Korean plastic food model industry is based on a total of eight months of fieldwork research and semi-structured interviews conducted from December 2011 to January 2012 with three of the twelve manufacturers in Seoul, South Korea. To protect the identity of my informants, I refer to them as the Pioneer (37 years of experience), Exporter (20 years of experience), and Franchisor (10 years of experience). The Pioneer, a leading food model specialist, was one of the first Korean manufactures who produced Korean models for domestic consumption. His models can be found in major museums and airports across the country. The Exporter is famous for inventing techniques and also producing for a global market. Many of her Korean models are displayed in restaurants in North America and Europe. The Franchisor is one of the largest producers for mid-range chain restaurants and cafes around the nation. His models are up-to-date with current food trends and are showcased at popular franchises. These three professionals not only have gained public recognition as plastic food experts through public competitions, mass media coverage, and government commissioned work but also are known to produce high-quality replicas by hand. Therefore, these three were not randomly selected but chosen to consider various production approaches, capture generational difference, and trace the development of the industry since the late 1970s. Plastic Food Models as Objects of Inquiry Plastic foods are created explicitly for the purpose of not being eaten, however, they impart “taste” in two major ways. Firstly, food models regulate the perception of gustatory and aesthetic taste by communicating flavors, mouth-feel, and visual properties of food through precise replicas. Secondly, models influence social behavior by defining what is culturally and politically appropriate. Food models are made with a variety of materials found in nature (wood, metal, precious stones, and cloth), edible matter (sugar, marzipan, chocolate, and butter), and inedible substances (plastic and wax). Among these materials, plastic is ideal because it creates the most durable and vivid three-dimensional models. Plastic can be manipulated freely with the application of heat and requires very little maintenance over time. Plastic allows for more precise molding and coloring, producing replicas that look more real than the original. Some may argue that fake models are mere hyper-real objects since the real and the simulation are seamlessly melded together and reproductions hold more power over the way reality is experienced (Baudrillard). Post-modern scholars such as Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco argue that the production of an absolute fake to satisfy the need for the real results in the rise of simulacra, which are representations that never existed or no longer have an original. I, however, argue that plastic foods within the Korean context rely heavily on originals and reinforce the authority of the original. The analysis of plastic food models can be conceptualized within the broader theoretical framework of uneaten food. This category encompasses food that is elaborately prepared for ritual but discarded, and foods that are considered inedible in different cultural contexts due to religion, customs, politics, and social norms (Douglas; Gewertz and Errington; Harris et al.; Messer; Rath). Analyzing plastic food models as a part of the uneaten food economy opens up analysis of the interrelationship between the physical and conceptual realms of food production and consumption. Although plastic models fall outside the bounds of the conventional food cycle, they influence each stage of this cycle. Food models can act as tools to inform the appropriate aesthetic characteristics of food that guide production. The color and shape can indicate ripeness to inform farming and harvesting methods. Models also act as reference points that ultimately standardize recipes and cooking techniques during food preparation. In restaurants displaying plastic food, kitchen staff use the models to ensure consistency and uniform presentation of dishes. Models often facilitate food choice by offering information on portion size and ingredients. Finally, as food models become the gold standard in the production, preparation, and consumption of food, they also dictate when to discard the “incorrect” looking food. The primary power of plastic food models as tastemakers lies in their ability to seamlessly stand in for the original. Only fake models that are spitting images of the real have the ability to completely deceive the viewer. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin asserts that for reproduction to invoke the authentic, the presence of the original is necessary. However, an exact replication is impossible since the original is transformed in the process of reproduction. Benjamin argues, “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence and, in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced” (221). Similarly, plastic models of Korean food are removed from the realm of culinary tradition because they deviate from the conventional food cycle but reinforce culinary culture by regulating aesthetic values and food related practices. The notion of authenticity becomes central in determining the strength of plastic food models to order culinary culture by setting visual and social standards. Plastic food models step in to meet the beholder on various occasions, which in turn solidifies and even expands the power of the original. Despite their inability to impart taste and smell, plastic models remain persuasive in their ability to reinforce the materiality of the original food or dish. Plastic Food Models and the Political Economy of Taste in South Korea While plastic models are prevalent all around the world, the degree to which they hold authority in influencing production and consumption practices varies. For example, in many parts of the world, toys are made to resemble food for children to play with or even as joke objects to trick others. In America and Europe, plastic food models are mainly used as decorative elements in historical sites, to recreate ambiance in dining rooms, or as props at deli counters to convey freshness. Plastic food models in Korea go beyond these informative, decorative, and playful functions by visually ordering culinary properties and standardizing food choice. Food models were first made out of wax in Japan in the early 20th century. In 1932, Takizo Iwasaki founded Iwasaki Bei-I, arguably the first plastic food model company in the world. As the plastic food model industry flourished in Japan, some of the production was outsourced to Korea to decrease costs. In the late 1970s, a handful of Japanese-trained Korean manufacturers opened companies in Korea and began producing for the domestic market (Pioneer). Their businesses did not flourish until their products became identified as a tool to promote Korean cuisine to a global audience. Two major international sporting events triggered the growth of the plastic food model industry in Korea. The first was the 1988 Seoul Olympics and the second was the 2002 World Cup. Leading up to these two high-profile international events, the Korean government made major efforts to spruce up the country’s image for tourists and familiarize them with all aspects of Korean culture (Walraven). For example, the designation of kimchi (fermented pickled vegetable) as the national dish for the 1988 Olympics explicitly opened up an opportunity for plastic food models to represent the aesthetic values of Korean cuisine. In 1983, in preparation for showcasing approximately 200 varieties of kimchi to the international community, the government commissioned food experts and plastic model manufacturers to produce plastic replicas of each type. After these models were showcased in public they were used as displays for the Kimchi Field Museum and remain as part of the exhibit today. The government also designated approximately 100 tourist-friendly restaurants across the country, requiring them to display food models during the games. This marked the first large-scale production of Korean plastic food. The second wave of food models occurred in the early 2000s in response to the government’s renewed interest to facilitate international tourists’ navigation of Korean culinary culture during the 2002 World Cup. According to plastic food manufacturers, the government was less involved in regulating the use of plastic models this time, but offered subsidies to businesses to encourage their display for tourists (Exporter; Franchisor). After the World Cup, the plastic food industry continued to grow with demand from businesses, as models become staple objects in public places. Plastic models are now fully incorporated into, and even expected at, mid-range restaurants, fast food chains, and major transportation terminals. Businesses actively display plastic models to increase competition and communicate what they are selling at one glance for tourists and non-tourists alike (Exporter). These increased efforts to reassert Korean culinary culture in public spaces have normalized plastic models in everyday life. The persuasive and authoritative qualities of plastic foods regulate consumption practices in Korea. There are four major ways that plastic food models influence food choice and consumption behavior. First, plastic food models mediate between consumer expectation and reality by facilitating decision-making processes of what and how much to eat. Just by looking at the model, the consumer can experience the sensory qualities of eating the dish, allowing decisions to be made within 30 seconds (Franchisor). Second, plastic models guide what types of foods are suitable for social and cultural occasions. These include during Chuseok (the harvest festival) and Seollal (New Year), when high-end department stores display holiday gift sets containing plastic models of beef, abalone, and pine mushrooms. These sets align consumer expectation and experience by showing consumers the exact dimension and content of the gift. They also define the propriety of holiday gifts. These types of models therefore direct how food is bought, exchanged, and consumed during holidays and reassert a social code. Third, food models become educational tools to communicate health recommendations by solidifying types of dishes and portions appropriate for individuals based on health status, age, and gender. This helps disseminate a definition of a healthful diet and adequate nutrition to guide food choice and consumption. Fourth, plastic food models act as a boundary marker of what constitutes Korean food. Applying Mary Douglas’s notion of food as a boundary marker of ethnicity and identity, plastic food models effectively mark Koreanness to reinforce a certain set of ingredients and presentation as authentic. Plastic models create the ideal visual representation of Korean cuisine that becomes the golden standard, by which dishes are compared, judged, and reproduced as Korean. Plastic models are essentially objects that socially construct the perception of gustatory, aesthetic, and social taste. Plastic foods discipline and define taste by directing the gaze of the beholder, conjuring up social protocol or associations. Sociologist John Urry’s notion of the tourist gaze lends insight to considering the implication of the intentional placement and use of plastic models in the Korean urban landscape. Urry argues that people do not gaze by chance but are taught when, where, and how to gaze by clear markers, objects, events, and experiences. Therefore, plastic models construct the gaze on Korean food to teach consumers when, where, and how to experience and practice Korean culinary culture. The Production Process of Plastic Food Models Analysis of plastic models must also consider who gets to define and reproduce the aesthetic and social taste of food. This approach follows the call to examine the knowledge and power of technical and aesthetic experts responsible for producing and authorizing certain discourses as legitimate and representative of the nation (Boyer and Lomnitz; Krishenblatt-Gimblett; Smith). Since plastic model manufacturers are the main technical and aesthetic experts responsible for disseminating standards of taste through the production of fake food, it is necessary to examine their approaches and methods. High-quality food models begin with original food to be reproduced. For single food items such as an apple or a shrimp, liquid plastic is poured into pre-formed molds. In the case of food with multiple components such as a noodle soup, the actual food is first covered with liquid plastic to replicate its exact shape and then elements are added on top. Next, the mold goes through various heat and chemical treatments before the application of color. The factors that determine the preciseness of the model are the quality of the paint, the skill of the painter, and the producer’s interpretation of the original. In the case of duplicating a dish with multiple ingredients, individual elements are made separately according to the process described above and assembled and presented in the same dishware as that of the original. The producers’ studios look more like test kitchens than industrial factories. Making food models require techniques resembling conventional cooking procedures. The Pioneer, for instance, enrolled in Korean cooking classes when he realized that to produce convincing replicas he needed to understand how certain dishes are made. The main mission for plastic food producers is to visually whet the appetite by creating replicas that look tastier than the original. Since the notion of taste is highly subjective, the objective for plastic food producers is to translate the essence of the food using imagination and artistic expression to appeal to universal taste. A fake model is more than just the sum of its parts because some ingredients are highlighted to increase its approximation of the real. For example, the Pioneer highlights certain characteristics of the food that he believes to be central to the dish while minimizing or even neglecting other aspects. When making models of cabbage kimchi, he focuses on prominently depicting the outer layers of neatly stacked kimchi without emphasizing the radish, peppers, fermented shrimp paste, ginger, and garlic that are tucked between each layer of the cabbage. Although the models are three-dimensional, they only show the top or exterior of the dishes from the viewer’s perspective. Translating dishes that have complex flavor profile and ingredients are challenging and require painstaking editing. The Exporter notes that assembling a dish and putting the final touches on a plate are similar to what a food stylist does because her aim, too, is to make the viewer’s mouth water. To communicate crispy breaded shrimp, she dunks pre-molded plastic shrimp into a thin plastic paste and uses an air gun to make the “batter” swirl into crunchy flakes before coloring it to a perfect golden brown. Manufacturers need to realistically capture the natural properties of food to help consumers imagine the taste of a dish. For instance, the Franchisor confesses that one of the hardest dishes to make is honey bread (a popular dessert at Korean cafes), a thick cut of buttered white toast served piping hot with a scoop of ice cream on top. Convincingly portraying a scoop of ice cream slowly melting over the steaming bread is challenging because it requires the ice cream pooling on the top and running down the sides to look natural. Making artificial material look natural is impossible without meticulous skill and artistic expression. These manufacturers bring plastic models to life by injecting them with their interpretations of the food’s essence, which facilitates food practices by allowing the viewer to imagine and indulge in the taste of the real. Conclusion Deception runs deep in the Korean urban landscape, as plastic models are omnipresent but their fakeness is difficult to discern without conscious effort. While the government’s desire to introduce Korean cuisine to an international audience fueled the increase in displays of plastic food, the enthusiastic adoption of fake food as a tool to regulate and communicate food practices has enabled integration of fake models into everyday life. The plastic models’ authority over daily food practices is rooted in its ability to seamlessly stand in for the real to influence the production and consumption of food. Rather than taking plastic food models at face value, I argued that deeper analysis of the power and agency of manufacturers is necessary. It is through the manufacturers’ expertise and artistic vision that plastic models become tools to articulate notions of taste. As models produced by these manufacturers proliferate both locally and globally, their authority solidifies in defining and reinforcing social norms and taste of Korean culture. Therefore, the Pioneer, Exporter, and Franchisor, are the true tastemakers who translate the essence of food to guide food preference and practices. References Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Anne Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Penguin, 1968. Boyer, Dominic, and Claudio Lomnitz. “Intellectuals and Nationalism: Anthropological Engagements.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 105–20. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge, 1966. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Bruce & Company, 1983. Exporter, The. Personal Communication. Seoul, South Korea, 11 Jan. 2012. Franchisor, The. Personal Communication. Seoul, South Korea, 9 Jan. 2012. Gewertz, Deborah, and Frederick Errington. Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Han, Kyung-Koo. “Some Foods Are Good to Think: Kimchi and the Epitomization of National Character.” Korean Social Science Journal 27.1 (2000): 221–35. Harris, Marvin, Nirmal K. Bose, Morton Klass, Joan P. Mencher, Kalervo Oberg, Marvin K. Opler, Wayne Suttles, and Andrew P. Vayda. “The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle [and Comments and Replies].” Current Anthropology (1966): 51–66. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Theorizing Heritage.” Ethnomusicology 39.3 (1995): 367–80. Messer, Ellen. “Food Definitions and Boundaries.” Consuming the Inedible: Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice. Eds. Jeremy MacClancy, C. Jeya Henry and Helen Macbeth. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. 53–65. Pioneer, The. Personal Communication. Incheon, South Korea. 19 Dec. 2011. Rath, Eric. Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Smith, Laura Jane. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge, 2006. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage Publications, 2002.Walraven, Boudewijn. “Bardot Soup and Confucians’ Meat: Food and Korean Identity in Global Context”. Asian Food: The Global and Local. Eds. Katarzyna Cwiertka, and Boudewijn Walraven. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. 95–115.

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Introduction Nun habe ich Euch genug geschrieben, diesen Brief wenn sei [sic] lesen würden, dann würde ich den Genickschuß bekommen.Now I have written you enough, this letter if they would read it, I would get the neck shot. (M., all translations from German sources and quotations by the author) When the German soldier Otto M. wrote these lines from Russia to his family on 3 September 1943 during the Second World War, he knew that his war letter would not be subject to the National Socialist censorship apparatus. The letter contains, inter alia, detailed information about the course of the war on the front, troop locations, and warnings about the Nazi regime. M., as he wrote in the letter, smuggled it past the censorship via a “comrade”. As a German soldier, M. was a member of the Volksgemeinschaft—a National Socialist concept that drew a “racist and anti-Semitic borderline” (Wildt 48)—and was thus not socially excluded due to his status. Nevertheless, in the sentence quoted above, M. anticipates possible future consequences of his deviant actions, which would be carried out by “them”—potentially leading to his violent death. This article investigates how social and societal exclusion is brought forth by everyday media practices such as writing letters. After an introduction to the thesis under discussion, I will briefly outline the linguistic research on National Socialism that underlies the approach presented. In the second section, the key concepts of agency and dispositif applied in this work are discussed. This is followed by two sections in which infrastructural and interactional practices of exclusion are analysed. The article closes with some concluding remarks. During the Second World War, Wehrmacht soldiers and their relatives could not write and receive letters that were not potentially subject to controls. Therefore, the blunt openness with which M. anticipated the brutal sanctions of behavioural deviations in the correspondence quoted above was an exception in the everyday practice of war letter communication. This article will thus pursue the following thesis: private communication in war letters was subject to specific discourse conditions under National Socialism, and this brought forth excluding agency, which has two intertwined readings. Firstly, “excluding” is to be understood as an attribute of “agency” in the sense of an acting entity that either is included and potentially excludes or is excluded due to its ascribed agency. For example, German soldiers who actively participated in patriotic service were included in the Volksgemeinschaft. By contrast, Jews or Communists, to name but a few groups that, from the perspective of racist Nazi ideology, did not contribute to the community, were excluded from it. Such excluding agencies are based on specific practices of dispositional arrangement, which I refer to as infrastructural exclusion of agency. Secondly, excluding agency describes a linguistic practice that developed under National Socialism and has an equally stabilising effect on it. Excluding agency means that agents, and hence protagonists, are excluded by means of linguistic mitigation and omission. This second reading emphasises practices of linguistic construction of agency in interaction, which is described as interactional exclusion of agency. In either sense, exclusion is inextricably tied to the notion of agency, which is illustrated in this article by using data from field post letters of the Second World War. Social exclusion, along with its most extreme manifestations under fascism, is both legitimised and carried out predominantly through discursive practices. This includes for the public domain, on the one hand, executive language use such as in laws, decrees, orders, court hearings, and verdicts, and on the other hand, texts such as ideological writings, speeches, radio addresses, folk literature, etc. Linguistic research on National Socialism and its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion has long focussed on the power of a regulated public use of language that seemed to be shaped by a few protagonists, most notably Hitler and Goebbels (Schlosser; Scholl). More recent works, however, are increasingly devoted to the differentiation of heterogeneous communities of practice, which were primarily established through discursive practices and are manifested accordingly in texts of that time (Horan, Practice). Contrary to a justifiably criticised “exculpation of the speakers” (Sauer 975) by linguistic research, which focusses on language but not on situated, interactional language use, such a perspective is increasingly interested in “discourse in National Socialism, with a particular emphasis on language use in context as a shared, communicative phenomenon” (Horan, Letter 45). To understand the phenomenon of social and societal exclusion, which was constitutive for National Socialism, it is also necessary to analyse those discursive practices of inclusion and exclusion through which the speakers co-constitute everyday life. I will do this by relating the discourse conditions, based on Foucault’s concept of dispositif (Confessions 194), to the agency of the correspondents of war letters, i.e. field post letters. On Agency and Dispositif Agency and dispositif are key concepts for the analysis of social exclusion, because they can be applied to analyse the situated practices of exclusion both in terms of the different capacities for action of various agents, i.e. acting entities, and the inevitably asymmetrical arrangement within which actions are performed. Let me first, very briefly, outline some linguistic conceptions of agency. While Ahearn states that “agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (28) and thus conceives agency as a potential, Duranti understands agency “as the property of those entities (i) that have some degree of control over their own behavior, (ii) whose actions in the world affect other entities’ (and sometimes their own), and (iii) whose actions are the object of evaluation (e.g. in terms of their responsibility for a given outcome)” (453). Deppermann considers agency to be a means of social and situational positioning: “‘agency’ is to capture properties of the subject as agent, that is, its role with respect to the events in which it is involved” (429–30). This is done by linguistic attribution. Following Duranti, this analysis is based on the understanding that agency is established by the ascription of action to an entity which is thereby made or considered accountable for the action. This allows a practice-theoretical reference to Garfinkel’s concept of accountability and identifies agentive practices as “visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical purposes” (7). The writing of letters in wartime is one such reflexive discursive practice through which agents constitute social reality by means of ascribing agency. The concept of semantic roles (Fillmore; von Polenz), offers another, distinctly linguistic access to agency. By semantic roles, agency in situated interaction is established syntactically and semantically. Put simply, a distinction is made between an Agent, as someone who performs an action, and a Patient, as someone to whom an action occurs (von Polenz 170; semantic roles such as Agent, Patient, Experiencer, etc. are capitalised by convention). Using linguistic data from war letters, this concept is discussed in more detail below. In the following, “field post” is considered as dispositif, by which Foucault means a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus [dispositif]. The apparatus [dispositif] itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Foucault, Confessions 194) The English translation of the French “dispositif” as “apparatus” encourages an understanding of dispositif as a rather rigid structure. In contrast, the field post service of the Second World War will be used here to show how such dispositifs enable practices of exclusion or restrict access to practices of inclusion, while these characteristics themselves are in turn established by practices or, as Foucault calls them, procedures (Foucault, Discourse). An important and potentially enlightening notion related to dispositif is that of agencement, which in turn is borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari and was further developed in particular in actor-network theory (Çalışkan and Callon; Gherardi). What Çalışkan and Callon state about markets serves as a general description of agencement, which can be defined as an “arrangement of heterogeneous constituents that deploys the following: rules and conventions; technical devices; metrological systems; logistical infrastructures; texts, discourses and narratives …; technical and scientific knowledge (including social scientific methods), as well as the competencies and skills embodied in living beings” (3). This resembles Foucault’s concept of dispositif (Foucault, Confessions; see above), which “denotes a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive elements with neither an originary subject not [sic] a determinant causality” (Coté 384). Considered morphosemantically, agencement expresses an important interrelation: in that it is derived from both the French agencer (to construct; to arrange) and agence (agency; cf. Hardie and MacKenzie 58) and is concretised and nominalised by the suffix -ment, agencement elegantly integrates structure and action according to Giddens’s ‘duality of structure’. While this tying aspect certainly contributes to a better understanding of dispositional arrangements and should therefore be considered, agencement, as applied in actor-network theory, emphasises above all “the fact that agencies and arrangements are not separate” (Çalışkan and Callon) and is, moreover, often employed to ascribe agency to material objects, things, media, etc. This approach has proven to be very fruitful for analyses of socio-technical arrangements in actor-network theory and practice theory (Çalışkan and Callon; Gherardi). However, within the presented discourse-oriented study on letter writing and field post in National Socialism, a clear analytical differentiation between agency and arrangement, precisely in order to point out their interrelation, is essential to analyse practices of exclusion. This is why I prefer dispositif to agencement as the analytical concept here. Infrastructural Exclusion of Agency in Field Post Letters In the Second World War, writing letters between the “homeland” and the “frontline” was a fundamental everyday media practice with an estimated total of 30 to 40 billion letters in Germany (Kilian 97). War letters were known as field post (Feldpost), which was processed by the field post service. The dispositif “field post” was, in opposition to the traditional postal service, subject to specific conditions regarding charges, transport, and above all censorship. No transportation costs arose for field post letters up to a weight of 250 grams. Letters could only be sent by or to soldiers with a field post number that encoded the addresses of the field post offices. Only soldiers who were deployed outside the Reich’s borders received a field post number (Kilian 114). Thus, the soldiers were socially included as interactants due to their military status. The entire organisation of the field post was geared towards enabling members of the Volksgemeinschaft to communicatively shape, maintain, and continue their social relationships during the war (Bergerson et al.). Applying Foucault, the dispositif “field post” establishes selection and exclusion mechanisms in which “procedures of exclusion” (Discourse 52) become manifest, two of which are to be related to the field post: “exclusion from discourse” and “scarcity of speaking subjects” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73). Firstly, “procedures of exclusion ensure that only certain statements can be made in discourse” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73). This exclusion procedure ought to be implemented by controlling and, ultimately, censoring field post letters. Reviews were carried out by censorship offices (Feldpostprüfstellen), which were military units independent of the field post offices responsible for delivery. Censorship initially focussed on military information. However, “in the course of the war, censorship shifted from a control measure aimed at defence towards a political-ideological review” (Kilian 101). Critical remarks could be legally prosecuted and punished with prison, penitentiary, or death (Kilian 99). Hence, it is assumed that self-censorship played a role not only for public media, such as newspapers, but also for writing private letters (Dodd). As the introductory quotation from Otto M. shows, writers who spread undesirable information in their letters anticipated the harshest consequences. In this respect, randomised censorship—although only a very small proportion of the high volume of mail was actually opened by censors (Kilian)—established a permanent disposition of control that resulted in a potentially discourse-excluding social stratification of private communication. Secondly, the dispositif “field post” was inherently exclusive and excluding, as those who did not belong to the Volksgemeinschaft could not use the service and thus could not acquire agentive capacity. The “scarcity of speaking subjects” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73) was achieved by restricting participation in the field post system to members of the Volksgemeinschaft. Since agency is based on the most basic prerequisite, namely the ability to act linguistically at all, the mere possibility of exercising agency was infrastructurally restricted by the field post system. Excluding people from “agency-through-language” means excluding them from an “agency of an existential sort” (Duranti 455), which is described here, regarding the field post system, as infrastructural exclusion of agency. Interactional Exclusion of Agency in Field Post Letters In this section, I will elaborate how agency is brought forth interactionally through linguistic means on the basis of data from a field post corpus that was compiled in the project “Linguistic Social History 1933 to 1945” (Kämper). The aim of the project is an actor-based description of discursive practices and patterns at the time of National Socialism, which takes into account the fact that society in the years 1933 to 1945 consisted of heterogeneous communities of practice (Horan, Practice). Letter communication is considered to be an interaction that is characterised by mediated indexicality, accountability, reflexivity, sequentiality, and reciprocity (Dang-Anh) and is performed as situated social practice (Barton and Hall). The corpus of field letters examined here provides access to the everyday communication of members of the ‘integrated society’, i.e. those who were neither high-ranking members of the Nazi apparatus nor exposed to the repressions of the fascist dictatorship. The corpus consists of about 3,500 letters and about 2.5 million tokens. The data were obtained by digitising letter editions using OCR scans and in cooperation with the field post archive of the Museum for Communication Berlin (cf. sources below). We combine qualitative and quantitative methods, the latter providing heuristic indicators for in-depth hermeneutical analysis (Felder; Teubert). We apply corpus linguistic methods such as keyword, collocation and concordance analysis to the digitised full texts in order to analyse the data intersubjectively by means of corpus-based hermeneutic discourse analysis (Dang-Anh and Scholl). However, the selected excerpts of the corpus do not comprise larger data sets or complete sequences, but isolated fragments. Nevertheless, they illustrate the linguistic (non-)constitution of agency and thus distinctively exemplify exclusionary practices in field post letter writing. From a linguistic point of view, the exclusion of actors from action is achieved syntactically and semantically by deagentivisation (Bernárdez; von Polenz 186), as will be shown below. The following lines were written by Albert N. to his sister Johanna S. and are dated 25 June 1941, shortly after the beginning of the German Wehrmacht’s military campaign in Russia (Russlandfeldzug) a few days earlier. Vor den russ. Gefangenen bekommt man einen Ekel, d.h. viele Gefangene werden nicht gemacht.One gets disgusted by the Russian prisoners, i.e. many prisoners are not made. (N.) In the first part of the utterance, “mitigation of agency” (Duranti 465) is carried out using the impersonal pronoun “man” (“one”) which does not specify its referent. Instead, by means of deagentivisation, the scope of the utterance is generalised to an indefinite in‑group of speakers, whereby the use of the impersonal pronoun implies that the proposition is valid or generally accepted. Moreover, the use of “one” generalises the emotional expression “disgust”, thus suggesting that the aversive emotion is a self-evident affect experienced by everyone who can be subsumed under “one”. In particular, this includes the author, who is implicitly displayed as primarily perceiving the emotion in question. This reveals a fundamental practice of inclusion and exclusion, the separating distinction between “us”/“we” and “them”/“the others” (Wodak). In terms of semantic roles, the inclusive and generalised formal Experiencer “one” is opposed to the Causative “Russian prisoner” in an exclusionary manner, implicitly indicating the prisoners as the cause of disgust. The subsequent utterance is introduced by “i.e.”, which marks the causal link between the two phrases. The wording “many prisoners are not made” strongly suggests that it refers to homicides, i.e. executions carried out at the beginning of the military campaign in Russia by German troops (Reddemann 222). The depiction of a quasi-universal disgust in the first part establishes a “negative characterization of the out-group” (Wodak 33) which, in the expressed causal relation with the second phrase, seems to morally legitimise or at least somehow justify the implied killings. The passive form entirely omits an acting entity. Here, deagentivisation obscures the agency of the perpetrators. However, this is not the only line between acting and non-acting entities the author draws. The omission of an agent, even the impersonal “one”, in the second part, and the fact that there is no talk of self-experienceable emotions, but war crimes are hinted at in a passive sentence, suggest the exclusion of oneself as a joint agent of the indicated actions. As further data from the corpus indicate, war crimes are usually not ascribed to the writer or his own unit as the agents but are usually attributed to “others” or not at all. Was Du von Juden schreibst, ist uns schon länger bekannt. Sie werden im Osten angesiedelt.What you write about Jews is already known to us for some time. They are being settled in the East. (G.) In this excerpt from a letter, which Ernst G. wrote to his wife on 22 February 1942, knowledge about the situation of the Jews in the war zone is discussed. The passage appears quite isolated with its cotext in the letter revolving around quite different, trivial, everyday topics. Apparently, G. refers in his utterance to an earlier letter from his wife, which has not been preserved and is therefore not part of the corpus. “Jews” are those about whom the two agents, the soldier and his wife, write, whereas “us” refers to the soldiers at the front. In the second part, agency is again obscured by deagentivisation. While “they” anaphorically refers to “Jews” as Patients, the agents of their alleged resettlement remain unnamed in this “agent-less passive construction” (Duranti 466). Jews are depicted here as objects being handled—without any agency of their own. The persecution of the Jews and the executions carried out on the Russian front (Reddemann 222), including those of Jews, are euphemistically played down here as “settlements”. “Trivialization” and “denial” are two common discursive practices of exclusion (Wodak 134) and emerge here, as interactional exclusion of agency, in one of their most severe manifestations. Conclusion Social and societal exclusion, as has been shown, are predominantly legitimised as well as constituted, maintained, and perpetuated by discursive practices. Field post letters can be analysed both in terms of the infrastructure—which is itself constituted by infrastructuring practices and is thus not rigid but dynamic—that underlies excluding letter-writing practices in times of war, and the extent to which linguistic excluding practices are performed in the letters. It has been shown that agency, which is established by the ascription of action to an entity, is a central concept for the analysis of practices of exclusion. While I propose the division into infrastructural and interactional exclusion of agency, it must be pointed out that this can only be an analytical distinction and both bundles of practices, that of infrastructuring and that of interacting, are intertwined and are to be thought of in relation to each other. Bringing together the two concepts of agency and dispositif, despite the fact that they are of quite different origins, allows an analysis of exclusionary practices, which I hope does justice to the relation of interaction and infrastructure. By definition, exclusion occurs against the background of an asymmetrical arrangement within which exclusionary practices are carried out. Thus, dispositif is understood as an arranged but flexible condition, wherein agency, as a discursively ascribed or infrastructurally arranged property, unfolds. Social and societal exclusion, which were constitutive for National Socialism, were accomplished not only in public media but also in field post letters. Writing letters was a fundamental everyday media practice and the field post was a central social medium during the National Socialist era. However, exclusion occurred on different infrastructural and interactional levels. As shown, it was possible to be excluded by agency, which means exclusion by societal status and role. People could linguistically perform an excluding agency by constituting a division between “us” and “them”. Also, specific discourses were excluded by the potential control and censorship of communication by the authorities, and those who did not suppress agency, for example by self-censoring, feared prosecution. Moreover, the purely linguistic practices of exclusion not only constituted or legitimised the occasionally fatal demarcations drawn under National Socialism, but also concealed and trivialised them. As discussed, it was the perpetrators whose agency was excluded in war letters, which led to a mitigation of their actions. In addition, social actors were depreciated and ostracised through deagentivisation, mitigation and omission of agency. In extreme cases of social exclusion, linguistic deagentivisation even prepared or resulted in the revocation of the right to exist of entire social groups. The German soldier Otto M. feared fatal punishment because he did not communicatively act according to the social stratification of the then regime towards a Volksgemeinschaft in a field post letter. This demonstrates how thin the line is between inclusion and exclusion in a fascist dictatorship. I hope to have shown that the notion of excluding agency can provide an approach to identifying and analytically understanding such inclusion and exclusion practices in everyday interactions in media as dispositional arrangements. However, more research needs to be done on the vast yet unresearched sources of everyday communication in the National Socialist era, in particular by applying digital means to discourse analysis (Dang-Anh and Scholl). Sources G., Ernst. “Field post letter: Ernst to his wife Irene. 22 Feb. 1942.” Sei tausendmal gegrüßt: Briefwechsel Irene und Ernst Guicking 1937–1945. Ed. Jürgen Kleindienst. Berlin: JKL Publikationen, 2001. Reihe Zeitgut Spezial 1. M., Otto. 3 Sep. 1943. 3.2002.7163. Museum for Communication, Berlin. Otto M. to his family. 16 Sep. 2020 <https://briefsammlung.de/feldpost-zweiter-weltkrieg/brief.html?action=detail&what=letter&id=1175>. 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IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, thus extending the life of embodied assemblies. In the mothers’ protest video, women carrying babies in body-wraps and strollers walk across the intersection leading to the Parliament Palace, while police direct traffic and ensure their safety (“Civil Disobedience”). This was an unusual scene for many reasons. Walkers met at the entrance to the Parliament Palace, an area most emblematic of the former regime. Built by Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu and inspired by Kim Il-sung’s North Korean architecture, the current Parliament building and its surrounding plaza remain, in the words of Renata Salecl, “one of the most traumatic remnants of the communist regime” (90). The construction is the second largest administrative building in the world, after the Pentagon, a size matching the ambitions of the dictator. It bears witness to the personal and cultural sacrifices the construction and its surrounded plaza required: the displacement of some 40,000 people from old neighbourhood Uranus, the death of reportedly thousands of workers, and the flattening of churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools (Parliament Palace). This arbitrary construction carved out of the old city remains a symbol of an authoritarian relation with the nation. As Salecl puts it, Ceaușescu’s project tried to realise the utopia of a new communist “centre” and created an artificial space as removed from the rest of the city as the leader himself was from the needs of his people. Twenty-nine years after the fall of communism, the plaza of the Parliament Palace remains as suspended from the life of the city as it was during the 1980s. The trees lining the boulevard have grown slightly and bike lanes are painted over decaying stones. Still, only few people walk by the neo-classical apartment buildings now discoloured and stained by weather and time. Salecl remarks on the panoptic experience of the Parliament Palace: “observed from the avenue, [the palace] appears to have no entrance; there are only numerous windows, which give the impression of an omnipresent gaze” (95). The building embodies, for Salecl, the logic of surveillance of the communist regime, which “created the impression of omnipresence” through a secret police that rallied members among regular citizens and inspired fear by striking randomly (95).Against this geography steeped in collective memories of fear and exposure to the gaze of the state, women turn their children’s bodies and their own into performances of resistance that draw on the rhetorical force of communist gender politics. Both motherhood and childhood were heavily regulated roles under Ceaușescu’s nationalist-socialist politics of forced birth, despite the official idealisation of both. Producing children for the nationalist-communist state was women’s mandated expression of citizenship. Declaring the foetus “the socialist property of the whole society”, in 1966 Ceaușescu criminalised abortion for women of reproductive ages who had fewer than four children, and, starting 1985, less than five children (Ceaușescu qtd. in Verdery). What followed was “a national tragedy”: illegal abortions became the leading cause of death for fertile women, children were abandoned into inhumane conditions in the infamous orphanages, and mothers experienced the everyday drama of caring for families in an economy of shortages (Kligman 364). The communist politicisation of natality during communist Romania exemplifies one of the worst manifestations of the political as biopolitical. The current maternal bodies and children’s bodies circulating in the communist-iconic plaza articulate past and present for Romanians, redeploying a traumatic collective memory to challenge increasingly authoritarian ambitions of the governing Social Democratic Party. The images of caring mothers walking in protest with their babies furthers the claims that anti-corruption publics have made in other venues: that the government, in their indifference and corruption, is driving millions of people, usually young, out of the country, in a braindrain of unprecedented proportions (Ursu; Deletant; #vavedemdinSibiu). In their determination to walk during the gruelling temperatures of mid-July, in their youth and their babies’ youth, the mothers’ walk performs the contrast between their generation of engaged, persistent, and caring citizens and the docile abused subject of a past indexed by the Ceaușescu-era architecture. In addition to performing a new caring imagined community (Anderson), women’s silent, resolute walk on the crosswalk turns a lifeless geography, heavy with the architectural traces of authoritarian history, into a public space that holds democratic protest. By inhabiting the cultural role of mothers, protestors disarmed state authorities: instead of the militarised gendarmerie usually policing protestors the Victoriei Square, only traffic police were called for the mothers’ protest. The police choreographed cars and people, as protestors walked across the intersection leading to the Parliament. Drivers, usually aggressive and insouciant, now moved in concert with the protestors. The mothers’ walk, immediately modeled by people in other cities (Cluj-Napoca), reconfigured a car-dominated geography and an unreliable, driver-friendly police, into a civic space that is struggling to facilitate the citizens’ peaceful disobedience. The walkers’ assembly thus begins to constitute the civic character of the plaza, collecting “the space itself […] the pavement and […] the architecture [to produce] the public character of that material environment” (Butler 71). It demonstrates the possibility of a new imagined community of caring and persistent citizens, one significantly different from the cynical, disconnected, and survivalist subjects that the nomenklatura politicians, nested in the Panoptic Parliament nearby, would prefer.Persisting in the Victoriei Square In addition to strenuous physical walking to reclaim city spaces, such as the mothers’ walking, the anti-corruption public also practices walking and gathering in less taxing environments. The Victoriei Square is such a place, a central plaza that connects major boulevards with large sidewalks, functional bike lanes, and old trees. The square is the architectural meeting point of old and new, where communist apartments meet late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, in a privileged neighbourhood of villas, museums, and foreign consulates. One of these 1930s constructions is the Government building, hosting the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Demonstrators gathered here during the major protests of 2015 and 2017, and have walked, stood, and wandered in the square almost weekly since (“Past Events”). On 24 June 2018, I arrive in the Victoriei Square to participate in the protest announced on social media by Corruption Kills. There is room to move, to pause, and rest. In some pockets, people assemble to pay attention to impromptu speakers who come onto a small platform to share their ideas. Occasionally someone starts chanting “We See You!” and “Down with Corruption!” and almost everyone joins the chant. A few young people circulate petitions. But there is little exultation in the group as a whole, shared mostly among those taking up the stage or waving flags. Throughout the square, groups of familiars stop to chat. Couples and families walk their bikes, strolling slowly through the crowds, seemingly heading to or coming from the nearby park on a summer evening. Small kids play together, drawing with chalk on the pavement, or greeting dogs while parents greet each other. Older children race one another, picking up on the sense of freedom and de-centred but still purposeful engagement. The openness of the space allows one to meander and observe all these groups, performing the function of the Ancient agora: making visible the strangers who are part of the polis. The overwhelming feeling is one of solidarity. This comes partly from the possibilities of collective agency and the feeling of comfortably taking up space and having your embodiment respected, otherwise hard to come by in other spaces of the city. Everyday walking in the streets of Romanian cities is usually an exercise in hypervigilant physical prowess and self-preserving numbness. You keep your eyes on the ground to not stumble on broken pavement. You watch ahead for unmarked construction work. You live with other people’s sweat on the hot buses. You hop among cars parked on sidewalks and listen keenly for when others may zoom by. In one of the last post-socialist states to join the European Union, living with generalised poverty means walking in cities where your senses must be dulled to manage the heat, the dust, the smells, and the waiting, irresponsive to beauty and to amiable sociality. The euphemistic vocabulary of neoliberalism may describe everyday walking through individualistic terms such as “grit” or “resilience.” And while people are called to effort, creativity, and endurance not needed in more functional states, what one experiences is the gradual diminution of one’s lives under a political regime where illiberalism keeps a citizen-serving democracy at bay. By contrast, the Victoriei Square holds bodies whose comfort in each other’s presence allow us to imagine a political community where survivalism, or what Lauren Berlant calls “lateral agency”, are no longer the norm. In “showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still […] an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics” is enacted (Butler 18). In arriving to Victoriei Square repeatedly, Romanians demonstrate that there is room to breathe more easily, to engage with civility, and to trust the strangers in their country. They assert that they are not disposable, even if a neoliberal corrupt post-communist regime would have them otherwise.ConclusionBecoming a public, as Michael Warner proposes, is an ongoing process of attention to an issue, through the circulation of discourse and self-organisation with strangers. For the anti-corruption public of Romania’s past years, such ongoing work is accompanied by persistent, civil, embodied collective assembly, in an articulation of claims, bodies, and spaces that promotes a material agency that reconfigures the city and the imagined Romanian community into a more democratic one. The Romanian citizenship of the streets is particularly significant in the current geopolitical and ideological moment. In the region, increasing authoritarianism meets the alienating logics of neoliberalism, both trying to reduce citizens to disposable, self-reliant, and disconnected market actors. Populist autocrats—Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Peace and Justice Party in Poland, and recently E.U.-penalized Victor Orban, in Hungary—are dismantling the system of checks and balances, and posing threats to a European Union already challenged by refugee debates and Donald Trump’s unreliable alliance against authoritarianism. In such a moment, the Romanian anti-corruption public performs within the geographies of their city solidarity and commitment to democracy, demonstrating an alternative to the submissive and disconnected subjects preferred by authoritarianism and neoliberalism.Author's NoteIn addition to the anonymous reviewers, the author would like to thank Mary Tuominen and Jesse Schlotterbeck for their helpful comments on this essay.ReferencesAnderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. 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Budapest: Central European UP. Tabako, Tomasz. “Irony as a Pro-Democracy Trope: Europe’s Last Comic Revolution.” Controversia 5.2 (2007): 23-53. Ursu, Ramona. Va Vedem (We See You). Bucharest: Humanitas, 2018.“#vavedemdinSibiu. Aproape 700 de sibieni, cu bagajele în fața sediului PSD.” Turnul Sfatului, 17 Dec. 2017. 10 Sep. 2018 <http://www.turnulsfatului.ro/2017/12/17/foto-protestele-vavedemdinsibiu-aproape-700-de-sibieni-cu-bagajele-fata-sediului-psd/>.Verdery, Katherine. “From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe.” East European Politics and Societies 8.2 (1994): 225–255. Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics (Abbreviated Version).” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88.4 (2002): 413–25. Zaharia, Diana. “Poverty in Statistics.” Profit.ro. 8 Aug. 2016. 1 Sep. 2018 <https://www.profit.ro/stiri/economie/saracia-din-statistici-aproape-jumatate-dintre-salariatii-romani-raman-cu-cel-mult-1-000-lei-in-mana-dupa-taxare-15540558>.

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It seems nowadays that any aspect of collecting and displaying tangible or intangible material culture is labeled as curating: shopkeepers curate their wares; DJs curate their musical selections; magazine editors curate media stories; and hipsters curate their coffee tables. Given the increasing ubiquity and complexity of 21st-century notions of curatorship, the current issue of MC Journal, ‘curate’, provides an excellent opportunity to consider some of the changes that have occurred in professional practice since the emergence of the ‘digital turn’. There is no doubt that the internet and interactive media have transformed the way we live our daily lives—and for many cultural commentators it only makes sense that they should also transform our cultural experiences. In this paper, I want to examine the issue of curatorial practice in the postdigital age, looking some of the ways that curating has changed over the last twenty years—and some of the ways it has not. The term postdigital comes from the work of Ross Parry, and is used to references the ‘tipping point’ where the use of digital technologies became normative practice in museums (24). Overall, I contend that although new technologies have substantially facilitated the way that curators do their jobs, core business and values have not changed as the result of the digital turn. While, major paradigm shifts have occurred in the field of professional curatorship over the last twenty years, these shifts have been issue-driven rather than a result of new technologies. Everyone’s a Curator In a 2009 article in the New York Times, journalist Alex Williams commented on the growing trend in American consumer culture of labeling oneself a curator. “The word ‘curate’,’’ he observed, “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting” (1). Williams dated the origins of the popular adoption of the term ‘curating’ to a decade earlier; noting the strong association between the uptake and the rise of the internet (2). This association is not surprising. The development of increasingly interactive software such as Web 2.0 has led to a rapid rise in new technologies aimed at connecting people and information in ways that were previously unimaginable. In particular the internet has become a space in which people can collect, store and most importantly share vast quantities of information. This information is often about objects. According to sociologist Jyri Engeström, the most successful social network sites on the internet (such as Pinterest, Flickr, Houzz etc), use discrete objects, rather than educational content or interpersonal relationships, as the basis for social interaction. So objects become the node for inter-personal communication. In these and other sites, internet users can find, collate and display multiple images of objects on the same page, which can in turn be connected at the press of a button to other related sources of information in the form of text, commentary or more images. These sites are often seen as the opportunity to virtually curate mini-exhibitions, as well as to create mood boards or sites of virtual consumption. The idea of curating as selective aesthetic editing is also popular in online markets places such as Etsy where numerous sellers offer ‘curated’ selections from home wares, to prints, to (my personal favorite) a curated selection of cat toys. In all of these exercises there is an emphasis on the idea of connoisseurship. As part of his article on the new breed of ‘curators’, for example, Alex Williams interviewed Tom Kalendrain, the Fashion Director of a leading American department store, which had engaged in a collaboration with Scott Schuman of the fashion blog, the Sartorialist. According to Kalendrain the store had asked Schuman to ‘curate’ a collection of clothes for them to sell. He justified calling Schuman a curator by explaining: “It was precisely his eye that made the store want to work with him; it was about the right shade of blue, about the cut, about the width of a lapel” (cited in Williams 2). The interview reveals much about current popular notions of what it means to be a curator. The central emphasis of Kalendrain’s distinction was on connoisseurship: exerting a privileged authoritative voice based on intimate knowledge of the subject matter and the ability to discern the very best examples from a plethora of choices. Ironically, in terms of contemporary museum practice, this is a model of curating that museums have consciously been trying to move away from for at least the last three decades. We are now witnessing an interesting disconnect in which the extra-museum community (represented in particular by a postdigital generation of cultural bloggers, commentators and entrepreneurs) are re-vivifying an archaic model of curating, based on object-centric connoisseurship, just at the point where professional curators had thought they had successfully moved on. From Being about Something to Being for Somebody The rejection of the object-expert model of curating has been so persuasive that it has transformed the way museums conduct core business across all sectors of the institution. Over the last thirty to forty years museums have witnessed a major pedagogical shift in how curators approach their work and how museums conceptualise their core values. These paradigmatic and pedagogical shifts were best characterised by the museologist Stephen Weil in his seminal article “From being about something to being for somebody.” Weil, writing in the late 1990s, noted that museums had turned away from traditional models in which individual curators (by way of scholarship and connoisseurship) dictated how the rest of the world (the audience) apprehended and understood significant objects of art, science and history—towards an audience centered approach where curators worked collaboratively with a variety of interested communities to create a pluralist forum for social change. In museum parlance these changes are referred to under the general rubric of the ‘new museology’: a paradigm shift, which had its origins in the 1970s; its gestation in the 1980s; and began to substantially manifest by the 1990s. Although no longer ‘new’, these shifts continue to influence museum practices in the 2000s. In her article, “Curatorship as Social Practice’” museologist Christina Kreps outlined some of the developments over recent decades that have challenged the object-centric model. According to Kreps, the ‘new museology’ was a paradigm shift that emerged from a widespread dissatisfaction with conventional interpretations of the museum and its functions and sought to re-orient itself away from strongly method and technique driven object-focused approaches. “The ‘new museum’ was to be people-centered, action-oriented, and devoted to social change and development” (315). An integral contributor to the developing new museology was the subjection of the western museum in the 1980s and ‘90s to representational critique from academics and activists. Such a critique entailed, in the words of Sharon Macdonald, questioning and drawing attention to “how meanings come to be inscribed and by whom, and how some come to be regarded as ‘right’ or taken as given” (3). Macdonald notes that postcolonial and feminist academics were especially engaged in this critique and the growing “identity politics” of the era. A growing engagement with the concept that museological /curatorial work is what Kreps (2003b) calls a ‘social process’, a recognition that; “people’s relationships to objects are primarily social and cultural ones” (154). This shift has particularly impacted on the practice of museum curatorship. By way of illustration we can compare two scholarly definitions of what constitutes a curator; one written in 1984 and one from 2001. The Manual of Curatorship, written in 1994 by Gary Edson and David Dean define a curator as: “a staff member or consultant who is as specialist in a particular field on study and who provides information, does research and oversees the maintenance, use, and enhancement of collections” (290). Cash Cash writing in 2001 defines curatorship instead as “a social practice predicated on the principle of a fixed relation between material objects and the human environment” (140). The shift has been towards increased self-reflexivity and a focus on greater plurality–acknowledging the needs of their diverse audiences and community stakeholders. As part of this internal reflection the role of curator has shifted from sole authority to cultural mediator—from connoisseur to community facilitator as a conduit for greater community-based conversation and audience engagement resulting in new interpretations of what museums are, and what their purpose is. This shift—away from objects and towards audiences—has been so great that it has led some scholars to question the need for museums to have standing collections at all. Do Museums Need Objects? In his provocatively titled work Do Museums Still Need Objects? Historian Steven Conn observes that many contemporary museums are turning away from the authority of the object and towards mass entertainment (1). Conn notes that there has been an increasing retreat from object-based research in the fields of art; science and ethnography; that less object-based research seems to be occurring in museums and fewer objects are being put on display (2). The success of science centers with no standing collections, the reduction in the number of objects put on display in modern museums (23); the increasing phalanx of ‘starchitect’ designed museums where the building is more important than the objects in it (11), and the increase of virtual museums and collections online, all seems to indicate that conventional museum objects have had their day (1-2). Or have they? At the same time that all of the above is occurring, ongoing research suggests that in the digital age, more than ever, people are seeking the authenticity of the real. For example, a 2008 survey of 5,000 visitors to living history sites in the USA, found that those surveyed expressed a strong desire to commune with historically authentic objects: respondents felt that their lives had become so crazy, so complicated, so unreal that they were seeking something real and authentic in their lives by visiting these museums. (Wilkening and Donnis 1) A subsequent research survey aimed specifically at young audiences (in their early twenties) reported that: seeing stuff online only made them want to see the real objects in person even more, [and that] they felt that museums were inherently authentic, largely because they have authentic objects that are unique and wonderful. (Wilkening 2) Adding to the question ‘do museums need objects?’, Rainey Tisdale argues that in the current digital age we need real museum objects more than ever. “Many museum professionals,” she reports “have come to believe that the increase in digital versions of objects actually enhances the value of in-person encounters with tangible, real things” (20). Museums still need objects. Indeed, in any kind of corporate planning, one of the first thing business managers look for in a company is what is unique about it. What can it provide that the competition can’t? Despite the popularity of all sorts of info-tainments, the one thing that museums have (and other institutions don’t) is significant collections. Collections are a museum’s niche resource – in business speak they are the asset that gives them the advantage over their competitors. Despite the increasing importance of technology in delivering information, including collections online, there is still overwhelming evidence to suggest that we should not be too quick to dismiss the traditional preserve of museums – the numinous object. And in fact, this is precisely the final argument that Steven Conn reaches in his above-mentioned publication. Curating in the Postdigital Age While it is reassuring (but not particularly surprising) that generations Y and Z can still differentiate between virtual and real objects, this doesn’t mean that museum curators can bury their heads in the collection room hoping that the digital age will simply go away. The reality is that while digitally savvy audiences continue to feel the need to see and commune with authentic materially-present objects, the ways in which they access information about these objects (prior to, during, and after a museum visit) has changed substantially due to technological advances. In turn, the ways in which curators research and present these objects – and stories about them – has also changed. So what are some of the changes that have occurred in museum operations and visitor behavior due to technological advances over the last twenty years? The most obvious technological advances over the last twenty years have actually been in data management. Since the 1990s a number of specialist data management systems have been developed for use in the museum sector. In theory at least, a curator can now access the entire collections of an institution without leaving their desk. Moreover, the same database that tells the curator how many objects the institution holds from the Torres Strait Islands, can also tell her what they look like (through high quality images); which objects were exhibited in past exhibitions; what their prior labels were; what in-house research has been conducted on them; what the conservation requirements are; where they are stored; and who to contact for copyright clearance for display—to name just a few functions. In addition a curator can get on the internet to search the online collection databases from other museums to find what objects they have from the Torres Strait Islands. Thus, while our curator is at this point conducting the same type of exhibition research that she would have done twenty years ago, the ease in which she can access information is substantially greater. The major difference of course is that today, rather than in the past, the curator would be collaborating with members of the original source community to undertake this project. Despite the rise of the internet, this type of liaison still usually occurs face to face. The development of accessible digital databases through the Internet and capacity to download images and information at a rapid rate has also changed the way non-museum staff can access collections. Audiences can now visit museum websites through which they can easily access information about current and past exhibitions, public programs, and online collections. In many cases visitors can also contribute to general discussion forums and collections provenance data through various means such as ‘tagging’; commenting on blogs; message boards; and virtual ‘talk back’ walls. Again, however, this represents a change in how visitors access museums but not a fundamental shift in what they can access. In the past, museum visitors were still encouraged to access and comment upon the collections; it’s just that doing so took a lot more time and effort. The rise of interactivity and the internet—in particular through Web 2.0—has led many commentators to call for a radical change in the ways museums operate. Museum analyst Lynda Kelly (2009) has commented on the issue that: the demands of the ‘information age’ have raised new questions for museums. It has been argued that museums need to move from being suppliers of information to providing usable knowledge and tools for visitors to explore their own ideas and reach their own conclusions because of increasing access to technologies, such as the internet. Gordon Freedman for example argues that internet technologies such as computers, the World Wide Web, mobile phones and email “… have put the power of communication, information gathering, and analysis in the hands of the individuals of the world” (299). Freedman argued that museums need to “evolve into a new kind of beast” (300) in order to keep up with the changes opening up to the possibility of audiences becoming mediators of information and knowledge. Although we often hear about the possibilities of new technologies in opening up the possibilities of multiple authors for exhibitions, I have yet to hear of an example of this successfully taking place. This doesn’t mean, however, that it will never happen. At present most museums seem to be merely dipping their toes in the waters. A recent example from the Art Gallery of South Australia illustrates this point. In 2013, the Gallery mounted an exhibition that was, in theory at least, curated by the public. Labeled as “the ultimate people’s choice exhibition” the project was hosted in conjunction with ABC Radio Adelaide. The public was encouraged to go online to the gallery website and select from a range of artworks in different categories by voting for their favorites. The ‘winning’ works were to form the basis of the exhibition. While the media spin on the exhibition gave the illusion of a mass curated show, in reality very little actual control was given over to the audience-curators. The public was presented a range of artworks, which had already been pre-selected from the standing collections; the themes for the exhibition had also already been determined as they informed the 120 artworks that were offered up for voting. Thus, in the end the pre-selection of objects and themes, as well as the timing and execution of the exhibition remained entirely in the hand of the professional curators. Another recent innovation did not attempt to harness public authorship, but rather enhanced individual visitor connections to museum collections by harnessing new GPS technologies. The Streetmuseum was a free app program created by the Museum of London to bring geotagged historical street views to hand held or portable mobile devices. The program allowed user to undertake a self-guided tour of London. After programing in their route, users could then point their device at various significant sites along the way. Looking through their viewfinder they would see a 3D historic photograph overlayed on the live site – allowing user not only to see what the area looked like in the past but also to capture an image of the overlay. While many of the available tagging apps simply allow for the opportunity of adding more white noise, allowing viewers to add commentary, pics, links to a particular geo tagged site but with no particular focus, the Streetmuseum had a well-defined purpose to encourage their audience to get out and explore London; to share their archival photograph collection with a broader audience; and to teach people more about London’s unique history. A Second Golden Age? A few years ago the Steven Conn suggested that museums are experiencing an international ‘golden age’ with more museums being built and visited and talked about than ever before (1). In the United States, where Conn is based, there are more than 17,500 accredited museums, and more than two million people visit some sort of museum per day, averaging around 865 million museum visits per year (2). However, at the same time that museums are proliferating, the traditional areas of academic research and theory that feed into museums such as history, cultural studies, anthropology and art history are experiencing a period of intense self reflexivity. Conn writes: At the turn of the twenty-first century, more people are going to more museums than at any time in the past, and simultaneously more scholars, critics, and others are writing and talking about museums. The two phenomena are most certainly related but it does not seem to be a happy relationship. Even as museums enjoy more and more success…many who write about them express varying degrees of foreboding. (1) There is no doubt that the internet and increasingly interactive media has transformed the way we live our daily lives—it only makes sense that it should also transform our cultural experiences. At the same time Museums need to learn to ride the wave without getting dumped into it. The best new media acts as a bridge—connecting people to places and ideas—allowing them to learn more about museum objects and historical spaces, value-adding to museum visits rather than replacing them altogether. As museologust Elaine Gurian, has recently concluded, the core business of museums seems unchanged thus far by the adoption of internet based technology: “the museum field generally, its curators, and those academic departments focused on training curators remain at the core philosophically unchanged despite their new websites and shiny new technological reference centres” (97). Virtual life has not replaced real life and online collections and exhibitions have not replaced real life visitations. Visitors want access to credible information about museum objects and museum exhibitions, they are not looking for Wiki-Museums. Or if they are are, they are looking to the Internet community to provide that service rather than the employees of state and federally funded museums. Both provide legitimate services, but they don’t necessarily need to provide the same service. In the same vein, extra-museum ‘curating’ of object and ideas through social media sites such as Pinterest, Flikr, Instagram and Tumblr provide a valuable source of inspiration and a highly enjoyable form of virtual consumption. But the popular uptake of the term ‘curating’ remains as easily separable from professional practice as the prior uptake of the terms ‘doctor’ and ‘architect’. An individual who doctors an image, or is the architect of their destiny, is still not going to operate on a patient nor construct a building. While major ontological shifts have occurred within museum curatorship over the last thirty years, these changes have resulted from wider social shifts, not directly from technology. This is not to say that technology will not change the museum’s ‘way of being’ in my professional lifetime—it’s just to say it hasn’t happened yet. References Cash Cash, Phillip. “Medicine Bundles: An Indigenous Approach.” Ed. T. Bray. The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans and Repatriation. New York and London: Garland Publishing (2001): 139-145. Conn, Steven. Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Edson, Gary, and David Dean. The Handbook for Museums. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Engeström, Jyri. “Why Some Social Network Services Work and Others Don’t — Or: The Case for Object-Centered Sociality.” Zengestrom Apr. 2005. 17 June 2015 ‹http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why-some-social-network-services-work-and-others-dont-or-the-case-for-object-centered-sociality.html›. Freedman, Gordon. “The Changing Nature of Museums”. Curator 43.4 (2000): 295-306. Gurian, Elaine Heumann. “Curator: From Soloist to Impresario.” Eds. Fiona Cameron and Lynda Kelly. Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 95-111. Kelly, Lynda. “Museum Authority.” Blog 12 Nov. 2009. 25 June 2015 ‹http://australianmuseum.net.au/blogpost/museullaneous/museum-authority›. Kreps, Christina. “Curatorship as Social Practice.” Curator: The Museum Journal 46.3 (2003): 311-323. ———, Christina. Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Macdonald, Sharon. “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction.” Ed. Sharon MacDonald. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011. Parry, Ross. “The End of the Beginning: Normativity in the Postdigital Museum.” Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1 (2013): 24-39. Tisdale, Rainey. “Do History Museums Still Need Objects?” History News (2011): 19-24. 18 June 2015 ‹http://aaslhcommunity.org/historynews/files/2011/08/RaineySmr11Links.pdf›. Suchy, Serene. Leading with Passion: Change Management in the Twenty-First Century Museum. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2004. Weil, Stephen E. “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum.” Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 128.3 (1999): 229–258. Wilkening, Susie. “Community Engagement and Objects—Mutually Exclusive?” Museum Audience Insight 27 July 2009. 14 June 2015 ‹http://reachadvisors.typepad.com/museum_audience_insight/2009/07/community-engagement-and-objects-mutually-exclusive.html›. ———, and Erica Donnis. “Authenticity? It Means Everything.” History News (2008) 63:4. Williams, Alex. “On the Tip of Creative Tongues.” New York Times 4 Oct. 2009. 4 June 2015 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/fashion/04curate.html›.

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Abstract:

IntroductionContemporary theorisations of family often present change in marriage as an icon of deinstitutionalisation (Cherlin). This idea, widely discussed in sociology, has been deepened and extended by Giddens, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Beck-Gernsheim and Bauman, considered to be the main architects of the individualisation, detraditionalisation and risk theses (Brannen and Nielsen). According to these authors, contemporary family is an ephemeral, fluid, and fragilereality, and weakening as a traditional institution. At the same time, and partly as a result of the changes to this institution, there has been a rise in the individual’s capacity to reflect on and choose their own life, to the point that living a life of their own becomes the individual’s defining injunction. Based on an in-depth and detailed analysis of a number of young Portuguese people’s accounts of their entry into conjugality, this paper seeks to unveil some of the hidden constraints which persist despite this claim to individualisation. Whilst individuals incorporate a personalised narrative in their construction of that “special day” – stressing the performance of the wedding they wanted, in the way they chose – these data show the continuing influence of the family on individual decisions (e.g. to marry or not to marry, and how to marry). These empirical findings thus contribute to the recent body of literature complexifying the individualisation and detraditionalisation theses (Smart and Shipman, Gross, Smart, Eldén).Using Sociology to Unveil Individualisation’s Hidden ConstraintsThis discussion of contemporary marriages is driven by empirical data from a sociological qualitative study based on episodic interviews (Flick, An Introduction to Qualitative Research and The Episodic Interview). This research (Costa) was developed in 2009 and aimed at an in-depth understanding of family practices (Morgan, Risk and Family Practices, Family Connections and Rethinking Family Practices), specifically family rituals (Bossard and Boll, Imber-Black and Roberts, Wolin and Bennett). Using a theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss), accounts were collected from 30 middle-class individuals, both men and women, living in an urban medium-sized city (Évora) in the south of Portugal (southern Europe), and with at least one small child between the age of 3 and 14 years old. Confidentiality and anonymity were maintained, and all names used in this paper are pseudonyms. For the purposes of this paper, I focus only on the women’s accounts. On the one hand, particularly for them, socialisation and media culture helped to consolidate a social representation around the wedding (Gillis, Marriages of the Mind); on the other hand, their more exhaustive descriptions of the wedding day allow better for examining the hidden constraints to individualisation. Data were coded and analysed through a thematic and structural content analysis (Bardin). The analysis of emerging themes and issues regarding the diverse ways of entering into conjugality was primarily assisted by qualitative software (NVivo, QSR International) and then presented in the form of contextualised narratives. Using a sociological perspective, the themes presented below illustrate the major conclusions of this study. Big Decisions: To Marry or Not to Marry? How to Marry?At the core of the decision of whether “to marry or not to marry?” and “how to marry?,” one can find multiple and complex arguments, which go beyond simplistic justifications based exclusively on the couple’s decision (Chesser; Maillochnon and Castrén). Women in particular display an awareness of the ways in which their decisions regarding marriage are crossed by the will, desires or preferences of the parents or in-laws. This was the case of Maria dos Anjos, married at the age of 26:It was a choice of the two of us [to marry]. Not an imposition. I didn’t care whether we were married by church or not… and there were times when I even put forward the possibility of a simple civil marriage. However, my parents really liked that I got married by the church. I'm not sure if this is due to tradition, if… and... they talked about it… and I also thought it was beautiful... it was a beautiful party... the dress, all that fantasy... and I really loved marrying in the church... so it became a strong possibility when we began to think about it [to get marry]… The argument that two people might marry because of or also to please the parents or in-laws explains, at least partially, a certain pressure that the fiancées feel before marriage to marry “in a certain way.” Filipa, who dated for ten years, lived the wedding day like “the realisation of a childhood’s dream.” The satisfaction she obtained was shared with her parents and in-laws:To marry in the church, with the wedding dress, and everything else... My mother in-law is a religious person too, right? So we felt that we both like it, the two of us, my mother, my mother-in-law, they would also like it, so we decided to marry in the church. To do the parents’ will is to meet the expectations around a “beautiful” wedding, but sometimes also to fulfil the marriage that the parents did not have. Lurdes is an only daughter, married at the age of 29. She argues that “marriage should be primarily significant for those who actually marry, not the parents or in-laws”. Yet, that was not her case: For us, maybe it was not so important; the paper signed, the ceremony in the church… maybe the two of us made it for our parents. It doesn’t mean that we didn’t have fun [...] and I don’t mean by this that it was a sacrifice, or a hardship […] My mother had no more daughters, and had a great will to marry her only daughter in the church. My mother was not married by the church, but was only married by civil registry. She never managed to convince my dad to get married by the church. And perhaps it was a bit... to project on me what she had not done! Despite her having the will to do but did not achieve it. And maybe I made her wish come true; I realise that she had that desire, a great desire that her daughter would marry in the church. For me, it was not a problem. So, we finally did agree and married in the church. The family of origin thus clearly has a great influence over some of the big decisions associated with marriage, such as whether to get married at all, and whether to involve the church in the process.Small decisions: It Is All about Details! The intrusion of the family of origin is also felt on the apparently more individual decisions as the choice of the dress or several other details concerning the organisation of the ceremony and the party (Chesser, Leeds-Hurwitz). The wedding dress is a good example of how women in particular perceive a certain pressure for conformity and subjection to buy it or choose it “in a certain way.” Silvia, who married at age 23, remembers: I married with a traditional wedding dress, even though I did not want to. I took a long veil, yet I did not want it... because at the time... I wanted to take a short dress... my mum thought I should not... because my mother did not marry in a wedding dress, did not marry in the church, she was already pregnant at the time and so on [downgrade of the tone] so she made pressure so that I was dressed properly.Precisely in order to run away from these impositions, some women admit having bought the dress alone, almost secretly. Maria dos Anjos, for example, chose and bought the wedding dress alone so that she did not have to give in to pressure from anyone: I really enjoyed it! I took a wedding dress... I was the one who chose it; I went to buy it myself, with my own money. I said to myself ‘the wedding dress, I will choose it; I will not be constrained by... I will not take my godmother and then think’... oh... I knew that if I did it, I would have to submit a little to her likes and dislikes… no! So I went to choose the dress alone. The girl who was in the shop was an acquaintance of mine, I tried a lot of them, and when I tried that one, I said to myself ‘this is it!’ and so it was the one!The position of the spouses in the sibling group also has an effect on numerous decisions that fiancées must make in the lead-up to the wedding. Raquel, who felt this pressure before marriage, attributed it to a large extent to the fact that her husband is an only child: Pressure in the sense that João [her husband]... he is an only child, right? So… his parents were always very concerned with certain things. And... everybody... even little things that had no importance, they wanted to decide on that! […] There are a lot of things that have to be decided, a lot of detail and… what I really think is that it is a really unique day, and it's all very important and all that but... but... then each one gives his/her opinion... And ‘I want this,’ ‘I want that,’ ‘I want the other’… it's too much; it's a lot of pressure... to manage... on one side, on the other side… because to try not to hurt vulnerabilities ends up being... crazy. Completely! Those fifteen days before... I think they are... they are a little crazy!Seemingly unimportant details (such as the fact that the mother did not marry in a wedding dress) end up becoming major arguments behind the suggestions or impositions made by both parents and in-laws in relation to decisions surrounding their children’s weddings.(Un)important Decisions: The Guest List The parents of the couple are often heavily involved in the planning of the wedding partly because, although the day is officially about the bride and groom, it is also the way that the parents share this important milestone with their family and friends (Pleck, Kalmijn, Maillochnon and Castrén). Interviewees say it is “easy” to decide on the guest list, since, at first glance arguments behind the most significant family relatives and friends to be present on the wedding day have to do with proximity, relationality and pleasure or happiness in sharing the moment. Nevertheless, it can be a hard task for couples to implement the criteria of proximity in the selection of guests as initially planned. In cases where the family is larger and there are economic constraints, it is common for fiancées to feel some unpleasantness from those relatives who would like to have been invited and were not. In other cases, parents, closer to the extended family, are the ones who produce this tension. On the one hand, they feel the need to justify to some relatives the choices of their adult children who did not include them in the guest list; on the other hand, they are forced to accept the fact that that decision lies with the couple. When planning the marriage of Dora, her mother at one point said something like “[…] ‘but my aunt invited us to her wedding and now...’” Dora understood the suspension of the sentence as a subtle pressure from her mother, although, for her, the question was indeed a very simple one: I give a lot of importance to the people who are with me on a day-to-day basis and that really are with me in good and bad times. [...] It happened. It was easy. For me, it was [laughs]. To my way of thinking it was. It cost my parents. However, not to me [laughs]. It cost me nothing! When the family is larger – but when there are no economic constraints which limit the number of guests – it is more common that weddings are bigger. In these circ*mstances, it is also more common to have a certain meddling from the families of origin encouraging couples to include the guests of the parents. Teresa admits this is precisely what happened with her: It was not so difficult because we were not also so limited. […] We left everything to the satisfaction of all. […] there were many people who were distant relatives, whom I was not close to. It didn’t really matter to me whether those people were present or not. It had more to do with the will of my parents. And usually we were also invited to those people’s weddings, so maybe it was also because of that… In some other cases there is a kind of agreement between parents and adult children, which allows both to invite “whoever they want”. This is the case of Marina, who had 194 guests “on her side,” against around 70 invited by her husband: I invited more people than him. Why? Well... I could count on my parents, right? And what my parents told me was: ‘you invite whoever you want!’. So, I invited my friends, and some other people I was not as close to, but who my parents wanted me to invite, right? […] but ok, they made a point of inviting them, and since they did not impose any financial limits, instead, they said to me ‘invite whoever you want to’, and we invited... For me, it was a ‘deal.’ I was indifferent about it [laughs]. Marina admits that she made a “deal” with her parents. By letting them pay the costs, she gave tacit consent that they could invite those who they wanted, even if it was the case those guests “didn’t relate to [her] at all.” At the wedding of Raquel, the fact that “there is family that [only her] parents were keen on inviting” was one of the main points of contention between her parents and the couple. The indignation was greater since it was “your [their own, not the parent’s] wedding” and they were being pressed to include people who they “hardly knew,” and with whom they “had no connection”: There were people who came who I did not know even who they were! Never seen them anywhere... but ok, my parents were keen on inviting some people, because they know them and all that... and then... it went into widening, extending and then... it ended up with more than one hundred guests […] we wanted it to be more intimate, more... with closer people… but it was not! The engaged couple thus recognises the importance of the parents’ guests. As one of the interviewees points out, the question is not so much the imposition of the will of the parents, rather the recognition of the importance of certain guests because “they are important to the parents.” Thus, the importance of these guests is not directly measured by the couple, but indirectly by being part of the importance that parents give them.Counter-Decisions: Narratives from the Inside Out Joana, a first daughter, “felt in her skin” the “punishment” for not having succumbed to the pressure she felt over her decision to marry. She told us she had her teenage dreams; however, as she grew older she identified herself less and less with the wedding ceremony. Moreover, with the death of her grandmother, who was especially meaningful to her, “it no longer made sense” to arrange that kind of ceremony since it would always be “incomplete” without her presence. Her boyfriend also did not urge that they marry, instead preferring to live in a de facto union. Joana felt strongly the pressure to take on a role that her parents and in-laws wanted: on the one hand, because she was “a girl, and the oldest daughter;” on the other hand, because her mother-in-law insisted since she had not saw her other daughter to get marry in church, as she was only civilly married. In fact, Joana could marry in church because she had been educated in the Catholic religion and met all the formal requirements to perform a religious marriage: I was the person who was prepared to move forward with this. And I did not! I'm not sorry. I don’t regret it at all! Although not regretted, Joana felt “very deeply” the gap between the expectations of her parents and the direction that she decided to give to her life when she told her parents she did not wanted to marry. She had the same boyfriend since adolescence, whom she moved in with on a New Year's Day at the age of 27. On that evening she organised a small party in the house they had rented and furnished, and stayed there for good. The mother “never forgave her.” The following year, when her sister got married, Joana “had the punishment” of, in the eyes of the mother, “not having done the right thing”: one thing I would have loved to have was a nightshirt [old piece of clothing, handmade] of my grandmother [...] But my mother kept the nightshirt and gave it to my sister on the day she married! My sister also loved my grandmother..., but she didn’t have the same emotional bond that I had with her! So, I got hurt. Honestly, I got! And the day of my sister's wedding for me it was full of surprises... This episode is particularly revealing of how Joana experienced the disappointment that caused to her parents for not having married: I did not have the faintest idea that she [her mother] was going to do that... Yet she kept it [the nightshirt]! [...] She kept it, and then she gave it to my sister! [...] It was my grandmother’s! And then I said, ‘but I was the first to get married!’ And it was I who had a closer relationship with my grandmother. I found it very unfair! [...] Joana sees this wedding gift as “a prize”: It was... she [her sister] was awarded because ‘you did the right thing,’ ‘you got married,’ ‘you had done it with all the pomp ... so take this [the nightshirt], that was of your grandmother!’ The day of her sister's wedding would still hold another surprise for Joana, that one coming from her father. She remembers always seeing at home a bottle of aged whiskey that her father “kept for the first daughter who gets to marry.” I did not get married, right? And... and it was sad to see that day and get the bottle open, the bottle that was proudly kept untouched for many years until the first daughter to marry... Whilst most women admit to have given in to pressure from parents and in-laws, Joana’s example demonstrates another side – emotionally painful – of those who did not conform to marry or to marry in a certain way.Conclusion Based on empirical research on marriages as a family ritual, I have argued that behind representations and discourses of a wedding “of our own,” quite often individuals grant the importance, of, and sometimes they are even pressured by, their families of origin (e.g. parents and in-laws). At the crossroad of tradition and modernity, this pressure is pervasive from the most important to the most apparently trivial decisions or details concerning the mise en scène of the ritual elements chosen to give a symbolic meaning to the ceremony and party (Chesser, Leeds-Hurwitz).Empirical findings and data discussion thus confirm and reinforce the high symbolic value that, despite all the changes weddings, still assume in contemporary society (Berger and Kellner, Segalen and Gillis, A World of their Own Making, Our Virtual Families and Marriages of the Mind). The power and influence of the size and density of the families of origin is not a part of history left behind by the processes of individualization and detraditionalization; rather, families continue to play a central role in structuring the actual options behind the anticipation, planning, and organisation of the wedding. 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