"Selling America to the World"? The Rise and Fall of an International Film Distributor in its Largest Foreign Market: United Artists in Britain, 1927-1947

Few industries are as widely associated with the spread of Americanvalues, ideas, and products as the film industry. U.S. firmscertainly dominated the global market for feature films, butdid they do so simply by "selling America to the world" or wasthere more to be gained by catering to the diverse tastes ofinternational audiences? This article examines the operationsof a leading U.S. film distributor in its largest foreign market.United Artists, like other U.S. firms, was forced to offer aminimum proportion of British films for distribution in theUnited Kingdom in the 1930s and 1940s. Was this requirementa burden, or were the firm’s British films actually atthe heart of its success in the U.K. market?     

Because you're worth it? Determinants of Vice Chancellor pay in the UK

Wage inequality has increased across most developed nations; this has been manifested in a wide range of organisations and sectors, with implications for well‐being and sustainability; within UK universities, this has become increasingly visible. There is increasing pressure on universities to deliver social and economic impact in an increasingly market‐driven and metric‐driven environment. In the UK context, increasing financial pressure has led to both an escalation of student fees and constrained wage growth for faculty. In contrast, most Vice Chancellors have secured substantive pay packages raising concerns that regulatory failures may be contributing to the rise. We show that Vice Chancellors use their internal power within organisations to extract a disproportionate amount of the value created by the institution. However, we encountered much diversity according to the quality of governance, highlighting the extent to which not only contextual but also internal dynamics drive wage inequality.     

British working‐class household composition,labour supply,and commercial leisure participation during the 1930s

The early twentieth century constituted the heyday of the ‘breadwinner–homemaker’ household, characterized by a high degree of intra‐household functional specialization between paid and domestic work according to age, gender, and marital status. This article examines the links between formal workforce participation and access to resources for individualized discretionary spending in British working‐class households during the late 1930s, via an analysis of household leisure expenditures. Leisure spending is particularly salient to intra‐household resource allocation, as it constitutes one of the most highly prioritized areas of individualized expenditure, especially for young, single people. Using a database compiled from surviving returns to the Ministry of Labour's national 1937/8 working‐class expenditure survey, we examine leisure participation rates for over 600 households, using a detailed set of commercial leisure activities together with other relevant variables. We find that the employment status of family members other than the male breadwinner was a key factor influencing their access to commercial leisure. Our analysis thus supports the view that the breadwinner–homemaker household was characterized by strong power imbalances that concentrated resources—especially for individualized expenditures—in the hands of those family members who engaged in paid labour.