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This paper aims to uncover the assumptions and concerns driving public debates about Google Glass and police body cameras. In doing so, it shows how debates about wearable cameras reflect broader cultural tensions surrounding race and privilege.

The paper employs a form of critical discourse analysis to discover patterns in journalistic coverage of these two technologies.

Public response to Glass has been overwhelmingly negative, while response to body cameras has been positive. Analysis indicates that this contrasting response reflects a consistent public concern about the dynamics of power and privilege in the digital economy. While this concern is well-founded, news coverage indicates that technologists, policy makers and citizens each hold assumptions about the inevitability and unvarnished beneficence of technology.

Since this qualitative approach seeks to discern broad emergent patterns, it does not employ a quantifiable and reproducible coding schema.

The article concludes by arguing that grassroots action, appropriate regulatory policy and revitalized systems of professional journalism are indispensable as the struggle for social justice unfolds in the emerging digital economy.

These debates represent a struggle over what and how people see. Yet public discourse often glosses over the disadvantages of technological change, which impacts who is able to amass social power.

This comparative approach yields unique conceptual insight into debates about technologies that augment ways of seeing.

Did the expansion of democratic institutions play a role in determining central government spending behavior in the 19th and 20th centuries? The link between democracy and increased central government spending is well established for the post-Second World War period, but has never been explored during the first “wave of democracy” and its subsequent reversal, that is 1870–1938. The main contribution of this paper is the compilation of a dataset covering 24 countries over this period to begin to address this question. Utilizing various descriptive techniques, including panel data regressions, we explore correlations between central government spending and the institutional characteristics of regimes. We find that the data are consistent with the hypothesis that democracies have a broader need for legitimization than autocracies as various measures of democracy are associated with higher central government spending. Our results indicate that the extension of franchise had a slight positive impact on central government spending levels, as did a few of the other democracy variables. We also find that early liberal democracies spent less and monarchies more than other regimes; debt increases spending; and participation in the Gold Standard reduced government spending substantially.

The 50th anniversary of Fox's Beyond Contract and Man Mismanagement coincides with another vital contribution to the sociology of work from 1974: Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. This article analyses these two scholars' complementary approaches to job design and the extent to which Fox's ideas influenced subsequent labour process thought.

The article's methodological approach is a historiographical reading of Fox and Braverman's thought in the context of their times and later scholarship.

The article demonstrates that despite some noteworthy overlap with Braverman concerning scientific management, Fox's insights were marginal to later iterations of labour process analysis. It delves into the reasons for this relative neglect, providing an understanding of the dynamics at play.

This paper's value lies in its combined industrial relations and labour process historiography. It offers a fresh perspective on Alan Fox's relationship to the latter field of study.

Library and Information Science Abstracts have successfully completed a pilot project, with SilverPlatter Information Limited, that has resulted in a one‐year file of Lisa for 1984 being recorded onto CD‐ROM (Compact Disk — Read Only Memory). Plans are now well under way for providing the complete Lisa database on CD‐ROM commercially by mid‐1986.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the practice of casting celebrity performers in London West End theatres. The paper uses the literature on celebrity to explore the impact that casting a celebrity has on the London theatre audience.

The pervasiveness of celebrity culture forms the background and starting point for this research. In the first phase, theatre managers, directors and producers were interviewed to explore their views on the practice of celebrity casting. In the second phase, an audience survey was conducted. The approach taken is exploratory and is intended to illuminate the conditions under which a successful celebrity-focused strategy can be constructed.

A distinction between fame and celebrity was drawn by both theatre professionals and audiences, with celebrity status being seen as something that is created by media exposure and being in the public eye. This is in contrast to fame, which is earned by being famous for something, or some achievement. Theatre audiences are more likely to be attracted by celebrities who have theatrical expertise and not by someone known simply through film, television or the all-pervasive gossip columns. Celebrities with a background in theatre and film were seen to strongly draw audiences to the theatre, as opposed to those with a background in reality TV shows, search-for-a-star shows or for being half of a famous couple.

The paper is focused on the theatre and makes an original contribution to the current discussion of the power wielded by celebrities. It is the first empirical research on this aspect of the theatre business. Its contribution lies in understanding audience members’ interpretation and understanding of celebrity to ascertain the extent to which they perceive celebrities as credible to perform theatre. This is based on a differentiation between their mediated fame and expertise. It is helpful and useful information for producers when deciding whether or not to cast a celebrity and to which audiences that the celebrity might appeal.

WE endorse with much pleasure the welcome that has greeted the election of the new President of the Library Association. When the Association, in what seems now a somewhat remote past, determined to place the executive side of its business in the hands of a permanent Secretary, the question of the continuance of an Honorary Secretary was given careful consideration. It was resolved that he should continue and that his main function would be to represent the President at all times when the latter was not available. He had other duties, even if they were not clearly expressed, including a general overall initiative in committee and Council matters. The successive holders of the office since, Stanley Jast, Dr. E. A. Savage and Lionel R. McColvin proved so clearly the wisdom of that decision that the Association made each of them President; they have been heads of the profession in a real sense, inspiring and actively creative. The last of them, Mr. McColvin, is known everywhere librarians meet, here and overseas, and only the newest library recruits are unfamiliar with his reports, essays and many books, or have not heard of his home and other county surveys and his fearless, suggestive appraisals of what he has seen and thought. In a rather difficult time the Library Association is fortunate to have so statesmanlike a librarian to lead it.