New Perspectives on the Role of Cultural Intermediaries in Social Inclusion in the UK

Based on interviews with arts administrators responsible for addressing targeted groups labelled “socially excluded,” this paper highlights new understandings of the term “cultural intermediary” (Featherstone 1991; Bourdieu 2000) within art galleries and art centres. It considers the unique role of such figures in crossing the exclusion/inclusion boundary within the arts and developing more personal approaches to marketing activities in their institutions through relationship building. While it is acknowledged here that such workers find themselves in a privileged position in being able to shape questions of taste and particular consumerist dispositions to understanding the art world, little, if not no, effort has been made to understand this process. As such, there remains a void between the cultural policy‐oriented conception of social inclusion, which implies a version of repairing the “flawed consumer” (Bauman 2005), and the way in which such policy is played out on the ground.

Kit positive cells in the guinea pig bladder.

PURPOSE: We describe the presence of interstitial cells of Cajal (ICC) throughout the wall of the guinea pig bladder. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Bladders obtained from male guinea pigs were prepared for immunohistochemical investigations using various primary antibodies, including the specific ICC marker c-kit (Gibco BRL, Grand Island, New York). Enzymatically dispersed cells with a branched morphology were identified as ICC using anti-c-kit. They were loaded with fluo-4acetoxymethyl (Molecular Probes, Eugene, Oregon) and studied using confocal laser scanning microscopy. RESULTS: Anti-c-kit labeling demonstrated that ICC were oriented in parallel with the smooth muscle bundles that run diagonally throughout the bladder. Double labeling with anti-smooth muscle myosin (Sigma Chemical Co., St. Louis, Missouri) revealed that ICC were located on the boundary of smooth muscle bundles. When anti-c-kit was used in combination with the general neuronal antibody protein gene product 9.5 (Ultraclone Ltd., Isle of Wight, United Kingdom) or anti-neuronal nitric oxide synthase, it was noted that there was a close association between nerves and ICC. Enzymatic dissociation of cells from tissue pieces yielded a heterogeneous population of cells containing typical spindle-shaped smooth muscle cells and branched cells resembling ICC from other preparations. The latter could be identified immunohistochemically as ICC using anti-c-kit, whereas the majority of spindle-shaped cells were not Kit positive. Branched cells responded to the application of carbachol by firing Ca2+ waves and they were often spontaneously active. CONCLUSIONS: ICC are located on the boundary of smooth muscle bundles in the guinea pig bladder. They fire Ca2+ waves in response to cholinergic stimulation and can be spontaneously active, suggesting that they could act as pacemakers or intermediaries in the transmission of nerve signals to smooth muscle cells.

Cell-collagen interactions: the use of peptide Toolkits to investigate collagen-receptor interactions

Fibrillar collagens provide the most fundamental platform in the vertebrate organism for the attachment of cells and matrix molecules. we have identified specific sites in collagens to which cells can attach, either directly or through protein intermediaries. Using Toolkits of triple-helical peptides, each peptide comprising 27 residues of collagen primary sequence and overlapping with its neighbours by nine amino acids, we have mapped the binding of receptors and other proteins on to collagens II or III. Integrin alpha 2 beta 1 binds to several GXX'GER motifs within the collagens, the affinities of which differ sufficiently to control cell adhesion and migration independently of the cellular regulation of the integrin. The platelet receptor, Gp (glycoprotein) VI binds well to GPO (where 0 is hydroxyproline)-containing model peptides, but to very few Toolkit peptides, suggesting that sequence in addition to GPO triplets is important in defining GpVI binding. The Toolkits have been applied to the plasma protein vWF (von Willebrand factor), which binds to only a single sequence, identified by truncation and amino acid substitution within Toolkit peptides, as GXRGQOGVMGFO in collagens II and III. Intriguingly, the receptor tyrosine kinase, DDR2 (discoidin domain receptor 2) recognizes three sites in collagen II, including its vWF-binding site, although the amino acids that support the interaction differ slightly within this motif. Furthermore, the secreted protein BM-40 (basement membrane protein 40) also binds well to this same region. Thus the availability of extracellular collagen-binding proteins may be important in regulating and facilitating direct collagen-receptor interaction.

New Financial Elites, or Financial Dualism in Historical perspective? An Extended Reply to Folkman, Froud, Johal and Williams

This paper challenges the recent suggestion that a new financial elite has evolved which is able to capture substantial profit shares for itself. Specifically, it questions the assumption that new groups of financial intermediaries have increased in significance primarily because there is evidence that various types of financial speculators have played a similarly extensive role at several junctures of economic development. The paper then develops the alternative hypothesis that, rather than being a recent development, the rise of these financial intermediaries is a cyclical phenomenon which is linked to specific regimes of capital accumulation. The hypothesis is underpinned by historical data from the US National Income and Product Accounts for the period from 1930 to 2000, which suggest that the activities of `mainstream' financial intermediaries have been accompanied by the frequently countercyclical activities of a `speculative' sector of security and commodity brokers. Based on the combination of this qualitative and quantitative evidence, the paper concludes that the rise of a speculative financial sector is a potentially recurrent phenomenon which is linked to periods of economic restructuring and turmoil.

Developing dance music from the song tradition

This paper takes an historical look at the development of now popular Irish dance tunes which originated in or passed through the song tradition. It discusses the role of what I have termed ‘intermediaries’ which bridge the gap between the song and dance music traditions, allowing repertoire to flow between these two tributary streams of the modern tradition. I will discuss the under-investigated practice of lilting, which I will argue has acted as an important intermediary between the dance and song traditions, particularly in the eighteenth century. before going on to discuss some examples of songs and dance tunes which have a more complex relationship.

The rise of the digital citizen-stakeholder: rebalancing multistakeholder governance

The principle feature in the evolution of the internet has been its ever growing reach to include old and young, rich and poor. The internet’s ever encroaching presence has transported it from our desktop to our pocket and into our glasses. This is illustrated in the Internet Society Questionnaire on Multistakeholder Governance, which found the main factors affecting change in the Internet governance landscape were more users online from more countries and the influence of the internet over daily life. The omnipresence of the internet is self- perpetuating; its usefulness grows with every new user and every new piece of data uploaded. The advent of social media and the creation of a virtual presence for each of us, even when we are not physically present or ‘logged on’, means we are fast approaching the point where we are all connected, to everyone else, all the time. We have moved far beyond the point where governments can claim to represent our views which evolve constantly rather than being measured in electoral cycles.
The shift, which has seen citizens as creators of content rather than consumers of it, has undermined the centralist view of democracy and created an environment of wiki democracy or crowd sourced democracy. This is at the heart of what is generally known as Web 2.0, and widely considered to be a positive, democratising force. However, we argue, there are worrying elements here too. Government does not always deliver on the promise of the networked society as it involves citizens and others in the process of government. Also a number of key internet companies have emerged as powerful intermediaries harnessing the efforts of the many, and re- using and re-selling the products and data of content providers in the Web 2.0 environment. A discourse about openness and transparency has been offered as a democratising rationale but much of this masks an uneven relationship where the value of online activity flows not to the creators of content but to those who own the channels of communication and the metadata that they produce.
In this context the state is just one stakeholder in the mix of influencers and opinion formers impacting on our behaviours, and indeed our ideas of what is public. The question of what it means to create or own something, and how all these new relationships to be ordered and governed are subject to fundamental change. While government can often appear slow, unwieldy and even irrelevant in much of this context, there remains a need for some sort of political control to deal with the challenges that technology creates but cannot by itself control. In order for the internet to continue to evolve successfully both technically and socially it is critical that the multistakeholder nature of internet governance be understood and acknowledged, and perhaps to an extent, re- balanced. Stakeholders can no longer be classified in the broad headings of government, private sector and civil society, and their roles seen as some sort of benign and open co-production. Each user of the internet has a stake in its efficacy and each by their presence and participation is contributing to the experience, positive or negative of other users as well as to the commercial success or otherwise of various online service providers. However stakeholders have neither an equal role nor an equal share. The unequal relationship between the providers of content and those who simple package up and transmit that content - while harvesting the valuable data thus produced - needs to be addressed. Arguably this suggests a role for government that involves it moving beyond simply celebrating and facilitating the on- going technological revolution. This paper reviews the shifting landscape of stakeholders and their contribution to the efficacy of the internet. It will look to critically evaluate the primacy of the individual as the key stakeholder and their supposed developing empowerment within the ever growing sea of data. It also looks at the role of individuals in wider governance roles. Governments in a number of jurisdictions have sought to engage, consult or empower citizens through technology but in general these attempts have had little appeal. Citizens have been too busy engaging, consulting and empowering each other to pay much attention to what their governments are up to. George Orwell’s view of the future has not come to pass; in fact the internet has insured the opposite scenario has come to pass. There is no big brother but we are all looking over each other’s shoulder all the time, while at the same time a number of big corporations are capturing and selling all this collective endeavour back to us.

Critical Nodes In Directed Networks

Critical nodes—or “middlemen”—have an essential place in both social and economic networks when considering the flow of information and trade. This paper extends the concept of critical nodes to directed networks and in doing so identify strong and weak middlemen.
Node contestability is introduced as a form of competition in networks; a duality between uncontested intermediaries and middlemen is established. The brokerage power of middlemen is formally expressed and a general algorithm is constructed to measure the brokerage power of each node from the networks adjacency matrix. Augmentations of the brokerage power measure are discussed to encapsulate relevant centrality measures. Furthermore, we extend these notions and provide measures of the competitiveness of a network.
We use these concepts to identify and measure middlemen in two empirical socio-economic networks, the elite marriage network of Renaissance Florence and Krackhardt’s advice net- work.

Adaptive utilitarianism, social enterprises and urban regeneration

Social enterprises have been placed at the centre of Big Society politics and an emphasis on the local as a site for experimentation and service delivery. Nationally, this has been supported by legislation in community transfer and procurement, social finance and new intermediaries to strengthen skills and loan readiness. This paper examines the role of social enterprises involved in urban development in Northern Ireland and highlights the multiple ethics, legitimation strategies and modalities that are necessary for sustainable forms of progressive regeneration. The paper concludes by stressing the possibilities of a more independent and reformist social economy and how this offers some practical alternatives to the enthusiasm for neoliberal policies in the local state.

Finance, social economics and community development

The last three decades have seen social enterprises in the United Kingdom pushed to the forefront of welfare delivery, workfare and area-based regeneration. For critics, this is repositioning the sector around a neoliberal politics that privileges marketization, state roll-back and disciplining community groups to become more self-reliant. Successive governments have developed bespoke products, fiscal instruments and intermediaries to enable and extend the social finance market. Such assemblages are critical to roll-out tactics, but they are also necessary and useful for more reformist understandings of economic alterity. The issue is not social finance itself but how it is used, which inevitably entangles social enterprises in a form of legitimation crises between the need to satisfy financial returns and at the same time keep community interests on board. This paper argues that social finance, how it is used, politically domesticated and achieves re-distributional outcomes is a necessary component of counter-hegemonic strategies. Such assemblages are as important to radical community development as they are to neoliberalism and the analysis concludes by highlighting the need to develop a better understanding of finance, the ethics of its use and tactical compromises in scaling it as an alternative to public and private markets.

Antonio y Gabriel de Sancha, libreros de la Ilustración, y sus relaciones comerciales con Inglaterra

In this article we take as our point of departure the booksellers' catalogues printed by the Sanchas during the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV, as well as the catalogues issued by their London correspondents the booksellers Thomas Payne and Benjamin White. We contextualize the business relationship which developed between the Sanchas and the London booksellers as a direct result of Gabriel de Sancha's visit to London in the Summer of 1784. This study highlights the significance of a parallel offer of recently published books in English and Spanish in some of the most renowned bookshops in Madrid and London between the mid 1780s and the years immediately before the Peninsular War, a circumstance that no doubt stimulated curiosity on both sides and sped up the transfert culturel between both countries. Notwithstanding their business and private troubles, Antonio and Gabriel de Sancha, self-reliant entrepreneurs and cultural intermediaries, were able to establish a dynamic book trade flow which did not imply the subordination of Spain to England.