Women’s work: how Britain discarded its female computer programmers

an article by Marie Hicks for the New Statesman

Britain once led the world in electronic computing. But when the industry squeezed out female employees, it wrote its own epitaph.



If the rise of computing is one of the biggest stories of the twentieth century, then the failure of the nation that invented the electronic computer to capitalise on it is undoubtedly one of history's most important cautionary tales.

In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. The top-secret codebreaking computers deployed by the British at Bletchley Park worked round the clock to ensure the success of D-Day and the Allies’ win in Europe. At a time when the best electronic computing technology in the United States was still only in its testing phase, British computers literally changed the world.

After the war, British computing breakthroughs continued, and British computers seemed poised to succeed across the board, competing with US technology on a global scale. But by the 1970s, a mere 30 years later, the country’s computing industry was all but dead.

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Locality and localism: a view from British Human Geography

an article by Nick Clarke (affiliation(s) unknown) published in Policy Studies Volume 34 Issue 5-6 (2013)

Abstract

This paper considers the political geography of localism and reviews the insights of geographers regarding localism and locality. It identifies three main approaches to locality in Human Geography.

1. Regional geographers, humanistic geographers and spatial scientists view localities as relatively natural phenomena.
2. Marxist and political-economic geographers view localities as social phenomena produced by uneven capitalist development.
3. Post-structuralist geographers view localities as characteristically open, plural and dynamic.

The paper also distinguishes three sets of political localism to be found in human-geographical literatures.

• First, localism describes seemingly natural ways of life – organised to maximise authentic experiences of place in the case of Humanistic Geography and to minimise the friction of distance in the case of spatial science.
• Second, localism describes cultural-political expressions of spatial divisions of labour, including local political cultures, local proactivity in the context of large-scale economic restructuring, and actually existing, variegated, local neoliberalisations.
• Third, localism describes struggles to produce locally scaled action, including projects of local autonomy and self-sufficiency directed against the central state, movements to defend collective consumption from developers, coalitions to defend fixed capital against devaluation, and state downscaling to regulate capitalism.

To illustrate their usefulness, some of these insights are applied to the localism agendas of recent British governments.