Strategies of technical choice in the Peruvian sugar industry, 1955–74

Despite the rapidly growing literature on agricultural mechanisation in developing countries, there are few studies which examine the evolution of technical choice on large plantations over time. This article analyses the process of selective mechanisation in sugar cane harvesting on three Peruvian plantations over a 20‐year period. Decisions regarding the choice of technique and the control of field labour are intimately connected. The concept of a strategy of technical choice is introduced to emphasise this interdependence and to provide a framework of analysis.     

William Friedman's Bletchley park diary: A new source for the history of Anglo-American intelligence cooperation

The great American cryptologist William F. Friedman along with two other colleagues visited Bletchley Park and other British code-breaking facilities in the spring of 1943. A recently discovered diary that Friedman kept while in the UK gives a meticulous account of his activities during the mission. the diary sheds light on the role Friedman and his colleagues played in negotiating the 1943 Travis–Strong agreement between the United States and Great Britain and helps resolve problems with the dating of that agreement. The diary gives Friedman's mid-war assessment of the British codebreaking effort. The diary also gives a portrait of Friedman himself as none of his other writings do.     

Theoretical practice and the sociology of knowledge a reply to Paul Q. Hirst: Recent tendencies in sociological theory

This article is a consideration of the viability of an aesthetically oriented social theory. After a discussion of some aspects of Michel Maffesoli's writings, the paper goes on to argue for three: 1. that we might take an interest in the aesthetic sphere not from the perspective of a critique of ideology or from that of critical philosophy but throguh a concern for something like Problematics of freedom: 2 that, against the understandable temptations of a sociological reduction of art, we need to treat aesthetic autonomy with a certain benign seriousness, that is to say, as a (moral, ethical, aesthetic) problem; and 3. That, in contrast to the aestheticizing tendencies of much of what goes by the name of cultural sociology, the question of the aestheticization of culture needs to be analysed in terms, above all, of its ascetic properties, aspirations and directions.