Shinobu Majima

This article analyses finance in South East Asia during the Second World War in terms of three challenges. Beginning in December 1941, Japan swiftly occupied South East Asia and immediately faced the challenge of how to finance occupation. Finance largely through printing money gave rise to a further challenge in the need to avoid hyperinflationary pressures. After the war the reoccupying powers faced their own, and a third, challenge of wartime finance in deciding how to deal with a large stock of money created during the conflict. Comparison with war finance elsewhere shows that the three challenges were met in sometimes unusual but rather effective ways.

The article addresses debates around the changing nature of old age, using UK data on spending on dress and related aspects of appearance by older women to explore the potential role of consumption in the reconstitution of aged identities. Based on pseudo-cohort analysis of Family Expenditures Survey, it compares spending patterns on clothing, cosmetics and hairdressing, 1961-2011. It concludes that there is little evidence for the 'baby boomers' as a strategic or distinctive generation. There is evidence, however, for increased engagement by older women in aspects of appearance: shopping for clothes more frequently; more involved in the purchase of cosmetics; and women over 75 are now the most frequent attenders at hairdressers. The roots of these patterns, however, lie more in period than cohort effects, and in the role of producer-led developments such as mass cheap fashion and the development of anti-ageing products. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This article analyzes how Japan financed its World War II occupation of Southeast Asia, the market-purchased transfer of resources to Japan, and the monetary and inflation consequences of Japanese policies. Occupation was financed principally by printing large quantities of money. While some Southeast Asian countries had high inflation, hyperinflation hardly occurred because of a sustained transactions demand for money and because of Japan's strong enforcement of monetary monopoly. Highly specialized Southeast Asian economies and loss of Japanese merchant shipping limited resource extraction.

This article reviews recent Japanese- and English-language publications to assess scholarly interchange between the two languages and the effects on South East Asia of Japan's Second World War occupation. The economic and social impact on Borneo, Malaya and Singapore of the Japanese interregnum was devastating. In Burma and Indonesia, military training given by the Japanese fundamentally shaped the post-war order. The authors find surprisingly little cross-over between those writing in Japanese or in English and argue that greater academic exchange, possibly facilitated through translation, would enhance understanding of wartime South East Asia.

This article introduces the symposium issue on 'Narrative, Numbers and Socio-Cultural Change'. The articles were all papers presented initially at the conference 'Narrative, Numbers and Social Change' at the University of Manchester, UK in November 2007. The conference was organized through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). Methodological issues have been central to CRESC since its inception, and the Centre has an ongoing commitment to nurturing methodological expertise and innovation in the study of socio-cultural change. This particular event marked an interest in rethinking the boundaries of qualitative and quantitative research and in developing methods adequate to the challenges posed by sociocultural complexity, in ways which involve reworking some of the conventional understandings of the relationships between the empirical, the theoretical and methodology. The introduction reviews the articles and reflects on their significance in the context of understandings of methods in cultural sociology and the sociology of culture, in the UK and beyond.

This article unravels the proliferation of 'fashion' with respect to clothing over the last half-century, putting the British perspective in the context of wider changes in European and American fashion production. Design innovation patterns evolved in the post-war world in response to growing markets and changes in social conditions. The concepts of 'design monopoly' and 'collective screening' are used to explain this phenomenon, with evidence from designer associations, trade exhibitions and international fashion shows to support this story. This article aims to offer a holistic account of interrelationships between haute couture and high street fashion and illustrates bow the global fashion system has evolved.

There is considerable debate among historians and sociologists over the periodisation of the social dynamics of mass consumption in the second half of the twentieth century. During the immediate period following post-war austerity, journalists and other commentators focused on greater affluence and the relative reduction in spending on 'necessary' items. Sociologists, however, often emphasised the continued role of class in shaping consumer preferences. In this paper, I use evidence from the Family Expenditure Survey, 1 conducted by the UK government since the 1950s, to capture relative differences in the weekly spending patterns of all households. I compare expenditure data for the year 1961 for detailed categories of consumer goods and services, with respect to differences in income, class and age, and compare these data with the results for 1971, 1981 and 2004. Using a multi-dimensional approach more conventionally used in lifestyle research and brand marketing allows us to examine how consumption is structured by inequality, though in subtly changing ways.

This paper critically examines Inglehart's argument that there is a predictable shift from materialist to post-materialist values, using the British case as our focus. Using the 1981, 1990 and 1999 data for the British part of World Values Surveys, we criticize the distinction between materialist and post-materialist values. Using multiple correspondence analysis, we visualize how different attitudes are related to each other by portraying them in a multiple-dimensional space. We show that the organization of cultural values is complex, and is not easily summarized by the materialist/post-materialist dichotomy. We prefer to recognize the more politically loaded nature of attitudes by distinguishing between libertarian and authoritarian values, and between conformist and rebellious citizens. We show that there is little evidence of major change between 1981 and 1999, and indeed Britons, and especially young people, are moving slightly away from post-materialism, becoming increasingly rebellious and conscientious.