Journal articles on the topic 'Peterson Industries'

Waste Disposal Incorporated (WDI) became a major player in both the domestic and international trash collection industries during the late 1990s by aggressively acquiring a large number of local haulers. The company also diversified into recycling, water treatment, energy, power, and lawn care. This rapid expansion initially resulted in substantial profits and a skyrocketing stock price for WDI. The financial market's desire for continued growth put intense pressure on the company to meet higher profit expectations. Increased government regulation of the waste industry and growing competition from smaller garbage haulers hindered WDI's ability to meet those expectations. When extensive cost-cutting measures failed to achieve their desired results, WDI's management turned to other strategies to keep the company at the top of the industry. In this case, you will follow Jane Sweeny, an audit manager employed by Alfred Peterson LLP, as she completes her duties as manager of the WDI 1999 year-end audit. Included in these duties is a review of the financial records, management's accounting practices, and other relevant details of WDI's audit. The review raises some doubts about the reasonableness of WDI's financial statements in Jane's mind. Jane also discusses her concerns with Peterson's engagement partner and the WDI controller.

The wastewater of the many industries that use divalent cobalt (Co2+)-containing compounds has elevated levels of this metal. Thus, novel technology is needed to efficiently remove Co2+ ions from aqueous solutions. Biosorption is a low-cost technique capable of removing heavy metals from contaminated water. This study aims to evaluate the performance of KH2PO4-pretreated Lemna gibba (PLEM) as a biosorbent of Co2+ in aqueous solutions tested under different conditions of pH, particle size, and initial Co2+ concentration. Kinetic, equilibrium, and thermodynamic studies were conducted. The capacity of biosorption increased with a greater initial Co2+ concentration and was optimal at pH 7.0 and with small-sized biosorbent particles (0.3–0.8 mm). The pseudo-second-order sorption model best describes the experimental data on Co2+ biosorption kinetics. The Sips and Redlich-Peterson isotherm models best predict the biosorption capacity at equilibrium. According to the thermodynamic study, biosorption of Co2+ was endothermic and spontaneous. The effect of pH on the biosorption/desorption of Co2+ suggests that electrostatic attraction is the main biosorption mechanism. SEM-EDX verified the presence of Co2+ on the surface of the pretreated-saturated biosorbent and the absence of the metal after desorption.

Heat transfer is a desirable phenomenon in many industries such as in refrigeration, transportation, power generation, cell preservation, incubator, metallurgy and material processing, health services, etc. Different types of fluids like water, oil, ethylene glycol etc are being used as a heat transfer medium. Water is a commonly used as working fluid for transfer of heat. Nanofluids are developed by adding nano sized particle(s) in existing fluid to improve the heat transfer rate. Thermal conductivity of the nanofluid is an important parameter in estimation of heat transfer rate. Different types of mathematical models were developed by various investigators to predict the thermal conductivity of the nanofluids. In this review paper,the theoretical and mathematical model(s) have been compared to predict the thermal conductivity of nanofluids. The experimental data have been collected from literature and compared with Maxwell model, Hamilton and crosser(H-C) model, Maxwell-Garnetts(MG) model, Pak cho model, Timofeeva et al. model, Li and Peterson model, Bhattacharya et al. model respectively in detail. It has been observed that the prediction wih the help of the mathematical models is good when the value of volume fraction was less than 0.01.

Abstract Many researchers have explored the relationship between market orientation and firm performance in manufacturing and services industries but such studies in agri-food SMEs are scarce. Previous research conducted has conceptually and empirically supported the notion that market orientation independently or collectively have positive correlations with the business performance of organization (such as Narver and Slater, 1990; Jaworski and Kohli, 1993; Lee and Peterson, 2000). The aim of this paper is to examine the marketing practices and the marketing orientation-business performance relationship among SMEs in agri-food sector in Malaysia. This study also investigated the role of the external environment in the market orientation-performance linkage. From an analysis of a survey data of 102 agri- food organizations, three dimensions namely customer-competitor orientation, inter-functional coordination and information dissemination extracted from factor analysis result of market orientation. The study revealed that customer-competitor orientation and information dissemination were positively related to business performance. In terms of the role of external environment, two dimensions produced by factor analysis, market-technology turbulence and competitive intensity did not moderate the relationship between market orientation and business performance. Findings are discussed and implications are highlighted. Keywords: Market Orientation, External Environment, Business Performance

United States citizen scientist, researcher, and anti-geoengineering activist, Rosalind Peterson of Mendocino, California, proved both pioneer and prophet. She helped catalyze a global grassroots anti-geoengineering movement through her decades-long work crusading for clearer skies, cleaner water, healthier trees and plants, and a more resilient planet free of geoengineering fallout. Peterson combined scientific data collection and research, publishing, public speaking, and political advocacy to educate the world about the many negative environmental consequences of clandestine geoengineering. Founder of the California Skywatch in 2002 and the Agricultural Defense Coalition in 2006, Peterson built an extensive collection of multimedia materials over three decades, now being archived and curated through Our Geoengineering Age for public use by the global scientific community. As an initial “sort” of her extensive archival collection reveals, Peterson proved a tenacious and courageous citizen scientist who wore many hats: environmentalist, photographer, field scientist/researcher, writer, speaker, and activist/publicist. Peterson’s decades-long effort to uncover the myriad toxic environmental impacts of clandestine geoengineering also provides a compelling, scientifically researched alternative to the widely accepted theory advanced by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that global warming is primarily caused by anthropogenically released carbon dioxide.

It is critical for manufacturing sectors to improve maximum performance to foster a competitive advantage. This article aims to analyze how the manufacturing industry can promote its performance to achieve sustainable development. We embark performance evaluation on Taiwanese manufacturing sectors which have profound implications in the global manufacturing supply chain. This study collected public information and reliable data from the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) covering 12 Taiwanese manufacturing industries. Performance evaluation indicators consist of four inputs chosen from a set of six items, whereas one output is from a set of three items. The analysis from Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is conducted including CCR (Charnes, Cooper, & Rhodes) efficiency, BCC (Banker et al.) efficiency, A&P(Andersen and Petersen) efficiency, cross-efficiency and D&G(Doyle and Green) efficiency plus the VIKOR prioritization method to evaluate the 12 manufacturing industries in Taiwan. The comprehensive analysis and comparison results of this study show the sophisticated outcomes through the analysis of DEA and VIKOR. In another objective evaluation, the efficiency of DEA proves a certain correlation between the model and the measurement of the VIKOR method. The results indicate that Taiwan’s manufacturing industry is moving towards design innovation thinking towards the high value of its own brand, whereas the industries in China and South East Asia appear different. The results can provide the best practice to allow the international manufacturing industry to enjoy a resurgence after falling output and diminishing labor force.

Equilibrium studies were carried out for the adsorption of phosphate onto newly discharged coal gangue and spontaneous combustion coal gangue, which are industrial solid residues. The experimental data were fitted to the two-parameter equations of Freundlich, Langmuir, Temkin, and Dubinin-Radushkevich and the three-parameter equations of the Redlich-Peterson, Sips and Toth isotherms by non-linear method. All three-parameter isotherm equations have a higher correlation coefficient than the two-parameter isotherm equations. For new discharged coal gangue, the maximum phosphate adsorption capacity is over 2.504 mg/g (as P), and the best two-parameter isotherm is Freundlich, which indicated multilayer adsorption takes place on the surface. For spontaneous combustion coal gangue, the maximum phosphate adsorption capacity is 7.079 mg/g (as P), two times larger than new discharged coal gangue, and the best two-parameter isotherm is Langmuir, suggesting that the adsorption process occurs on a homogenous surface by monolayer adsorption. The three-parameter isotherm model of Redlich-Peterson shows the best fitting in both cases, but parameter g is 0.6138 in new discharged coal gangue (the parameter g is nearly 1, which means that the equilibrium isotherm behaves as the Langmuir, not as the Freundlich isotherm), g approaches to unity in spontaneous combustion coal gangue, suggesting that the two kinds of coal gangues have different adsorption properties.

Abstract Coal is a porous medium and natural absorbent. It can be used for its original purpose after adsorbing organic compounds, its value does not reduce and the pollutants are recycled, and then through systemic circulation of coking wastewater zero emissions can be achieved. Thus, a novel method of industrial organic wastewater treatment using adsorption on coal is introduced. Coking coal was used as an adsorbent in batch adsorption experiments. The quinoline, indole, pyridine and phenol removal efficiencies of coal adsorption were investigated. In addition, several operating parameters which impact removal efficiency such as coking coal consumption, oscillation contact time, initial concentration and pH value were also investigated. The coking coal exhibited properties well-suited for organics' adsorption. The experimental data were fitted to Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms as well as Temkin and Redlich–Peterson (R-P) models. The Freundlich isotherm model provided reasonable models of the adsorption process. Furthermore, the purification mechanism of organic compounds' adsorption on coking coal was analysed.

Zeolite X/activated carbon composite material (X/AC) was prepared from elutrilithe, by a process consisting of carbonization, activation, and subsequent hydrothermal transformation of aluminosilicate in alkaline solution, which was used for the removal of ammoniacal nitrogen from aqueous solutions. Adsorption kinetics, equilibrium, and thermodynamic were studied and fitted by various models. The adsorption kinetics is best depicted by pseudosecond-order model, and the adsorption isotherm fits the Freundlich and Redlich-Peterson model. This explains the ammoniacal nitrogen adsorption onto X/AC which was chemical adsorption in nature. Thermodynamic properties such as ΔG, ΔH, and ΔS were determined for the ammoniacal nitrogen adsorption, and the positive enthalpy confirmed that the adsorption process was endothermic. It can be inferred that ammoniacal nitrogen removal by X/AC composite is attributed to the ion exchange ability of zeolite X. Further, as a novel sorbent, this material has the potential application in removing ammoniacal nitrogen coexisting with other organic compounds from industrial wastewater.

Abstract The potential of an economically cheap raw material (rice husk) was evaluated in the present study to remove dyes including reactive yellow 15 (RY15) and reactive red 241 (RR241) in single and multi-component systems. The adsorbent was modified and functionalized chemically using glycidoxypropyltrimethoxysilane, sulfur and silane to enhance the removal efficiency of pollutants. The modified rice husk was evaluated by scanning electron microscope (SEM) and Fourier transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). Batch adsorption study showed that the modified rice husk with silane graft (RHSi) had highest removal efficiency of both dyes with 20% more removal compared to raw rice husk. The sorption correlated well with Langmuir, Freundlich, SIPS and Redlich-Peterson models for adsorption. Highest sorption was obtained at 10 mg L−1 of dye, 50 °C, 200 mg g−1 of adsorbent dose and pH 4. The mixture of two dyes poorly fit to the original Langmuir but fit best to the Langmuir-like model. This indicates that competitive Langmuir-like model considers that the capacities of adsorbents are equal. Results showed that the components compete for the available binding sites on adsorbent surface. It was also indicated that silane grafting can offer comparatively more binding sites compared to the raw rice husk and single-solute isotherm parameters cannot used for multi-component solute system.

Natural clay from Darbandikhan (DC) was evaluated in its natural form, after acid activation (ADC), and after pillaring (PILDC) as a potential adsorbent for the adsorption of methyl orange (MO) as a model anionic dye adsorbate. The effect of different clay treatments was investigated using X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR), and N2 physisorption analysis. Both acid activation and pillaring resulted in a significant increase in adsorption affinity, respectively. The adsorption favored acidic pH for the anionic dye (MO). The adsorption process was found to follow pseudo-second-order kinetics with activation energies of 5.9 and 40.1 kJ·mol−1 for the adsorption of MO on ADC and PILDC, respectively, which are characteristic of physical adsorption. The adsorption isotherms (Langmuir, Redlich-Peterson and Freundlich) were fitted well to the experimental data. The specific surface area of the natural clay was very low (22.4 m2·g−1) compared to high-class adsorbent materials. This value was increased to 53.2 m2·g−1 by the pillaring process. Nevertheless, because of its local availability, the activated materials may be useful for the cleaning of local industrial wastewaters.

In recent years, understanding national styles of collaboration between universities and business is important in a context of growing globalization. Here access to knowledge has become a key element in economic development. Moreover, this supposes that the new technological advantages of each country or region will largely take place as a result of the way the infrastructure of scientific research and industrial capacity is arranged. Differences are due to the way interaction mechanisms have been constructed between the various actors and the value systems on which they are based. They are also caused by the institutional arrangements formalized by each country for the integration of its innovation system, and those arrangements have unique national histories. (Etzinga, Aant and A. Jamison Changing Policy Agendas in Science and Technology, in Jasanoff, Sheila, G.E. Markle, J. Petersen, T. Pinch (Eds.) Handbook of Science and Technologies Studies, London: Sage Publications. 1994.)

Background:Flares in PsA, presenting as periods of acute disease activity, are thought to negatively impact patients’ lives. This has not been extensively studied in a real-world setting.Objectives:Describe flares, assess impact on quality of life and work productivity, and explore predictors.Methods:A cross-sectional survey among patients with PsA recruited by rheumatologists and dermatologists was conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK and US. Data were collected Jun-Aug 2018 via patient record forms and patient self-complete forms. Physicians recorded flare status (in flare currently/flared in last 12 mo/longer than 12 mo or never), demographics, physician perceived severity and clinical outcomes. Patients reported quality of life [QoL] (EQ5D-5L), work productivity (WPAI), disability (HAQ-DI), pain (PsAID12 pain scale). Patients were compared by flare status using parametric or non-parametric tests. Logistic regression explored predictors of flare. Multivariate regression explored the impact of flare status on patient reported outcomes (PRO). The model was adjusted for gender, age, BMI, physician speciality.Results:Data were collected for 2,238 patients (586 US, 1,652 EU). Mean age was 48.7 years (13.2 SD), 53.8% were male. Physicians reported 7.5% were currently in flare and 22.0% had flared in the last 12 mo. Patients had experienced 2.2 mean flares in the last 12 mo (4.9 SD), lasting a mean 16.4 days (16.2 SD). Patients in flare were comparable demographically with those not; however, those in flare were less likely to work full time (43.6 vs. 59.3%, p<0.01). Patients not in flare had clinically active disease (Table 1).Table 1.Clinical characteristics of patients by flare statusCurrently in flare (n=168)Flared in last 12 mo(n=492)Not flared in last 12 mo/never flared(n=1578)p-valueIn remission, n (%)4 (2.4)157 (33.2)799 (53.5)<0.01*Current BSA affected, mean (SD)10.3 (12.0)6.5 (7.6)5.0 (7.7)<0.01*66 SJC, mean (SD)5.4 (4.6)4.5 (7.3)2.4 (6.9)<0.01*68 TJC, mean (SD)7.8 (5.8)5.5 (8.3)3.1 (5.6)<0.01Physician-perceived severity, n (%)Mild35 (20.8)346 (70.3)1297 (82.2)<0.01Moderate101 (60.1)139 (28.3)261 (16.5)Severe32 (19.0)7 (1.4)20 (1.3)*Calculated on available data: Total base sizes: BSA=1665; SJC=514; TJC=493; Satisfaction=931Results showed that flare status significantly impacted QoL, work productivity, disability, and pain (Table 2). Exploring predictors of flare in the last 12 mo in un-adjusted analyses showed that demographic characteristics were not predictive of flare status, however patients presenting as moderate or severe at diagnosis were at greater risk of flare. Patients who were prescribed a bDMARD at diagnosis were at lower risk (Figure 1).Table 2.Impact of flare status on PROsCurrent flare statusChange in predicted PRO valuesP valueEQ5D utility (n=933)Not in flare (ref)In flare0.83-0.23<0.01EQ5D VAS (n=946)Not in flareIn flare76.1-21.3<0.01WPAI % overall work impairment (n=496)Not in flareIn flare20.1+28.5<0.01HAQ-DI (n=901)Not in flareIn flare0.4+0.6<0.01PsAID12 pain score (n=922)Not in flareIn flare2.5+3.0<0.01PRO key for worse outcome (range): EQ5D utility (0-1.0) = lower; EQ5D VAS (1-100) = lower; WPAI (0-100) = higher; HAQ-DI (0-3) = higher; PsAID12 pain (0-10) = higherFigure 1.Predictors of flaring in last 12 monthsConclusion:One third of patients surveyed were either currently in flare or had flared in the last 12 mo. Being in flare adversely impacted QoL, disability and work productivity. Flare may be predicted by overall physician-reported PsA disease severity at diagnosis.Disclosure of Interests:Ana-Maria Orbai Grant/research support from: Abbvie, Eli Lilly and Company, Celgene, Novartis, Janssen, Horizon, Consultant of: Eli Lilly; Janssen; Novartis; Pfizer; UCB. Ana-Maria Orbai was a private consultant or advisor for Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, Inc, not in her capacity as a Johns Hopkins faculty member and was not compensated for this service., William Tillett Grant/research support from: AbbVie, Celgene, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, Pfizer Inc, UCB, Consultant of: AbbVie, Amgen, Celgene, Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, MSD, Pfizer Inc, UCB, Speakers bureau: AbbVie, Amgen, Celgene, Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, Pfizer Inc, UCB, Suzanne Grieb Grant/research support from: Janssen, Steve Peterson Employee of: Janssen Research & Development, LLC, Elizabeth Holdsworth Employee of: Adelphi Real World, Sophie Meakin Employee of: Adelphi Real World, Sara Bruce Wirta Employee of: Janssen-Cilag Sweden AB, Soumya D Chakravarty Shareholder of: Johnson & Johnson, Employee of: Janssen Scientific Affairs, LLC, Laure Gossec Grant/research support from: Lilly, Mylan, Pfizer, Sandoz, Consultant of: AbbVie, Amgen, Biogen, Celgene, Janssen, Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Sandoz, Sanofi-Aventis, UCB

This article studies the process of spreading generations of industrial products in the competitive market and assessing the influence of the characteristics of generations of products and destabilizing factors on the volume of their sales. The level of innovation and competitiveness of generations is used as characteristics, their definition and mathematical formalization are given. The study uses the generalized model of F. Bass, the provisions of the concept of “multi-product competition” by R. Peterson and V. Mahajan, and the concept of the va­riability of consumer behavior of different generations by T. Islam and N. Mead. A model of the spreading of generations of industrial products of competing brands in the duopole market is obtained, taking into account destabilizing factors. Based on this model, equations are constructed that establish the relationship between the shares of consumers of competing generations of pro­ducts. The statistical data on the spreading of generations of video game consoles from Sony and Microsoft in the global and regional markets serve as a basis for approbation. To identify the parameters of the model and determine the presence and closeness of the relationship, correlation-regression analysis and the least squares method are used. These results demonstrate a high level of correlation between the sales volume of each console generation and the characteristics of the console generations. It was found that with an increase in the influence exerted by a competitor, the cumulative market share of the considered generation of the product decreases, and with an increase in the level of innovation of the generation of the product, its level of competitiveness increases. The obtained results of processing the predicted and actual data on the spread of generations demonstrate a significant influence of destabilizing factors on the process of spreading generations. The theo­retical significance of the work consists in the development of a model for the distribution of generations of industrial products for a particular case with a duapole market structure. The practical significance lies in obtaining the calculated values of the link between the sales volume of each generation of consoles and their characteristics.

Every year, a large quantity of vanadium-containing wastewater is discharged from industrial factories, resulting in severe environmental problems. In particular, V(V) is recognized as a potentially hazardous contaminant due to its high mobility and toxicity, and it has received considerable attention. In this study, a silica-supported primary amine resin (SiPAR) was prepared by in-situ polymerization, and the V(V) adsorption from the solution was examined. The as-prepared resin exhibited fast adsorption kinetics, and it could attain an equilibrium within 90 min for the V(V) solution concentration of 100 mg/L at an optimum pH of 4, whereas the commercial D302 resin required a treatment time of more than 3 h under the same conditions. Furthermore, the maximum adsorption capacity of the resin under optimum conditions for V(V) was calculated to be 70.57 mg/g. In addition, the kinetics and isotherm data were satisfactorily elucidated with the pseudo-second-order kinetics and Redlich–Peterson models, respectively. The silica-based resin exhibited an excellent selectivity for V(V), and the removal efficiency exceeded 97% in the presence of competitive anions at 100 mmol/L concentrations. The film mass-transfer coefficient (kf) and V(V) pore diffusivity (Dp) onto the resins were estimated by mathematical modeling. In summary, this study provided a potential adsorbent for the efficient removal of V(V) from wastewater.

Phosphorous from municipal and industrial wastewater is the main cause of eutrophication of rivers and lakes, because effluent quality from conventional secondary wastewater treatment plants does not meet the discharge standard that demands further treatment. Therefore, we investigated pumice as a potential low-cost adsorbent for the tertiary treatment of phosphate from municipal wastewater. The phosphate adsorption process reached equilibrium after 60 minutes contact time and achieved a removal efficiency of 94.4% ± 0.7% for an adsorbent dose of 10 g/L in 3 mg/L phosphate solution. The highest phosphate removal was recorded at pH 7. The experimental data best fitted with the Redlich-Peterson isotherm and the pseudo-second-order kinetic models. The coexisting anions decreased phosphate adsorption in the order of mixture >SO42– > HCO3− > NO3− > Cl− > CO3−. Pumice removed 95% ± 0.2% of phosphate from effluents of the secondary treatment unit of a municipal wastewater treatment plant. Furthermore, effective regeneration of saturated pumice was possible with a 0.2 M NaOH solution. Therefore, pumice could be a technically workable low-cost reusable adsorbent for phosphate removal from wastewater as a tertiary treatment to curb eutrophication of surface waters. However, further column adsorption study is recommended for a continuous flow system to optimize process design variables and scale up for field applications.

Purpose This paper aims to evaluate the financial performance of companies listed on Tehran Stock Exchange by using negative data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. Design/methodology/approach First, the financial metrics for performance evaluation were extracted and then filtered based on the experts’ opinions. Upon choosing the appropriate financial measures, the financial information of 72 companies selected from four automotive, pharmaceutical, petrochemical and cement industries were collected, and the criteria values were also measured. The financial performance of selected companies was assessed using negative data bounded adjusted measure in the DEA, and efficient and inefficient companies were identified. Finally, the efficient companies were ranked using Andersen and Petersen model. Findings The required analysis was conducted, and the financial performance of selected companies listed on Tehran Stock Exchange was evaluated. There were 58 efficient companies with a performance value of 1; 14 companies became inefficient because the efficiency size was less than 1; therefore, reference units were also introduced to the managers for efficiency of inefficient companies. Originality/value The aim of this study was to identify the required financial criteria and to determine an appropriate model for performance evaluation based on negative DEA. The findings can help shareholders to identify efficient companies and make the optimal portfolio accordingly; the managers of inefficient companies can also take the proper reforming actions to improve efficiency.

Rapid development of technology and challenges in upcoming industrial revolution 4.0 require students to equip themselves with relevant competencies. The success of students as prospective workers will depend on this. Initial stage for students is to have clarity on the direction of career preparation. Adequate career preparation, including the accuracy of career decision making is synchronized between their potential versus what is desired (Sharf, 2002). Internal factorof students’ success in choosing a future career is by having strong characters. Character with perseverance and great desire to achieve long-term goals in a long time is known as grit ((Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews & Kelly, 2007). This study aims to identify the influence of grit and gender on career decision making among Psychology faculty’s students in UniversitasMuhammadiyah Lampung. The research involved 83 students from 4 classes and using quantitative research method using a scale as a data collection tool. Results of empirical research prove that grit and gender are proven to significantly influence students' career decision making. Grit correlate to career decision making with pearson-correlation score 0.519 (p <0.001) and gender correlate to career decision making with pearson-correlation score 0.277 (p <0.005). Simultaneously, grit and gender make 28% (p<0.000) effective contribution to student’s career decision making. Further research is expected to be able to examine the interventions that can be done to improve the ability of taking career decisions for students.

Biosorption of chromium (Cr(VI)) is studied by using raw (chemically not modified) Moringa (Moringa Oleifera) leaf powder without any pretreatment. Cr(VI) is one of the potentially harmful heavy metals found in industrial wastewater. In the Moringa leaf powder, the presence of a significant amount of organic acids form the source for the biosorption of Cr(VI). The concentration of Cr(VI) in the feed solution is varied and different dosages of the proposed biosorbent are used to study its efficiency in the removal of Cr(VI). The concentration of Cr(VI) is varied from 1 ppm to 20 ppm while the amount of biosorbent is varied from 0.5 g to 2.5 g. The equilibrium time for adsorption of Cr(VI) is observed to vary between half an hour and 90 min. The metal removal efficiency varied from 30% to 90% which is a significant achievement compared to other conventional methods which are either energy-intensive or not cost effective. The experimental results are modeled using Langmuir, Freundlich and Redlich–Peterson isotherms. The metal removal efficiency is attributed to the chelating effect of carboxylate and hydroxyl groups present in the moringa leaves and is confirmed from the FTIR analysis. Further molecular docking simulations are performed to confirm the binding of the metal to the speculated sites within the different acids present in the moringa leaves. Untreated green moringa leaf powder used as a biosorbent in this study leads to a sustainable and cheaper option for treating wastewater containing Cr(VI).

Lignocellulosic materials have been used as bioadsorbents for contaminants removal from industrial effluents due to their physical-chemical properties, renewable source, low-cost and efficiency that make them competitive to commercial activated carbon. The objective of this work is to develop an efficient and low cost bioadsorbent reusing the cashew nut shell (Anarcadium accidentale L), CNS, for the removal of metal ions (Cu2+ and Cr3+). The CNS was characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), the point of zero charge (pHpzc) and the Boehm titration. The kinetics and adsorption equilibrium experiments were carried out in a monoelementary system, in batch runs at room temperature. The adsorption kinetics was evaluated by the mathematical models of pseudo first-order, pseudo second-order and intraparticle diffusion, while the adsorption isotherm was adjusted according to the Langmuir, Freundlich and Redlich-Peterson models. The removal percentage was 91% (Cu2+) and 96% (Cr3+) and adsorption kinetics was better adjusted to the pseudo second-order model, suggesting the predominance of chemisorption. The fit of the Langmuir isotherm was better for the experimental data of Cu2+ and Cr3+ ions, indicating adsorption in monolayers. It is concluded that the bioabsorbent produced from the cashew nut shell has a high potential for the removal of metals, in addition to being an abundant product in nature, is renewable and biodegradable and its reuse contributes to the reduction of environmental pollution, the production of waste and improves the local circular economy through the valorization of the byproduct.

Straw is one of the largest agricultural biowastes and a potential alternative precursor of activated carbon. Activated carbon prepared from different types of straw have great differences in structure and adsorption performance. In order to explore the performance of different straw-based activated carbon in volatile organic compounds adsorption, five common straws were selected as potential source materials for the preparation of SAC. The straw-based activated carbons were prepared and characterized via a thermo-gravimetric analysis, scanning electron microscope and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller method. Among the five straw-based activated carbons, millet straw-derived activated carbon exhibited superior properties in SBET, Smic and adsorption capacities of both toluene and ethyl acetate. Furthermore, the preparation process of millet straw activated carbon was optimized via response surface methodology, using carbonization temperature, carbonization time and impregnation ratio as variables and toluene adsorption capacity, ethyl acetate adsorption capacity and activated carbon yield as responses. The optimal preparation conditions include a carbonization temperature of 572 °C, carbonization time of 1.56 h and impregnation ratio (ZnCl2/PM, w/w) of 1.60, which was verified experimentally, resulting in millet straw activated carbon with a toluene adsorption capacity of 321.9 mg/g and ethyl acetate adsorption capacity of 240.4 mg/g. Meanwhile, the adsorption isothermals and regeneration performance of millet straw activated carbon prepared under the optimized conditions were evaluated. The descriptive ability of the isothermals via the Redlich–Peterson equation suggests a heterogeneous surface on millet straw activated carbon. Recyclability testing has shown that millet straw activated carbon maintained a stable adsorption capacity throughout the second to fifth cycles. The results of this work indicate that millet straw activated carbon may be a potential volatile organic compound adsorbent for industrial application.

In systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems [Aziz-Alaoui & Bertelle, 2009]. In this paper, we use the emergent property of the ultra weak multidimensional coupling of p 1-dimensional dynamical chaotic systems which leads from chaos to randomness. Generation of random or pseudorandom numbers, nowadays, is a key feature of industrial mathematics. Pseudorandom or chaotic numbers are used in many areas of contemporary technology such as modern communication systems and engineering applications. More and more European or US patents using discrete mappings for this purpose are obtained by researchers of discrete dynamical systems [Petersen & Sorensen, 2007; Ruggiero et al., 2006]. Efficient Chaotic Pseudo Random Number Generators (CPRNG) have been recently introduced. They use the ultra weak multidimensional coupling of p 1-dimensional dynamical systems which preserve the chaotic properties of the continuous models in numerical experiments. Together with chaotic sampling and mixing processes, ultra weak coupling leads to families of (CPRNG) which are noteworthy [Hénaff et al., 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2010]. In this paper we improve again these families using a double threshold chaotic sampling instead of a single one. We analyze numerically the properties of these new families and underline their very high qualities and usefulness as CPRNG when very long series are computed. Moreover, a determining property of such improved CPRNG is the high number of parameters used and the high sensitivity to the parameters value which allows choosing it as cipher-keys. It is why we call these families multiparameter chaotic pseudo-random number generators (M-p CPRNG).

Environments containing significant concentration of NaCl such as salt lakes harbor extremophiles microorganisms which have a great biotechnology interest. To explore the diversity of Bacteria in Chott Tinsilt (Algeria), an isolation program was performed. Water samples were collected from the saltern during the pre-salt harvesting phase. This Chott is high in salt (22.47% (w/v). Seven halophiles Bacteria were selected for further characterization. The isolated strains were able to grow optimally in media with 10–25% (w/v) total salts. Molecular identification of the isolates was performed by sequencing the 16S rRNA gene. It showed that these cultured isolates included members belonging to the Halomonas, Staphylococcus, Salinivibrio, Planococcus and Halobacillus genera with less than 98% of similarity with their closest phylogenetic relative. The halophilic bacterial isolates were also characterized for the production of biosurfactant and industrially important enzymes. Most isolates produced hydrolases and biosurfactants at high salt concentration. In fact, this is the first report on bacterial strains (A4 and B4) which were a good biosurfactant and coagulase producer at 20% and 25% ((w/v)) NaCl. In addition, the biosurfactant produced by the strain B4 at high salinity (25%) was also stable at high temperature (30-100°C) and high alkalinity (pH 11).Key word: Salt Lake, Bacteria, biosurfactant, Chott, halophiles, hydrolases, 16S rRNAINTRODUCTIONSaline lakes cover approximately 10% of the Earth’s surface area. The microbial populations of many hypersaline environments have already been studied in different geographical regions such as Great Salt Lake (USA), Dead Sea (Israel), Wadi Natrun Lake (Egypt), Lake Magadi (Kenya), Soda Lake (Antarctica) and Big Soda Lake and Mono Lake (California). Hypersaline regions differ from each other in terms of geographical location, salt concentration and chemical composition, which determine the nature of inhabitant microorganisms (Gupta et al., 2015). Then low taxonomic diversity is common to all these saline environments (Oren et al., 1993). Halophiles are found in nearly all major microbial clades, including prokaryotic (Bacteria and Archaea) and eukaryotic forms (DasSarma and Arora, 2001). They are classified as slight halophiles when they grow optimally at 0.2–0.85 M (2–5%) NaCl, as moderate halophiles when they grow at 0.85–3.4 M (5–20%) NaCl, and as extreme halophiles when they grow at 3.4–5.1 M (20–30%) NaCl. Hyper saline environments are inhabited by extremely halophilic and halotolerant microorganisms such as Halobacillus sp, Halobacterium sp., Haloarcula sp., Salinibacter ruber , Haloferax sp and Bacillus spp. (Solomon and Viswalingam, 2013). There is a tremendous demand for halophilic bacteria due to their biotechnological importance as sources of halophilic enzymes. Enzymes derived from halophiles are endowed with unique structural features and catalytic power to sustain the metabolic and physiological processes under high salt conditions. Some of these enzymes have been reported to be active and stable under more than one extreme condition (Karan and Khare, 2010). Applications are being considered in a range of industries such as food processing, washing, biosynthetic processes and environmental bioremediation. Halophilic proteases are widely used in the detergent and food industries (DasSarma and Arora, 2001). However, esterases and lipases have also been useful in laundry detergents for the removal of oil stains and are widely used as biocatalysts because of their ability to produce pure compounds. Likewise, amylases are used industrially in the first step of the production of high fructose corn syrup (hydrolysis of corn starch). They are also used in the textile industry in the de-sizing process and added to laundry detergents. Furthermore, for the environmental applications, the use of halophiles for bioremediation and biodegradation of various materials from industrial effluents to soil contaminants and accidental spills are being widely explored. In addition to enzymes, halophilic / halotolerants microorganisms living in saline environments, offer another potential applications in various fields of biotechnology like the production of biosurfactant. Biosurfactants are amphiphilic compounds synthesized from plants and microorganisms. They reduce surface tension and interfacial tension between individual molecules at the surface and interface respectively (Akbari et al., 2018). Comparing to the chemical surfactant, biosurfactant are promising alternative molecules due to their low toxicity, high biodegradability, environmental capability, mild production conditions, lower critical micelle concentration, higher selectivity, availability of resources and ability to function in wide ranges of pH, temperature and salinity (Rocha et al., 1992). They are used in various industries which include pharmaceuticals, petroleum, food, detergents, cosmetics, paints, paper products and water treatment (Akbari et al., 2018). The search for biosurfactants in extremophiles is particularly promising since these biomolecules can adapt and be stable in the harsh environments in which they are to be applied in biotechnology.OBJECTIVESEastern Algeria features numerous ecosystems including hypersaline environments, which are an important source of salt for food. The microbial diversity in Chott Tinsilt, a shallow Salt Lake with more than 200g/L salt concentration and a superficies of 2.154 Ha, has never yet been studied. The purpose of this research was to chemically analyse water samples collected from the Chott, isolate novel extremely or moderate halophilic Bacteria, and examine their phenotypic and phylogenetic characteristics with a view to screening for biosurfactants and enzymes of industrial interest.MATERIALS AND METHODSStudy area: The area is at 5 km of the Commune of Souk-Naâmane and 17 km in the South of the town of Aïn-Melila. This area skirts the trunk road 3 serving Constantine and Batna and the railway Constantine-Biskra. It is part the administrative jurisdiction of the Wilaya of Oum El Bouaghi. The Chott belongs to the wetlands of the High Plains of Constantine with a depth varying rather regularly without never exceeding 0.5 meter. Its length extends on 4 km with a width of 2.5 km (figure 1).Water samples and physico-chemical analysis: In February 2013, water samples were collected from various places at the Chott Tinsilt using Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of 35°53’14” N lat. and 06°28’44”E long. Samples were collected randomly in sterile polythene bags and transported immediately to the laboratory for isolation of halophilic microorganisms. All samples were treated within 24 h after collection. Temperature, pH and salinity were measured in situ using a multi-parameter probe (Hanna Instruments, Smithfield, RI, USA). The analytical methods used in this study to measure ions concentration (Ca2+, Mg2+, Fe2+, Na+, K+, Cl−, HCO3−, SO42−) were based on 4500-S-2 F standard methods described elsewhere (Association et al., 1920).Isolation of halophilic bacteria from water sample: The media (M1) used in the present study contain (g/L): 2.0 g of KCl, 100.0/200.0 g of NaCl, 1.0 g of MgSO4.7HO2, 3.0 g of Sodium Citrate, 0.36 g of MnCl2, 10.0 g of yeast extract and 15.0 g agar. The pH was adjusted to 8.0. Different dilutions of water samples were added to the above medium and incubated at 30°C during 2–7 days or more depending on growth. Appearance and growth of halophilic bacteria were monitored regularly. The growth was diluted 10 times and plated on complete medium agar (g/L): glucose 10.0; peptone 5.0; yeast extract 5.0; KH2PO4 5.0; agar 30.0; and NaCl 100.0/200.0. Resultant colonies were purified by repeated streaking on complete media agar. The pure cultures were preserved in 20% glycerol vials and stored at −80°C for long-term preservation.Biochemical characterisation of halophilic bacterial isolates: Bacterial isolates were studied for Gram’s reaction, cell morphology and pigmentation. Enzymatic assays (catalase, oxidase, nitrate reductase and urease), and assays for fermentation of lactose and mannitol were done as described by Smibert (1994).Optimization of growth conditions: Temperature, pH, and salt concentration were optimized for the growth of halophilic bacterial isolates. These growth parameters were studied quantitatively by growing the bacterial isolates in M1 medium with shaking at 200 rpm and measuring the cell density at 600 nm after 8 days of incubation. To study the effect of NaCl on the growth, bacterial isolates were inoculated on M1 medium supplemented with different concentration of NaCl: 1%-35% (w/v). The effect of pH on the growth of halophilic bacterial strains was studied by inoculating isolates on above described growth media containing NaCl and adjusted to acidic pH of 5 and 6 by using 1N HCl and alkaline pH of 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 using 5N NaOH. The effect of temperature was studied by culturing the bacterial isolates in M1 medium at different temperatures of incubation (4°C–55°C).Screening of halophilic bacteria for hydrolytic enzymes: Hydrolase producing bacteria among the isolates were screened by plate assay on starch, tributyrin, gelatin and DNA agar plates respectively for amylase, lipase, protease and DNAse activities. Amylolytic activity of the cultures was screened on starch nutrient agar plates containing g/L: starch 10.0; peptone 5.0; yeast extract 3.0; agar 30.0; NaCl 100.0/250.0. The pH was 7.0. After incubation at 30 ºC for 7 days, the zone of clearance was determined by flooding the plates with iodine solution. The potential amylase producers were selected based on ratio of zone of clearance diameter to colony diameter. Lipase activity of the cultures was screened on tributyrin nutrient agar plates containing 1% (v/v) of tributyrin. Isolates that showed clear zones of tributyrin hydrolysis were identified as lipase producing bacteria. Proteolytic activity of the isolates was similarly screened on gelatin nutrient agar plates containing 10.0 g/L of gelatin. The isolates showing zones of gelatin clearance upon treatment with acidic mercuric chloride were selected and designated as protease producing bacteria. The presence of DNAse activity on plates was determined on DNAse test agar (BBL) containing 10%-25% (w/v) total salt. After incubation for 7days, the plates were flooded with 1N HCl solution. Clear halos around the colonies indicated DNAse activity (Jeffries et al., 1957).Milk clotting activity (coagulase activity) of the isolates was also determined following the procedure described (Berridge, 1952). Skim milk powder was reconstituted in 10 mM aqueous CaCl2 (pH 6.5) to a final concentration of 0.12 kg/L. Enzyme extracts were added at a rate of 0.1 mL per mL of milk. The coagulation point was determined by manual rotating of the test tube periodically, at short time intervals, and checking for visible clot formation.Screening of halophilic bacteria for biosurfactant production. Oil spread Assay: The Petridis base was filled with 50 mL of distilled water. On the water surface, 20μL of diesel and 10μl of culture were added respectively. The culture was introduced at different spots on the diesel, which is coated on the water surface. The occurrence of a clear zone was an indicator of positive result (Morikawa et al., 2000). The diameter of the oil expelling circles was measured by slide caliber (with a degree of accuracy of 0.02 mm).Surface tension and emulsification index (E24): Isolates were cultivated at 30 °C for 7 days on the enrichment medium containing 10-25% NaCl and diesel oil as the sole carbon source. The medium was centrifuged (7000 rpm for 20 min) and the surface tension of the cell-free culture broth was measured with a TS90000 surface tensiometer (Nima, Coventry, England) as a qualitative indicator of biosurfactant production. The culture broth was collected with a Pasteur pipette to remove the non-emulsified hydrocarbons. The emulsifying capacity was evaluated by an emulsification index (E24). The E24 of culture samples was determined by adding 2 mL of diesel oil to the same amount of culture, mixed for 2 min with a vortex, and allowed to stand for 24 h. E24 index is defined as the percentage of height of emulsified layer (mm) divided by the total height of the liquid column (mm).Biosurfactant stability studies : After growth on diesel oil as sole source of carbone, cultures supernatant obtained after centrifugation at 6,000 rpm for 15 min were considered as the source of crude biosurfactant. Its stability was determined by subjecting the culture supernatant to various temperature ranges (30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and 100 °C) for 30 min then cooled to room temperature. Similarly, the effect of different pH (2–11) on the activity of the biosurfactant was tested. The activity of the biosurfactant was investigated by measuring the emulsification index (El-Sersy, 2012).Molecular identification of potential strains. DNA extraction and PCR amplification of 16S rDNA: Total cellular DNA was extracted from strains and purified as described by Sambrook et al. (1989). DNA was purified using Geneclean® Turbo (Q-BIO gene, Carlsbad, CA, USA) before use as a template in polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. For the 16S rDNA gene sequence, the purified DNA was amplified using a universal primer set, forward primer (27f; 5′-AGA GTT TGA TCM TGG CTC AG) and a reverse primer (1492r; 5′-TAC GGY TAC CTT GTT ACG ACT T) (Lane, 1991). Agarose gel electrophoresis confirmed the amplification product as a 1400-bp DNA fragment.16S rDNA sequencing and Phylogenic analysis: Amplicons generated using primer pair 27f-1492r was sequenced using an automatic sequencer system at Macrogene Company (Seoul, Korea). The sequences were compared with those of the NCBI BLAST GenBank nucleotide sequence databases. Phylogenetic trees were constructed by the neighbor-joining method using MEGA version 5.05 software (Tamura et al., 2011). Bootstrap resembling analysis for 1,000 replicates was performed to estimate the confidence of tree topologies.Nucleotide sequence accession numbers: The nucleotide sequences reported in this work have been deposited in the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database. The accession numbers are represented in table 5.Statistics: All experiments were conducted in triplicates. Results were evaluated for statistical significance using ANOVA.RESULTSPhysico-chemical parameters of the collected water samples: The physicochemical properties of the collected water samples are reported in table 1. At the time of sampling, the temperature was 10.6°C and pH 7.89. The salinity of the sample, as determined in situ, was 224.70 g/L (22,47% (w/v)). Chemical analysis of water sample indicated that Na +and Cl- were the most abundant ions (table 1). SO4-2 and Mg+2 was present in much smaller amounts compared to Na +and Cl- concentration. Low levels of calcium, potassium and bicarbonate were also detected, often at less than 1 g/L.Characterization of isolates. Morphological and biochemical characteristic feature of halophilic bacterial isolates: Among 52 strains isolated from water of Chott Tinsilt, seven distinct bacteria (A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B4 and B5) were chosen for further characterization (table 2). The colour of the isolates varied from beige, pale yellow, yellowish and orange. The bacterial isolates A1, A2, A4, B1 and B5 were rod shaped and gram negative (except B5), whereas A3 and B4 were cocci and gram positive. All strains were oxidase and catalase positive except for B1. Nitrate reductase and urease activities were observed in all the bacterial isolates, except B4. All the bacterial isolates were negative for H2S formation. B5 was the only strain positive for mannitol fermentation (table 2).We isolated halophilic bacteria on growth medium with NaCl supplementation at pH 7 and temperature of 30°C. We studied the effect of NaCl, temperature and pH on the growth of bacterial isolates. All the isolates exhibited growth only in the presence of NaCl indicating that these strains are halophilic. The optimum growth of isolates A3 and B1 was observed in the presence of 10% NaCl, whereas it was 15% NaCl for A1, A2 and B5. A4 and B4 showed optimum growth in the presence of 20% and 25% NaCl respectively. A4, B4 and B5 strains can tolerate up to 35% NaCl.The isolate B1 showed growth in medium supplemented with 10% NaCl and pH range of 7–10. The optimum pH for the growth B1 was 9 and they did not show any detectable growth at or below pH 6 (table 2), which indicates the alkaliphilic nature of B1 isolate. The bacterial isolates A1, A2 and A4 exhibited growth in the range of pH 6–10, while A3 and B4 did not show any growth at pH greater than 8. The optimum pH for growth of all strains (except B1) was pH 7.0 (table 2). These results indicate that A1, A2, A3, A4, B4 and B5 are neutrophilic in nature. All the bacterial isolates exhibited optimal growth at 30°C and no detectable growth at 55°C. Also, detectable growth of isolates A1, A2 and A4 was observed at 4°C. However, none of the bacterial strains could grow below 4°C and above 50°C (table 2).Screening of the halophilic enzymes: To characterize the diversity of halophiles able to produce hydrolytic enzymes among the population of microorganisms inhabiting the hypersaline habitats of East Algeria (Chott Tinsilt), a screening was performed. As described in Materials and Methods, samples were plated on solid media containing 10%-25% (w/v) of total salts and different substrates for the detection of amylase, protease, lipase and DNAse activities. However, coagulase activity was determined in liquid medium using milk as substrate (figure 3). Distributions of hydrolytic activity among the isolates are summarized in table 4.From the seven bacterial isolates, four strains A1, A2, A4 and B5 showed combined hydrolytic activities. They were positive for gelatinase, lipase and coagulase. A3 strain showed gelatinase and lipase activities. DNAse activities were detected with A1, A4, B1 and B5 isolates. B4 presented lipase and coagulase activity. Surprisingly, no amylase activity was detected among all the isolates.Screening for biosurfactant producing isolates: Oil spread assay: The results showed that all the strains could produce notable (>4 cm diameter) oil expelling circles (ranging from 4.11 cm to 4.67 cm). The average diameter for strain B5 was 4.67 cm, significantly (P < 0.05) higher than for the other strains.Surface tension and emulsification index (E24): The assimilation of hydrocarbons as the sole sources of carbon by the isolate strains led to the production of biosurfactants indicated by the emulsification index and the lowering of the surface tension of cell-free supernatant. Based on rapid growth on media containing diesel oil as sole carbon source, the seven isolates were tested for biosurfactant production and emulsification activity. The obtained values of the surface tension measurements as well as the emulsification index (E24) are shown in table 3. The highest reduction of surface tension was achieved with B5 and A3 isolates with values of 25.3 mN m−1 and 28.1 mN m−1 respectively. The emulsifying capacity evaluated by the E24 emulsification index was highest in the culture of isolate B4 (78%), B5 (77%) and A3 (76%) as shown in table 3 and figure 2. These emulsions were stable even after 4 months. The bacteria with emulsification indices higher than 50 % and/or reduction in the surface tension (under 30 mN/m) have been defined as potential biosurfactant producers. Based on surface tension and the E24 index results, isolates B5, B4, A3 and A4 are the best candidates for biosurfactant production. It is important to note that, strains B4 and A4 produce biosurfactant in medium containing respectively 25% and 20% (w/v) NaCl.Stability of biosurfactant activities: The applicability of biosurfactants in several biotechnological fields depends on their stability at different environmental conditions (temperatures, pH and NaCl). For this study, the strain B4 appear very interesting (It can produce biosurfactant at 25 % NaCl) and was choosen for futher analysis for biosurfactant stability. The effects of temperature and pH on the biosurfactant production by the strain B4 are shown in figure 4.biosurfactant in medium containing respectively 25% and 20% (w/v) NaCl.Stability of biosurfactant activities: The applicability of biosurfactants in several biotechnological fields depends on their stability at different environmental conditions (temperatures, pH and NaCl). For this study, the strain B4 appear very interesting (It can produce biosurfactant at 25 % NaCl) and was chosen for further analysis for biosurfactant stability. The effects of temperature and pH on the biosurfactant production by the strain B4 are shown in figure 4. The biosurfactant produced by this strain was shown to be thermostable giving an E-24 Index value greater than 78% (figure 4A). Heating of the biosurfactant to 100 °C caused no significant effect on the biosurfactant performance. Therefore, the surface activity of the crude biosurfactant supernatant remained relatively stable to pH changes between pH 6 and 11. At pH 11, the value of E24 showed almost 76% activity, whereas below pH 6 the activity was decreased up to 40% (figure 4A). The decreases of the emulsification activity by decreasing the pH value from basic to an acidic region; may be due to partial precipitation of the biosurfactant. This result indicated that biosurfactant produced by strain B4 show higher stability at alkaline than in acidic conditions.Molecular identification and phylogenies of potential isolates: To identify halophilic bacterial isolates, the 16S rDNA gene was amplified using gene-specific primers. A PCR product of ≈ 1.3 kb was detected in all the seven isolates. The 16S rDNA amplicons of each bacterial isolate was sequenced on both strands using 27F and 1492R primers. The complete nucleotide sequence of 1336,1374, 1377,1313, 1305,1308 and 1273 bp sequences were obtained from A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B4 and B5 isolates respectively, and subjected to BLAST analysis. The 16S rDNA sequence analysis showed that the isolated strains belong to the genera Halomonas, Staphylococcus, Salinivibrio, Planococcus and Halobacillus as shown in table 5. The halophilic isolates A2 and A4 showed 97% similarity with the Halomonas variabilis strain GSP3 (accession no. AY505527) and the Halomonas sp. M59 (accession no. AM229319), respectively. As for A1, it showed 96% similarity with the Halomonas venusta strain GSP24 (accession no. AY553074). B1 and B4 showed for their part 96% similarity with the Salinivibrio costicola subsp. alcaliphilus strain 18AG DSM4743 (accession no. NR_042255) and the Planococcus citreus (accession no. JX122551), respectively. The bacterial isolate B5 showed 98% sequence similarity with the Halobacillus trueperi (accession no. HG931926), As for A3, it showed only 95% similarity with the Staphylococcus arlettae (accession no. KR047785). The 16S rDNA nucleotide sequences of all the seven halophilic bacterial strains have been submitted to the NCBI GenBank database under the accession number presented in table 5. The phylogenetic association of the isolates is shown in figure 5.DICUSSIONThe physicochemical properties of the collected water samples indicated that this water was relatively neutral (pH 7.89) similar to the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake (USA) and in contrast to the more basic lakes such as Lake Wadi Natrun (Egypt) (pH 11) and El Golea Salt Lake (Algeria) (pH 9). The salinity of the sample was 224.70 g/L (22,47% (w/v). This range of salinity (20-30%) for Chott Tinsilt is comparable to a number of well characterized hypersaline ecosystems including both natural and man-made habitats, such as the Great Salt Lake (USA) and solar salterns of Puerto Rico. Thus, Chott Tinsilt is a hypersaline environment, i.e. environments with salt concentrations well above that of seawater. Chemical analysis of water sample indicated that Na +and Cl- were the most abundant ions, as in most hypersaline ecosystems (with some exceptions such as the Dead Sea). These chemical water characteristics were consistent with the previously reported data in other hypersaline ecosystems (DasSarma and Arora, 2001; Oren, 2002; Hacěne et al., 2004). Among 52 strains isolated from this Chott, seven distinct bacteria (A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B4 and B5) were chosen for phenotypique, genotypique and phylogenetique characterization.The 16S rDNA sequence analysis showed that the isolated strains belong to the genera Halomonas, Staphylococcus, Salinivibrio, Planococcus and Halobacillus. Genera obtained in the present study are commonly occurring in various saline habitats across the globe. Staphylococci have the ability to grow in a wide range of salt concentrations (Graham and Wilkinson, 1992; Morikawa et al., 2009; Roohi et al., 2014). For example, in Pakistan, Staphylococcus strains were isolated from various salt samples during the study conducted by Roohi et al. (2014) and these results agreed with previous reports. Halomonas, halophilic and/or halotolerant Gram-negative bacteria are typically found in saline environments (Kim et al., 2013). The presence of Planococcus and Halobacillus has been reported in studies about hypersaline lakes; like La Sal del Rey (USA) (Phillips et al., 2012) and Great Salt Lake (Spring et al., 1996), respectively. The Salinivibrio costicola was a representative model for studies on osmoregulatory and other physiological mechanisms of moderately halophilic bacteria (Oren, 2006).However, it is interesting to note that all strains shared less than 98.7% identity (the usual species cut-off proposed by Yarza et al. (2014) with their closest phylogenetic relative, suggesting that they could be considered as new species. Phenotypic, genetic and phylogenetic analyses have been suggested for the complete identification of these strains. Theses bacterial strains were tested for the production of industrially important enzymes (Amylase, protease, lipase, DNAse and coagulase). These isolates are good candidates as sources of novel enzymes with biotechnological potential as they can be used in different industrial processes at high salt concentration (up to 25% NaCl for B4). Prominent amylase, lipase, protease and DNAase activities have been reported from different hypersaline environments across the globe; e.g., Spain (Sánchez‐Porro et al., 2003), Iran (Rohban et al., 2009), Tunisia (Baati et al., 2010) and India (Gupta et al., 2016). However, to the best of our knowledge, the coagulase activity has never been detected in extreme halophilic bacteria. Isolation and characterization of crude enzymes (especially coagulase) to investigate their properties and stability are in progress.The finding of novel enzymes with optimal activities at various ranges of salt concentrations is of great importance. Besides being intrinsically stable and active at high salt concentrations, halophilic and halotolerant enzymes offer great opportunities in biotechnological applications, such as environmental bioremediation (marine, oilfiel) and food processing. The bacterial isolates were also characterized for production of biosurfactants by oil-spread assay, measurement of surface tension and emulsification index (E24). There are few reports on biosurfactant producers in hypersaline environments and in recent years, there has been a greater increase in interest and importance in halophilic bacteria for biomolecules (Donio et al., 2013; Sarafin et al., 2014). Halophiles, which have a unique lipid composition, may have an important role to play as surface-active agents. The archae bacterial ether-linked phytanyl membrane lipid of the extremely halophilic bacteria has been shown to have surfactant properties (Post and Collins, 1982). Yakimov et al. (1995) reported the production of biosurfactant by a halotolerant Bacillus licheniformis strain BAS 50 which was able to produce a lipopeptide surfactant when cultured at salinities up to 13% NaCl. From solar salt, Halomonas sp. BS4 and Kocuria marina BS-15 were found to be able to produce biosurfactant when cultured at salinities of 8% and 10% NaCl respectively (Donio et al., 2013; Sarafin et al., 2014). In the present work, strains B4 and A4 produce biosurfactant in medium containing respectively 25% and 20% NaCl. To our knowledge, this is the first report on biosurfactant production by bacteria under such salt concentration. Biosurfactants have a wide variety of industrial and environmental applications (Akbari et al., 2018) but their applicability depends on their stability at different environmental conditions. The strain B4 which can produce biosurfactant at 25% NaCl showed good stability in alkaline pH and at a temperature range of 30°C-100°C. Due to the enormous utilization of biosurfactant in detergent manufacture the choice of alkaline biosurfactant is researched (Elazzazy et al., 2015). On the other hand, the interesting finding was the thermostability of the produced biosurfactant even after heat treatment (100°C for 30 min) which suggests the use of this biosurfactant in industries where heating is of a paramount importance (Khopade et al., 2012). To date, more attention has been focused on biosurfactant producing bacteria under extreme conditions for industrial and commercial usefulness. In fact, the biosurfactant produce by strain B4 have promising usefulness in pharmaceutical, cosmetics and food industries and for bioremediation in marine environment and Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) where the salinity, temperature and pH are high.CONCLUSIONThis is the first study on the culturable halophilic bacteria community inhabiting Chott Tinsilt in Eastern Algeria. Different genera of halotolerant bacteria with different phylogeneticaly characteristics have been isolated from this Chott. Culturing of bacteria and their molecular analysis provides an opportunity to have a wide range of cultured microorganisms from extreme habitats like hypersaline environments. Enzymes produced by halophilic bacteria show interesting properties like their ability to remain functional in extreme conditions, such as high temperatures, wide range of pH, and high salt concentrations. These enzymes have great economical potential in industrial, agricultural, chemical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnological applications. Thus, the halophiles isolated from Chott Tinsilt offer an important potential for application in microbial and enzyme biotechnology. In addition, these halo bacterial biosurfactants producers isolated from this Chott will help to develop more valuable eco-friendly products to the pharmacological and food industries and will be usefulness for bioremediation in marine environment and petroleum industry.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSOur thanks to Professor Abdelhamid Zoubir for proofreading the English composition of the present paper.CONFLICT OF INTERESTThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.Akbari, S., N. H. Abdurahman, R. M. Yunus, F. Fayaz and O. R. Alara, 2018. Biosurfactants—a new frontier for social and environmental safety: A mini review. Biotechnology research innovation, 2(1): 81-90.Association, A. P. H., A. W. W. Association, W. P. C. 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Alternating arc single-phase earth faults in 6–10 kV cable networks with insulated neutral are accompanied by over-voltages and a significant increase in the root-mean-square current value at the fault location. When evaluating the specified parameters of transient voltages and currents during arc earth faults, as a rule, the presence of higher harmonics in earth fault current is not taken into account. At the same time, in modern systems of industrial and urban electricity supply, the customers with nonlinear current-voltage characteristics are widely used. They caused a significant increase in the share of higher harmonics in earth fault currents of more than 40–55 % of the total network capacitive current determined at the fundamental frequency of 50 Hz. With such correlations between the levels of the fundamental frequency component and higher harmonics, higher harmonics can have a significant effect on the conditions of quenching and reignition of grounding arcs and, accordingly, on the parameters of transient voltages and currents in intermittent arc earth faults. Simulation in Matlab with SimPowerSystem was used to study the influence of higher harmonics in earth fault current on transient voltages and currents in 6–10 kV cable networks with insulated neutral. Modeling of alternating arc faults was carried out on the basis of existing theories of the occurrence of maximum overvoltages during arc earth faults in networks with isolated neutral developed by W. Petersen and Belyakov N.N. On the basis of computational experiments on simulation models of 6–10 kV cable networks with different values of the total capacitive current, it was shown that in the case of arc alternating earth faults the presence of higher harmonics in the earth fault current can lead to an increase in the multiplicity of overvoltages in intact phases by 13–16 % and the root-mean-square value of the current at the fault location by up to 22 %. Higher harmonics in earth fault current can have a significant effect on the conditions of extinction and reignition of the grounding arc, leading to an increase in the time of its extinction, the multiplicity of the maximum overvoltage level and root-mean-square value of fault current during alternating arc faults, which should be taken into account when evaluating the network efficiency in the isolated neutral mode.

Constant demand for new naval and commercial vessels has created special conditions for the Government-owned Soviet shipbuilding industry, which practically has not been affected by the world shipbuilding crisis. On the other hand, such chronic diseases of the centralized economy as lack of incentive, material shortage and poor workmanship cause specific problems for ship construction. Being technically and financially unable to rapidly improve the overall technology level and performance of the entire industry, the Soviets concentrate their efforts on certain important areas and have achieved significant results, especially in welding and cutting titanium and aluminum alloys, modular production methods, standardization, etc. All productivity improvement efforts are supported by an army of highly educated engineers and scientists at shipyards, in multiple scientific, research and design institutions. Discussion Edwin J. Petersen, Todd Pacific Shipyards Three years ago I addressed the Ship Production Symposium as chairman of the Ship Production Committee and outlined some major factors which had contributed to the U.S. shipbuilding industry's remarkable achievements in building and maintaining the world's largest naval and merchant fleets during the five-year period starting just before World War II. The factors were as follows:There was a national commitment to get the job done. The shipbuilding industry was recognized as a needed national resource. There was a dependable workload. Standardization was extensively and effectively utilized. Shipbuilding work was effectively organized. Although these lessons appear to have been lost by our Government since World War II, the paper indicates that the Soviet Union has picked up these principles and has applied them very well to its current shipbuilding program. The paper also gives testimony to the observation that the Soviet Government recognizes the strategic and economic importance of a strong merchant fleet as well as a powerful naval fleet. In reviewing the paper, I found great similarity between the Soviet shipbuilding productivity improvement efforts and our own efforts or goals under the National Shipbuilding Research Program in the following areas:welding technology, flexible automation (robotics), application of group technology, standardization, facilities development, and education and training. In some areas, the Soviet Union appears to be well ahead of the United States in improving the shipbuilding process. Most noteworthy among these is the stable long-and medium-range planning that is possible by virtue of the use and adherence to the "Table of Vessel Classes." It will be obvious to most who hear and read these comments what a vast and significant improvement in shipbuilding costs and schedules could be achieved with a relatively dependable 15year master ship procurement plan for the U.S. naval and merchant fleets. Another area where the Soviet Union appears to lead the United States is in the integration of ship component suppliers into the shipbuilding process. This has been recognized as a vital step by the National Shipbuilding Research Program, but so far we have not made significant progress. A necessary prerequisite for this "supplier integration" is extensive standardization of ship components, yet another area in which the Soviets have achieved significantly greater progress than we have. Additional areas of Soviet advantage are the presence of a multilevel research and development infrastructure well supported by highly educated scientists, engineering and technical personnel; and better integration of formally educated engineering and technical personnel into the ship production process. In his conclusion, the author lists a number of problems facing the Soviet economy that adversely affect shipbuilding productivity. Perhaps behind this listing we can delve out some potential U.S. shipbuilding advantages. First, production systems in U.S. shipyards (with the possible exception of naval shipyards) are probably more flexible and adjustable to meet new circumstances as a consequence of not being constrained by a burdensome centralized bureaucracy, as is the case with Soviet shipyards. Next, such initiatives as the Ship Production Committee's "Human Resources Innovation" projects stand a better chance of achieving product-oriented "production team" relationship among labor, management, and technical personnel than the more rigid Soviet system, especially in view of the ability of U.S. shipyard management to offer meaningful financial incentives without the kind of bureaucratic constraints imposed in the Soviet system. Finally, the current U.S. Navy/shipbuilding industry cooperative effort to develop a common engineering database should lead to a highly integrated and disciplined ship design, construction, operation, and maintenance system for naval ships (and subsequently for commercial ships) that will ultimately restore the U.S. shipbuilding process to a leadership position in the world marketplace (additional references [16] and [17]).On that tentatively positive note, it seems fitting to close this discussion with a question: Is the author aware of any similar Soviet effort to develop an integrated computer-aided design, production and logistics support system? The author is to be congratulated on an excellent, comprehensive insight into the Soviet shipbuilding process and productivity improvement efforts that should give us all adequate cause not to be complacent in our own efforts. Peter M. Palermo, Naval Sea Systems Command The author presents an interesting paper that unfortunately leaves this reader with a number of unanswered questions. The paper is a paradox. It depicts a system consisting of a highly educated work force, advanced fabrication processes including the use of standardized hull modules, sophisticated materials and welding processes, and yet in the author's words they suffer from "low productivity, poor product quality, . . . and the rigid production systems which resists the introduction of new ideas." Is it possible that incentive, motivation, and morale play an equally significant role in achieving quality and producibility advances? Can the author discuss underlying reasons for quality problems in particular—or can we assume that the learning curves of Figs. 5 and Fig. 6 are representative of quality improvement curves? It has been my general impression that quality will improve with application of high-tech fabrication procedures, enclosed fabrication ways, availability of highly educated welding engineers on the building ways, and that productivity would improve with the implementation of modular or zone outfitting techniques coupled with the quality improvements. Can the author give his impressions of the impact of these innovations in the U.S. shipbuilding industry vis-a-vis the Soviet industry? Many of the welding processes cited in the paper are also familiar to the free world, with certain notable exceptions concerning application in Navy shipbuilding. For example, (1) electroslag welding is generally confined to single-pass welding of heavy plates; application to thinner plates—l1/4 in. and less when certified—would permit its use in more applications than heretofore. (2) Electron beam welding is generally restricted to high-technology machinery parts; vacuum chamber size restricts its use for larger components (thus it must be assumed that the Soviets have solved the vacuum chamber problem or have much larger chambers). (3) Likewise, laser welding has had limited use in U.S. shipbuilding. An interesting theme that runs throughout the paper, but is not explicitly addressed, is the quality of Soviet ship fitting. The use of high-tech welding processes and the mention of "remote controlled tooling for welding and X-ray testing the butt, and for following painting" imply significant ship fitting capabilities for fitting and positioning. This is particularly true if modules are built in one facility, outfitted and assembled elsewhere depending on the type of ship required. Any comments concerning Soviet ship fitting capabilities would be appreciated. The discussion on modular construction seems to indicate that the Soviets have a "standard hull module" that is used for different types of vessels, and if the use of these hull modules permit increasing hull length without changes to the fore and aft ends, it can be assumed that they are based on a standard structural design. That being the case, the midship structure will be overdesigned for many applications and optimally designed for very few. Recognizing that the initial additional cost for such a piece of hull structure is relatively minimal, it cannot be forgotten that the lifecycle costs for transporting unnecessary hull weight around can have significant fuel cost impacts. If I perceived the modular construction approach correctly, then I am truly intrigued concerning the methods for handling the distributive systems. In particular, during conversion when the ship is lengthened, how are the electrical, fluid, communications, and other distributive systems broken down, reassembled and tested? "Quick connect couplings" for these type systems at the module breaks is one particular area where economies can be achieved when zone construction methods become the order of the day in U.S. Navy ships. The author's comments in this regard would be most welcome. The design process as presented is somewhat different than U.S. Navy practice. In U.S. practice, Preliminary and Contract design are developed by the Navy. Detail design, the development of the working drawings, is conducted by the lead shipbuilder. While the detail design drawings can be used by follow shipbuilders, flexibility is permitted to facilitate unique shipbuilding or outfitting procedures. Even the contract drawings supplied by the Navy can be modified— upon Navy approval—to permit application of unique shipbuilder capabilities. The large number of college-trained personnel entering the Soviet shipbuilding and allied fields annually is mind-boggling. According to the author's estimation, a minimum of about 6500 college graduates—5000 of which have M.S. degrees—enter these fields each year. It would be most interesting to see a breakdown of these figures—in particular, how many naval architects and welding engineers are included in these figures? These are disciplines with relatively few personnel entering the Navy design and shipbuilding field today. For example, in 1985 in all U.S. colleges and universities, there were only 928 graduates (B.S., M.S. and Ph.D.) in marine, naval architecture and ocean engineering and only 1872 graduates in materials and metallurgy. The number of these graduates that entered the U.S. shipbuilding field is unknown. Again, the author is to be congratulated for providing a very thought-provoking paper. Frank J. Long, Win/Win Strategies This paper serves not only as a chronicle of some of the productivity improvement efforts in Soviet shipbuilding but also as an important reminder of the fruits of those efforts. While most Americans have an appreciation of the strengths of the Russian Navy, this paper serves to bring into clearer focus the Russians' entire maritime might in its naval, commercial, and fishing fleets. Indeed, no other nation on earth has a greater maritime capability. It is generally acknowledged that the Soviet Navy is the largest in the world. When considering the fact that the commercial and fishing fleets are, in many military respects, arms of the naval fleet, we can more fully appreciate how awesome Soviet maritime power truly is. The expansion of its maritime capabilities is simply another but highly significant aspect of Soviet worldwide ambitions. The development and updating of "Setka Typov Su dov" (Table of Vessel Classes), which the author describes is a classic example of the Soviet planning process. As the author states, "A mighty fishing and commercial fleet was built in accordance with a 'Setka' which was originally developed in the 1960's. And an even more impressive example is the rapid expansion of the Soviet Navy." In my opinion it is not mere coincidence that the Russians embarked on this course in the 1960's. That was the beginning of the coldest of cold war periods—Francis Gary Power's U-2 plane was downed by the Russians on May 1, 1960; the mid-May 1960 Four Power Geneva Summit was a bust; the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 and, in 1962, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States maritime embargo capability in that crisis undoubtedly influenced the Soviet's planning process. It is a natural and normal function of a state-controlled economy with its state-controlled industries to act to bring about the controlled productivity improvement developments in exactly the key areas discussed in the author's paper. As the author states, "All innovations at Soviet shipyards have originated at two main sources:domestic development andadaptation of new ideas introduced by leading foreign yards, or most likely a combination of both. Soviet shipbuilders are very fast learners; moreover, their own experience is quite substantial." The Ship Production Committee of SNAME has organized its panels to conduct research in many of these same areas for productivity improvement purposes. For example, addressing the areas of technology and equipment are Panels SP-1 and 3, Shipbuilding Facilities and Environmental Effects, and Panel SP-7, Shipbuilding Welding. Shipbuilding methods are the province of SP-2; outfitting and production aids and engineering and scientific support are the province of SP-4, Design Production Integration. As I read through the descriptions of the processes that led to the productivity improvements, I was hoping to learn more about the organizational structure of Soviet shipyards, the managerial hierarchy and how work is organized by function or by craft in the shipyard. (I would assume that for all intents and purposes, all Russian yards are organized in the same way.) American shipyard management is wedded to the notion that American shipbuilding suffers immeasurably from a productivity standpoint because of limitations on management's ability to assign workers across craft lines. It is unlikely that this limitation exists in Soviet shipyards. If it does not, how is the unfettered right of assignment optimized? What are the tangible, measurable results? I believe it would have been helpful, also, for the author to have dedicated some of the paper to one of the most important factors in improvement in the labor-intensive shipbuilding industry—the shipyard worker. There are several references to worker problems—absenteeism, labor shortage, poor workmanship, and labor discipline. The reader is left with the impression that the Russians believe that either those are unsolvable problems or have a priority ranking significantly inferior to the organizational, technical, and design efforts discussed. As a case in point, the author devotes a complete section to engineering education and professional training but makes no mention of education or training programs for blue-collar workers. It would seem that a paper on productivity improvement efforts in Soviet shipbuilding would address this most important element. My guess is that the Russians have considerable such efforts underway and it would be beneficial for us to learn of them.

William F. Lincoln of University of Michigan reviews “Global Trade in Services: Fear, Facts, and Offshoring” by J. Bradford Jensen. The EconLit abstract of the reviewed work begins: Explores U.S. services in the national and global economies and considers whether the United States should be concerned about increased trade in services. Discusses some basic facts about the service sector and service trade; a new approach to identifying tradable services; characteristics of workers in tradable service industries; comparative advantage -- lessons from manufacturing; comparative advantage -- prospects for the service sector; impediments to trade in services; the labor-market impact of increased service trade; and trade services across U.S. regions -- opportunities and vulnerabilities. Jensen is Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Professor of Economics and International Business in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, and a senior policy scholar at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Index.

The biosorption of eight different metals from aqueous solutions of combined industrial effluent by live or dead cells of Phanerochaete chrysosporium was investigated. Growth rate studies of P. chrysosporium were carried out in a selected medium as well as in the effluent. The specific growth rate of the fungus was in the range of 0.089–0.102 h–1 in the medium. The biosorption of metal ions increased as the initial concentration of metal ions increased in the medium. Biosorption equilibrium was established in about 1 h and the concentration of adsorbed metal ions did not change further with time. The equilibrium was well described by Langmuir, Freundlich and Reidlich – Peterson isotherms. The dead fungal biomass was more effective than living fungus for biosorption of metals. The optimum pH for the fungal growth was at 4.5 but enhanced Biosorption was at pH 6 for maximum reduction of hexavalent chromium to trivalent.

Abstract The activated coal fly ash (FA) treated with NaOH and hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide (HDTMABr) was used as adsorbent for removal of cadmium(II) ions and rhodamine B (RB) form an aqueous solution. Characterization of FA and FA-HDTMABr were done by using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The sorption equilibrium in the system were analysed by isotherm models, such as Freundlich, Langmuir, generalized Langmiur-Freundlich, Redlich-Peterson, Jovanović, extended Jovanović, Tóth, Fumkin-Fowler-Guggenheim, Fowler-Guggenheim-Jovanović-Freundlich, Temkin, Dubinin-Radushkevich, Halsey, Brunauer Emmett and Teller. The evaluation of fitting of the isotherms studied experimentally points was carried out by means of the reduced chi-square test and the coefficient of determination. The maximum monolayer adsorption capacity of the FA-HDTMABr was found to be 744 mg·g−1 and 666 mg·g−1 for Cd(II) and RB, respectively. The PFO, PSO, Elovich mass transfer, liquid film diffusion and intra-particle diffusion models were analysed. Sorption kinetics data were well fitted by PSO model. The Elovich and intra-particle model also revealed that there are two separate stages in the sorption process, namely, the external diffusion and the inter-particle diffusion.

IntroductionIn the wine world, authenticity is not just desired, it is actively required. That demand comes from a complex of producers, distributors and consumers, and other interested parties. Consequently, the authenticity of wine is constantly created, reworked, presented, performed, argued over, contested and appreciated.At one level, such processes have clear economic elements. A wine deemed to be an authentic “expression” of something—the soil and micro-climate in which it was grown, the environment and culture of the region from which it hails, the genius of the wine-maker who nurtured and brought it into being, the quintessential characteristics of the grape variety it is made from—will likely make much more money than one deemed inauthentic. In wine, as in other spheres, perceived authenticity is a means to garner profits, both economic and symbolic (Beverland).At another level, wine animates a complicated intertwining of human tastes, aesthetics, pleasures and identities. Discussions as to the authenticity, or otherwise, of a wine often involve a search by the discussants for meaning and purpose in their lives (Grahm). To discover and appreciate a wine felt to “speak” profoundly of the place from whence it came possibly involves a sense of superiority over others: I drink “real” wine, while you drink mass-market trash (Bourdieu). It can also create reassuring senses of ontological security: in discovering an authentic wine, expressive of a certain aesthetic and locational purity (Zolberg and Cherbo), I have found a cherishable object which can be reliably traced to one particular place on Earth, therefore possessing integrity, honesty and virtue (Fine). Appreciation of wine’s authenticity licenses the self-perception that I am sophisticated and sensitive (Vannini and Williams). My judgement of the wine is also a judgement upon my own aesthetic capacities (Hennion).In wine drinking, and the production, distribution and marketing processes underpinning it, much is at stake as regards authenticity. The social system of the wine world requires the category of authenticity in order to keep operating. This paper examines how and why this has come to be so. It considers the crafting of authenticity in long-term historical perspective. Demand for authentic wine by drinkers goes back many centuries. Self-conscious performances of authenticity by producers is of more recent provenance, and was elaborated above all in France. French innovations then spread to other parts of Europe and the world. The paper reviews these developments, showing that wine authenticity is constituted by an elaborate complex of environmental, cultural, legal, political and commercial factors. The paper both draws upon the social science literature concerning the construction of authenticity and also points out its limitations as regards understanding wine authenticity.The History of AuthenticityIt is conventional in the social science literature (Peterson, Authenticity) to claim that authenticity as a folk category (Lu and Fine), and actors’ desires for authentic things, are wholly “modern,” being unknown in pre-modern contexts (Cohen). Consideration of wine shows that such a view is historically uninformed. Demands by consumers for ‘authentic’ wine, in the sense that it really came from the location it was sold as being from, can be found in the West well before the 19th century, having ancient roots (Wengrow). In ancient Rome, there was demand by elites for wine that was both really from the location it was billed as being from, and was verifiably of a certain vintage (Robertson and Inglis). More recently, demand has existed in Western Europe for “real” Tokaji (sweet wine from Hungary), Port and Bordeaux wines since at least the 17th century (Marks).Conventional social science (Peterson, Authenticity) is on solider ground when demonstrating how a great deal of social energies goes into constructing people’s perceptions—not just of consumers, but of wine producers and sellers too—that particular wines are somehow authentic expressions of the places where they were made. The creation of perceived authenticity by producers and sales-people has a long historical pedigree, beginning in early modernity.For example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, wine-makers in Bordeaux could not compete on price grounds with burgeoning Spanish, Portuguese and Italian production areas, so they began to compete with them on the grounds of perceived quality. Multiple small plots were reorganised into much bigger vineyards. The latter were now associated with a chateau in the neighbourhood, giving the wines connotations of aristocratic gravity and dignity (Ulin). Product-makers in other fields have used the assertion of long-standing family lineages as apparent guarantors of tradition and quality in production (Peterson, Authenticity). The early modern Bordelaise did the same, augmenting their wines’ value by calling upon aristocratic accoutrements like chateaux, coats-of-arms, alleged long-term family ownership of vineyards, and suchlike.Such early modern entrepreneurial efforts remain the foundations of the very high prestige and prices associated with elite wine-making in the region today, with Chinese companies and consumers particularly keen on the grand crus of the region. Globalization of the wine world today is strongly rooted in forms of authenticity performance invented several hundred years ago.Enter the StateAnother notable issue is the long-term role that governments and legislation have played, both in the construction and presentation of authenticity to publics, and in attempts to guarantee—through regulative measures and taxation systems—that what is sold really has come from where it purports to be from. The west European State has a long history of being concerned with the fraudulent selling of “fake” wines (Anderson, Norman, and Wittwer). Thus Cosimo III, Medici Grand Duke of Florence, was responsible for an edict of 1716 which drew up legal boundaries for Tuscan wine-producing regions, restricting the use of regional names like Chianti to wine that actually came from there (Duguid).These 18th century Tuscan regulations are the distant ancestors of quality-control rules centred upon the need to guarantee the authenticity of wines from particular geographical regions and sub-regions, which are today now ubiquitous, especially in the European Union (DeSoucey). But more direct progenitors of today’s Geographical Indicators (GIs)—enforced by the GATT international treaties—and Protected Designations of Origin (PDOs)—promulgated and monitored by the EU—are French in origin (Barham). The famous 1855 quality-level classification of Bordeaux vineyards and their wines was the first attempt in the world explicitly to proclaim that the quality of a wine was a direct consequence of its defined place of origin. This move significantly helped to create the later highly influential notion that place of origin is the essence of a wine’s authenticity. This innovation was initially wholly commercial, rather than governmental, being carried out by wine-brokers to promote Bordeaux wines at the Paris Exposition Universelle, but was later elaborated by State officials.In Champagne, another luxury wine-producing area, small-scale growers of grapes worried that national and international perceptions of their wine were becoming wholly determined by big brands such as Dom Perignon, which advertised the wine as a luxury product, but made no reference to the grapes, the soil, or the (supposedly) traditional methods of production used by growers (Guy). The latter turned to the idea of “locality,” which implied that the character of the wine was an essential expression of the Champagne region itself—something ignored in brand advertising—and that the soil itself was the marker of locality. The idea of “terroir”—referring to the alleged properties of soil and micro-climate, and their apparent expression in the grapes—was mobilised by one group, smaller growers, against another, the large commercial houses (Guy). The terroir notion was a means of constructing authenticity, and denouncing de-localised, homogenizing inauthenticity, a strategy favouring some types of actors over others. The relatively highly industrialized wine-making process was later represented for public consumption as being consonant with both tradition and nature.The interplay of commerce, government, law, and the presentation of authenticity, also appeared in Burgundy. In that region between WWI and WWII, the wine world was transformed by two new factors: the development of tourism and the rise of an ideology of “regionalism” (Laferté). The latter was invented circa WWI by metropolitan intellectuals who believed that each of the French regions possessed an intrinsic cultural “soul,” particularly expressed through its characteristic forms of food and drink. Previously despised peasant cuisine was reconstructed as culturally worthy and true expression of place. Small-scale artisanal wine production was no longer seen as an embarrassment, producing wines far more “rough” than those of Bordeaux and Champagne. Instead, such production was taken as ground and guarantor of authenticity (Laferté). Location, at regional, village and vineyard level, was taken as the primary quality indicator.For tourists lured to the French regions by the newly-established Guide Michelin, and for influential national and foreign journalists, an array of new promotional devices were created, such as gastronomic festivals and folkloric brotherhoods devoted to celebrations of particular foodstuffs and agricultural events like the wine-harvest (Laferté). The figure of the wine-grower was presented as an exemplary custodian of tradition, relatively free of modern capitalist exchange relations. These are the beginnings of an important facet of later wine companies’ promotional literatures worldwide—the “decoupling” of their supposed commitments to tradition, and their “passion” for wine-making beyond material interests, from everyday contexts of industrial production and profit-motives (Beverland). Yet the work of making the wine-maker and their wines authentically “of the soil” was originally stimulated in response to international wine markets and the tourist industry (Laferté).Against this background, in 1935 the French government enacted legislation which created theInstitut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO) and its Appelation d’Origine Controlle (AOC) system (Barham). Its goal was, and is, to protect what it defines as terroir, encompassing both natural and human elements. This legislation went well beyond previous laws, as it did more than indicate that wine must be honestly labelled as deriving from a given place of origin, for it included guarantees of authenticity too. An authentic wine was defined as one which truly “expresses” the terroir from which it comes, where terroir means both soil and micro-climate (nature) and wine-making techniques “traditionally” associated with that area. Thus French law came to enshrine a relatively recently invented cultural assumption: that places create distinctive tastes, the value of this state of affairs requiring strong State protection. Terroir must be protected from the untrammelled free market. Land and wine, symbiotically connected, are de-commodified (Kopytoff). Wine is embedded in land; land is embedded in what is regarded as regional culture; the latter is embedded in national history (Polanyi).But in line with the fact that the cultural underpinnings of the INAO/AOC system were strongly commercially oriented, at a more subterranean level the de-commodified product also has economic value added to it. A wine worthy of AOC protection must, it is assumed, be special relative to wines un-deserving of that classification. The wine is taken out of the market, attributed special status, and released, economically enhanced, back onto the market. Consequently, State-guaranteed forms of authenticity embody ambivalent but ultimately efficacious economic processes. Wine pioneered this Janus-faced situation, the AOC system in the 1990s being generalized to all types of agricultural product in France. A huge bureaucratic apparatus underpins and makes possible the AOC system. For a region and product to gain AOC protection, much energy is expended by collectives of producers and other interested parties like regional development and tourism officials. The French State employs a wide range of expert—oenological, anthropological, climatological, etc.—who police the AOC classificatory mechanisms (Barham).Terroirisation ProcessesFrench forms of legal classification, and the broader cultural classifications which underpin them and generated them, very much influenced the EU’s PDO system. The latter uses a language of authenticity rooted in place first developed in France (DeSoucey). The French model has been generalized, both from wine to other foodstuffs, and around many parts of Europe and the world. An Old World idea has spread to the New World—paradoxically so, because it was the perceived threat posed by the ‘placeless’ wines and decontextualized grapes of the New World which stimulated much of the European legislative measures to protect terroir (Marks).Paxson shows how artisanal cheese-makers in the US, appropriate the idea of terroir to represent places of production, and by extension the cheeses made there, that have no prior history of being constructed as terroir areas. Here terroir is invented at the same time as it is naturalised, made to seem as if it simply points to how physical place is directly expressed in a manufactured product. By defining wine or cheese as a natural product, claims to authenticity are themselves naturalised (Ulin). Successful terroirisation brings commercial benefits for those who engage in it, creating brand distinctiveness (no-one else can claim their product expresses that particularlocation), a value-enhancing aura around the product which, and promotion of food tourism (Murray and Overton).Terroirisation can also render producers into virtuous custodians of the land who are opposed to the depredations of the industrial food and agriculture systems, the categories associated with terroir classifying the world through a binary opposition: traditional, small-scale production on the virtuous side, and large-scale, “modern” harvesting methods on the other. Such a situation has prompted large-scale, industrial wine-makers to adopt marketing imagery that implies the “place-based” nature of their offerings, even when the grapes can come from radically different areas within a region or from other regions (Smith Maguire). Like smaller producers, large companies also decouple the advertised imagery of terroir from the mundane realities of industry and profit-margins (Beverland).The global transportability of the terroir concept—ironic, given the rhetorical stress on the uniqueness of place—depends on its flexibility and ambiguity. In the French context before WWII, the phrase referred specifically to soil and micro-climate of vineyards. Slowly it started mean to a markedly wider symbolic complex involving persons and personalities, techniques and knowhow, traditions, community, and expressions of local and regional heritage (Smith Maguire). Over the course of the 20th century, terroir became an ever broader concept “encompassing the physical characteristics of the land (its soil, climate, topography) and its human dimensions (culture, history, technology)” (Overton 753). It is thought to be both natural and cultural, both physical and human, the potentially contradictory ramifications of such understanding necessitating subtle distinctions to ward off confusion or paradox. Thus human intervention on the land and the vines is often represented as simply “letting the grapes speak for themselves” and “allowing the land to express itself,” as if the wine-maker were midwife rather than fabricator. Terroir talk operates with an awkward verbal balancing act: wine-makers’ “signature” styles are expressions of their cultural authenticity (e.g. using what are claimed as ‘traditional’ methods), yet their stylistic capacities do not interfere with the soil and micro-climate’s natural tendencies (i.e. the terroir’sphysical authenticity).The wine-making process is a case par excellence of a network of humans and objects, or human and non-human actants (Latour). The concept of terroir today both acknowledges that fact, but occludes it at the same time. It glosses over the highly problematic nature of what is “real,” “true,” “natural.” The roles of human agents and technologies are sequestered, ignoring the inevitably changing nature of knowledges and technologies over time, recognition of which jeopardises claims about an unchanging physical, social and technical order. Harvesting by machine production is representationally disavowed, yet often pragmatically embraced. The role of “foreign” experts acting as advisors —so-called “flying wine-makers,” often from New World production cultures —has to be treated gingerly or covered up. Because of the effects of climate change on micro-climates and growing conditions, the taste of wines from a particular terroir changes over time, but the terroir imaginary cannot recognise that, being based on projections of timelessness (Brabazon).The authenticity referred to, and constructed, by terroir imagery must constantly be performed to diverse audiences, convincing them that time stands still in the terroir. If consumers are to continue perceiving authenticity in a wine or winery, then a wide range of cultural intermediaries—critics, journalists and other self-proclaiming experts must continue telling convincing stories about provenance. Effective authenticity story-telling rests on the perceived sincerity and knowledgeability of the teller. Such tales stress romantic imagery and colourful, highly personalised accounts of the quirks of particular wine-makers, omitting mundane details of production and commercial activities (Smith Maguire). Such intermediaries must seek to interest their audience in undiscovered regions and “quirky” styles, demonstrating their insider knowledge. But once such regions and styles start to become more well-known, their rarity value is lost, and intermediaries must find ever newer forms of authenticity, which in turn will lose their burnished aura when they become objects of mundane consumption. An endless cycle of discovering and undermining authenticity is constantly enacted.ConclusionAuthenticity is a category held by different sorts of actors in the wine world, and is the means by which that world is held together. This situation has developed over a long time-frame and is now globalized. Yet I will end this paper on a volte face. Authenticity in the wine world can never be regarded as wholly and simply a social construction. One cannot directly import into the analysis of that world assumptions—about the wholly socially constructed nature of phenomena—which social scientific studies of other domains, most notably culture industries, work with (Peterson, Authenticity). Ways of thinking which are indeed useful for understanding the construction of authenticity in some specific contexts, cannot just be applied in simplistic manners to the wine world. When they are applied in direct and unsophisticated ways, such an operation misses the specificities and particularities of wine-making processes. These are always simultaneously “social” and “natural”, involving multiple forms of complex intertwining of human actions, environmental and climatological conditions, and the characteristics of the vines themselves—a situation markedly beyond beyond any straightforward notion of “social construction.”The wine world has many socially constructed objects. But wine is not just like any other product. Its authenticity cannot be fabricated in the manner of, say, country music (Peterson, Country). Wine is never in itself only a social construction, nor is its authenticity, because the taste, texture and chemical elements of wine derive from complex human interactions with the physical environment. Wine is partly about packaging, branding and advertising—phenomena standard social science accounts of authenticity focus on—but its organic properties are irreducible to those factors. Terroir is an invention, a label put on to certain things, meaning they are perceived to be authentic. But the things that label refers to—ranging from the slope of a vineyard and the play of sunshine on it, to how grapes grow and when they are picked—are entwined with human semiotics but not completely created by them. A truly comprehensive account of wine authenticity remains to be written.ReferencesAnderson, Kym, David Norman, and Glyn Wittwer. “Globalization and the World’s Wine Markets: Overview.” Discussion Paper No. 0143, Centre for International Economic Studies. Adelaide: U of Adelaide, 2001.Barham, Elizabeth. “Translating Terroir: The Global Challenge of French AOC Labelling.” Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003): 127–38.Beverland, Michael B. “Crafting Brand Authenticity: The Case of Luxury Wines.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1003–29.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1992.Brabazon, Tara. “Colonial Control or Terroir Tourism? The Case of Houghton’s White Burgundy.” Human Geographies 8.2 (2014): 17–33.Cohen, Erik. “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 15.3 (1988): 371–86.DeSoucey, Michaela. “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union.” American Sociological Review 75.3 (2010): 432–55.Duguid, Paul. “Developing the Brand: The Case of Alcohol, 1800–1880.” Enterprise and Society 4.3 (2003): 405–41.Fine, Gary A. “Crafting Authenticity: The Validation of Identity in Self-Taught Art.” Theory and Society 32.2 (2003): 153–80.Grahm, Randall. “The Soul of Wine: Digging for Meaning.” Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking. Ed. Fritz Allhoff. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 219–24.Guy, Kolleen M. When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.Hennion, Antoine. “The Things That Bind Us Together.”Cultural Sociology 1.1 (2007): 65–85.Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process." The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 64–91.Laferté, Gilles. “End or Invention of Terroirs? Regionalism in the Marketing of French Luxury Goods: The Example of Burgundy Wines in the Inter-War Years.” Working Paper, Centre d’Economie et Sociologie Appliquées a l’Agriculture et aux Espaces Ruraux, Dijon.Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1993.Lu, Shun and Gary A. Fine. “The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment.” The Sociological Quarterly 36.3 (1995): 535–53.Marks, Denton. “Competitiveness and the Market for Central and Eastern European Wines: A Cultural Good in the Global Wine Market.” Journal of Wine Research 22.3 (2011): 245–63.Murray, Warwick E. and John Overton. “Defining Regions: The Making of Places in the New Zealand Wine Industry.” Australian Geographer 42.4 (2011): 419–33.Overton, John. “The Consumption of Space: Land, Capital and Place in the New Zealand Wine Industry.” Geoforum 41.5 (2010): 752–62.Paxson, Heather. “Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse Engineering Terroir for New-World Landscapes.” American Anthropologist 112.3 (2010): 444–57.Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.———. “In Search of Authenticity.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1083–98.Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.Robertson, Roland, and David Inglis. “The Global Animus: In the Tracks of World Consciousness.” Globalizations 1.1 (2006): 72–92.Smith Maguire, Jennifer. “Provenance and the Liminality of Production and Consumption: The Case of Wine Promoters.” Marketing Theory 10.3 (2010): 269–82.Trubek, Amy. The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2008.Ulin, Robert C. “Invention and Representation as Cultural Capital.” American Anthropologist 97.3 (1995): 519–27.Vannini, Phillip, and Patrick J. Williams. Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.Wengrow, David. “Prehistories of Commodity Branding.” Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 7–34.Zolberg, Vera and Joni Maya Cherbo. Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

In the heady expansion of capital’s productive capacity during the post-war period, E.P. Thompson wondered optimistically at potentials accruing to humanity by accelerating automation. He asked, “If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not ‘how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?’ but ‘what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live?’” (Thompson 36). Indeed, linear and economistic variants of Marxian materialism have long emphasised that the socialisation of production by the use of machinery will eventually free us from work. At the very least, the underemployment produced by the automation of pivotal labour roles is supposed to create a political subject capable of agitating successfully against bourgeois and capitalist hegemony. But contrary to these prognostications, the worker of 2019 is caught up in a process of generalising work far beyond what is considered necessary by tradition, or at least the convention of what David Harvey calls “embedded liberalism” (11). As Anne Helen Peterson wrote in a recent Buzzfeed article,even the trends millennials have popularized — like athleisure — speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they’re efficient: you can transition seamlessly from an exercise class to a Skype meeting to child pickup. We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work. (Peterson)For the work-martyr, activity in its broadest Aristotelian sense is evaluated by and subordinated to the question of efficiency and productivity. Occupations of time that were once considered external to “work” as matters of “life” (to use Kathi Weeks’s vocabulary) are reconceived as waste when not deployed in the service of value-generation (Weeks 15).The point here, then, is to provide some answers for why the decrease in socially-necessary labour time in an age of automation has not coincided with the Thompsonian expansion of free time. The current dilemma of the neoliberal “work-martyr” is traceable to the political responses generated by crises in production during the depression and the stagflationary disaccumulation of the 1960s-70s, and the major victory in the “battle for ideas” was the transformation of the political subject into human capital. This “intensely constructed and governed” suite of possible values is tasked, according to Wendy Brown, “with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavours and ventures” (Brown 10). Connecting the creation of this subject in relation to personal or free time is important partly because of time’s longstanding importance to philosophies of subjectivity. But more to the point, the focus on time is important because it serves to demonstrate the economic foundations of the incursion of capitalist governance into the most private domains of existence. Against the criticism of Marx’s ‘abstract’ theory of value, one can see that the laws of capitalist accumulation make their mark in all parts of contemporary human being, including temporality. By tracing the emergence of afterwork as the unpaid continuation of the accumulation of value, one can show how each subject increasingly ‘lives’ capital. This marks a turning point in political economy. When work spills over a temporal limit, its relationship to reproduction is finally blurred to the point of indistinction. What this means for value-creation in 2019 is something in urgent need of critique.State ReproductionAccording to the Marxian theory, labour’s minimum cost is abstractly determined by the price of the labourer’s necessities. Once they have produced enough objects of value to cover these costs, the rest of their work is surplus value in the hands of the capitalist. The capitalist’s aim, then, is to extend the overall working-day for as long beyond the minimum as possible. Theoretically, the full 24 hours of the day may be used. The rise of machine production in the 19th century allowed the owners to make this theory a reality. The only thing that governed the extension of work-time was the physical minimum of labour-power’s reproduction (Marx 161). But this was on the provision that all the labourer’s “free” time was to be spent regrouping their energies. Anything in excess of this was a privilege: time wasted that could have been spent in the factory. “If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself”, says Marx, “he robs the capitalist” (162).This began to change with the socialisation of the work process and the increase in technical proficiency that labour demanded in early 20th-century industry. With the changes in the sophistication of the manufacture process, the labourer came to be factored in the production process less as an “appendage of the machine” and more as a collection of decisive skills. Fordism based itself around the recognition that capital itself was “dependent on a family-based reproduction” (Weeks 27). In Ford’s America, the sense that work’s intensity might supplant losses in the working day propelled owners of production to recognise the economic need of ensuring a robust culture of social reproduction. In capital’s original New Deal, Ford provided an increase in wages (the Five Dollar Day) in exchange for a rise in productivity (Dalla Costa v). To preserve the increased rhythm of industrial production required more than a robust wage, however. It required “the formation of a physically efficient and psychologically disciplined working class” (Dalla Costa 2). Companies began to hire sociologists to investigate how workers spent their spare time (Dalla Costa 8). They led the charge in a what we might call the first “anthropological revolution” of the American 20th century, whereby the improved wage of the worker was underpinned by the economisation of their reproduction. This was enabled by the cheapening of social necessities (and thus a reduction in socially-necessary labour time) in profound connection to the development of household economy on the backs of unpaid female labour (Weeks 25).This arrangement between capital and labour persisted until 1929. When the inevitable crisis came, however, wages faltered, and many workers joined the ranks of the unemployed. Unable to afford even the basics of their own reproduction, the working-class looked to the state. They created political and social pressure through marches, demonstrations, attacks on shops and the looting of supply trucks (Dalla Costa 40). The state held out against them, but the crisis in production eventually reached such a point of intensity that the government was forced to intervene. Hoover instituted the Emergency Relief Act and Financial Reconstruction Corporation in 1932. This was expanded the following year by FDR’s New Deal, transforming Emergency Relief into a federal institution and creating the Civil Works Association to stimulate the job market (Dalla Costa 63). The security of the working class was decisively linked to the state through the wage guarantees, welfare measures and even the legal guarantee of collective bargaining.For the most part, the state’s intervention in social reproduction took the pressure off industry by ensuring that the workforce would remain able to handle its burdens and that the unemployed would remain employable. It guaranteed a minimum wage for the employed to ensure that demand didn’t collapse, and provided care outside the workforce to women, children and the elderly.Once the state took responsibility for reproduction, however, it immediately became interested in how free time could be made efficient and cost effective. Abroad, they noted the example of European statist and corporativist approaches. Roosevelt sent a delegation to Europe to study the various measures taken by fascist and United Front governments to curb the effects of economic crisis (Dogliani 247). Among these was Mussolini’s OND (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro) which sought to accumulate the free time of workers to the ends of production. Part of this required the responsibilisation of the broader community not only for regeneration of labour-power but the formation of a truly fascist political subject.FDR’s social reform program was able to reproduce this at home by following the example of workers’ community organisation during the depression years. Throughout the early ‘30s, self-help cooperatives, complete with “their own systems of payment in goods or currency” emerged among the unemployed (Dalla Costa 61). Black markets in consumer goods and informal labour structures developed in all major cities (Dalla Costa 34). Subsistence goods were self-produced in a cottage industry of unpaid domestic labour by both men and women (Dalla Costa 71). The paragon of self-reproducing communities was urbanised black Americans, whose internal solidarity had saved lives throughout the depression. The state took notice of these informal economies of production and reproduction, and started to incorporate the possibility of community engineering into their national plan. Roosevelt convened the Civilian Conservation Corps to absorb underemployed elements of the American workforce and recover consumer demand through direct state sponsorship (wages) (Dogliani, 247). The Committee of Industrial Organisation was transformed into a “congress” linking workers directly to the state (Dalla Costa 74). Minium wages were secured in the supreme court in 1937, then hiked in 1938 (78). In all, the state emerged at this time as a truly corporativist entity- the guarantor of employment and of class stability. From Social Reproduction to Human Capital InvestmentSo how do we get from New Deal social engineering to yoga pants? The answer is deceptively simple. The state transformed social reproduction into a necessary part of the production process. But this also meant that it was instrumentalised. The state only had to fund its workforce’s reproduction so long as this guaranteed productivity. After the war, this was maintained by a form of “embedded liberalism” which sought to provide full employment, economic growth and welfare for its citizens while anchoring the international economy in the Dollar’s gold-value. However, by providing stable increases in “relative value” (wages), this form of state investment incentivised capital flight and its spectacular consequent: deindustrialisation. The “embedded liberalism” of the state-capital-labour compromise began to breakdown with a new crisis of accumulation (Harvey 11-12). The relocation of production to non-union states and decolonised globally-southern sites of hyper-exploitation led to an ‘urban crisis’ in the job market. But as capitalist expansion carried on abroad, inflation kept dangerous pace with the rate of unemployment. This “stagflation” put irresistible pressure on the post-war order. The Bretton-Woods policy of maintaining fixed interest rates while pinning the dollar to gold was abandoned in 1971 and exchange rates were floated all over the world (Harvey 12). The spectre of a new crisis loomed, but one which couldn’t be resolved by the simple state sponsorship of production and reproduction.While many solutions were offered in place of this, one political vision singled out the state’s intervention into reproduction as the cause of the crisis. The ‘neoliberal’ political revolution began at the level of individual groups of capitalist agitants seeking governmental influence in a crusade against communism. It was given its first run on the historical pitch in Chile as part of the CIA-sponsored Pinochet revanchism, and then imported to NYC to deal with the worsening urban crisis of the 1970s. Instead of focusing on production (which required state intervention to proceed without crisis), neoliberal theory promulgated a turn to monetisation and financialisation. The rule of the New York banks after they forced the City into near-bankruptcy in 1975 prescribed total austerity in order to make good on its debts. The government was forced by capital itself to withdraw from investment in the reproduction of its citizens and workers. This was generalised to a federal policy as Reagan sought to address the decades-long deficit during the early years of his presidential term. Facilitating the global flow of finance and the hegemony of supranational institutions like the IMF, the domestic labour force now became beholden to an international minimum of socially-necessary labour time. At the level of domestic labour, the reduction of labour’s possible cost to this minimum had dramatic consequences. International competition allowed the physical limitations of labour to, once again, vanish from sight. Removed from the discourse of reproduction rights, the capitalist edifice was able to focus on changing the ratio of socially necessary labour to surplus. The mechanism that enabled them to do so was competition among the workforce. With the opening of the world market, capital no longer had to worry about the maintenance of domestic demand.But competition was not sufficient to pull off so grand a feat. What was required was a broader “battle of ideas”; the second anthropological revolution of the American century. The protections that workers had relied upon since the Fordist compromise and the corporativist solution eroded as the new “class-power” of the bourgeoisie levelled neoliberal assaults against associated labour (Harvey 23). While unions were gradually disempowered to fight the inevitable tide of deindustrialisation and capital flight, individual workers were coddled by a stream of neoliberal propaganda promising “Freedom” to those who would leave the stifling atmosphere of collective association. The success of this double enervation crippled union power, and the capitalist could rely increasingly on internal workplace wage stratification to regulate labour at an enterprise level (Dalla Costa 25). Incentive structures transformed labour rights into privileges; imagining old entitlements as concessions from above. In the last thirty years, the foundation of worker protections at large has, according to Brown, become illegible (Brown 38).Time and ValueThe reduction of time needed to produce has not coincided with an expansion of free time. The neoliberal anthropological revolution has wormed its way into the depth of the individual subject’s temporalising through a dual assault on labour conditions and propaganda. The privatisation of reproduction means that its necessary minimum is once again the subject of class struggle. Time spent unproductively outside the workplace now not only robs the capitalist, but the worker. If an activity isn’t a means to increase one’s “experience” (the vector of employability), it is time poorly spent. The likelihood of being hired for a job, in professional industries especially, is dependent on your ability to outperform others not only in your talents and skills, but in your own exploitability. Brown points out that the groups traditionally defined by the “middle strata … works more hours for less pay, fewer benefits, less security, and less promise of retirement or upward mobility than at any time in the past century” (Brown 28-29).This is what is meant by the transformation of workers into ‘human capital’. As far as the worker is concerned, the capitalist no longer purchases their labour-power: they purchase the sum of their experiences and behaviours. A competitive market has emerged for these personality markers. As a piece of human capital, one must expend one’s time not only in reproduction, but the production of their own surplus value. Going to a play adds culture points to your brand; speaking a second language gives you a competitive edge; a robust Instagram following is the difference between getting or missing out on a job. For Jess Whyte, this means that the market is now able to govern in place of the state. It exercises a command over people’s lives in and out of the workplace “which many an old tyrannical state would have envied” (Whyte 20).There is a question here of change and continuity. A survey of the 20th century shows that the reduction of ‘socially necessary labour time’ does not necessarily mean a reduction in time spent at work. In fact, the minimum around which capitalist production circulates is not worktime but wages. It is only at the political level that the working class prevented capital from pursuing this minimum. With the political victory of neoliberalism as a “restoration of class power” to the bourgeoisie, however, this minimum becomes a factor at the heart of all negotiations between capital and labour. The individual labourer lying at the heart of the productive process is reduced to his most naked form: human capital. This capital must spend all its time productively for its own benefit. Mundane tasks are avoidable, as stipulated by the piece of human capital sometimes known as Anne Helen Peterson, if they “wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better”. People are never really after-work under neoliberalism; their spare time is structurally adjusted into auxiliary labour. Competition has achieved what the state could never have dreamed of: a total governance of spare hours. This governance unites journalists tweeting from bed with Amazon workers living where they work, not to mention early-career academics working over a weekend to publish an article in an online journal that is not even paying them. These are all ways in which the privatisation of social reproduction transforms afterwork into unpaid overtime.ReferencesBrown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.Dalla Costa, Maria. Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal. Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2015.Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Engels, Friedrich, and Karl Marx. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. R.C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Vol. 1 and 2. Trans. E. Aveling and E. Untermann. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2013.Peterson, Anne Helen. “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Buzzfeed. 10 Oct. 2019 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work>.Postone, Moishe. Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” In Stanley Aronowitz and Michael J. Roberts, eds., Class: The Anthology. Hoboken: Wiley, 2018.Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018.Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.Whyte, Jessica. “The Invisible Hand of Friedrich Hayek: Submission and Spontaneous Order.” Political Theory (2017): 1-29.

AbstractL. (ZscL) is a plant residue that has been used as adsorbent for the removal of Hg(II) ions from an aqueous solution. The ability of ZscL to adsorb Hg(II) ions was investigated by using the batch adsorption procedure. It was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to support the adsorption of Hg(II) ions. The effects of various parameters on the adsorption process, such as contact time, adsorbent concentration, solution pH and initial concentrations of metal ions were studied to optimize the conditions for maximum adsorption. Experimental equilibrium data were fitted to the Freundlich, Langmuir, Dubinin-Radushkevich, Halsey and Temkin (two parameter models), Redlich-Peterson, Sips, Khan, Hill, Radke-Prausnitz, Langmuir-Freundlich and Toth (three parameter models), Fritz-Schlunder and Baudu (four parameter models) and Fritz-Schlunder (five parameter model) at 30°C by using nonlinear regression analysis. The examination of error analysis methods showed that the Halsey model provides the best fit for experimental data compared with the other isotherms. Various kinetic models have been applied to the experimental data to predict the adsorption kinetics. It was found that pseudo-second-order rate was better obeyed than pseudo-first-order reaction, supporting that the chemisorption process was involved. The obtained results show that ZscL can be used as an effective and natural low-cost adsorbent for the removal of Hg(II) ions from aqueous solutions.

Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisements – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circumstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. 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This paper presents results of a research on determinants of entrepreneurial intention among business students. VNU – University of Economics and Business is chosen for survey location. 250 questionnaires were emailed to business students at VNU – UEB, and then 226 responses were valid for further analysis. Findings from this research show that knowledge and experience, attitude toward entrepreneurship and perceived behavior control are three most important factors that influence the entrepreneurial intention. Keyword Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial intention, business students References [1] Drucker, P. F. (1985), Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Butterworth-Heineman Publishing House[2] Schumpeter, J.A (1947) “The creative response in economic history”, Journal of Economic History, 7(2), 149 – 159.[3]Volkman, C.et al., (2009),“Educating the Next wave of entrepreneurs. Unlocking entrepreneurial capabilities to meet the global challenges of 21st century”, Report of the Global Education Initiative. Cologny, Geneva: World Economic Forum.[4]Mumtaz et al., (2012)B.A.K. Mumtaz, S. Munirah, K. Halimahton. “The Relationship between educational support and entrepreneurial intentions in Malaysian Higher Learning Institution”, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 69 (24) (2012), pp. 2164-2173[5, 7]. Turker, D., Selcuk, S.S. (2009). “Which factors affect entrepreneurial intention of university students?” Journal of European Industrial Training, 33(2), 142 – 159[6]Peterman, Kennedy, (2003) “Enterprise Education: Influencing Students’ Perceptions of Entrepreneurship”,Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 28(2), pp. 129 – 144.[8] Roxas et al. (2008) “An Institutional View of Local Entrepreneurial Climate”,Asia-Pacific Social Science Review, 7(1) [9] Engle, R.I., Dimitriadi, N., Gavidia, J.V., Schlaegel, C.Delanoe, S., Alvarado, I., He, X., Buame, S. and Wolff, B. (2010). “Entrepreneurial Intent: A Twelve-Country Evaluation of Ajzen’s Model of Planned Behavior”,International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior and Research, 16(1), pp. 35 – 47.[10] Devonish , D., Alleyne, P., Soverall, W.C., Marshall, A.Y. and Pounder, P. (2010). “Explaining Entrepreneurial Intentions in the Caribbean”, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior and Research, 16(2), pp.149 – 171.[11] Yusof, M., Sandhu, M.S, Jain, K.K. (2007), “Relationship between Psychological Characteristics and Entrepreneurial Inclination: A Case Study of Students at University Tun Abdul Razak (UNITAR)”, Journal of Asia Entrepreneurship and Sustainability, 3(2).[12] Birdthistle, N. (2008), “Family SMEs in Ireland as Learning Organizations”, The Learning Organization, 15(5), pp. 421-436.[13] Davey, T., Plewa, C.,Struwig, M. (2010). “Entrepreneurial Perceptions and Career Intentions of International Students”, Journal of Education and Training, 53(5), pp. 335 – 352.[14] Krueger, Norris F., Reilly, Michael D., Carsrud, Alan L. (2000). “Competing models of entrepreneurial intentions”, Journal of Business Venture, 15(5/6), pp. 411 – 432.[15] Hoyer, W., MacInnis, D. (2004),Consumer Behavior (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.[16] Boissin, J. P., Branchet, B., Emin, S., Herbert, J. I. (2009). “Students and entrepreneurship: A comparative study of France and the United States”, Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship, 22(2), 101-122.[17] Shane, S., (2003), A general theory of entrepreneurship: The individual-opportunitynexus, UK: Edward Elgar[18] Brandstätter, H. (2011). “Personality aspects of entrepreneurship: A look at five meta-analyses”, Personality and Individual Differences, 51, pp. 222–230.[19] GhasemiF. et al (2011), “The relationship between creativity and achievement motivationwith high school students’ entrepreneurship”, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 30, pp. 1291 – 1296.[20] Nguyen, M., & Phan, A. (2014), “Entrepreneurial Traits and Motivations of the Youth – an Empirical Study in Ho Chi Minh City – Vietnam”. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 5(1), pp. 53–62.[21] Maes, J., Leroy, H., & Sels, L (2014), “Gender differences in entrepreneurial intentions: A TPB multi-group analysis at factor and indicator level”, European Management Journal, 32 (5), pp. 784-794

Hidden away at the ends of streets, behind suburban parks and community assets, there remain remnants of the coastal wallum heathlands that once stretched from Caloundra to Noosa, in Queensland, Australia. From late July to September, these areas explode with colour, a springtime wonderland of white wedding bush, delicate ground orchids, the pastels and brilliance of pink boronias, purple irises, and the diverse profusion of yellow bush peas. These gifts of nature are still relatively unknown and unappreciated, with most locals, and Australians at large, having little knowledge of the remarkable nature of the wallum, the nutrient-poor sandy soil that can be almost as acidic as battery acid, but which sustains a finely tuned ecosystem that, once cleared, cannot be regrown. These heathlands and woodlands, previously commonplace beyond the beach dunes of the coastal region, are now only found in a number of national parks and reserves, and suburban remnants.Image 1: The author wildflowering and making art (Photo: Judy Barrass)I too was one of those who had no idea of the joys of the wallum and heathland wildflowers, but it was the creative works of Kathleen McArthur and Judith Wright that helped initiate my education, my own wanderings, wildflowering, and love. Learning country has been a multi-faceted experience, extended and tested as walking becomes an embodied encounter, bodies and landscapes entwined (Lund), an imaginative reimagining, creative act and source of inspiration, a form of pilgrimage (Morrison), forging an intimate relationship (Somerville).Image 2: Women wildflowering next to Rainbow Beach (Photo: Susan Davis)Wandering—the experience shares some similar characteristics to walking, but may have less of a sense of direction and destination. It may become an experience that is relational, contemplative, connected to place. Wandering may be transitory but with impact that resonates across years. Such is the case of wandering for McArthur and Wright; the experience became deeply relational but also led to a destabilisation of values, where the walking body became “entangled in monumental historical and social structures” (Heddon and Turner). They called their walking and wandering “wildflowering”. Somerville said of the term: “Wildflowering was a word they created to describe their passion for Australian wildflower and their love of the places where they found them” (Somerville 2). However, wildflowering was also very much about the experience of wandering within nature, of the “art of seeing”, of learning and communing, but also of “doing”.Image 3: Kathleen McArthur and Judith Wright “wildflowering” north of Lake Currimundi. (Photo: Alex Jelinek, courtesy Alexandra Moreno)McArthur defined and described going wildflowering as meaningdifferent things to different people. There are those who, with magnifying glass before their eyes, looking every inch the scientist, count stamens, measure hairs, pigeon-hole all the definitive features neatly in order and scoff at common names. Others bring with them an artistic inclination, noting the colours and shapes and shadows in the intimate and in the general landscape. Then there are those precious few who find poetry in a Helmut Orchid “leaning its ear to the ground”; see “the trigger-flower striking the bee”; find secrets in Sun Orchids; see Irises as “lilac butterflies” and a fox in a Yellow Doubletail…There are as many different ways to approach the “art of seeing” as there are people who think and feel and one way is as worthy as any other to make of it an enjoyably sensuous experience… (McArthur, Australian Wildflowers 52-53)Wildflowering thus extends far beyond the scientific collector and cataloguer of nature; it is about walking and wandering within nature and interacting with it; it is a richly layered experience, an “art”, “a sensuous experience”, “an artistic inclination” where perception may be framed by the poetic.Their wildflowering drove McArthur and Wright to embark on monumental struggles. They became the voice for the voiceless lifeforms within the environment—they typed letters, organised meetings, lobbied politicians, and led community groups. In fact, they often had to leave behind the environments and places that brought them joy to use the tools of culture to protest and protect—to ensure we might be able to appreciate them today. Importantly, both their creativity and the activism were fuelled by the same wellspring: walking, wandering, and wildflowering.Women Wandering and WildfloweringWhen McArthur and Wright met in the early 1950s, they shared some similarities in terms of relatively privileged social backgrounds, their year of birth (1915), and a love of nature. They both had houses named after native plants (“Calanthe” for Wright’s house at Tambourine, “Midyim” for McArthur’s house at Caloundra), and were focussed on their creative endeavours—Wright with her poetry, McArthur with her wildflower painting and writing. Wright was by then well established as a highly regarded literary figure on the Australian scene. Her book of poetry The Moving Image (1946) had been well received, and later publications further consolidated her substance and presence on the national literary landscape. McArthur had been raised as the middle daughter of a prominent Queensland family; her father was Daniel Evans, of Evans Deakin Industries, and her mother “Kit” was a daughter of one of the pastoral Durack clan. Kathleen had married and given birth to three children, but by the 1950s was exploring new futures and identities, having divorced her husband and made a home for her family at Caloundra on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. She had time and space in her life to devote to her own pursuits and some financial means provided through her inheritance to finance such endeavours.Wright and McArthur met in 1951 after McArthur sent Wright a children’s book for Judith and Jack McKinney’s daughter Meredith. The book was by McArthur’s cousins, Mary Durack (of Kings in Grass Castles fame) and Elizabeth Durack. Wright subsequently invited McArthur to visit her at Tambourine and from that visit their friendship quickly blossomed. While both women were to become known as high-profile nature lovers and conservationists, Wright acknowledges that it was McArthur who helped “train her eye” and cultivated her appreciation of the wildflowers of south-east Queensland:There are times in one’s past which remain warm and vivid, and can be taken out and looked at, so to speak, with renewed pleasure. Such, for me, were my first meetings in the early 1950s with Kathleen McArthur, and our continuing friendship. They brought me joys of discovery, new knowledge, and shared appreciation. Those “wild-flowering days” at Tamborine Mountain, Caloundra, Noosa or Lake Cootharaba, when I was able to wander with her, helped train my own eye a little to her ways of seeing and her devotion to the flowers of the coast, the mountains, and the wallum plains and swamps. (Wright quoted in McArthur, Australian Wildflowers 7)It was through this wandering and wildflowering that their friendship was forged, their knowledge of the plants and landscape grew and their passion was ignited. These acts of wandering were ones where feelings and the senses were engaged and celebrated. McArthur was to document her experiences of these environments through her wildflower paintings, cards, prints, weekly articles in the local newspapers, and books featuring Queensland and Australian Wildflowers (McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers; Living; Bush; Australian Wildflowers). Wright wrote a range of poems featuring landscapes and flora from the coastal experiences and doubtless influenced by their wildflowering experiences. These included, for example, Judith Wright’s poems “Wildflower Plain”, “Wonga Vine”, “Nameless Flower”, and “Sandy Swamp” (Collected Works).Through these acts of wildflowering, walking, and wandering, McArthur and Wright were drawn into activism and became what I call “wild/flower” women: women who cared for country, who formed a deep connection and intimate relationship with nature, with the more-than-human world; women who saw themselves not separate from nature but part of the great cycles of life, growth, death, and renewal; women whose relationship to the country, to the wildflowers and other living things was expressed through drawing, painting, poetry, stories, and performances—but that love driving them also to actions—actions to nurture and protect those wildflowers, places, and living things. This intimate relationship with nature was such that it inspired them to become “wild”, at times branded difficult, prompted to speak out, and step up to assume high profile roles on the public stage—and all because of their love of the small, humble, and often unseen.Wandering into Activism A direct link between “wildflowering” and activism can be identified in key experiences from 1953. That was the year McArthur devoted to “wildflowering”, visiting locations across the Sunshine Coast and South-East Queensland, documenting all that was flowering at different times of the year (McArthur, Living 15). She kept a monthly journal and also engaged in extensive drawing and painting. She was joined by Wright and her family for some of these trips, including one that would become a “monumental” expedition. They explored the area around Noosa and happened to climb to the top of Mt Tinbeerwah. Unlike many of the other volcanic plugs of the Sunshine Coast that would not be an easy climb for a family with young children, Tinbeerwah is a small volcanic peak, close to the road that runs between Cooroy and Tewantin, and one that is a relatively easy walk. From the car park, the trail takes you over volcanic lava flows, a pathway appearing, disappearing, winding through native grasses, modest height trees and to the edge of a dramatic cliff (one now popular with abseilers and adventurers). The final stretch brings you out above the trees to stunning 360-degree views, other volcanic peaks, a string of lakes and waterways, the patchwork greens of farmlands, distant blue oceans, and an expanse of bushland curving north for miles. Both women wrote about the experience and its subsequent significance: When Meredith was four years old, Kathleen McArthur, who was a great wildflower enthusiast and had become a good friend, invited us to join her on a wildflower expedition to the sand-plains north of Noosa. There the Noosa River spread itself out into sand-bottomed lakes between which the river meandered so slowly that everywhere the sky was serenely mirrored in it, trees hung low over it, birds haunted them.Kathleen took her little car, we took our converted van, and drove up the narrow unsealed road beyond Noosa. Once through the dunes—where the low bush-cover was white with wedding-bush and yellow with guinea-flower vines—the plains began, with many and mingled colours and scents. It was spring, and it welcomed us joyfully. (Wright, Half 279-280)McArthur also wrote about this event and its importance, as they both realised that this was territory that was worth protecting for posterity: ‘it was obvious that this was great wildflower country in addition to having a fascinating system of sand mass with related river and lakes. It would make a unique national park’ (McArthur, Living 53). After this experience, Kathleen and Judith began initial inquiries to find out about how to progress ideas for forming a national park (McArthur, Living). Brady affirms that it was Kathleen who first “broached the idea of agitating to have the area around Cooloola declared a National Park” (Brady 182), and it was Judith who then made inquiries in Brisbane on their way back to Mount Tambourine:Judith took the idea to Romeo Lahey of the National Parks Association who told her it was not threatened in any way whereas there were important areas of rainforest that were, and his association gave priority to those. If he had but known, it was threatened. The minerals sands prospectors were about to arrive, if not already in there. (McArthur, Living 53)These initial investigations were put on hold as the pair pursued their “private lives” and raised their children (McArthur, Living), but reignited throughout the 1960s. In 1962, McArthur and Wright were to become founding members of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (along with David Fleay and Brian Clouston), and Cooloola was to become one of one of their major campaigns (McArthur, Living 32). This came to the fore when they discovered there were multiple sand mining leases pending across the Cooloola region. It was at McArthur’s suggestion that a national postcard campaign was launched in 1969, with their organisation sending over 100,000 postcards across Australia to then be sent back to Joh Bjelke Peterson, the notoriously pro-development, conservative Queensland Premier. This is acknowledged as Australia’s first postcard campaign and was reported in national newspapers; The Australian called the Caloundra branch of WPSQ one of the “most militant cells” in Australia (25 May 1970). This was likely because of the extent of the WPSQ communications across media channels and persistence in taking on high profile critics, including the mining companies.It was to be another five years of campaigning before the national park was declared in 1975 (then named Cooloola National Park, now part of the Great Sandy). Wright was to then leave Queensland to live on a property near Braidwood (on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales) and in a different political climate. However, McArthur stayed in Caloundra, maintaining her deep commitment to place and country, keeping on walking and wandering, painting, and writing. She campaigned to protect beach dunes, lobbied to have Pumicestone Passage added to the national heritage register (McArthur, Pumicestone), and fought to prevent the creation of canal estates on the Pumicestone passage. Following the pattern of previous campaigns, she engaged in detailed research, drawing on expertise nationally and internationally, and writing many submissions, newspaper columns, and letters.McArthur also advocated for the plants, the places, and forms of knowing that she loved, calling for “clear thinking and deep feeling” that would enable people to see, value, and care as she did, notably saying:Because our flowers have never settled into our consciousness they are not seen. People can drive through square miles of colourful, massed display of bloom and simply not see it. It is only when the mind opens that the flowers bloom. (McArthur, Bush 2)Her belief was that once you walked the country and could “see”, become familiar with, and fall in love with the wildflowers and their environment, you could not then stand by and see what you love destroyed. Her conservation activities and activism arose and was fed through her wildflowering and the deep knowledge and connections that were formed.Wildflowering and Wanderings of My OwnSo, what we can learn from McArthur and Wright, from our wild/flower women, their wanderings, and wildflowering?Over the past few years, I have walked the wallum country that they loved, recited their poetry, shared their work with others, walked with women in the present accompanied by resonances of the past. I have shared these experiences with friends, artists, and nature lovers. While wandering with one group of women one day, we discovered that a patch of wallum behind Sunshine Beach was due to be cleared for an aged care development. It is full of casuarina food trees visited by the endangered Glossy Black Cockatoos, but it is also full of old wallum banksias, a tree I have come to love, influenced in part by writing and art by McArthur, and my experiences of “wildflowering”.Banksia aemula—the wallum banksia—stands tall, often one of the tallest trees of our coastal heathlands and after which the wallum was named. A range of sources, including McArthur herself, identify the source of the tree’s name as an Aboriginal word:It is an Aboriginal word some say applied to all species of Banksia, and others say to Banksia aemula. The wallum, being up to the present practically useless for commercial purposes provides our best wildflower shows… (McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers 2)Gnarled, textured bark—soft grey and warm red browns, in parts almost fur—the flower heads, when young, feed the small birds and honeyeaters; the bees collect nectar to make honey. And the older heads—remnants on the ground left by glorious black cockatoos, whose beaks, the perfect pliers, crack pods open to recover the hidden seeds. In summer, as the new flowers burst open, every stage of the flower stem cycle is on show. The trees often stand together like familiar friends gossiping, providing shelter; they are protective, nurturing. Banksia aemula is a tree that, according to Thomas Petrie’s reminiscence of “early” Queensland, was significant to Aboriginal women, and might be “owned” by certain women:but certain men and women owned different fruit or flower-trees and shrubs. For instance, a man could own a bon-yi (Auaurcaria Bidwilli) tree, and a woman a minti (Banksia aemula)… (Petrie, Reminiscences 148)Banksia, wallum, women… the connection has existed for millennia. Women walking country, talking, observing, collecting, communing—and this tree was special to them as it has become for me. Who knows how old those trees are in that patch of forest and who may have been their custodians.Do I care about this? Yes, I do. How did I come to care? Through walking, through “wildflowering”, through stories, art, and experience. My connections have been forged by nature and culture, seeing McArthur’s art and reading Wright’s words, through walking the country with women, learning to know, and sharing a wildflowering culture. But knowing isn’t enough: wandering and wondering, has led to something more because now I care; now we must act. Along with some of the women I walked with, we have investigated council records; written to, and called, politicians and the developer; formed a Facebook group; met with various experts; and proposed alternatives. However, our efforts have not met with success as the history of the development application and approval was old and complex. Through wandering and “wildflowering”, we have had the opportunity to both lose ourselves and find ourselves, to escape, to learn, to discover. However, such acts are not necessarily aimless or lacking direction. As connections are forged, care and concern grows, and acts can shift from the humble and mundane, into the intentional and deliberate. The art of seeing and poetic perceptions may even transform into ecological action, with ramifications that can be both significant monumental. Such may be the power of “wildflowering”.ReferencesBrady, Veronica. South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998.Heddon, Deirdre and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review 22.2 (2012): 224–236.Lund, Katrín. “Landscapes and Narratives: Compositions and the Walking Body.” Landscape Research 37.2 (2012): 225–237.McArthur, Kathleen. Queensland Wildflowers: A Selection. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1959.———. The Bush in Bloom: A Wildflower Artist’s Year in Paintings and Words. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1982.———. Pumicestone Passage: A Living Waterway. Caloundra: Kathleen McArthur, 1978.———. Looking at Australian Wildflowers. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1986.———. Living on the Coast. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1989.Morrison, Susan Signe. “Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past.” M/C Journal 21.4 (2018). 12 Aug. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1437>.Petrie, Constance Campbell, and Tom Petrie. Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland. 4th ed. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Somerville, Margaret. Wildflowering: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004.Wright, Judith. Collected Poems: 1942 to 1985. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2016.———. Half a Lifetime. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999.

When historian Graeme Davison famously declared that “Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban” (98), he was clearly referring to Melbourne or Sydney, but certainly not Brisbane. Although the Brisbane of 2011 might resemble a contemporary, thriving metropolis, its genealogy is not an urban one. For most of its history, as Gillian Whitlock has noted, Brisbane was “a place where urban industrial society is kept at bay” (80). What distinguishes Brisbane from Australia’s larger southern capital cities is its rapid morphology into a city from a provincial, suburban, town. Indeed it is Brisbane’s distinctive regionalism, with its sub-tropical climate, offering a steamy, fecund backdrop to narratives of the city that has produced a plethora of writing in literary accounts of the city, from author David Malouf through to contemporary writers such as Andrew McGahan, John Birmingham, Venero Armanno, Susan Johnson, and Nick Earls. Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition makes its transformation unique among Australian cities. Its rapid population growth and urban development have changed the way that many people now live in the city. Unlike the larger cities of Sydney or Melbourne, whose inner cities were established on the Victorian model of terrace-row housing on small lots, Brisbane’s early planners eschewed this approach. So, one of the features that gives the city its distinction is the languorous suburban quality of its inner-city areas, where many house blocks are the size of the suburban quarter-acre block, all within coo-ee of the city centre. Other allotments are medium to small in size, and, until recently, housed single dwellings of varying sizes and grandeur. Add to this a sub-tropical climate in which ‘green and growth’ is abundant and the pretty but flimsy timber vernacular housing, and it’s easy to imagine that you might be many kilometres from a major metropolitan centre as you walk around Brisbane’s inner city areas. It is partly this feature that prompted demographer Bernard Salt to declare Brisbane “Australia’s most suburban city” (Salt 5). Prior to urban renewal in the early 1990s, Brisbane was a low-density town with very few apartment blocks; most people lived in standalone houses.From the inception of the first Urban Renewal program in 1992, a joint initiative of the Federal government’s Building Better Cities Program and managed by the Brisbane City Council (BCC), Brisbane’s urban development has undergone significant change. In particular, the city’s Central Business District (CBD) and inner city have experienced intense development and densification with a sharp rise in medium- to high-density apartment dwellings to accommodate the city’s swelling population. Population growth has added to the demand for increased density, and from the period 1995–2006 Brisbane was Australia’s fastest growing city (ABS).Today, parts of Brisbane’s inner city resembles the density of the larger cities of Melbourne and Sydney. Apartment blocks have mushroomed along the riverfront and throughout inner and middle ring suburbs. Brisbane’s population has enthusiastically embraced apartment living, with “empty nesters” leaving their suburban family homes for the city, and apartments have become the affordable option for renters and first home purchasers. A significant increase in urban amenities such as large-scale parklands and river side boardwalks, and a growth in service industries such as cafes, restaurants and bars—a feature of cities the world over—have contributed to the appeal of the city and the changing way that people live in Brisbane.Urbanism demands specific techniques of living—life is different in medium- to high-density dwellings, in populous places, where people live in close proximity to one another. In many ways it’s the antithesis to suburban life, a way of living that, as Davison notes, was established around an ethos of privacy, health, and seclusion and is exemplified in the gated communities seen in the suburbs today. The suburbs are characterised by generosity of space and land, and developed as a refuge and escape from the city, a legacy of the nineteenth-century industrial city’s connection with overcrowding, disease, and disorder. Suburban living flourished in Australia from the eighteenth century and Davison notes how, when Governor Phillip drew up the first town plan for Sydney in 1789, it embodied the aspirations of “decency, good order, health and domestic privacy,” which lie at the heart of suburban ideals (100).The health and moral impetus underpinning the establishment of suburban life—that is, to remove people from overcrowding and the unhygienic conditions of slums—for Davison meant that the suburban ethos was based on a “logic of avoidance” (110). Attempting to banish anything deemed dangerous and offensive, the suburbs were seen to offer a more natural, orderly, and healthy environment. A virtuous and happy life required plenty of room—thus, a garden and the expectation of privacy was paramount.The suburbs as a site of lived experience and cultural meaning is significant for understanding the shift from suburban living to the adoption of medium- to high-density inner-city living in Brisbane. I suggest that the ways in which this shift is captured discursively, particularly in promotional material, are indicative of the suburbs' stronghold on the collective imagination. Reinforcing this perception of Brisbane as a suburban city is a history of literary narratives that have cast Brisbane in ways that set it apart from other Australian cities, and that are to do with its non-urban characteristics. Imaginative and symbolic discourses of place have real and material consequences (Lefebvre), as advertisers are only too well aware. Discursively, city life has been imagined oppositionally from life in the suburbs: the two sites embody different cultural meanings and values. In Australia, the suburbs are frequently a site of derision and satire, characterized as bastions of conformity and materialism (Horne), offering little of value in contrast to the city’s many enchantments and diverse pleasures. In the well-established tradition of satire, “suburban bashing is replete in literature, film and popular culture” (Felton et al xx). From Barry Humphries’s characterisation of Dame Edna Everage, housewife superstar, who first appeared in the 1960s, to the recent television comedy series Kath and Kim, suburbia and its inhabitants are represented as dull-witted, obsessed with trivia, and unworldly. This article does not intend to rehearse the tradition of suburban lampooning; rather, it seeks to illustrate how ideas about suburban living are hard held and how the suburban ethos maintains its grip, particularly in relation to notions of privacy and peace, despite the celebratory discourse around the emerging forms of urbanism in Brisbane.As Brisbane morphed rapidly from a provincial, suburban town to a metropolis throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a set of metropolitan discourses developed in the local media that presented new ways of inhabiting and imagining the city and offered new affiliations and identifications with the city. In establishing Brisbane’s distinction as a city, marketing material relied heavily on the opposition between the city and the suburbs, implying that urban vitality and diversity rules triumphant over the suburbs’ apparent dullness and homogeneity. In a billboard advertisement for apartments in the urban renewal area of Newstead (2004), images of architectural renderings of the apartments were anchored by the words—“Urban living NOT suburban”—leaving little room for doubt. It is not the design qualities of the apartments or the building itself being promoted here, but a way of life that alludes to utopian ideas of urban life, of enchantment with the city, and implies, with the heavy emphasis of “NOT suburban,” the inferiority of suburban living.The cultural commodification of the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century city has been well documented (Evans; Dear; Zukin; Harvey) and its symbolic value as a commodity is expressed in marketing literature via familiar metropolitan tropes that are frequently amorphous and international. The malleability of such images makes them easily transportable and transposable, and they provided a useful stockpile for promoting a city such as Brisbane that lacked its own urban resources with which to construct a new identity. In the early days of urban renewal, the iconic images and references to powerhouse cities such as New York, London, and even Venice were heavily relied upon. In the latter example, an advertisement promoting Brisbane appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald colour magazine (May 2005). This advertisement represented Brisbane as an antipodean Venice, showing a large reach of the Brisbane river replete with gondolas flanked by the city’s only nineteenth-century riverside building, the Custom’s House. The allusion to traditional European culture is a departure from the usual tropes of “fun and sun” associated with promotions of Queensland, including Brisbane, while the new approach to promoting Brisbane is cognizant of the value of culture in the symbolic and economic hierarchy of the contemporary city. Perhaps equally, the advertisement could be read as ironic, a postmodern self-parodying statement about the city in general. In a nod to the centrality of the spectacle, the advertisement might be a salute to idea of the city as theme park, a pleasure playground and a collective fantasy of escape. Nonetheless, either interpretation presents Brisbane as somewhere else.In other promotional literature for apartment dwellings, suburban living maintains its imaginative grip, evident in a brochure advertising Petrie Point apartments in Brisbane’s urban renewal area of inner-city New Farm (2000). In the brochure, the promise of peace and calm—ideals that have their basis in suburban living—are imposed and promoted as a feature of inner-city living. Paradoxically, while suggesting that a wholesale evacuation and rejection of suburban life is occurring presumably because it is dull, the brochure simultaneously upholds the values of suburbia:Discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers who prefer lounging over latte rather than mowing the quarter acre block, are abandoning suburban living in droves. Instead, hankering after a more cosmopolitan lifestyle without the mind numbing drive to work, they are retreating to the residential mecca, the inner city, for chic shops and a lively dining, arts and theatre culture. (my italics)In the above extract, the rhetoric used to promote and uphold the virtues of a cosmopolitan inner-city life is sabotaged by a language that in many respects capitulates to the ideals of suburban living, and evokes the health and retreat ethos of suburbia. “Lounging” over lattes and “retreating to a residential mecca”[i] allude to precisely the type of suburban living the brochure purports to eschew. Privacy, relaxation, and health is a discourse and, more importantly, a way of living that is in many ways anathema to life in the city. It is a dream-wish that those features most valued about suburban life, can and should somehow be transplanted to the city. In its promotion of urban amenity, the brochure draws upon a somewhat bourgeois collection of cultural amenities and activities such as a (presumably traditional) arts and theatre culture, “lively dining,” and “chic” shops. The appeal to “discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers” has more than a whiff of status and class, an appeal that disavows the contemporary city’s attention to diversity and inclusivity, and frequently the source of promotion of many international cities. In contrast to the suburban sub-text of exclusivity and seclusion in the Petrie Point Apartment’s brochure, is a promotion of Sydney’s inner-city Newtown as a tourist site and spectacle, which makes an appeal to suburban antipathy clear from the outset. The brochure, distributed by NSW Tourism (2000) displays a strong emphasis on Newtown’s cultural and ethnic diversity, and the various forms of cultural consumption on offer. The inner-city suburb’s appeal is based on its re-framing as a site of tourist consumption of diversity and difference in which diversity is central to its performance as a tourist site. It relies on the distinction between “ordinary” suburbs and “cosmopolitan” places:Some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney’s blessed with Newtown — a cosmopolitan neighbourhood of more than 600 stores, 70 restaurants, 42 cafes, theatres, pubs, and entertainment venues, all trading in two streets whose origins lie in the nineteenth century … Newtown is the Catwalk for those with more style than money … a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul, where Milano meets post-punk bohemia, where Max Mara meets Doc Marten, a stage where a petticoat is more likely to be your grandma’s than a Colette Dinnigan designer original (From Sydney Marketing brochure)Its opening oppositional gambit—“some cities are cursed with suburbs”—conveniently elides the fact that like all Australian cities, Sydney is largely suburban and many of Sydney’s suburbs are more ethnically diverse than its inner-city areas. Cabramatta, Fairfield, and most other suburbs have characteristically high numbers of ethnic groups such as Vietnamese, Korean, Lebanese, and so forth. Recent events, however, have helped to reframe these places as problem areas, rather than epicentres of diversity.The mingling of social groups invites the tourist-flâneur to a performance of difference, “a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul (my italics), where Milano meets post-punk bohemia,” and where “the upwardly mobile and down at heel” appear in what is presented as something of a theatrical extravaganza. Newtown is a product, its diversity a commodity. Consumed visually and corporeally via its divergent sights, sounds, smells and tastes (the brochure goes on to state that 70 restaurants offer cuisine from all over the globe), Newtown is a “successful neighbourhood experiment in the new globalism.” The area’s social inequities—which are implicit in the text, referred to as the “down at heel”—are vanquished and celebrated, incorporated into the rhetoric of difference.Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition and culture, as well as its lack of diversity in comparison to Sydney, reveals itself in the first brochure while the Newtown brochure appeals to the idea of a consumer-based cosmopolitanism. As a sociological concept, cosmopolitanism refers to a set of "subjective attitudes, outlooks and practices" broadly characterized as “disposition of openness towards others, people, things and experiences whose origin is non local” (Skrbis and Woodward 1). Clearly cosmopolitan attitudes do not have to be geographically located, but frequently the city is promoted as the site of these values, with the suburbs, apparently, forever looking inward.In the realm of marketing, appeals to the imagination are ubiquitous, but discursive practices can become embedded in everyday life. Despite the growth of urbanism, the increasing take up of metropolitan life and the enduring disdain among some for the suburbs, the hard-held suburban values of peace and privacy have pragmatic implications for the ways in which those values are embedded in people’s expectations of life in the inner city.The exponential growth in apartment living in Brisbane offers different ways of living to the suburban house. For a sub-tropical city where "life on the verandah" is a significant feature of the Queenslander house with its front and exterior verandahs, in the suburbs, a reasonable degree of privacy is assured. Much of Brisbane’s vernacular and contemporary housing is sensitive to this indoor-outdoor style of living, a distinct feature and appeal of everyday life in many suburbs. When "life on the verandah" is adapted to inner-city apartment buildings, expectations that indoor-outdoor living can be maintained in the same way can be problematic. In the inner city, life on the verandah may challenge expectations about privacy, noise and visual elements. While the Brisbane City Plan 2000 attempts to deal with privacy issues by mandating privacy screenings on verandahs, and the side screening of windows to prevent overlooking neighbours, there is ample evidence that attitudinal change is difficult. The exchange of a suburban lifestyle for an urban one, with the exposure to urbanity’s complexity, potential chaos and noise, can be confronting. In the Urban Renewal area and entertainment precinct of Fortitude Valley, during the late 1990s, several newly arrived residents mounted a vigorous campaign to the Brisbane City Council (BCC) and State government to have noise levels reduced from local nightclubs and bars. Fortitude Valley—the Valley, as it is known locally—had long been Brisbane’s main area for nightclubs, bars and brothels. A small precinct bounded by two major one-way roads, it was the locus of the infamous ABC 4 Corners “Moonlight State” report, which exposed the lines of corruption between politicians, police, and the judiciary of the former Bjelke-Petersen government (1974–1987) and who met in the Valley’s bars and brothels. The Valley was notorious for Brisbanites as the only place in a provincial, suburban town that resembled the seedy side of life associated with big cities. The BCC’s Urban Renewal Task Force and associated developers initially had a tough task convincing people that the area had been transformed. But as more amenity was established, and old buildings were converted to warehouse-style living in the pattern of gentrification the world over, people started moving in to the area from the suburbs and interstate (Felton). One of the resident campaigners against noise had purchased an apartment in the Sun Building, a former newspaper house and in which one of the apartment walls directly abutted the adjoining and popular nightclub, The Press Club. The Valley’s location as a music venue was supported by the BCC, who initially responded to residents’ noise complaints with its “loud and proud” campaign (Valley Metro). The focus of the campaign was to alert people moving into the newly converted apartments in the Valley to the existing use of the neighbourhood by musicians and music clubs. In another iteration of this campaign, the BCC worked with owners of music venues to ensure the area remains a viable music precinct while implementing restrictions on noise levels. Residents who objected to nightclub noise clearly failed to consider the impact of moving into an area that was already well known, even a decade ago, as the city’s premier precinct for music and entertainment venues. Since that time, the Valley has become Australia’s only regulated and promoted music precinct.The shift from suburban to urban living requires people to live in very different ways. Thrust into close proximity with strangers amongst a diverse population, residents can be confronted with a myriad of sensory inputs—to a cacophony of noise, sights, smells (Allon and Anderson). Expectations of order, retreat, and privacy inevitably come into conflict with urbanism’s inherent messiness. The contested nature of urban space is expressed in neighbour disputes, complaints about noise and visual amenity, and sometimes in eruptions of street violence. There is no shortage of examples in the Brisbane’s Urban Renewal areas such as Fortitude Valley, where acts of homophobia, racism, and other less destructive conflicts continue to be a frequent occurrence. While the refashioned discursive Brisbane is re-presented as cool, cultured, and creative, the tensions of urbanism and tests to civility remain in a process of constant negotiation. This is the way the city’s past disrupts and resists its cool new surface.[i] The use of the word mecca in the brochure occurred prior to 11 September 2001.ReferencesAllon, Fiona, and Kay Anderson. "Sentient Sydney." In Passionate City: An International Symposium. Melbourne: RMIT, School of Media Communication, 2004. 89–97.Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Regional Population Growth, Australia, 1996-2006.Birmingham, John. "The Lost City of Vegas: David Malouf’s Old Brisbane." Hot Iron Corrugated Sky. Ed. R. Sheahan-Bright and S. Glover. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. xx–xx.Davison, Graeme. "The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb." Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities. Ed. L. Johnson. Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1994. xx–xx.Dear, Michael. The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.Evans, Graeme. “Hard-Branding the Cultural City—From Prado to Prada.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.2 (2003): 417–40.Evans, Raymond, and Carole Ferrier, eds. Radical Brisbane. Melbourne: The Vulgar Press, 2004.Felton, Emma, Christy Collis, and Phil Graham. “Making Connections: Creative Industries Networks in Outer Urban Locations.” Australian Geographer 14.1 (Mar. 2010): 57–70.Felton, Emma. Emerging Urbanism: A Social and Cultural Study of Urban Change in Brisbane. PhD thesis. Brisbane: Griffith University, 2007.Glover, Stuart, and Stuart Cunningham. "The New Brisbane." Artlink 23.2 (2003): 16–23. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Horne, Donald. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Ringwood: Penguin, 1964.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.Malouf, David. Johnno. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975. ---. 12 Edmondstone Street. London: Penguin, 1986.NSW Tourism. Sydney City 2000. Sydney, 2000.Salt, Bernard. Cinderella City: A Vision of Brisbane’s Rise to Prominence. Sydney: Austcorp, 2005.Skrbis, Zlatko, and Ian Woodward. “The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitanism Openness.” Sociological Review (2007): 1-14.Valley Metro. 1 May 2011 < http://www.valleymetro.com.au/the_valley.aspx >.Whitlock, Gillian. “Queensland: The State of the Art on the 'Last Frontier.’" Westerly 29.2 (1984): 85–90.Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1995.

“What's the brief?” is an everyday question within the graphic design process. Moreover, the concept and importance of a design brief is overtly understood well beyond design practice itself—especially among stakeholders who work with designers and clients who commission design services. Indeed, a design brief is often an assumed and expected physical or metaphoric artefact for guiding the creative process. When a brief is lacking, incomplete or unclear, it can render an already ambiguous graphic design process and discipline even more fraught with misinterpretation. Nevertheless, even in wider design discourse, there appears to be little research on design briefs and the briefing process (Jones and Askland; Paton and Dorst). It seems astonishing that, even in Peter Phillips’s 2014 edition of Creating the Perfect Design Brief, he feels compelled to comment that “there are still no books available about design briefs” and that the topic is only “vaguely” covered within design education (21). While Phillips’s assertion is debatable if one draws purely from online vernacular sources or professional guides, it is supported by the lack of scholarly attention paid to the design brief. Graphic design briefs are often mentioned within design books, journals, and online sources. However, this article argues that the format, function and use of such briefs are largely assumed and rarely identified and studied. Even within the broader field of design research, the tendency appears to be to default to “the design brief” as an assumed shorthand, supporting Phillips’s argument about the nebulous nature of the topic. As this article contextualises, this is further problematised by insufficient attention cast on graphic design itself as a specific discipline. This article emerges from a wider, multi-stage creative practice study into graphic design practice, that used experimental performative design research methods to investigate graphic designers’ professional relationships with stakeholders (Meron, Strangely). The article engages with specific outcomes from that study that relate to the design brief. The article also explores existing literature and research and argues for academics, the design industry, and educationalists, to focus closer attention on the design brief. It concludes by suggesting that experimental and collaborative design methods offers potential for future research into the design brief. Contextualising the Design Brief It is critical to differentiate the graphic design brief from the operational briefs of architectural design (Blyth and Worthington; Khan) or those used in technical practices such as software development or IT systems design, which have extensive industry-formalised briefing practices and models such as the waterfall system (Petersen et al.) or more modern processes such as Agile (Martin). Software development and other technical design briefs are necessarily more formulaically structured than graphic design briefs. Their requirements are generally empirically and mechanistically located, and often mission-critical. In contrast, the conceptual nature of creative briefs in graphic design creates the potential for them to be arbitrarily interpreted. Even in wider design discourse, there appears to be little consistency about the form that a brief takes. Some sources indicate that a brief only requires one page (Elebute; Nov and Jones) or even a single line of text (Jones and Askland). At other times briefs are described as complex, high-level documents embedded within processes which designers respond to with the aim of producing end products to satisfy clients’ requirements (Ambrose; Patterson and Saville). Ashby and Johnson (40) refer to the design brief as a “solution neutral” statement, the aim being to avoid preconceptions or the narrowing of the creative possibilities of a project. Others describe a consultative (Walsh), collaborative and stakeholder-inclusive process (Phillips). The Scholarly Brief Within scholarly design research, briefs inevitably manifest as an assumed artefact or process within each project; but the reason for their use or antecedents for chosen formats are rarely addressed. For example, in “Creativity in the Design Process” (Dorst and Cross) some elements of the design brief are described. The authors also describe at what stage of the investigation the brief is introduced and present a partial example of the brief. However, there is no explanation of the form of the brief or the reasons behind it. They simply describe it as being typical for the design medium, adding that its use was considered a critical part of addressing the design problem. In a separate study within advertising (Johar et al.), researchers even admit that the omission of crucial elements from the brief—normally present in professional practice—had a detrimental effect on their results. Such examples indicate the importance of briefs for the design process, yet further illustrating the omission of direct engagement with the brief within the research design, methodology, and methods. One exception comes from a study amongst business students (Sadowska and Laffy) that used the design brief as a pedagogical tool and indicates that interaction with, and changes to, elements of a design brief impact the overall learning process of participants, with the brief functioning as a trigger for that process. Such acknowledgement of the agency of a design brief affirms its importance for professional designers (Koslow et al.; Phillips). This use of a brief as a research device informed my use of it as a reflective and motivational conduit when studying graphic designers’ perceptions of stakeholders, and this will be discussed shortly. The Professional Brief Professionally, the brief is a key method of communication between designers and stakeholders, serving numerous functions including: outlining creative requirements, audience, and project scope; confirming project requirements; and assigning and documenting roles, procedures, methods, and approval processes. The format of design briefs varies from complex multi-page procedural documents (Patterson and Saville; Ambrose) produced by marketing departments and sent to graphic design agencies, to simple statements (Jones and Askland; Elebute) from small to medium-sized businesses. These can be described as the initial proposition of the design brief, with the following interactions comprising the ongoing briefing process. However, research points to many concerns about the lack of adequate briefing information (Koslow, Sasser and Riordan). It has been noted (Murray) that, despite its centrality to graphic design, the briefing process rarely lives up to designers’ expectations or requirements, with the approach itself often haphazard. This reinforces the necessarily adaptive, flexible, and compromise-requiring nature of professional graphic design practice, referred to by design researchers (Cross; Paton and Dorst). However, rather than lauding these adaptive and flexible designer abilities as design attributes, such traits are often perceived by professional practitioners as unequal (Benson and Dresdow), having evolved by the imposition by stakeholders, rather than being embraced by graphic designers as positive designer skill-sets. The Indeterminate Brief With insufficient attention cast on graphic design as a specific scholarly discipline (Walker; Jacobs; Heller, Education), there is even less research on the briefing process within graphic design practice (Cumming). Literature from professional practice on the creation and function of graphic design briefs is often formulaic (Phillips) and fractured. It spans professional design bodies, to templates from mass-market printers (Kwik Kopy), to marketing-driven and brand-development approaches, in-house style guides, and instructional YouTube videos (David). A particularly clear summary comes from Britain’s Design Council. This example describes the importance of a good design brief, its requirements, and carries a broad checklist that includes the company background, project aims, and target audience. It even includes stylistic tips such as “don’t be afraid to use emotive language in a brief if you think it will generate a shared passion about the project” (Design Council). From a subjective perspective, these sources appear to contain sensible professional advice. However, with little scholarly research on the topic, how can we know that, for example, using emotive language best informs the design process? Why might this be helpful and desirable (or otherwise) for designers? These varied approaches highlight the indeterminate treatment of the design brief. Nevertheless, the very existence of such diverse methods communicates a pattern of acknowledgement of the criticality of the brief, as well as the desire, by professional bodies, commentators, and suppliers, to ensure that both designers and stakeholders engage effectively with the briefing process. Thus, with such a pedagogic gap in graphic design discourse, scholarly research into the design brief has the potential to inform vernacular and formal educational resources. Researching the Design Brief The research study from which this article emerges (Meron, Strangely) yielded outcomes from face-to-face interviews with eleven (deidentified) graphic designers about their perceptions of design practice, with particular regard to their professional relationships with other creative stakeholders. The study also surveyed online discussions from graphic design forums and blog posts. This first stage of research uncovered feelings of lacking organisational gravitas, creative ownership, professional confidence, and design legitimacy among the designers in relation to stakeholders. A significant causal factor pointed to practitioners’ perceptions of lacking direct access to and involvement with key sources of creative inspiration and information; one specific area being the design brief. It was a discovery that was reproduced thematically during the second stage of the research. This stage repurposed performative design research methods to intervene in graphic designers’ resistance to research (Roberts, et al), with the goal of bypassing practitioners’ tendency to portray their everyday practices using formulaic professionalised answers (Dorland, View). In aiming to understand graphic designers’ underlying motivations, this method replaced the graphic designer participants with trained actors, who re-performed narratives from the online discussions and designer interviews during a series of performance workshops. Performative methodologies were used as design thinking methods to defamiliarise the graphic design process, thereby enabling previously unacknowledged aspects of the design process to be unveiled, identified and analysed. Such defamiliarisation repurposes methods used in creative practice, including design thinking (Bell, Blythe, and Sengers), with performative elements drawing on ethnography (Eisner) and experimental design (Seago and Dunne). Binding these two stages of research study together was a Performative Design Brief—a physical document combining narratives from the online discussions and the designer interviews. For the second stage, this brief was given to a professional theatre director to use as material for a “script” to motivate the actors. In addition to identifying unequal access to the creative process as a potential point of friction, this study yielded outcomes suggesting that designers were especially frustrated when the design brief was unclear, insufficiently detailed, or even missing completely. The performative methodology enabled a refractive approach, using performative metaphor and theatre to defamiliarise graphic design practice, portraying the process through a third-party theatrical prism. This intervened in graphic designers’ habitual communication patterns (Dorland, The View). Thus, combining traditional design research methods with experimental interdisciplinary ones, enabled outcomes that might not otherwise have emerged. It is an example of engaging with the fluid, hybrid (Heller, Teaching), and often elusive practices (van der Waarde) of graphic design. Format, Function, and Use A study (Paton and Dorst) among professional graphic designers attempts to dissect practitioners’ perceptions of different aspects of briefing as a process of ‘framing’. Building on the broader theories of design researchers such as Nigel Cross, Bryan Lawson, and Donald Schön, Paton and Dorst suggest that most of the designers preferred a collaborative briefing process where both they and client stakeholders were directly involved, without intermediaries. This concurs with the desire, from many graphic designers that I interviewed, for unobstructed engagement with the brief. Moreover, narratives from the online discussions that I investigated suggest that the lack of clear frameworks for graphic design briefs is a hotly debated topic, as are perceptions of stakeholder belligerence or misunderstanding. For example, in a discussion from Graphic Design Forums designer experiences range from only ever receiving informal verbal instructions—“basically, we’ve been handed design work and they tell us ‘We need this by EOD’” (VFernandes)—to feeling obliged to pressure stakeholders to provide a brief—“put the burden on them to flesh out the details of a real brief and provide comprehensive material input” (HotButton) —to resignation to an apparent futility of gaining adequate design briefs from stakeholders because— “they will most likely never change” (KitchWitch). Such negative assumptions support Koslow et al.’s assertion that the absence of a comprehensive brief is the most “terrifying” thing for practitioners (9). Thus, practitioners’ frustrations with stakeholders can become unproductive when there is an inadequate design brief, or if the creative requirements of a brief are otherwise removed from the direct orbit of graphic designers. This further informs a narrative of graphic designers perceiving some stakeholders as gatekeepers of the design brief. For example, one interviewed designer believed that stakeholders ‘don’t really understand the process’ (Patricia). Another interviewee suggested that disorganised briefs could be avoided by involving designers early in the process, ensuring that practitioners had direct access to the client as a creative source, rather than having to circumnavigate stakeholders (Marcus). Such perceptions appeared to reinforce beliefs among these practitioners that they lack design capital within the creative process. These perceptions of gatekeeping of the design brief support suggestions of designers responding negatively when stakeholders approach the design process from a different perspective (Wall and Callister), if stakeholders assume a managerial position (Jacobs) and, in particular, if stakeholders are inexperienced in working with designers (Banks et al.; Holzmann and Golan). With such little clarity in the design briefing process, future research may consider comparisons with industries with more formalised briefing processes, established professional statuses, or more linear histories. Indeed, the uneven historical development of graphic design (Frascara; Julier and Narotzky) may influence the inconsistency of its briefing process. Inconsistency as Research Opportunity The inconsistent state of the graphic design brief is reflective of the broader profession that it resides within. Graphic design as a profession remains fluid and inconsistent (Dorland, Tell Me; Jacobs), with even its own practitioners unable to agree on its parameters or even what to call the practice (Meron, Terminology). Pedagogically, graphic design is still emerging as an independent discipline (Cabianca; Davis), struggling to gain capital outside of existing and broader creative practices (Poynor; Triggs). The inherent interdisciplinarity (Harland) and intangibility of graphic design also impact the difficulty of engaging with the briefing process. Indeed, graphic design’s practices have been described as “somewhere between science and superstition (or fact and anecdote)” (Heller, Teaching par. 3). With such obstacles rendering the discipline fractured (Ambrose et al.), it is understandable that stakeholders might find engaging productively with graphic design briefs challenging. This can become problematic, with inadequate stakeholder affinity or understanding of design issues potentially leading to creative discord (Banks et al.; Holzmann and Golan). Identifying potentially problematic and haphazard aspects of the design brief and process also presents opportunities to add value to research into broader relationships between graphic designers and stakeholders. It suggests a practical area of study with which scholarly research on collaborative design approaches might intersect with professional graphic design practice. Indeed, recent research suggests that collaborative approaches offer both process and educational advantages, particularly in the area of persona development, having the ability to discover the “real” brief (Taffe 394). Thus, framing the brief as a collaborative, educative, and negotiative process may allow creative professionals to elucidate and manage the disparate parts of a design process, such as timeframes, stakeholders, and task responsibilities, as well as the cost implications of stakeholder actions such as unscheduled amendments. It can encourage the formalisation of incomplete vernacular briefs, as well as allow for the influence of diverse briefing methods, such as the one-page creative brief of advertising agencies, or more formal project management practices while allowing for some of the fluidity of more agile approaches: acknowledging that changes may be required while keeping all parties informed and involved. In turn, collaborative approaches may contribute towards enabling the value of contributions from both graphic designers and stakeholders and it seems beneficial to look towards design research methodologies that promote collaborative pathways. Mark Steen, for example, argues for co-design as a form of design thinking for enabling stakeholders to combine knowledge with negotiation to implement change (27). Collaborative design methods have also been advocated for use between designers and users, with stakeholders on shared projects, and with external collaborators (Binder and Brandt). Others have argued that co-design methods facilitate stakeholder collaboration “across and within institutional structures” while challenging existing power relations, albeit leaving structural changes largely unaffected (Farr 637). The challenge for collaborative design research is to seek opportunities and methodologies to conduct design brief research within a graphic design process that often appears amorphous, while also manifesting complex designer–stakeholder dynamics. Doubly so, when the research focus—the graphic design brief—often appears as nebulous an entity as the practice it emerges from. Conclusion The research discussed in this article suggests that graphic designers distrust a creative process that itself symbolises an inconsistent, reactive, and often accidental historical development of their profession and pedagogy. Reflecting this, the graphic design brief emerges almost as a metaphor for this process. The lack of overt discussion about the format, scope, and process of the brief feeds into the wider framework of graphic design’s struggle to become an independent scholarly discipline. This, in turn, potentially undermines the professional authority of graphic design practice that some of its practitioners believe is deficient. Ultimately, the brief and its processes must become research-informed parts of graphic design pedagogy. Embracing the brief as a pedagogical, generative, and inseparable part of the design process can inform the discourse within education, adding scholarly value to practice and potentially resulting in increased agency for practitioners. The chameleon-like nature of graphic design’s constant adaptation to ever-changing industry requirements makes research into the role and influences of its briefing process challenging. Thus, it also follows that the graphic design brief is unlikely to quickly become as formalised a document or process as those from other disciplines. But these are challenges that scholars and professionals must surely embrace if pedagogy is to gain the research evidence to influence practice. As this article argues, the often obfuscated practices and inherent interdisciplinarity of graphic design benefit from experimental research methods, while graphic designers appear responsive to inclusive approaches. Thus, performative methods appear effective as tools of discovery and collaborative methodologies offer hope for organisational intervention. References Ambrose, Gavin. Design Thinking for Visual Communication. Fairchild, 2015. Ambrose, Gavin, Paul Harris, and Nigel Ball. The Fundamentals of Graphic Design. Bloomsbury, 2020. Ashby, M.F., and Kara Johnson. Materials and Design: The Art and Science of Material Selection in Product Design. Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2010. 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