September was a very busy and productive month for the project. We interviewed applicants for the research fellowship position which had been vacated by Joe and had some outstanding candidates. We would like to thank Dr Gillian Forster, Associate Professor in Organization Studies and Director of Education for Postgraduate Programmes in the Marketing Operations and Systems Department at Northumbria University for helping us out on the panel. Her support, experience and insights into selecting the successful candidate were invaluable.
We chose Dr Emily Rees Koerner for the research fellowship and would like to welcome her to the project. Emily Rees is a historian of twentieth century Britain, with a focus on histories of technology and industry, and how these intersect with visual culture and gender. She joins the project from the Science Museum, where she was a postdoctoral research fellow on the international research project Museums and Industry: Long Histories of Collaboration (MaILHoC), as well as the Open Access consultant in charge of launching the Science Museum Group’s Open Access research repository. Previously, she was the postdoctoral research assistant on Electrifying Women: Understanding the Long History of Women in Engineering at the University of Leeds, which informs her more recent research into international networks of women engineers and scientists. Her PhD, undertaken at the University of Nottingham, explored the commodification and domestication of the television set in mid-century Britain. Her recent academic publications include articles on television as a material object and the professional networks and careers of women in STEM in the 20th century, which sits alongside a portfolio of outreach-focused material, including project websites, blogs, videos, and interviews. We are very excited to have her join us at the beginning of November and are confident she will make a huge contribution to our project, its research, dissemination and impact.
September saw us finish off our research at the Postal Museum Archives. We would like to thank Gavin and the archive team for their much appreciated support. What was originally anticipated as a two week research stint lasted the entire summer due to the wealth of material on internal communications (IC) that the archive holds. Much of this has been due to the cataloguing of new material, particularly extremely important files from the 1970s and 1980s which reveal the formation of the Internal Communication Committee at the Post Office and its Quality of Service campaigns in the 1980s. This material has enabled us for the first time to historically map the formation of one of the first IC departments in the UK and to research one of the first IC campaigns in the 1980s which took place over several years. This finishes off our research into public sector corporations in post-war Britain: the BBC, British Rail, the National Coal Board and the Post Office. What this research confirms is that IC predominantly emerged in the public sector and then spread to the private sectors in the 1980s. This is a major research findings which we aim to start writing up in November when our archival research will be mainly completed.
October will be a busy month. We are carrying out research at the archives of GlaxoSmithKiline and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank. Michael will also be attending the Unite 24 Employee Experience Conference https://www.unily.com/unite where he will be giving a paper on the development of internal labour markets in British companies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their influence on internal communication. Michael will also be travelling to Tokyo where he will be visiting three universities and giving a paper on content marketing at the Japanese Business History Society 60th Meeting and Conference which will be held at the prestigious University of Tokyo. This will be based on a paper that he has just had published this month in the global journal Business History. You can read the paper here.