Staff Profile:Mike Esbester

Responsibilities:

Areas of Interest:

My current research, on the AHRC-funded 'Designing information for everyday life, 1815-1914' project, explores how items intended for use in daily life in Britain during the 'long nineteenth century' were designed, disseminated and used. This work focuses on ephemeral documents, such as timetables, route maps, guides, trade catalogues, and forms: items that were used by people who had to make choices between alternatives, who had to calculate, who looked for guidance or for answers to questions. I am looking at how the design of these documents aided - or hindered - the user, and how people used the documents in practice. In doing so, I am engaging with social and cultural history, design history, the history of reading and the history of everyday life. See the Project website at: http://www.designinginformation.org

At the same time, I am continuing my research into cultures of safety, in transport, the workplace and British society. My AHRC-funded doctoral study focused on the Great Western Railway Company's occupational safety education campaign between 1913 and 1939. The campaign was reliant upon 'social' methods to convey its messages: visual media, such as magazines, booklets and photographs, and an informal, personal tone of address, all characteristic of 'modern' educative campaigns. I have analysed the techniques used by the Great Western Railway, arguing that they were innovative in attempting to make the subject matter immediately accessible to the target audience. I have explored the rhetoric of the campaign in order to elucidate tensions between managerial grades, workers and the state in negotiating definitions and understandings of 'safety.' The Great Western Railway's campaign attempted to 'educate' employees in the 'safe' ('correct') and 'unsafe' ('incorrect') methods of work. It also attempted to extend managerial prerogative over the labour process and impede employee autonomy. I have demonstrated how 'safety' was socially constructed, and how employees could resist managerial interpretations.

This study has stimulated interests in adjacent areas such as occupational health and safety, the history of work, business and organisational history, media history, the history of disability, and the use and interpretation of visual sources. I have a particular interest in internal communications within businesses (such as company magazines) and the development of corporate culture. I am also interested in the cultural mediation of the railways and transport, in the early steam era (c.1825-60) and in the twentieth century.

Research groups / Centres:

Publications:

'Designing Time: The Design and Use of Nineteenth Century Transport Timetables', Journal of Design History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2009), 91-113.

'Nineteenth Century Timetables and the History of Reading', Book History, Vol. 12 (2009), 156-85.

Entries for 'Bill posters' and 'Bradshaw's Monthly Railway Guide' in Phaidon Compendium of Graphic Design (Phaidon, 2009, forthcoming).

'Mapping the Way? Maps, Gender, Emotion', in G. Letherby & G. Reynolds (eds.), Gendered Journeys, Mobile Emotions (Ashgate, 2009), 33-44.

Organizing Work: Company Magazines and the Discipline of Safety', Management and Organizational History, Vol. 3, No. 3-4 (August/November 2008), 217-37.

'Administration, Technology & Workplace Safety in the early Twentieth Century', Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte (Yearbook of European Administrative History), Vol. 20 (2008), 95-117.

'"No Good Reason for the Government to Interfere": Business, the State and Railway Employee Safety in Britain, c.1900-39', Business and Economic History Online, Vol. 4 (2006), http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHonline/beh.html.

'Reinvention, Renewal or Repetition? The Great Western Railway and Occupational Safety on Britain's Railways, c.1900-c.1920', Business and Economic History Online, Vol. 3 (2005), http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHonline/beh.html.