How to Write Good College Essays

Instructions to Write Good College Essays Instructions to Write Good College Essays Composing a school article may appear to be quite confused initially. In any case, on the off chance that you realize what is required from you and how to merit your perusers thankfulness, you get all opportunities to succeed. This article will assist you with becoming more acquainted with some uncommon insider facts of composing great school expositions. Think about them, and you make certain to pick up composing great school papers. Moreover, give several minutes of your opportunity to peruse an article on great research project points, how to compose a decent school paper, and survey a rundown of good exposition subjects: Step by step instructions to compose great school papers: Secret 1. Keep away from clichés When composing a school exposition, you should remember that the board of trustees glances through several totally indistinguishable papers. Consequently, so as to succeed, you have to make a standing apart paper. Think about some selective data about you so as to pull in the perusers consideration from the main sight. The most effective method to compose great school papers: Secret 2. Build up a connection among you and your peruser Show the peruser that it is simple for you to converse with him/her. Envision that you are having a discussion with a conversationalist who is attempting to uncover you. Nonetheless, mind that a variety of individuals will peruse your paper. Thus, be cautious when discussing the passing of your nearby individuals or something private. Step by step instructions to compose great school papers: Secret 3. Be straightforward You know, the peruser doesn't hope to see a superhuman in you. Along these lines, there is no requirement for you to misrepresent your capacities. Step by step instructions to compose great school papers: Secret 4. Concentrate on your qualities yet don't dismiss your shortcomings This is somehow or another methods being genuine to the peruser. Plus, there are no ideal individuals, so in the event that you center around your qualities just, the peruser may feel that you keep down something. The most effective method to compose great school articles: Secret 5. Use humor Utilize pertinent jokes however be cautious with them. Various individuals have diverse comical inclination. Instructions to compose great school expositions: Secret 6. Make an infectious presentation and powerful end Generally, these two sections establish the last connections from perusing. That is the reason it is so imperative to invest enough energy making them powerful. The most effective method to compose great school expositions: Secret 7. Check and return The more mix-ups you will locate, the more possibilities you should get a high evaluation on your paper. The most effective method to compose great school articles: Secret 8. Have confidence in yourself! Keep in mind, the person who consistently ponders achievement will surely succeed! Along these lines, good karma with your school paper! In the event that you don't have the foggiest idea how to compose great school articles and need proficient assistance with composing, don't stop for a second to put in a request on our site and get your school paper composed by proficient essayists! Related posts: Arrangement Essay Paper Writing Guide Paper Help Draft Essay Rough Paper Editing Service

Summary of Percey Jackson and the Olympians Series free essay sample

The Percy Jackson and the Olympians arrangement comprises of five books, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, the Sea of Monsters, the Titan’s Curse, the Battle of the Labyrinth, and the Last Olympian. Each book has a mission that Percy and his companions Annabeth Chase, little girl of Athena, and Grover, a satyr go on. Every one has an alternate reason and all paving the way to the war with the Titan Lord Kronos in the last book. The initial circumstance is in the principal book when Percy is presented as the child that has ADHD, dyslexia, a terrible notoriety for being ousted from numerous schools, and his lone companion is Grover Underwood. While is on a fieldtrip in his ebb and flow school, Yancey, he gets mindful of his capacity for controlling water and is dumbfounded. After this occurrence Mr. Brunner, Grover, and Percy drive to Camp Half-Blood while Mr. Brunner, who is really Chiron the executive of the camp and a centaur, clarifies what's going on. We will compose a custom article test on Synopsis of Percey Jackson and the Olympians Series or on the other hand any comparative subject explicitly for you Don't WasteYour Time Recruit WRITER Just 13.90/page It is uncovered that Percy is a diving being, half human and half god, and Grover Underwood is a satyr and was at Percy’s school to secure him. Not long after Percy shows up at camp, he is guaranteed by Poseidon, which implies that Poseidon is his dad. Camp Half-Blood is where diving beings come to prepare and shield themselves against beasts. The contentions in the arrangement are when Zeus’s lightning jolts disappear and he imagines that Percy is the cheat. So Percy goes on an excursion to locate the genuine cheat and recover the lightning jolts to come back to Zeus. In the second book when Percy was twelve, he, Annabeth and Clarrisse, girl of Ares needed to go get the Golden Fleece to spare the mystical tree that ensured the camp. In the third book, Percy and Annabeth and Grover discover two new diving beings at a life experience school, Nico and Bianca di Angelo. They are the main known offspring of Hades . Bianca gets slaughtered in a fight with a beast after she joins the Hunters of Artemis. The Battle of the Labyrinth is when Annabeth and Percy unintentionally fall into an enormous labyrinth and Annabeth remembers it similar to the Labyrinth made by Daedalus, and understood that that was the way Kronos’s armed force would attack their camp. So Annabeth, Percy, Grover and Tyson (Cyclopes) go determined to keep this from occurring. While on the mission they hear that the military has attacked camp and come back to help. At long last Daedalus penances himself since he is the just one keeping the abyrinth alive. The rising activity is in the last book when they all plan for the war between the mythical beings and Kronos’s armed force. The peak of the arrangement is when Luke, who’s body is simply being utilized by Kronos, and Percy have their last fight. Luke’s body became strong when Kronos dominated however he was still in there, battling, lastly he had the option to tell Percy Kronos’s shaky area. The ultimate result is the point at which they win the war and is tidying up the chaos that the fight left. The level character in the Percy Jackson arrangement is Annabeth on the grounds that she remains the equivalent all through the entire arrangement. She doesn’t change character. The dynamic character is Grover in light of the fact that supposedly on he gets increasingly more focused on the grounds that he cannot appear to discover the divine force of the wild, Pan, which is his obligation as a satyr. In any case, when he does, it was Pans time to pass in light of the fact that the environmental change was out of his capacity and instructed him to convey the message to the various satyrs yet they don’t trust him. The hero is Percy Jackson and the Antagonist is the Titan Lord Kronos. Reference index: the five books: percy jackson and the lightning hoodlum, ocean of beasts, the titans revile, the clash of the maze, and the last olympian

Book Riots Deals of the Day for December 17th, 2019

Book Riot’s Deals of the Day for December 17th, 2019 Sponsored by Waterhouse Press. These deals were active as of this writing, but may expire soon, so get them while they’re hot! Todays  Featured Deals All About Love by  bell hooks for $1.99. Get it here,  or just click on the cover image below. The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by  Helene Hanff for $1.99. Get it here,  or just click on the cover image below. All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg for $2.99. Get it here,  or just click on the cover image below. The Color of Water by  James McBride for $1.99. Get it here,  or just click on the cover image below. In Case You Missed Yesterdays Most Popular Deals The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters by Balli Kaur Jaswal for $2.99. Get it here,  or just click on the cover image below. The Likeness by Tana French for $1.99. Get it here, or just click on the cover image below. Previous Daily Deals That Are Still Active As Of This Writing (Get em While Theyre hot!): The Hole: A Novel by Hye-young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell for $1.99. The Serpent of Venice by  Christopher Moore for $1.99. Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult for $2.99. Florida by Lauren Groff for $4.99. The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War Book 2) by R. F. Kuang for $2.99. Goldie Vance Vol. 1 by Hope Larson, illustrated by Brittney Williams for $4.49 Guapa by Saleem Haddad for $1.99 The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H. G. Parry for $2.99 Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman for $2.99 The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku for $2.99 The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon for $1.99 What Doesnt Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays by Damon Young for $2.99 The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter for $2.99 Ten Women by Marcela Serrano, translated by Beth Fowler for $3.99 Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri for $4.99 Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender for $2.99 Internment by Samira Ahmed for $3.49 Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller for $1.99 Travels by Michael Crichton for $1.99 A Prince on Paper by Alyssa Cole for $1.99 Invasive by Chuck Wendig for $1.99 Marlena by  Julie Buntin for $1.99. The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang for $2.99 Slayer by Kiersten White for $1.99 Chasing Down a Dream by Beverly Jenkins for $2.99 The Field Guide to the North American Teenager by Ben Philippe for $1.99 The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow for $2.99 I Believe in a Thing Called Love by Maurene Goo for $2.99 Im Telling the Truth, but Im Lying by Bassey Ikpi for $2.99 Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver for $4.99 Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey for $1.99 Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds for $1.99 All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks for $1.99 How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu for $2.99 News of the World by Paulette Jiles for $2.99 A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum for $2.99 Dont Call Us Dead by Danez Smith for $2.99 Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore for $2.99 The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi for $2.99 Fatality in F (A Gethsemane Brown Mystery Book 4) by Alexia Gordon for $4.99 Reckless by Selena Montgomery for $3.99 Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras for $4.99 Black Water Rising by Attica Locke for $1.99 The Bone Witch  by Rin Chupeco for $0.99 Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds for $2.99 The Ensemble: A Novel by Aja Gabel for $4.99 Cant Escape Love by Alyssa Cole for $1.99 Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson for $5.99 Ark by Veronica Roth for $1.99 Ten Women by Marcela Serrano for $3.99 Flights by Olga Tokarczuk for $4.99 The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith for $0.99 Ormeshadow by Priya Sharma for $3.99 Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather for $3.99 Prophecy  by Ellen Oh for $2.99 Along for the Ride  by Mimi Grace for $2.99 Sign up for our Book Deals newsletter and get up to 80% off books you actually want to read.

Alcohol And Drug Addiction The Greatest Dangers Of A...

Alcohol and drug addictions are the greatest dangers to a healthy society nationwide. An addiction is â€Å"a condition that results when a person ingests a substance (e.g. alcohol, nicotine, cocaine) or engages in an activity (e.g. gambling) that can be pleasurable but the continued use/ act of which becomes compulsive and interferes with ordinary life responsibilities, such as work, relationships, or health.† An addicted person may not be aware of their altered behavior or the problems that their behavior is causing. To help an addicted person it is important to understand the psychology behind addictions, the symptoms, drug trends, and the options for treatment. The word addiction usually refers to a physical addiction. A physical†¦show more content†¦Whether or not a person become addicted to something depends on their individual biology, social environment, age, and their current stage of development as a human person. A few inward symptoms are the inability to limit oneself, the craving for the substance, and the amount of drug needed rises to produce the desired effect as one builds up a tolerance to the drug. An outward symptom is that the use of the substance will interfere with school, work, social and family life. This interference creates psychological impairments and negative effects on the addict’s health, mood, and self-respect. Another outward symptom of an addiction is withdrawal. During withdrawal, the addict will have irritability, anxiety, shakes, and nausea. General symptoms can be â€Å"declining grades, aggressiveness, forgetfulness, disappearing money or valuables, feeling hopeless, depressed, or suicidal, use of room deodorizers, lying, particularly about how much alcohol or other drugs he or she is using, frequent hangover, getting in trouble with the law, drinking and driving, and suspension for work or school.† Over time, the continued use of a substance can alter the addict’s decision-making process, judgment skills, the learning and memory part of the brain, as well as the behavior control part of the brain. All addictions can cause shame, guilt, hopelessness, thoughts of failure, anxiety, and depression. People who become addicted to

The Pros and Cons of Free Trade Essay - 1116 Words

Free Trade is the ability to trade goods and services without barriers, and for prices to rise naturally through supply and demand. In theory, Free Trade was a way to break down the barriers between countries, banishing taxes and allowing prices to be naturally set through supply and demand. According to the World Trade Organization, this gives the poor countries the opportunity to specialize in the production of goods that derive from their environment and natural resources with the capacity to sell those same goods to the western world, while being able to buy back goods that may not produced in their native country. This idea is to be beneficial to all; however, the rich become richer while the poor remain poor. Free Trade Agreements†¦show more content†¦Those economically disadvantaged (poor) within a country generally gain from a loose trade. A loose trade is generally a strong positive contributor to poverty reduction. This allows people to exploit their productive pot ential, assists economic growth, restrains illogical policy interventions and helps to insulate against shocks. This corresponds with a new World Bank study which, used data from 80 countries over four decades, confirmed that openness boosts economic growth and that the incomes of the poor rose one-for-one with overall growth. Economic analysts say trading among other countries with no stipulations improve global efficiency in resource allocation (Tupy, 2005). Free Trade delivers goods and services to those who value them most and allows partners to gain from specializing in the producing those goods and services they do best; according to Tupy’s findings, Economists call that the law of comparative advantage. Tupy also states when producers create goods they are comparatively skilled at i.e. Germans producing beer and the French producing wine, those goods increase in abundance and quality. Trade allows consumers to benefit from more efficient production methods, for example , without large markets for goods and services, large production runs would not be economical. Large production runs, in turn, are instrumental to reducing product costs while lower productionShow MoreRelatedPros And Cons Of Free Trade Essay3046 Words   |  13 PagesPros and Cons of Free Trade I. Introduction Free trade, the ever present driving force behind our national and world economy, is a trade policy embroiled in controversy. It is considered by most economists to be an almost perfect trade policy, barring a few negative effects. Free trade has been shown to increase production, output and income levels in an economy. However, there are many people that view free trade as destroyer of economies and a catalyst of poverty. Critics of free trade have pointedRead MorePros and Cons of Free Trade1495 Words   |  6 PagesGeography: Pros and Cons of Free Trade Few can contend that the world is more interconnected and interrelated more than ever. This web of interdependency is primarily made possible by trade, and in the twenty-first century, a large and significant portion of trade is conducted on a global scale. Furthermore, while the majority of people agree that free trade can benefit both parties in terms of economic development and an increase in overall production, many critics have voiced their fears of theRead MoreThe Pros And Cons Of Free Trade1286 Words   |  6 Pageswhich is a free trade agreement between the US and 11 other Pacific Rim states reached under the Obama administration. Trump stated that he did a great thing for the American worker. (Bradner) When Trump was on the presidential campaign trail, 54% of Americans answered â€Å"much more likely† or â€Å"somewhat more likely† to the question would you be more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate for President who promises to put a stop to the Tr ans-Pacific Partnership, and enact trade policies thatRead MorePros and Cons of the Free Trade Agreements706 Words   |  3 PagesWhile I was on the internet I was researching for the pros and cons of The Free Trade Agreements, and this is what I found: It seems to be a split between the democrats and the republicans. Pros Some believe that the Free trade will increase sales and profit for the US business. I still think this is up in the air. I don’t feel the economy is up, but is it better? They also said that the Free trade will create us jobs for the middle class over a long term, but I also know that there are still a lotRead More The Pros and Cons of Free Trade Essay941 Words   |  4 PagesThe Pros and Cons of Free Trade Free trade is exchange of goods and commodities between parties without the enforcement of tariffs or duties. The trading of goods between people, communities, and nations is not an innovative economic practice. Nations are however the main element within a free trade agreement. By examining free trade through three different political ideologies: Liberal, Nationalistic, and Marxist approaches, the advantages and disadvantages will become apparent. ThesesRead MoreWhat Is The Pros And Cons Of The North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement?1847 Words   |  8 Pagesnegotiation, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a trade agreement between the three north American countries: Canada, United States, and Mexico, was put into effect on January 1st 1994. NAFTA was developed to increase trade among the three north American countries while simultaneously promoting each countries’ economy growth. However, the United States faces a new government, and President Trump believes that NAFTA should be renegotiated to modernize the trade agreement instead of removingRead MorePros And Cons Of Tariffs1127 Words   |  5 Pages Pros and Cons of Tariffs Principles of Macroeconomics Columbia Southern University BBA-2401 Angelo Jones Managing the how goods and services enter or leave this country (import/export) is an important process that allows for us to control the economic status of our nation. Sometimes imposing tariffs on the goods imported balances our labor cost, resources and government supported industry. A tariff by definition is a tax or duty to be paid on a particular class of importsRead MoreDiscuss Pros and Cons for Joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership837 Words   |  3 Pages Introduction The Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement was outlined on November 11th, 2011. It is currently set up between nine countries. They are: the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Peru, and Brunei Darussalem. The purpose of the trade agreement is to â€Å"enhance trade and investment among the Trans- Pacific Partnership countries, promote innovation, economic growth and development, and support the creation and retention of jobsRead MoreSolution For Contemporary Economic Issues Essay1371 Words   |  6 PagesSolution for Contemporary Economic Issues The economic globalization is known as the growing scale of cross-border trade of goods and services, communication, and transportation because of Strengthening economies of a group of countries (Shangquan, 2000). Recently, many countries have encountered new types of economic problems, which is related to economic globalization. To master these problems, economists adopted two general types of economic theories. The first theory is protectionism, which isRead MoreInternational Economic Dimensions Of Nutrition Essay1216 Words   |  5 Pages Assignment Question: With a focus on food security, what are the pros and cons of free trade? Food security is defined as when all people at all times have access to safe nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life (FAO 2003). Therefore, the importance of food security is to the general welfare of the population as a public health and nutrition benefit. Free trade can be defined as a market model in which trade in goods and services between or within countries flow unhindered by

Katrina Possisble Solutions Free Essays

Possible Solutions to prevent another Hurricane Katrina Sea gates are another option that have proven very affective in other areas of the world such as Holland, Britain, and Venice, which is also below sea level and has a large number of canals. Sea gates are simply giant air-filled walls that cut off water flow. These gates would most likely be placed on Lake Pontchartrain’s two narrow outlets and would be only be closed if a storm was approaching. We will write a custom essay sample on Katrina Possisble Solutions or any similar topic only for you Order Now Such structures have been considered since the 1960’s, but the idea was crushed in the late 1970’s because people feared the gates would disrupt marine life and sediment transportation. However this should not be an issue since the gates are open the majority of the time. The main hurdle is cost, ranging from $500 million to 1 billion Closing or covering certain canals is an option that would help prevent storm surges from reaching so far inland. Currently canals and channels can give storm surge direct access to inland neighborhoods. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet [MRGO] is one of the canals that has caused major problems in the past. Where MRGO meets the Intracoastal Waterway there is a major area of funneling. The two fronts met at a narrowing point that forms the Industrial Canal and the water height is amplified 20-40%, putting intense pressure on floodwalls causing them to burst. After Hurricane Katrina hit the narrow strip of wetlands between MRGO and Lake Borgne got even smaller, bringing to reality the fear that the two waters might merge into one. MRGO has less than five ships navigating its channel per day; often times only one ship uses the outlet. MRGO has also amplified the wetland loss in the area, allowing salt water to intrude and kill off native vegetation. By keeping only heavily used channels open and turning the rest into trails or parks, flood damage could be reduced. Adding a subterranean drainage system to the city is another idea that engineers have come up with. This would include turning some canals into culverts (covering them with trails and parks) and then having heavy duty pumps (located on high ground) to pump the water fully out of the city. The culverts would help channel the water and get it out quickly in times of flood. This is a simple technology, but it is costly running about $1 million per mile of canal. Moving the pumping stations is a relatively simple way to help prevent New Orleans from being overwhelmed. Installing heavy-duty pumping stations on high ground or in areas where they can act as damn-like buffers would allow water to be pumped out even when the city is overwhelmed. During Hurricane Katrina, once the pumping stations were flooded the low areas just continued to rise in water level. Wetland rehabilitation is another plan that could help protect New Orleans from storm surge. Wetlands act as natural barriers against wind-driven waters, but wetlands are being destroyed by saltwater intrusion everyday. Hand planting is very costly and time consuming, making it hard to implement. Source: http://www. uwec. edu/jolhm/eh3/group7/futureneworleans. htm How to cite Katrina Possisble Solutions, Papers

Globalisation and Standardisation of Products

Questions: 1. Discuss and compare the success (or lack of success) of their strategy. 2. Do you agree or disagree with the thesis statement above. Why? Why not? Answers: Nowadays, Coca-Cola is considered as one of the most successful brands all over the world. The company has gained pace and growth while expanded itself in a quite rapid manner and thereby becoming the largest beverage manufacturing company in the world. Coca Cola company has increased its global market share extensively and presently it operates in more than 200 countries accompanies by more than 84000 suppliers (Banutu-Gomez 2012). During the present period most of the revenue of the company is generated from outside the United States. In order to achieve this extensive development in business, Coca Cola Company had adopted the strategy of globalization. The process of globalization started during the early stages of 1900. Primarily the bottling plants of the company were set up in Panama and Cuba as the United States military were spread in these regions, which gave rise to an increase in the demand for Coca Cola. These plants became very successful as these helped to reduce the cost associated with delivery and shipping process (Arzaba 2013). After the success of these plants, Coca Cola opened its next bottling plants in Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Philippines. During the year 1926, the company had set up a centre for foreign relationships and manufacturing units all over the world in order to support its present global operations. According to Arzaba (2013), the Coca Cola Company continued on its path of producing in a mass and expansion in the upcoming decades. The company had established local branches accompanied by local partnerships for the effective and efficient production and distribution of the renowned Coca Cola products all over the world. In order to examine the globalization activity of the Coca Cola Company the three major strategies that have been adopted by the company must be discussed. These three strategies are namely global marketing, differentiation of products and use of advanced technologies (Saylor.org 2016). The marketing strategies adopted by Coca Cola have helped the company to globalize successfully. The popular slogans added with the rhythmic songs compelled the consumers to remember the particular brand. Moreover, added with the advertising initiatives Coca Cola became the first and foremost commercial sponsor of the Olympic Games (Toma 2012). Another, key strategy is product differentiation. The company has effectively differentiated its products for meeting the needs of customers from different classes. Such as in order to meet the needs of young customers the company has manufactured flavored coke. On the other hand, for the health concerned population the company produces diet coke, vitamin water along with Odwalla products (Toma 2012). For building up a proper understanding about the market segments, lifestyle, age and buying behavior of the population, Coca Cola has invested a significantly high amount of money. Finally, technology is the last strategy that the company used for the successful globalization. The use of advanced technologies has enabled the company to reduce the cost of transportation and it became able to transport larger amount of products more easily and quickly by using cargo ships, jet aircrafts etc. In addition to these, advancement in technologies became a driving force that enabled easy availability of information. Reference List: Arzaba, A., 2013. Coca-Cola: Globalization in the Modern Mayan World. Banutu-Gomez, M.B., 2012. Coca-Cola: International business strategy for globalization. The Business Management Review, 3(1), p.155. Saylor.org. (2016). Saylor Academy. Toma, G., 2012. THE CULTURAL DIMENSION OF GLOBALIZATION. Strategic Impact, 42(1).

Madonna Of Raphael And Cimabue Essays - Madonna Del Prato, Madonna

Madonna Of Raphael And Cimabue The following paper is a comparison of Raphael's Madonna of the Meadow and Cimabue's Madonna Enthroned. Madonna of the Meadow was painted by Raffaello Sanzio, otherwise known as Raphael, in 1505. This time period is known as the Italian Renaissance. The painting was oil on panel and stood 3 ft 8.5 in X 2 ft 10.25 in. It is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Italy (Adams, 567). Madonna of the Meadow is of a classical nature, which is very common of the time period. A good example of this would be the nude characters used in the art. The medium used (oil) was also being used very widely in Italy by this time. It allowed the painter to make very realistic shades and colors. The figures and landscape in the painting also looked very fluid and real due to the use of the oil paint. The iconography of the painting lies in the history of its famous characters. The three figures come from the Bible; however, the artist has taken some liberties. The picture contains the Virgin Mary, the baby Jesus and his second cousin St. John the Baptist. The picture foreshadows the death of Christ on the cross. This point is displayed in the action of the painting where St. John is handing Jesus a small cross and Mary is looking upon it knowing what is to come. There is a feeling of connection between the three of them by the way they are all looking at each other and the cross. Although I could find no documentation on this, I feel there is also a symbol of the trinity in the three flowers to Mary's left side. The flowers are very prevalent and are connected to the figures in the painting by having the same color that is in the Virgin's shirt. It is also speculated that the water in the background symbolizes the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist. The fact that Mary is barefoot in the painting indicates that she is walking on holy ground. This painting is among a series that has been called Madonna of the Lands because the Florentine countryside in the background is said to be under the protection of the Virgin, the Child and the infant Baptist. The Virgin Mary is also joined to the landscape by her sloping shoulders which make a continuation of the mountainous peaks of Florence in the background (Hartt, 470). The positioning and placement of the three biblical characters are said to be in a Leonardesque-type pyramid (Hartt, 470). Raphael favored this style and positioning from Leonardo DiVinchi. The poses of the three are very calm, relaxed and subdued. His overall style of the painting was very realistic and smooth. The use of light was very natural and soft with delicate shadowing and a continuous flow of the direction of the sunlight. The setting is very spacious and deep and his use of atmospheric perspective is very noticeable, allowing the scene to become even more alive and believable to the eye. The halos adorning the three are also put into perspective by an elliptical shape and by being very faint. The colors and tones are very natural and soothing, much like the brushwork of the painting as well. The best description of the painting comes from our textbook Art Across Time stating that, "Raphael's style is calm, harmonious, and restrained". In comparison, Madonna Enthroned has many differences although it contains two of the same characters. The painting is much larger having a height of 12 ft 7 in and a width of 7 ft 4 in. It was designed about 200 years earlier than Madonna of the Meadow during the Byzantine Influence. It is currently being held in the Galleria degli Uffizi. Its medium also differs quite much in that it is a tempera on wood (Adams, 452). The tempera does not allow the painting to look as real and as fluid as does the oil. The Christ child is very much adult-like in his appearance and gestures, nothing like the one in Raphael's painting. It is, however, very typical of the Byzantine style as is the gold background and thin figures (Adams, 450). The figures in the painting are once again from the Bible. However, in this painting we also have angels and four older men at the bottom of the throne holding scrolls. These men depict the four prophets of the Old Testament. The style differs quite a bit from Madonna

Anne Truitt, Sculptor of Minimalist Form and Color

Anne Truitt, Sculptor of Minimalist Form and Color Anne Truitt was an American artist and writer, known for her work as a minimalist sculptor and, to a lesser extent, painter. She is perhaps most widely regarded for Daybook, a volume of the artist’s diaries, reflecting on the life of an artist and mother. Fast Facts: Anne Truitt Occupation: Artist and writerBorn: March 16, 1921 in Baltimore, MarylandDied: December 23, 2004 in Washington, DC, USAKey Accomplishments: Early contributions to minimalist sculpture and the publication of Daybook, which reflected on her life as both artist and mother Early Life Anne Truitt was born Anne Dean in Baltimore in 1921 and grew up in the town of Easton, on the Eastern shore of Maryland. The stark coastal style- rectangles of colored doors against white clapboard facades- influenced her later work as a minimalist. Her family life was comfortable, as her parents were well-to-do (her mother came from a family of Boston ship owners). She lived happily and freely as a child, though she was not unaffected by the poverty of which she caught glimpses in her town. Later in life, she would inherit a modest sum of money from her family, which financed her art practice- though not so much as to keep finances from being a constant worry for the artist. Truitt’s mother, to whom she was very close, died while Truitt was still in her twenties. Her father suffered from alcoholism, and though she pitied him, she wrote that she â€Å"decided† to love him despite his faults. This strength of will is characteristic of the artist and is seen in her staunch determination to continue in her work, even at times when her money dwindled and her pieces did not sell. After her first year at Bryn Mawr College, Truitt came down with a case of appendicitis, which her doctors handled poorly. The result, Truitt was told, was infertility. Though this prognosis ultimately proved to be false, and Truitt was able to have three children later in life, she attributes her career as an artist to this temporary sterility, largely because her focus was on her art at the time in her life when most women were expected to raise children. Early Career in Medicine After returning to Bryn Mawr to finish her undergraduate degree, Truitt decided to begin a career in psychiatric medicine. She felt a duty to help those who struggled in their lives. Though she was admitted to Yale to begin a Master’s in psychology, she turned down her scholarship and instead began work as a researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Already successful by the age of twenty-four, Truitt had a revelation one afternoon and immediately quit her position. She turned her back on a career in medicine, recounting later that something within her knew she had to be an artist. An Artist's Calling Anne married James Truitt, a journalist, in 1948. The two traveled often, following James work. While living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Truitt began to take art classes, and excelled in sculpture. When the couple moved to Washington, D.C., Truitt continued her art practice by enrolling in classes at the Institute of Contemporary Art. On a trip to New York in 1961 with her good friend Mary Meyer, Truitt visited the â€Å"American Abstractionists and Imagists† show at the Guggenheim. The experience would ultimately change her career. As she was rounding one of the museum’s famed curved ramps, she came upon a Barnett Newman â€Å"zip† painting and was stunned by its size. â€Å"I had never realized you could do that in art. Have enough space. Enough color, she later wrote. The visit to New York marked a change in her practice, as she transitioned into sculpture which relied on pared-down painted wooden surfaces to convey their subtle impact. The family moved to Japan in 1964, where they stayed for 3 years. Truitt never felt comfortable in Japan, and ended up destroying all her work from this period. Anne Truitts column sculptures.   annetruitt.org The Truitts divorced in 1969. After the divorce, Truitt lived in Washington, D.C. for the remainder of her life. Her separation from the art world of New York perhaps accounts for her lack of critical acclaim compared to her minimalist contemporaries, but that is not to say she existed outside of New York completely. She befriended artist Kenneth Noland and later took over his studio near Dupont Circle when he moved to New York. Through Noland, Truitt was introduced to Andrà © Emmerich, Noland’s New York gallerist, who eventually became Truitt’s gallerist. Work Truitt is known for her stark minimalist sculptures set directly on the floor of the gallery space, which mimic in verticality and proportion the shape of a human body. Unlike many of her fellow minimalist artists like Walter de Maria and Robert Morris, she did not shy away from color, but in fact made it the central point of interest in her work. The subtlety of color is applied precisely to the sculptures, often painstakingly and in as many as forty layers. Truitt was also notable in her studio practice, as she sanded, prepped, and painted each of her works without the help of a studio assistant. The structures themselves she sent out to a lumber yard close to her home to be made to her specifications. Daybook and Diaries Following retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1973 and the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1974, Truitt began to write a diary, seeking to make sense of the increased publicity her previously quietly shown art began to receive. How was she to understand herself as an artist now that her work was consumed and criticized by so many eyes other than her own? The result was Daybook, later published in 1982, which begins as an exploration of this newfound critical regard for her work, but ends up being an exploration of an artist’s day-to-day, as she struggles to find the money to continue her practice, all the while supporting her children. Due to Daybook’s critical success, Truitt would publish two more volumes of diaries. The language of the diaries is often poetic with frequent forays into Truitt’s past. Though she gave up a career in psychology, it is clearly still present in her thinking, as her analysis of her life and career relies heavily on the interpretation of her psychological motivations and the impact of her youth on her personality. Legacy Anne Truitt died in Washington, D.C. in 2004 at the age of 83. She was honored posthumously by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington in 2009 with a major retrospective. Her estate is managed by her daughter Alexandra Truitt, and her work is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City. Sources Munro, E. (2000). Originals: American Women Artists. New York: Da Capo Press.Truitt, A. (1982). Daybook. New York, Scribner.

An observation report of a faculty member Essay

An observation report of a faculty member - Essay Example Let me start off the relating of my observations by first describing the kind of class that I was assigned to observe. While I was hoping to be assigned to a highly exciting and eye-opening class, I was instead assigned to an ESL class for college graduates who had very little English writing skills. The students in this English 100 class were all college school students who, due to one reason or another, managed to graduate from high school with very poor English writing skills. Gaining acceptance into college may have meant that they had the chance to get a better future by completing all the levels of their education, the problem of their English writing readiness became quite evident when they enrolled int heir regular English classes. Due to the serious nature of their problem in expressing themselves in English, these students were advised to enroll in remedial English writing classes. The aim of this type of class, is to improve their English writing abilities to the extent th at the student will be able to clearly and legibly express his thoughts and emotions through his writing. The professor in this class was a female in her late thirties who felt that the best way to help her students learn how to write in English was to ask them to engage themselves in a writing activity that they could relate to. Which is why she asked the class to write their personal memoirs. Since her students came from highly diverse backgrounds, their English writing skills seemed to copy the kind of background they were exposed to when they tried to express themselves through writing. However, the teacher, who used the â€Å"Daniel Stiepleman Cluster† in her class, managed to divide her time equally among the students and in the process, managed to help them improve their writing abilities in the process. She did this by clustering her class in groups that came from similiar backgrounds. This way the students shared a set of low writing skill problems that she could hel p them address by group rather than individually. In doing so, she allowed the class members to become teaching aides in a way because they found themselves in the unique position of helping one another improve their writing ability through consultation with one another. By asking the students to write their own memoirs, the professor actually encouraged the students to express themselves by discussing a topic that they are highly familiar with and therefore, gave them the confidence to take a chance upon which they could express themselves in English as best as they could. Since this was a basic English writing class, I observed that most of the students had apprehensions about how they should write about themselves and how they might be judged for their written grammatical mistakes. This was a point of nervousness for the students that the professor was able to diffuse by encouraging them to write regardless of their mistakes, which she would help them correct later on. It was her belief that unless they took a chance upon expressing themselves, they would never be able to do so. Part of her encouragement and genius in teaching came from the way that she effectively utilized the clustering technique in teaching the

Sociology - social research Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Sociology - social research - Essay Example Body image may be criticized from sociocultural, neurocognitive, psycho-dynamic, behavioral, and even feminist viewpoints (Cash & Pruzinsky, 2002). Although body image includes many facets of issues within its context, body image is most often associated with self-esteem issues being that it is the level of one’s satisfaction with his or her physical self (Jones, 2001). As body image greatly affects a person’s development from early childhood to adulthood, it is important to study how influential factors affect a healthy body image perception. For adolescents, the concept of body image is crucial in their development to becoming healthy adult individuals. As such, at the very heart and core of adolescence and youth lies the concept of body image as they search for identity and make their stamp in the world (Ferron, 1997). There are many factors that affect a person’s perception of his or her body image. However, it is the media and the celebrity culture that goes along with it that plays a more significant role. In this study, the effects of the media, specifically magazines and the celebrity culture, on the youth 14 to 18 years old. Vital to the success of this study is first and foremost the research materials gathered that would support the hypothesis of the study entitled â€Å"Thin and Slim is Sexy: The Media’s Impact on the Body Image of the Youth Ages 14 to 18.† The design chosen by the researcher is the non-probability sampling design. The researcher recognizes the fact that availability of respondents may pose a problem. Hence, a non-probability sampling of the accidental or haphazard type, which is made up of those who come at hand or who is readily available will be utilized. Quota sampling may also be used wherein a sample of a fixed size are obtained from predetermined subdivisions of the population. Only young men and women who belong to the age group of 18 to 25 years old will be chosen for the

How Power Is Maintained Within The Society Media Essay

How Power Is Maintained Within The Society Media Essay According to Lukes (1986) cited in Scott (2001), power is, in its most general sense, the production of casual effects. When it comes to the social power, probably the best known definition of all was introduced by a German sociologist Max Weber (1920). He distinguished three kinds of power- traditional authority, legal authority and charismatic authority. Traditional authority occurred mainly in early Middle Ages and in some of todays tribal societies. It is the most stable form of power, not very susceptible to manipulation, because it is based mainly on tradition, which could be extremely difficult to change and the effects of such changes could be difficult to predict. Charismatic authority based on a personal ability to subordinate people, their dedication and trust in relation to the leader. No one else is able to perform such kind of power except of the person endowed with charisma. Legal authority is the least stable and its impermanence is apparent from the ease of manipula tion of the legal standards that form the basis of legitimacy. The authority is a feature of the relationship, not an attribute of personality. It is the impact on the partners in a mutual relationship. The aim of this essay is to show the ways, in which power is maintained within the society, through the transmission of values and ideas. Media can contribute a lot to a society. It can change opinions because they have access to people and this gives it a lot of strength. This strength can either be used constructively by educating people or it can be used destructively by misleading the innocent people. According to van Dijk article (1995) media uses their power in a really elaborate way. Thanks to its persuasive power, mass media can influence and control the audiences minds. Consequently through such a mind control, the mass media can also indirectly affect the viewers or readers actions. Author argues also, that the mass media consciously leaves a bit of independence to its audiences, just to make them better absorbed and encourages them to be actively involved instead of stay passive. Such a deliberate action of the media on the recipient, van Dijk described as a media manipulation. Author further explains, that the manipulation is the most effective when the recipients do not realize, they are being a subject of the media manipulation. Furthermore, according to that, manipulation is often perceived in a negative terms and is also being seen as a kind of the power abuse in the media. It is because of people, who create an image or certain argument just to support own interests. In effect, recipients accepts the news reports as a true and journalists opinions as a trustworthy.(van Dijk, 1995). There are many ways in which media manipulate their audiences inter alia suppression by omission, labeling, face-value transmission, slighting of content, false balancing, or framing. The basic way to make people stop to listen certain arguments, is to divert their attention elsewhere. The useful tool to do this is propaganda.(Herman, 2003;) In Manufacturing Consent Chomsky and Herman explains that the vast majority of the mass media companies are businesses, owned by wealthy people or big companies, and therefore media are mainly looking for profit, and they are selling airtime in TV or columns in newspapers to advertisers, who wants their ads to appear in a supporting environment just to secure access to the widest audience. Moreover, Herman and Chomsky introduced five factors actively involved in propaganda model. Those factors are: ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and anticommunist ideology.(Herman, 2003) Those factors works like a filters, every information must pass through to get its final shape. Marxists also agrees, that ownership is an important factor. From Marxist point of view, if a newspapers are owned by the wealthy, it suggest that they will promote views of their owners. Another way in which the productivities of the mass media are affirmed, is through advertising. Companies pay large amounts of money just to have their products advertised in the newspaper or shown in television, and in effect the vast majority of newspapers or commercial television stations exists only because they earn money from advertising goods and services. Nowadays advertisements are everywhere and for some people it is nothing more than letting to know what is new or worth to buy. But for Marxists advertising performs more functions than only informing people what is worth buying. (Berger,1982; Chapter 2) In his book The State in the Capitalist Society R. Milliband analyzed the functions of the mass media, and he found that advertising could be seen also as a kind of political tool, because it reinforces the existing social order and highlights the rule of the capitalists. Milliband stated that advertising not only informs but mostly persuades. It not only tells to the potential buyer what to buy, but also suggests that capitalism is the best system. Consequently, the company not only sells goods, it also sells capitalism. Just to conclude propaganda model from the Marxist perspective, if a group own the production, they have not only economic, but also political power. The state is being seen as an institution which helps to organize the capitalist society, while the working class people are said to hold values, ideas and beliefs, but their ideas are still being manipulated by the media. Marx saw capitalism as a system of unequal wealth distribution within group of the powerful people, and believed, that the masses will further give up with capitalism to find the less oppressive system. (Best, 2002; 78-79) The Marxs theory of ideology was further continued by an Itali an Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci understood that each of the dominant political class dominates also the consciousness of others. Gramsci believed that the working class has not made a revolution because capitalism was on its cultural hegemony. Cultural hegemony in practice is limited to fixing the content has already been imposed. Such content may be, for example lifestyle, religion, school programs or career patterns. All this is presented to a subordinate class in a knowledge-sense way, and it effectively prevents the proletarians from formation of their own culture, their own patterns of life, or their own ideas. In Marxs materialist concept of history, the conditions of scarcity and poverty create antagonism between the classes. Antagonism, which leads to the hegemony of one class over another. Capitalism has not collapsed thanks to the cultural hegemony. The workers accepted the existing system of production as really reasonable and unassailable. Therefore that gave the ide ological victory for the bourgeoisie. To succeed the revolution, workers must have their own culture and ideology. Therefore the key challenge for them is to oppose to the bourgeois culture. (Gramsci, 1926-37) According to Turow, hypodermic needle theory implied that the mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on their audiences. That model of media communication was introduced by S. Tchakhotine (1939) and was based on media war propaganda. Broadcasters using the targeted content continuously and systematically stimulate basic instincts of the recipients on a stimulus- response base. This model assumes passivity and irrationality of behavior and a high susceptibility to the content of propaganda. A reflection of this concept in the context of the relationship between media and the recipient is a shot called a magic bullet theory or hypodermic needle injection. The basis of this theory is the assertion of total passivity of the recipients and the lack of resistance to the transfer. It was assumed that the message reaches all units in the society, which each of them receives in the same way, and it leads them to a similar reaction. Every unit within the society becomes a subje ct to bite specified by the message and whether it will be effective depends only on the dose. (Croteau and Hoynes, 2003, 240; Turow, 2009, 153) French sociologist Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation argues that we live in an age of simulacra in which reality has been absorbed by its own representation, in an age in which truth, reference or objective reason ceased to exist. According to the philosopher people no longer perceive reality, only a simulation. In the opinion of Baudrillard simulacra has become one of the most important category in our culture. Media lead to the invalidation of reality, and to stem the flow of information. Each event is ground, which according to the author of Simulacra and Simulation leads to loss of feeling and the whole sequence of events. Simulation runs directly to produce hyper-reality, which defines the reality even more real than the reality itself. Media offer us the beauty more beautiful than the beauty and truth truer than the truth. Baudrillard argues that there is no reality, which does not mean that we live in a world of fantasy, he says only that people can no long er reach the unmediated reality. Baudrillard says that the reality does not disappear, it vanished the difference between what is real and what is simulated. Our senses are no longer able to distinguish between images and simulacrum.(Baudrillard, 1994; 21-23) Baudrillard also famously claimed that the Gulf War in 1991, did not happen, although its appearance in television. It is obvious, that the war actually took place, but the meaning and the details of what happened are inseparable from television coverage.(Baudrillard, 1995; 17). A man immersed in the hyper-reality, assess their real survival according to whether they match with the image promoted by the movies he watch, he sees himself in the mirror through the prism of ideal images in advertising. A sense of reality blurs for him forever because of continuous invasion of images served by the media, what captures their understanding of the world. In conclusion, media therefore do not affect what people think, but affect it, about what people think and can focus our attention on some issues, turning it (via omissions, etc.) from the other cases. The views of the unit depends largely on its perceived bias, the opinion prevailing in the social environment, and these in turn from the views presented in the mass media. The views of the media are easier than others reinforced by public opinion. The truth of this assertion depends on the activities of dissident groups, having the courage and strength to expression of alternative.

Introduction to K Means Analysis for Stock Portfolio Essay

1. Background[1] Investment decisions are about making choice. Investors need to decide what asset to be invested. This is an important decision because these assets are the means by which investors transfer today’s purchasing power to the future. In effect, investor must decide on a portfolio of asset to own. A portfolio is simply a combination of assets designed to serve as store of value. Poor management of these assets may destroy the portfolio’s value, and investor will then not achieve their financial goals. There are many assets like stocks, bonds, derivatives that investors may include in the portfolio. In Hong Kong, stock portfolio is the most common investment. But what stocks have higher return? What stocks are risky? What stocks in the portfolio that it has higher return? Many investors may use fundamental analysis to analysis financial data for answering above questions. In the last decade, some researches applied data mining techniques on financial market. Data mining is the process of automatically discovery useful information in large data repositories. It can be used to support a wide range of business intelligence applications such as customer profiling, targeted marketing, store layout. 2. Motivation In America, there are some research papers[2] about applying clustering technique on America financial market. For example, using Self-organizing map(SOM) to cluster stocks and financial ratio for fundamental analysis, using SOM to find the valuable stock. These all researches want to find the characteristic of the stocks. However, most these researches use SOM clustering technique, and focus on America financial market. It seems that few researches do similar thing in Hong Kong stock market. Moreover, these researches only want to find the characteristic of stocks. In real case, investors will not only purchase one stocks. They will construct a stock portfolio to eliminate the risk. So I want to apply similar approach on Hong Kong stock market and change the clustering technique to K-means, not SOM. And I not only want to cluster the stocks, but also the portfolio. I want to cluster many combinations of the portfolio as I can to find the characteristic of different combinations of the portfolio. I am interested in investment, and I study information technology in university. I want to combine two aspects for my final year project. And I believe this project is very useful for my future career. I have read relative books, papers for getting the basic idea and concept of portfolio and data mining. In this project, I use many technical skills, methods and knowledge learnt from City University of Hong Kong in the past three years. Java programming is used to do the data preprocessing like normalization, financial calculation. It is also used to generate the combination of the portfolio and the simulation of K-means. MYSQL database is used to store the data of stocks and portfolio. The simulation result is also stored in the database. 3. Objectives In this final year project, there are several objects: 1. To investigate the characteristic of stocks in Hong Kong stock market. 2. To investigate the characteristic of different stock portfolios in Hong Kong stock market. 3. To determine that different combination of stocks how to affect the performance of the portfolio. 4. To investigate the strength and weakness of applying K-means on financial data. 4. Report outline  There are total 6 chapters in this report. Following this Chapter 1 Introduction, Chapter 2 Literature Review refers to related theories applied on the simulation, result analysis and discussion. Chapter 3 Simulation presents the methodology, project flow chat of the simulation. Chapter 4 Result Analysis will do the data processing of the result from the simulation. Chapter 5 Further Development will discuss the further development and improvement of the project. At the end, Chapter 6 Conclusion will do the conclusion of the whole project. 5. Chapter Summary This chapter mentions the background of the project. It also presents the motivation of this project and give the objective, report outline to the readers for better understanding of the project.

No Place to Hide

‘No place to hide’? The realities of leadership in UK supermarkets SKOPE Research Paper No. 91 May 2010 * Irena Grugulis, **Odul Bozkurt and ***Jeremy Clegg * Bradford University School of Management, **Lancaster University Management School, ***Leeds University Business School Editor’s Foreword SKOPE Publications This series publishes the work of the members and associates of SKOPE.A formal editorial process ensures that standards of quality and objectivity are maintained. Orders for publications should be addressed to the SKOPE Secretary, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT Research papers can be downloaded from the website: www. skope. ox. ac. uk ISSN 1466-1535 Abstract This article explores the realities of managerial work in two major British supermarket chains.While the prescriptive literature welcomes the displacement of bureaucratic management by rote with leadership, empirical account s of what managers actually do underscore how the purported tenets of leadership tend to disappear upon closer inspection, even at the discursive level. This study observes and discusses the discrepancy between the rhetoric of leadership articulated by executives at the corporate head offices and the actual roles and responsibilities of managers in stores.Work was tightly controlled and managers had little real freedom. We draw on empirical evidence to argue both that while leadership in practice secured only trivial freedoms such freedoms were highly valued and that academic analysis should follow these managers in their ability to distinguish between rhetorical flourishes and reallife job design. Leadership in practice is mundane and local. Keywords: leadership, leaders, managers, control, deskilling, supermarkets, retailIntroduction This article explores the realities of managerial work in two major British supermarkets chains. While the prescriptive literature welcomes the displ acement of bureaucratic management by rote with leadership (see for example Zaleznik 1992), empirical accounts of what managers and leaders actually do underscore how the purported tenets of ‘leadership’ tend to disappear upon closer inspection, even at the discursive level (Meindl et al. 1985, Alvesson and Sveningsson 2003a, 2003b, Tengblad 2004).Kelly (2008) has taken issue with the tendency in the leadership literature of discounting the ordinary everyday work activity of managers in lieu of a continued effort to theoretically pin down how leadership really ought to be conceptualised. He argues that the common terminology used by various writers conceals a wide diversity of practice and that leadership is locally produced. We join Kelly’s contention that ‘the apparently mundane practices that are made accountable and therefore observable remain unexplicated and actively ignored’ (2008:774) and that this is regrettable.We diverge from his emphasis on the reification of leadership through language games, however, and focus instead on the dissonance between the salience of leadership in the popular and practitioner representations of management jobs and the actual limits to the discretion, initiative and control that managers are able to exercise in the concrete, routine and core practices associated with their roles. This dissonance was actively exploited by the supermarkets’ business models.Celebratory accounts of leadership were cascaded down the managerial hierarchy, from the corporate head office to the departmental managers, to spur managerial staff to greater efforts in routine work. The empirical material we use to support these claims comes from a study of managers and managerial work in the stores of two of Britain’s largest supermarkets. In the four store sites where research was carried out, the work of managers was heavily prescribed, with ordering, product ranges, stock levels, store layouts, pricing , special offers and staffing policies all set out by respective functional divisions at head ffice. Their work was also closely monitored, and their personal performance assessed, through the constant and close inspection of the sales, profit and customer service performance scores of the stores and departments they were responsible for. In line with Hales’ (2005) observations, these managers were not entrepreneurial visionaries, but links in a chain with little real influence over policies and procedures. 1Their work was generally confined to striving to meet a range of very demanding performance targets over which they themselves had little, if any, control. In both supermarket chains, leadership by managers in stores was considered vital for company performance, with ‘the importance of people’ to competing with rival chains and ‘keeping customers satisfied’ repeatedly stressed by the full range of interviewees. Yet this leadership was to be exerc ised in specific and specified ways.Both managers in charge of stores and those in charge of departments had little power over most aspects of their work but were expected to lead, inspire, motivate and monitor staff on customer service (in the widest sense). Head office executives and store-level managers themselves in both chains repeatedly stressed the charismatic and inspirational elements of leadership. In particular, this depiction of leadership required managers to mediate between the dual pressures of much service sector work, to minimise costs but maximise customer service (Taylor and Bain 1999, Korczynski 2001, 2002).In this context, leadership appeared to be a euphemism for the demand that managers mobilise their personal physical, emotional and social resources to make up for the discrepancies between targets and resources and be ardent pursuers of the employer’s end of the wage-effort bargain. This type of contained leadership bears little resemblance to the cele bratory accounts but it is probably a far closer reflection of the realities of workplace practice. While the article stresses the mundane nature of managerial jobs in supermarket stores, it also highlights the way both individual managers and shopfloor workers use the leadership rhetoric.This rhetoric was valued by the managers largely because of its unreality; while they ostensibly ‘bought in’ to the rhetoric, in practice, most were adept at negotiating the dissonance between it and real work and none sought to put its wider tenets into practice. On the shopfloor, the dramatic language of leadership and transformation was used to legitimise managerial freedoms; these were trivial but they nevertheless proved an escape from scripting for people management and were deeply valued by the managers themselves.We elaborate on the constitutive parts of our arguments in the rest of this article. First, we provide a critical review of the popular ways of conceptualising leaders hip in the literature and the way these are problematic in relation to managerial work in practice. Then we introduce the specific context of retail work and of our study to highlight the significance of both to an inquiry into the discrepancy between leadership rhetoric and managerial practice. This is followed by a discussion of the contradictions inherent in 2 eadership on the supermarket shopfloor and the nature of the spaces that remain for initiative and freedom. Managers, Leaders and ‘Real Work’ It is popular to claim that managerial work is changing, that hidebound and bureaucratic managers who impede workplace performance are being (or should be) replaced with charismatic and visionary leaders who know when to subvert rules, inspire enthusiasm in their followers and contribute to corporate dynamism (Zaleznik 1992, Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2005). Such claims, clearly, need to be tempered with caution (Storey 2004a, 2004b).Students of business and manage ment have long suffered from those thrills of novelty, which set critical descriptions of the existing and unfashionable against enthusiastic predictions of what an ideal type of the latest fad might look like. An unfair but recurrent practice which, as Storey (2004a) notes, is being repeated for leadership. This advocacy is rendered possible, at least in part, by the paucity of empirical accounts of who leaders are and what it is they actually do (see for example Jackson and Parry 2008).When data is available, authors rarely write about transformational activities. Rather, they stress how ordinary leaders are and how mundane their work is (Carlson 1951, Meindl et al. 1985, Alvesson and Sveningsson 2003a, 2003b, Tengblad 2004). Even charismatic leaders are not unfettered (Robinson and Kerr 2009). Empirical enquiry strips leadership of its universal grandeur and helps depict a practice that is both contested (Collinson 2005) and locally defined (Kelly 2008). Bureaucratic forms of con trol are still going strong (Power 1997, Hales 2002, Protherough and Pick 002) and old-fashioned supervision rather than inspirational leadership is at the heart of most jobs (Delbridge and Lowe 1997, Hales 2005). Kelly (2008), in his analysis of the nature of leadership and the various discourses that surround it, has argued that leadership as a practice is locally defined and here we propose one example of such local definition:. In this study, the requirements of customer service did indeed shape the demand for leadership skills, but not quite in the way that the proponents of the spread of transformational leadership suggest.What was at stake was not an entrepreneurial transformation. On the contrary, managers’ actions were tightly controlled and those controls were increasing. As well as following orders from head office, store and department managers were simultaneously required to inspire, enthuse and motivate the front-line 3 staff they were responsible for. The posit ive connotations of the word leadership helped to motivate individual managers, as they in turn sought to motivate others (Etzioni 1961).Here the dissonance between the leadership rhetoric and workplace realities was not an analytical lacuna but an important part of the process since images of leaders needed to be inspirational rather than accurate. Retail Work Retail work accounts for a significant proportion of the working population, with 12 per cent of UK workers employed in retail (Burt and Sparks 2003). While this work can be skilled, from the glamour of the ‘style labour markets’ (Nickson et al. 2001), to the product knowledge of expert assistants in France (McGauran 2000, 2001), the wide-ranging skills of apprentice-trained workers in Germany (Kirsch et al. 000) or the impressive educational achievements of Chinese retail workers (Gamble 2006), most British jobs are not. For the majority of British supermarkets, the main skills policy pursued is one that is â₠¬Ëœtantamount to a personnel strategy based on zero competence’, zero qualifications, zero training and zero career (Gadrey 2000). Margins are tight and the extensive centralisation and standardisation of supply chains and products (Baron et al. 2001) extends to work and work processes (Felstead et al. 2009).Workers are valued for their presence and their temporal flexibility, not their skills, and presence and temporal flexibility are seldom highly paid. The retail sector accounts for 26 per cent of British low paid workers (Mason et al. 2008) with 75 per cent of sales assistants and 80 per cent of checkout operators compensated at rates below the low pay threshold (Mason and Osborne 2008). Part-time and women workers, who dominate the sector (Arrowsmith and Sisson 1999, Burt and Sparks 2003) are particularly badly affected. Some stores deploy sophisticated human resource anagement techniques such as psychometric tests (Freathy and Sparks 2000) and merit-based pay but these are set against generally low wage rates, rigid control mechanisms and limited discretion (Arrowsmith and Sisson 1999, Broadbridge 2002, Burt and Sparks 2003). Against this backdrop, recent writing on retail employment from a strategic perspective has increasingly emphasised the role of management and managers in the overall performance of companies (Booth and Hamer 2006, Hart et al. 2006). It argues that the link between managers’ work and store (or firm) performance is 4 hrough ‘lay’ workers, in one example, asserting that ‘without strong management and leadership skills, store and employee productivity suffers together with lower staff motivation, ultimately leading to lower profits’ (Hart et al. 2006:281-282). However, lists of actions such as ‘providing good pay and benefits, praise and encouragement and support and training, or even at the most basic level, ensuring employees receive their correct rest periods at work’ (Booth and H amer 2006:299) do not accurately depict the real remit of managers in large-scale retail organisations.Methods and Methodology This research was part of an EPSRC/AIM funded project on the organisation and experience of employment in retailing. Since our main interest was in the processual aspects of work, a multi-pronged, qualitative approach was adopted, as this was best suited to compare and contrast official organisational statements with real life practices and experiences. Research was conducted in two of Britain’s largest supermarket chains, here referred to as Retail 1 and Retail 2, respectively.Retail 1 had 356 stores and employed over 160,000 people. Retail 2’s portfolio of stores included the convenience store format, which brought its total number of stores to 823, but it had slightly fewer employees at around 150,000. By and large, their target clientele overlapped and they were direct competitors with similar market shares. In each supermarket, detailed in terviews were conducted with head office staff who were responsible for determining strategies, setting policies and designing business processes.We were able to review a large amount and range of company material pertaining to company strategy, business models, performance indicators, human resource policies, recruitment and training programmes and change initiatives. Interviews were carried out with top executives in strategy, human resources, training, marketing, accounting, customer services and profit/productivity/performance improvement departments. In addition to this, in each chain, two locations were selected for store-level research; store A and store B at Retail 1, store C and store D at Retail 2.In the stores interviews were conducted with the (general) store managers, who would be managing anywhere between 200 and 400 employees, the secondary tier of between three and five senior managers, who had store-wide responsibility and supervised and coordinated the work of depa rtment managers, and the managers of the 12 to 15 different departments such as produce, customer service, or bakery, as well as a number of shopfloor workers. All of the managers were salaried, while all 5 of the shopfloor workers were hourly-paid. Store interviews with hourly paid workers were the most challenging.Our informants were welcoming and supportive but, owing to the tight margins and pressure on staff, few had time for interviews. The length of interviews with managers ranged from half an hour to multiple sessions of several hours, typically averaging an hour and a half to two hours. Some of the interviews with workers also lasted over an hour, but a number of them had to be interrupted after less than half an hour. All formal interviews were recorded, professionally transcribed and coded using NVivo Qualitative Data Analysis software.In total, 86 interviews were carried out, 46 in Retail 1, 34 in Retail 2, and the rest with a range of outside key informants including a top level executive of a third supermarket chain, industry experts based at the Institute of Grocery Distributors (IGD) and trade union representatives. In addition to the interviews, participant and non-participant observation was carried out by one of the research team at the Retail 1 head office and, more extensively, at one of the two Retail 1 stores included in the study (store A).In addition to observing recruitment group interviews, new employee induction sessions and a range of daily activities in the store, the researcher also worked shifts of 10 to 15 hours a week for six weeks on the delicatessen, fish, rotisserie, pizza and ready-meal counters. A research diary was kept during this part of the fieldwork and transcribed. ‘No Place to Hide’ Leadership was a ‘quality’ that was extensively referenced in the public presentations of managerial career paths in both supermarket chains.Retail 1’s literature on career prospects described the traini ng programme for shopfloor workers who wished to become department managers as being ‘built upon’ their ‘current leadership skills’ through on-the-job training, while that for department managers with ambitions to be store managers or deputies was said to help them ‘perfect their leadership style’. Retail 2’s careers information on the company website directed those with some previous retail management experience and ‘looking to grow into a leadership role’ to the ‘fast-track to Store Manager Development Program’.Hitting the link, interested parties were informed that nobody played a more important role in the supermarket’s everyday operations (turnaround) than the managers in the stores, whose leadership ‘inspires our people to deliver a great everyday customer experience’. Retail 2’s recruitment process for senior managers included psychometric tests that were, among 6 other qualitie s, designed to pick up leadership skills and potential. Retail 1’s rogrammes for management development included selection hurdles such as roleplay sessions where future managers were expected to stand out from among their peers by displaying the desired abilities, with ‘leadership’ prominent among these. While leadership skills and qualities were presented as core to the work of everyone and as particularly central for progression into managerial roles, in stores almost every aspect of work for every kind of employee, from shopfloor workers during their training period all the way to the general store manager, was set out, standardised and occasionally scripted by the experts at head office.Buyers sourced goods and set prices at the head offices, with computer networks monitoring sales in stores and re-ordering supplies. The corporate human resources department set wages and provided clear targets for store managers in terms of staffing, leaving stores with a ba lancing act between resources and targets. Checkout tills used electronic scanning, shelf-stackers followed planograms that provided detailed layout plans for displays, price guns printed out price tags, including reductions, as decided by head office software depending on the time of day. According to long-serving informants, limits on discretion were increasing.The remaining specialist departments, such as the delicatessen counter (which included meats, cheeses and fish) and the bakery, were coming under increasing levels of central control. A trained butcher (now the manager of a non-food department) revealed that most meats were now cut and packaged before arrival in store. The same was true for cheeses. In the smaller stores bakeries worked entirely from deliveries of frozen goods which they re-heated, and in larger stores there was a mix of supplier-packed, frozen, ambient and chilled products and goods baked in store.But even breads baked in store arrived ready made up with i nstructions on times for mixing, proving and baking. The only formally accredited staff in stores were pharmacists employed in special stand-alone units on some sites. Such a policy of standardisation was deliberate and referred to with pride. The wageplanning manager in the Business Improvement Group at Retail 1 head office summarised the challenge as ‘how lazy we can make it†¦ make the process easy for them so it becomes a natural habit’.This close prescription and standardisation of work tasks was not a surprising observation to make of hourly-paid workers, or in the context of retail employment, traditionally known for its reliance on low skills and low wages. What was unusual was that the same restrictions applied to managers. In fact, the managers were under 7 far greater surveillance in terms of observable results. Because performance and productivity measurements were taken at both department and store level, which were then linked back and traceable to ind ividual managers, their performance evaluation was quantified and routinised.There was no comparable performance evaluation of individual shopfloor workers except for those at the tills, although Retail 2 had just introduced a new performance enhancement programme to track the performance of individual workers. Yet these practices, too, only increased the number of indicators by which managers’ performance could be monitored, as the ultimate responsibility for meeting unit-based targets, as well as ensuring that individual workers showed the head-office dictated levels of performance, still lay with the managers.An executive in the productivity improvement division of Retail 2’s head office operations, who had risen through the ranks, observed that the role of store managers had changed considerably over the last twenty years: I think what we probably lost was a bit of the entrepreneurial or tradesmanship of the store manager to say, ‘Oh next week that’s g oing on offer, I want 200 of them next week’. Because they were good traders and experienced. And they knew how they were going to present it. Honestly, when I joined†¦ he store manager where I trained was a bit of a wide boy I suppose, but he would do things like – well he made me do it – Saturday afternoon if we were overstocked, I remember him saying ‘We’re overstocked on lettuces. [Name] go to the front door and stand there and sell your lettuces! ’ And you’d do things like say ‘Come on, here’s your lettuce! Get one for the rabbit! Half price! ’ And you’d literally drop them in people’s baskets as they walked through the door so they almost got no choice but to have your lettuce. productivity improvement manager, Retail 2, Head Office) But in the current arrangements, because of the focus on what Pye (1968) terms the ‘workmanship of certainty’, the emphasis in store for both manag ers and workers was on obedience to instruction. In fact, much of a manager’s work was about ensuring such obedience. [The parent company] is very much about†¦ they use a word quite a lot called compliance and there is a lot of compliance and the phrase they used†¦ was ‘there is no place to hide’ [Was that like an official thing? No, it was kind of like – you know with all the systems, their systems monitor everything, they monitor everything. Every little thing is monitored so there is no place to hide. I am not saying in terms of hiding things that are wrong but they see everything. (senior manager, Retail 1, Store B) A policy backed up by the motto ‘comply then complain’, which had clear implications for the way work was conducted. 8 [I]f the company says to you 9am Monday morning stand on one leg in the oyer, I want you to do it, at 9am and if that’s all of you, I want you to do it but then you’ll all stand there th inking why on God’s earth are we doing this, then ask the question, why do we need to do this? What benefit am I getting from it? But do it in the first place before you even complain about it, because until you’ve tried it you don’t know what it’s going to do, but it’s driving that culture. (general store manager, Retail 1, Store A) This approach was generally greeted with enthusiasm. I love this comply and then complain.You know because you put it right, you do it the way they want you to do it and then if it is not right you feed back what is wrong with it so you complain after you have had a go at it at putting it right. And I think that is absolutely vital. You know we have a duty to feed back and give that feedback but you know we don’t have that right until we have had a go at it†¦ the right way first. (training manager, Retail 1, Training Store) Unsurprisingly, such an approach influenced the skills expected of both workers and managers as well as leaving little space for transformational leadership.Skill levels were low and product knowledge in particular was a welcome, but almost optional part of work. Several of our informants did possess expertise and boasted strong personal interests in electronics or fish or experience in bakeries, but while this might allow front-line workers to develop a personal pride in aspects of their work it was not a job requirement and was rarely shared by the senior management team in stores, whose career progression was based on obligatory movement between different departments.Head office executives spoke of promoting people with an interest in a particular area of work, a ‘passion about food’ or ‘a personal interest’, and management training did provide product information as part of the process, but the demand for and emphasis on specialist knowledge was limited.Mason and Osborne’s (2008) comparison of supermarkets with electrical retail ers reveals that the (often supplier provided) training in product knowledge that characterised electrical goods had few parallels in supermarkets, while Gamble’s (2006) research into Chinese retailers showed a well educated workforce and a highly demanding customer base not reflected in our study. In these supermarkets, workers could apply for entry-level managerial posts as soon as their twelve weeks of initial training were complete (although the graduate training schemes in both supermarkets were rather different).Graduates were more noticeable in the head offices and in certain specialisms (three of the four store-based human resource (HR) managers we spoke to were graduates, compared to three of the 23 managers in Retail 1 Store A). But while one 9 of the HR managers thought that having a degree was useful for ‘the analytical side of what (managers) need to do’, in general formal qualifications were not a significant criteria for managerial posts. The vast majority of managers had come up from the ranks of hourly-paid shopfloor workers.Interestingly, the non-graduate managers all spoke of the encouragement they had received from their managers to embark on management training. In the absence of a universal demand for specialist training or knowledge, leadership, both demonstrated and potential, was presented as the key element in selection decisions for such career progression: I mean, when I interview managers to join my team, I’m not necessarily looking for ‘Do they know what baked beans and yoghurts are? ’ and ‘Have they filled them before? ’ I’m looking for attitude, I’m looking for personal resilience and I’m looking for a track record.What have they done before? What have they done in the past? But it doesn’t necessarily mean that if I’ve got a grocery manager position I want a grocery manager from another store. Because it’s about managing people, itâ₠¬â„¢s about managing hearts and minds really. (general store manager, Retail 1, Store A) But while store language focused on obedience and hearts and minds, the structural features of promotion ensured that, in practice, most managers and leaders were men. Moving between departments was an integral part of career mobility in both supermarkets.Promotion, even for the first foray into managerial duties, involved a switch of departments, while subsequent expansions of responsibility meant managers would be moved to increasingly larger departments in the stores. For general store managers, and for the second tier of senior management, geographical mobility was required and managers were expected to move between different stores in the same ‘regional cluster’ (generally between 15 to 25 stores, depending on the region). Interestingly, managerial informants stressed how lenient their superiors were when imposing these travel requirements. Annual performance appraisals istingu ished between preferences for a 30-minute or a one-hour commute. Retail 2 store managers were told by their regional bosses to prioritise their families and the general manager of Store B asserted proudly that he would not be despatched to the other end of the country against his will. But, while all managers seemed to accept that mobility was required, for others the geographical differences between managerial and front-line worker posts discouraged progression and helped to account for the fact that, while the lower ranks of supermarket workers were dominated by women, the managers were predominately male. 0 Many of the workers we interviewed were attracted to retail by the fact that it was part-time: women with caring responsibilities, students, young people and older workers dominated the workforce. People worked in their local stores and their limited hours often suited their other responsibilities or desire for education. Managerial posts, by contrast, were almost universally full-time despite, given the length of opening hours (24 hours for Retail 1 and 8am to 10pm for Retail 2), no one manager would be able to control their store continually (see Dalton 1966, Moss-Kanter 1977).We did meet two women managers in shared posts but these were rare and had been specifically created to accommodate these informants’ demands for job-sharing (see also Mason and Osborne 2008). Small Freedoms Unlike the transformational visionaries of the leadership literature, the freedoms enjoyed by the supermarket managers in this study were generally minor and illicit. Despite the recurrent official emphasis on ‘comply then complain’, most created their own small discretionary spaces.The most commonly cited example was in store, counter or shelf layout. Detailed specifications were sent down from head office dictating the number and placement of products. But these were based on national averages of other stores in that category with little sensitivity for local geography, tastes or customer-base. Accordingly, in practice local knowledge, personal interest and the desire to personalise space often triumphed over the formal specifications. It was, of course, possible to protest against layouts officially.The general manager of Retail 1 Store A had done so when he wished to re-site the movie and video booth in his city centre store, taking it out of the foyer where it was vulnerable to repeated thefts and switching it with a sandwich booth which would have benefited from being more readily accessible. His request involved developing a detailed business case and visits from senior management but was eventually turned down (or indefinitely postponed pending a fuller refurbishment to include a pharmacy).Others were less regulation bound. I just did it, I got told to do it. They put trust in me to change the layout in the store of Home and Leisure, to move products around if I believed it would gain sales. And for example all the Home secti on wasn’t together, DIY and water was with pots and pans, party ranges weren’t with disposable paper tableware, so I put a new shopfloor plan together to move it all around and we did that†¦ [A]t [names other store] I’d gone through a couple of revamps where I’d actually 11 hanged over 200 bays in [other store] because we went through revamps to get bigger and better ranges in so I’d done a lot of work in the past on how a department should flow and how it should look and how we get the best out of the ranges and stuff like that so putting that experience into here and grouping the departments together†¦ [Did you have to negotiate with Head Office? ] No, we just did it. (senior manager, Retail 1, Store B) Occasionally re-siting compensated for inadequacies in the briefing documents.One manager liked to get experienced staff to adapt official shelving briefs to suit the store: They know if they’ve been doing that for a couple of yea rs, they know what will sell and what won’t. Now [if] it’s a novice then they wouldn’t, so I’d need them to do it in space flexing which will tell them the quantity. The plan would tell them how many facings so, say, it was like that it wanted a capacity of 70 on four facings but you can fit that 70 on two facings I would expect you to do it to two facings.And that’s where you gain space as well on the plan if you needed to open up on something else because it wasn’t lasting on the shop. [So you’ve got to play around quite a bit? ] Yes, you’ve got to play around with it, yes. Everything’s not as easy as black and white on paper. (general merchandise manager, Retail 1 Store B) Occasionally individuals also needed to over-ride the computer systems to over-come limitations.The demand for hot dog rolls on bonfire night, more salads and fresh vegetables for barbecues on unexpectedly hot days and ensuring that local tastes wer e provided for through particular fish or flavours of roast chicken were matters of relative individual discretion. But most of these practices were heavily discouraged officially and many were formally denied. One manager of a Retail 2 supermarket during a first interview and guided tour of his store was enthusiastic about the way Retail 2’s head office experts designed and laid out the shelf space.An enthusiasm which lasted until one of the researchers took out a camera to photograph the excellent layout. He was immediately asked not to take photographs, since the manager had exercised his own discretion and did not want news of this individuality to get back to head office. People and Leadership Amidst the widespread use of regulation, standardisation and constraint there was one area where managers were both encouraged and expected to use their own discretion and, in the rhetoric of their head offices, exercise ‘leadership’.This was in the area of people mana gement. The structural means for doing this was very limited. Wages, 12 staffing levels and worker tasks were all pre-set by head office, although some local adjustments were possible. Store managers who recruited staff would be told how many ‘hours’ they could hire, but it was up to them to decide how to divide this up, so, for example, twenty hours might translate into three new part-timers working distinctive shifts. This often proved difficult to implement, since computer staffing levels did not always translate into viable recruitment.The personnel manager, she cares a lot, but [for] the company [it’s] all about its process, [it’s] not really about the people. And so the process is sort of disguised as this ‘caring’ – but it’s not. So these people, they just expect you to do more and more, and we take more and more sales but we don’t necessarily get the hours. Produce was given 20 extra hours for quarter three in line with sales and things, but I can’t recruit for these 20 hours because all that’ll happen is they’ll get taken away after Christmas or the sales won’t be there so I’ll never see them anyway.You know they’re not tangible, I can’t take them and use them. (produce manager, Retail 1, Store A) Much of this was work intensification. Head office staff expected local managers to know who they could allocate to particular tasks to save a few hours on the timesheet and this was considered excellence in leadership. [S]o we’re looking for the managers to not be creative in the ways they do their processes, I want them to follow the processes exactly how the systems define them†¦I want them to lay the store out how the system devises and I want them to fill the shelves how it says on the tin, if you like, but then absolutely be as creative as possible in the way you service the customers. More the way we would be going. (business impro vement director, Retail 1, Head Office) This ‘creativity’ was also set down in systems and structures of the stores. The performance of their departments or stores in terms of customer service was assessed through monthly ‘mystery shopper’ visits, while regular staff meetings provided managers with an opportunity to motivate.The morning shifts in both supermarkets began with caucus-style meetings, held in a central location on the shopfloor in Retail 1 and in a staff area in Retail 2, between the store manager, the upper management team and all the departmental managers who were on shift. Department managers held the same sort of ‘getting the day started’ meetings with their respective department staff. News about how the store or unit was doing in terms of the performance criteria was often a major theme; good performance was usually emphasised as a reason to feel good and underperformance as grave and in need of immediate attention.In the bri efing templates handed down from the head offices, spots were allocated for events to note, improve or celebrate. Managers’ motivational 13 role (whether through generating pride or alarm) was possibly most necessary during these meetings, as announcements, for example about the roll-out of new uniforms could be rendered exciting, or a letter of appreciation from a customer as emotionally touching, through their performative skills. Performance related pay was extensively used.For general store managers it could amount to as much as 40 per cent of salary and even hourly paid workers might earn over ? 100. Individual performance was supposed to be assessed separately, as one informant noted: ‘sometimes you can have a department which hasn’t performed well on paper but what that manager’s contributed to that maybe it’s a total different story’. But in practice, greatest weight was placed on store and overall company performance in a given tradi ng year. Both supermarkets used some version of recognition schemes where small monetary awards from ? 10 to ? 0 could be given out, and this was largely at managers’ discretion to ‘celebrate success’, as there was ‘a lot of pressure on everybody to perform all the time’ (bakery manager, Retail 2). But managers appreciated that the effectiveness of such schemes was limited: [A] lot is spending time with them and motivating them. You know if you motivate them they work far better than – [How can you motivate them? What do you have at your disposal to motivate them? ] You don’t really have any financial really, apart from you’ve got the yearly bonus, you know colleagues get a yearly bonus.So you’ve got the bonus to aim for. I don’t know really†¦ I think everyone is motivated by doing a good job and job satisfaction and spending time with people and I think a lot of it as well is getting to know colleagues, I know just about everyone by their first name and things like that. (senior manager, Retail 1 Store A) The financial outcomes of managers’ work were assessed through daily checks and monitoring of sales, waste, loss of products and the profits their departments or stores generated. Many were factors over which they had little control.Describing her Key Result Areas, which included absences, sales, labour turnover, waste and the customer service score, the HR manager (Retail 1, Store A) commented, ‘[s]o all my key result areas are linked with everybody else’s, so it’s my influencing skills that are really being looked at for that†¦ As a manager, you’re paid to manage; you’re not paid to fill the shop necessarily’. This confidence was widespread. But as the store managers pointed out structural conditions, including local labour markets, might be ignored in head office plans but heavily influenced how effective such work intensification could be.One, who was responsible for staffing a city centre store in a University town, spoke with 14 envy of a friend who managed a rural outlet. If workers in the city centre felt unfairly treated, they had a choice of part-time service sector jobs to move to. Their rural counterparts, in the absence of other local job opportunities, stayed in post (many had been there since the store opened). Yet this was the area over which managers were deemed to have most control and many seemed to accept this. When our informants spoke about leadership, their most common reaction was to emphasise the difference that they, as individuals, could make.A graduate departmental manager in his early 20s noted that he needed to ‘work on leadership and people skills’. It was not that these managers did not appreciate the impact that computer breakdowns, local labour markets, employee turnover, stock levels and the weather could have. They did, and dealt with such problems every day. But they also saw them as excuses for a lack of leadership. It was the managers’ job to enthuse and inspire others, even when policies and practices had not been explained to them and even if they disagreed with head office decisions (see also Smith 1990, Watson 1994).According to three of our informants: The depot might have been short of people and deliveries haven’t turned up on time. That could throw things off. Or promotional stuff hasn’t turned up. But there’s nothing in a store that we can’t fix, and it’s all about driving the right attitude in the management teams. Because if you drive that attitude well, you can fix anything. (general store manager, Retail 1, Store A) At the end of the day we’ve got to be the leader†¦ I think there’s a difference between being a manager and being a leader and we have to become leaders and†¦ e need to keep a real positive approach, because if we turn round to staff and say yes, wh at we may think in our heart of hearts is one thing, but when we go out there we’re out on stage, we’ve got to perform and say, ‘OK, it’s tough, but however if we all do this that and the other and get stuck in, we’re going to win this’. And you’ve somehow got to inspire your people out there, you know, so you’ve got to leave that at the door, because we can’t do anything about that.Somehow, what you have got to do is deal with the colleagues you have got, to ensure that they’re motivated, trained, they’re quick to do the job, and hyped up, and they’re going to go out there and deliver it. (senior manager A, Retail 2, Store C) OK, if I’m in store today and we get the [mystery shopper] man and I get 90 per cent, then that’s on my watch so was I here, was I up in the office looking at the PC or was I downstairs driving the availability, saying, ‘Where are those cauliflowers, whereâ⠂¬â„¢s that, where’s that, where’s that? Or did I allow there to be nobody on produce because both the departments’ managers†¦ are on the same day off, and when they came in there was no cauliflower or lettuce because the person 15 down there was actually on the till and I didn’t actually know†¦ Yes, so if I’m going to be running a store tomorrow, for instance, I should really know who’s in what’s going on and any problems. (senior manager B, Retail 2, Store C) Leadership in these supermarkets was very specific and very detailed. Formal HR practices, meeting templates and detailed systems were in place.Informants gave examples that included monitoring work to ensure people were achieving their targets, retraining those who were not; monitoring stock levels; and being present on the shopfloor. However ultimately encounters with people, whether employees or customers, could not be scripted. The leadership rhetoric, because of its lack of links to the reality of daily work, was used as a motivational tool to persuade managers to work more intensively themselves and encourage others to extra effort. Discussion and Conclusions This article has presented an empirically based discussion of leadership in British supermarkets.The managers we observed were constrained by extensive regulation. Their experience of deskilling and discretion, consent and control bears little resemblance to the entrepreneurial visionaries described by writers on leadership. Yet despite that, most of our informants described aspects of what they did as leadership, maintaining proudly, and often in defiance of the evidence, the difference that they as individuals could make. Evidence from elsewhere confirms the impact that line managers have (Rainbird and Munro 2003) but this impact is not without limits.Here, head office systems, computerised schedules, pre-packaged and automatically ordered goods, design planograms and set hours and pay rates provided internal constraints just as location, labour market and the local economy supplied external ones. Our informants needed to accept the leadership rhetoric enough to assert that they could make a difference, but not so much that that difference was extended to questioning the constraints on them; a difference accepted in practice by most. This leads us to two conclusions. Firstly that leadership was a small freedom rather than a radical transformation (see also Rosenthal et al. 997, Edwards and Collinson 2002 on empowerment). It affected only the minutiae of the work but even this trivial level of discretion made a great deal of difference to the individual managers. The illicit freedoms of revising store layouts and adjusting stock orders, which managers engaged in to make their mark on work and improve store 16 performance, were matched by official and acceptable areas of freedom in the unscriptable areas of people management. These trivial freedoms lead us to ou r second conclusion on the implications for academic analysis. Leadership is, at least in part, what leaders do, how they do it and who they are.If, as here, mainly male managers worked to pre-set routines with tightly monitored targets then this needs to feature in our understanding of leadership. Yet to date, most accounts have neglected the mundane aspects of work, the very elements highlighted as core in this study. The leadership rhetoric, valued for its emotive qualities and its unreality, was used by managers and their superiors to value, inspire and intensify their input. Managers showed a sophistication missing from many academic writings in their ability to distinguish between rhetorical flourishes and real-world job design.Given this, we suggest that future research may wish to focus more clearly on the unexciting, hackneyed and everyday aspects of work and to consider the form the language of leadership really takes on the shopfloor. The unrealities of leadership are imp ortant but they have already absorbed too much academic attention and need to be clearly distinguished from the realities. Future studies, developed through empirical evidence, need to provide a nuanced, local and empirically based understanding of what really happens. 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