Currently, and most especially since the economic crisis of 2008 began to bite, commentators, politicians and policy makers of all kinds of persuasion have advocated 'The John Lewis Model' as a leading alternative solution to the business practices in the wider economy which are thought to have contributed to the difficulties now encountered. Advocacy of the model is also sometimes based on the idea that such an alternative approach could be a constructive way to cope with the recession irrespective of its original cause. The Cabinet Office has sponsored a Pathfinder Mutual's initiative which is championing the idea of co-ownership - most notably in the public sector including the NHS. In January 2012, the Deputy Prime Minister explicitly advocated the John Lewis model for firms throughout the wider economy. Partly as a result of this attention, and partly because of its commercial success when other retailers are struggling, the John Lewis Partnership finds itself consulted by organizations large and small seeking insight into the potential for transferability of its methods. In such a climate, there is a danger of over-selling the model. In collaboration with the Chairman and the Board, we have been asked to help analyse the component elements of the JLP approach to business and to employment and to help assess the potential and the conditions for replicability in other organizations. As our User Referee organizations might indicate, there are prima facie reasons to believe that some organizations, under the right conditions, can borrow at least some characteristic features of the model. In tune with the Knowledge Exchange Scheme purposes, the main impact will be to raise awareness and deepen understanding of the much-discussed JLP model with particular focus upon its potential for wider adoption and the conditions governing such adoption. The aims and objectives of this Knowledge Exchange Proposal are to: describe, clarify and evaluate the operational reality of the JLP model and to make this knowledge available for discussion and scrutiny both internally and externally; seek to establish the importance of the various constituent components of the approach and the nature and extent of the mutual interplay between them; clarify the link between the model - in part or whole - and performance; clarify the potential for the wider adoption of the model and the conditions governing its successful transfer; and to hold a series of workshops with internal and external audiences to examine the workings and the implications of the model and its practice. The John Lewis Partnership approach appears to be familiar (the ownership structures, the formal processes of consultation and representation). But, the practical workings, both at strategic and operational levels, are not well understood. In a dynamic and fast-moving retail environment, managers in the Partnership are faced with numerous challenges which test their abilities to use and work with the model. It is through a detailed analysis and an informed discussion about how such dilemmas are handled in practice, that most value will be found both internally and externally. Peer-reviewed publications arising from this grant will be registered on the Open University's open access institutional repository - Open Research Online (ORO) at http://oro.open.ac.uk. ORO is now one of the largest repositories in the UK. The site receives an average of 40,000 visitors per month from over 200 different countries and has received over 1.6 million visitors since 2006. It enables access to research outputs via common search engines including Google, by using the OAI (Open Archives Initiative) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

Internal communication does more than transfer information, it infuses organizations with meaning. This 3-year research programme traces the history of internal communication in the UK. As a specialized activity internal comms originates from company magazines in the late 19th century. Since then magazines have morphed into complex systems of intranets, emails, internal social media, company newsletters, road shows, briefing groups, huddles, blogs and roadshows. It is estimated that around 45k professionals are currently engaged in internal communication. The history of internal communication will be studied through the archives of 14 prominent organisations, where research access has been secured: BBC; Boots; British Airways; British Army; British Rail; Cadbury; GlaxoSmithKline; HSBC; John Lewis; National Coal Board; Prudential Insurance; Royal Mail; Shell; and Unilever. In addition the archives for 5 professional bodies and a leading consultancy will be used: AB Communications, which provides internal comms for prominent global and UK organisations; Chartered Institute of Marketing; Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; Chartered Institute of Public Relations; Institute of Internal Communication; and the Industrial Society. The British Library, which has extensive historical holdings of internal comms, has also agreed to assist with disseminating findings from the research. The changing form and content of internal comms will be mapped, tracing the transformation of the magazine format into the contemporary system of internal comms that aims at enhancing employee engagement, voice, and corporate identity. Discussions about the role of communication will be examined in documents such as minutes from board meetings and reports. Internal comms practitioners and company archivists theorise their own practices. The discourses of practitioners and their relation to actual practices will be examined through communications produced by professional bodies and consultants. Historians accept that nations have been imagined as communities through national newspapers and television channels. Corporations can also be seen as communities that have been imagined through internal comms. Three discourses of imagined communities have legitimated both organisations and the role of internal comms: esprit de corps, where the corporation is imagined as an extended family or military unit; brand community, where employees are imagined as part of community with consumers; and democratic polity, where the employees are imagined as citizens with internal comms as a free press holding government to account. The discourse of brand communities is now predominant, but the interplay between these discourses will be examined throughout the 20th century. Management scholars refer to the instrumental use of the past by corporations as "rhetorical history", which is usually studied in relation to uses of the past in the present for external marketing communication with customers. But references to the past featured in company magazines almost from the outset. The research will produce an account of how rhetorical history has been used in the past both to legitimate organisations to their employees, and to legitimate the role of internal comms. This research program will produce a theoretically informed history of internal comms as a reference point for contemporary debates, such as the response of organisations to the coronavirus pandemic. Company archivists will be interested in how their work informs internal comms, and how internal comms constitutes archives. The internal comms profession will be enhanced by historical debate, and organisations will be interested in finding out what made for effective internal comms in the past. As the wider public consists of many current and former members of large organisations, there will be general interest in remembering how these bodies communicated with their members in the past.

This project will explore the largely unknown international history of British healthcare and beauty, using Boots the Chemists, Britain's most recognised chain pharmacist, as the central case study. The project spans the period from 1919, when the company posted its first sales agent overseas, to the streamlining of its divisions in 1980. It examines how Boots established itself as a prospector, retailer and manufacturer overseas, but also how it continually absorbed international influences as part of its home marketing strategies. Drawing on Boots' vast, underexplored archive (c.5,000 boxes of approximately 500,000 items), this project bridges medical, social, cultural, business, colonial and transnational history. The project team are not interested in writing a classic business biography of Boots' success and growth, rather they are interested in exploring what the Boots story reveals about the international dynamics of the British health and beauty industries. The central research question asks: How does Boots' international archive allow us to map the global networks that moulded and sustained British experiences of healthcare and beauty both at home and abroad? To answer this, thematically focused work packages will recreate the life-cycles of key products within six product domains (pain management, personal hygiene, surgical supplies, vitamins, perfumes, and skincare) across local, national and international spaces. These six focal areas have been selected because of their ample archival resources and their potential to illustrate how complex imperial and other global networks of materials, knowledge and people underpinned the development of British healthcare and beauty, both at home and overseas. This pioneering research will appear in leading academic journals across the historical humanities and in a co-authored book. It will advance early career capacity by employing a full-time postdoctoral researcher, and provide additional opportunities for an already funded M4C doctoral student. Three interdisciplinary academic workshops will explore new perspectives on the internationalisation of the UK beauty and healthcare industries and will open the project to colleagues in geography, pharmacy, medicine, literature and linguistics. The project team will showcase findings via an easily navigable website featuring information about the project, links to relevant resources and quarterly updated project stories, attractively illustrated with archival images. Some of these stories will be authored by the project team and some by 'citizen researchers'. These contributors will be identified through call outs via social media, Boots newsletters, and the local press, and might be local history enthusiasts, former Boots employees or business people reflecting on historical context. Additional outreach will include two pieces of popular history, a high-profile public exhibition, with a touring component and accompanying public talks, timed to coincide with Boots' 175th anniversary in 2024. A further outreach strategy targets professional archivists via three initiatives i) working with Boots Archive staff to help inform their cataloguing and digitisation strategies; ii) holding three innovative 'Archive Roadshows' where team members visit other significant business archives (Unilever, Marks and Spencer, John Lewis) to reflect on the usefulness and accessibility of their resources; iii) hosting an Archive Study Day to bring together company archivists throughout the UK. Finally, team members will work with Nottinghamshire County Council to run two 'Knowledge Labs' to consider how this research might stimulate creative thinking about current issues facing the UK high street. Sessions will discuss not only how local growth is internationally informed, but also how international markets are heavily influenced by smaller local developments.

Internal communication does more than transfer information, it infuses organizations with meaning. This 3-year research programme traces the history of internal communication in the UK. As a specialized activity internal comms originates from company magazines in the late 19th century. Since then magazines have morphed into complex systems of intranets, emails, internal social media, company newsletters, road shows, briefing groups, huddles, blogs and roadshows. It is estimated that around 45k professionals are currently engaged in internal communication. The history of internal communication will be studied through the archives of 14 prominent organisations, where research access has been secured: BBC; Boots; British Airways; British Army; British Rail; Cadbury; GlaxoSmithKline; HSBC; John Lewis; National Coal Board; Prudential Insurance; Royal Mail; Shell; and Unilever. In addition the archives for 5 professional bodies and a leading consultancy will be used: AB Communications, which provides internal comms for prominent global and UK organisations; Chartered Institute of Marketing; Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; Chartered Institute of Public Relations; Institute of Internal Communication; and the Industrial Society. The British Library, which has extensive historical holdings of internal comms, has also agreed to assist with disseminating findings from the research. The changing form and content of internal comms will be mapped, tracing the transformation of the magazine format into the contemporary system of internal comms that aims at enhancing employee engagement, voice, and corporate identity. Discussions about the role of communication will be examined in documents such as minutes from board meetings and reports. Internal comms practitioners and company archivists theorise their own practices. The discourses of practitioners and their relation to actual practices will be examined through communications produced by professional bodies and consultants. Historians accept that nations have been imagined as communities through national newspapers and television channels. Corporations can also be seen as communities that have been imagined through internal comms. Three discourses of imagined communities have legitimated both organisations and the role of internal comms: esprit de corps, where the corporation is imagined as an extended family or military unit; brand community, where employees are imagined as part of community with consumers; and democratic polity, where the employees are imagined as citizens with internal comms as a free press holding government to account. The discourse of brand communities is now predominant, but the interplay between these discourses will be examined throughout the 20th century. Management scholars refer to the instrumental use of the past by corporations as "rhetorical history", which is usually studied in relation to uses of the past in the present for external marketing communication with customers. But references to the past featured in company magazines almost from the outset. The research will produce an account of how rhetorical history has been used in the past both to legitimate organisations to their employees, and to legitimate the role of internal comms. This research program will produce a theoretically informed history of internal comms as a reference point for contemporary debates, such as the response of organisations to the coronavirus pandemic. Company archivists will be interested in how their work informs internal comms, and how internal comms constitutes archives. The internal comms profession will be enhanced by historical debate, and organisations will be interested in finding out what made for effective internal comms in the past. As the wider public consists of many current and former members of large organisations, there will be general interest in remembering how these bodies communicated with their members in the past.

This programme brings together teams from Herriot Watt University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Westminster and Durham University: providing a multidisciplinary focus on the research needed to enable and underpin radical measures to decarbonise the UK's road freight transport sector. The researchers are augmented by a consortium of 22 industrial partners, drawn from users, suppliers and participants in the road logistics sector. These industrial members provide advice and guidance as well as a rapid route to prototyping and implementation of solutions. The first 5-year programme, conducted by the same team, laid the foundations and showed that radical measures are necessary to hit the UK Government's CO2 reduction targets. It also showed that integration between logistics solutions, vehicle technology, and policy measures is essential. This experience has shaped the design of the proposed programme. The new research programme will run for 5 years and has three themes: (i) data collection and management, (ii) logistics systems, and (iii) vehicle technology. A portfolio of 23 projects spans the themes. The first strand of projects (funded mainly by EPSRC), will focus on reducing barriers to promising strategic, deep decarbonisation technologies and solutions. These projects will create and integrate new data, new modelling tools and decision support systems, to create new insights about technological and logistical solutions, compelling arguments for their early adoption and recommendations for the necessary policy measures. Driven by a desire to model and then quantify the benefits of radical logistics options, the models will be developed and validated with data from real freight operations by the industrial partners, collected by novel automated means. Alternative vehicle fuels and power trains and ways of significantly reducing energy consumption will be investigated. The second strand of projects (funded mainly by EPSRC and industry) will focus on extending and optimising the capabilities of promising technologies and on increasing their impact when applied to decarbonisation of road freight. Applied research into the dynamics of logistics mode decisions and testing of novel logistics options such as horizontal collaboration, co-loading and reorganisation of logistics infrastructure, will be enabled by tools developed in the first strand. Technologies developed in the first 5 years of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight (SRF) will be tested in two separate full-scale field trials with consortium partners, funded by InnovateUK. Road-mapping will provide a mechanism for corporates, government departments and researchers to build a common view of the future. The projects in the third strand (funded by Energy Technologies Institute) will focus on implementation of tools and practices that offer immediate impact. These include novel and powerful software systems for industry to use in data collection and for vehicle characterisation and fleet decarbonisation. Research into the drivers of strategy and policy will, likewise identify the most powerful ways to influence adoption of technologies and logistics solutions. The Road Freight Systems Living Laboratory ('Living Lab') is the central integrating element of the SRF's five-year research programme. Almost every project in the Centre will be part of it. The Living Lab will provide a test bed to measure and model freight operations; to develop technical and logistical interventions based on real-time logistics data; to test the interventions in simulation; to develop decision support tools (several based on work done in the first 5 years of the SRF) and eventually to implement and trial the tools and systems in practice. The Living Lab will be based on an integrated software and data platform that is currently being built by the research team and industry partners.