Book about British magazine business fills gap in history
A book co-authored by AUT Associate Professor Simon Mowatt that tells the story of how Britain’s magazine industry has evolved as a business has been commended for filling a gap in British media history and drawn praise from both academics and industry insiders.
Revolutions from Grub Street by Mowatt and Howard Cox is the first comprehensive business history of Britain's consumer magazine publishing industry. It charts the history of Britain's magazine industry from the 17th Century to the modern day, telling the stories of the people and organisations that shaped the industry along the way. Mowatt and Cox (University of Worcester), set out to tell the story of the magazine industry in a new way, focusing their research on the evolution of corporate and business strategy.
“We wanted to examine a sector where technology had changed patterns of production and consumption in order to examine how firms adapted their organisation and strategy. Magazine companies, from the early days of Grub Street hacks embracing the letterpress, to global firms grappling with the impact of the Internet and mobile computing provided an excellent case. Strangely, for a key part of the creative economy in the UK that is bigger than both film production and the music industry, no one has really studied it before.”
The study, based on extensive archival company records, interviews and industry surveys, spans the full life of the industry to 2010 has been lauded by Geoffrey Jones, the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at Harvard Business School as “a milestone in business and economic history".
Associate Professor Mowatt is the Head of International Business at AUT University and leader of the Business and Labour History Group within AUT’s New Zealand Work Research Institute and an associate of the Centre for International Business Studies at London South Bank University. He has published widely in the areas of business history, strategy and innovation in journals such as Business History and Industrial and Corporate Change.
More information about Revolutions from Grub Street
Praise for Revolutions from Grub Street – excerpts from independent reviews
"Media histories often barely acknowledge magazines ...Cox and Mowatt's book fills the aching gap."
-Tony Quinn, Financial Times
"A fine book. Broad in its coverage and rich in detail. This impressive mapping of the complicated dynamics of a plurality of titles across the industry complements previous studies of magazines themselves."
- Professor Laurel Brake, The Times Literary Supplement
"The strength of Cox and Mowatt's book is that it tells the story of magazine publishing in Britain from a business point of view …"
- David Hepworth, InPublishing
"This essential text … is both entertaining and scholarly."
- Professor Tom Wilson, Information Research