In many countries governments and labor unions have contested the post-war rise of temporary agency work, arguing that this innovation infringed on workers' rights and security. We investigate the rhetorical strategies used by Dutch temporary work agencies (TWAs) to gain legitimacy for their business between 1961 and 1996. Our conclusion is that the TWAs' trade association ABU developed a sophisticated rhetoric of “self-restraint” to legitimize the deployment of a non-standard labor arrangement. The core message was that – if applied properly - agency work did not threaten permanent employment. The complexity of the inclusive nature of this rhetorical approach, aiming to acknowledge the concerns of multiple stakeholders, was reflected in ABU's difficulty in aligning its claims of socially responsible behavior with an effective defense of the sector's economic interests. Still, the consistent focus on restraint lent credibility to the claimed function of “allocating” workers to their jobs that eventually gained the TWA industry fundamental acceptance as a responsible labor market actor.

The concept of path dependence is used to compare the evolution of the organizational forms of two groups of transportation and warehousing firms, the Dutch vemen and the Antwerp naties, that operated in seaports between c.1500 and 1900 and beyond. Their adoption of cooperative forms reflected the corporative guild creed that prevailed in early modern European cities. After 1815, when their businesses were no longer regulated by local governments, the vemen and naties remained locked into the cooperative form of governance that had prevailed for so long. This organizational form gradually adapted to changing circumstances, but its egalitarian structure remained intact until the late nineteenth century (vemen), and even into the twentieth century (naties). The two groups of firms’ organizational forms evolved differently under the impact of the legacy of the early modern period and the weight of their own later distinctive experiences.

At Westerbork, we have mapped the distribution and motions of HI in about twenty gas-rich SO and SO/a galaxies, with resolutions of order 30 arcsec. Gas-rich SO's often have most of their HI in an outer ring, with diameters between 0.9 and 2.5 times the optical (D0). Assuming circular shape and motions for this ring, radius R, and a spherical distribution of matter, we derive the inclination and rotation speed of the ring, the amount of mass MT(R) interior to it and the corresponding ratio MT/LB0 to blue luminosity.

We report the results of HI observations of eleven gas-rich SO/SOa galaxies with the Westerbork Synthesis Telescope. The majority of these galaxies have most of their hydrogen outside the optical body, in annular configurations with diameters ~2 times the optical. These outer gas rings are often clumped, incomplete, and in approximately circular motion. They may represent the remnants of primordial, often warped, gas disks; or they may have formed from gas (or dwarf galaxies) accreted recently. Optical spectra could discriminate between these possibilities.

A few objects have filled gas disks, and several have inner HI rings with radii ~0.4 × optical. Two objects have peculiar distributions suggesting, respectively, tidal effects and stripping. However, stripping by intergalactic gas appears not to be a major current process.