Autonomy and resilience in cultural work: looking beyond the ‘creative industries’

How do cultural workers deal with the tension between autonomy and control in their working lives? One answer, advanced in this journal by Mark Banks in 2010, is that cultural autonomy provides scope for self-realisation, and potentially for ways of working that challenge commercial and managerial constraints. It allows those with critical inclinations to resist unpalatable controls and initiate processes of struggle which may deliver improvements in the conduct and experience of work. More recent empirical studies have cast doubt on this interpretation, pointing to patterns of instrumental behaviour and conforming autonomy that reinforce earlier images of controlled or self-interested ‘creatives’. With most of the relevant research focused on commercial contexts, this article considers whether publicly funded art provides more fertile terrain for the destabilising autonomy thesis. Four years of fieldwork with community arts practitioners in Scotland and Northern Ireland captures the everyday pressures of struggling to survive and to resist neoliberal cultural policies, managerial controls and fluctuating incomes. It also reveals collective capacities to intervene that are consistent with the Banks image of dissenting activists for change. The abiding impression at the end of the research is of grinding struggle rather than progressive change, however, or even sustained relief.     

‘Thence to Patty Cannon’s’: gender,family, and the reverse Underground Railroad

The abduction of free African-Americans from cities like Philadelphia and the wholly illegal traffic of such people into the Deep South to be sold as slaves provided exceptional opportunities for women to participate directly in the American interstate slave trade as kidnappers, warehouse managers, and coffle co-captains. The activities of the Cannon-Johnson ring, active in the 1820s, demonstrate how Delaware’s Patty Cannon and other female traffickers leveraged familial relations with male conductors and station agents on this reverse Underground Railroad in order to secure their own passage through an otherwise treacherous and decidedly homo-social world.     

Everyday leisure and Northernness in Mass Observation’s Worktown 1937–1939

Much leisure history deals with specific forms of activity or with the macro social and cultural patterns which mark leisure behaviours. However, as historians have turned to the micro-history of the everyday, individuals have become visible as producers and not only consumers of leisure. Mass Observation’s Worktown archive offers unique insight to the leisure lives of Bolton’s working class population between 1937 and 1939. Bound to the culture of the cotton industry and the spatial confines of Bolton, leisure served to form overlapping identities around work and neighbourhood. Everyday leisure accommodated mass cultural forms, while also remaining part of a local northern culture which grew from its industrial environment. The ‘up-close’ nature of the history of the everyday afforded by the Worktown archive provides new insights to leisure practices which become defined not only in terms of activity, but also involve conviviality, conversation and custom. This article argues that leisure was not so much a field of resistance but a sphere in which ordinary people were able to create their own leisure spaces through customary practice, language and an adaptation of employer-based facilities. Everyday working-class leisure was not confined to an illusory escapism of passive consumption but was active and engaged, forming social contexts, shared places and communal activities which helped form a collective consciousness and a sense of social and cultural identity.     

‘Talk’ and Hermès

Attention to ‘textuality’ has been used in organizational studies to point to the strong situational quality of organizing, but there has been little detailed empirical or theoretical examination of talk in action. Simply stating that ‘organizing is talk’ is not enough. Starting with Boden's analysis of organizing as ‘talk’, the import of the communication‐based interpretation of organizing is examined. A ‘flat’ or ‘one‐dimensional’ analysis of organization, grounded solely on speech‐based causality, will be rejected. Michel Serres' philosophy of communication provides in the figure of Hermès, needed complex connectionist insight(s) into interaction. And coupled with Levi‐Strauss' concept of the totemic operator, Serres' philosophical insights are used to develop a concept of communicative agency in tune with a complex narrative analysis of organizing.     

Doing the ‘gender dance’: Black women professionals negotiating gender,race, work and family in post-apartheid South Africa

Transformation imperatives in contemporary South Africa require greater workforce participation by Black South African women but we know very little about their lived experiences. To address this gap, we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with black mothers employed in professional occupations. We use an intersectionality lens to show how the interplay of race, gender and organisational culture hinders the advancement of Black women professionals. In doing so, we lay the groundwork for the development of new theory and the implementation of strategies that incorporate contemporary insights on race, gender, work and family.     

Exploring the depths of gender,parenting and ‘work’: critical discursive psychology and the ‘missing voices’ of involved fatherhood

ABSTRACT

This paper sets out to capture the missing voices of fathers in discussions around gender, parenting and work. Using Critical Discursive Psychology (CDP), a qualitative methodology that frames discourse, language and action as socially situated, the paper sets out to understand the complexities of involved fatherhood. Using data from two distinct research projects that considered managing tensions around parenting and paid work, alongside the move to ‘involved fatherhood’, we examine the ways in which different discourses are operating in order to construct stories around gender and parenting. We are particularly interested in the ways in which participants use language and, specifically, discourses of parenting, working and caring. Through the interview excerpts we analysed how simultaneously participants position themselves in the discourses and were also being positioned by the wider societal discourses. We consider how CDP can contribute rich insights into the ways in which fathers are arranging sharing parenting caregiving responsibilities, using these insights to inform the policy landscape. We finish the paper by suggesting that CDP methodology can be mobilised by researchers wanting to capture missing voices in shifting policy landscapes.     

Child’s gender,parental monetary investments and care of elderly parents in China

Review of Economics of the Household - This study analyzes whether parental monetary investments in children stimulate support from sons and daughters. Using data from the China Health and...     

Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’: Rosamond,Sensational Anti-Catholicism,Religious Freedom,and Liberalism

ABSTRACT

This paper reads Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ as a response to antebellum anti-Catholic fiction. Focusing on Rosamond Culbertson’s captivity narrative and its editor Samuel B. Smith’s remarks in his magazine The Downfall of Babylon, I argue that through Delano, Melville ventriloquizes the sensationalist argument that because American Catholics were part of a Roman conspiracy to undermine Anglo-American liberties and place the U.S. government under the pope’s control, it was necessary to suppress Catholic religious liberty. Melville uses an ironic narrative structure to probe the blindspots and overconfidence of Delano’s Protestant liberal subjectivity, which reflects Smith’s similar certainty. Smith understood the capacity for participation in a liberal democracy as a trait inhering in Protestant identities. Here, race and religion are entangled; for Smith and Delano, Protestant liberal subjectivity is a peculiarly Anglo-American identity. Liberalism, moreover, is for them a rhetorical tool for justifying the exploitation and marginalisation of minority individuals. Melville interrogates liberalism as a cultural formation meant to justify the exclusion of those who, like Catholics, were thought to be incapable of participating in a liberal democracy. He suggests that readers must develop a detached attitude to better negotiate the challenges of difference in society.     

Young people’s leisure patterns: testing social age,social gender,and linguistic capital hypotheses

We analysed young people’s leisure activities in order to identify their leisure habitus, discover how they combined activities into leisure patterns, and examine how leisure patterns were socially structured. We argue that the effects of age, gender, and language on how young people’s leisure patterns are structured are mediated by social class. We found that leisure practices could be classified in terms of three habitus: the frequent leisure habitus, the cultural activity habitus, and the social vs. entertainment habitus. The different combinations of these three leisure habitus by young people resulted in four patterns which we refer to as social, omnivorous, entertainment, and religious leisure patterns. The association of leisure patterns with indicators of social position suggests that, as predicted by our theoretical framework, age, gender, and language effects are diminished once we take into account the mediating role of social class. Young people’s leisure practices are therefore socially differentiated, with young immigrants forming a vulnerable group that should be the particular focus of youth leisure policies.     

Women’s and men’s work,housework and childcare,before and during COVID-19

Review of Economics of the Household - Evidence from past economic crises indicates that recessions often affect men’s and women’s employment differently, with a greater impact on...     

‘The Rule of Men Entirely Great’: Republicanism,Ritual, and Richelieu in Melville’s ‘The Two Temples’

Abstract

This article explores the complex and multifarious reasons behind Herman Melville’s decision to refer to the English playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1839 work Richelieu, or The Conspiracy in his 1854 diptych ‘The Two Temples’. It responds to a critical consensus that has seen the reference merely as a sarcastic attack on William Macready (whose rivalry with the American actor Edwin Forrest was the nominal cause of the bloody 1849 Astor Place Riot in New York), by contextualizing the play within traditions of antebellum American Anglophilia. By using a combination of new critical work on Anglo-Americanism and anthropological ritual theory, I show how Bulwer-Lytton’s play was significant to Melville’s artistic development. In particular, I demonstrate how the play influenced his increasing engagement with republican and theatrical forms of expression that emphasized the importance of filial relationships between America and Britain in a period of increasing hostility between the two nations.     

Mainstreaming ‘gender’ and ‘integration’ needs in human development initiatives: Asian and African migrant women's integration in Europe

The current study examines the inclusion of ‘gender’ in the policies/legislation relating to the human development of women migrants (from Asian and African origins) and their impact on six determinants of migrant's gender ideology in two different European gender regimes: Germany and Sweden. The study is conducted in four stages: (1) thematic analysis of different conventions and recommendations of the UN, ILO, and EU, (2) latent analysis of selected policies/legislation, (3) survey of women migrants, and (4) expert interviews. Exposure to relatively egalitarian gender regimes through migration has brought positive changes in all determinants of the gender ideology of migrants, except domestic chores and caregiving responsibilities. Inclusion of a missing ‘gender’ perspective in relevant measures can expedite smooth integration of migrants, but lack of political commitment, scarcity of financial resources, the absence of gender experts, and lack of coordination between line ministries/agencies are salient barriers to its ‘inclusion’ in both countries.     

Horses and baseball: social work’s cultivation of one’s ‘third eye’

Active self-reflection is a sophisticated and subtle, multi-layered process that requires learning the capacity to constantly self-monitor. These fundamental interactive skills, the core of a competent social worker, are important to work in any context. Using two distinct metaphors, one relating to horses, the other to baseball, the article will explore the importance of developing competency skills and utilize a ‘third eye.’ In current social work education curricula the use of self may not be prioritized, practiced, or well understood. Evidence from human and veterinary medicine as well as social work, are discussed. An example of an undergraduate BSW course using simulated clients and standardized measures is discussed. The paper includes a brief review of the preliminary findings for a small pilot study and the relevance to future research is considered.     

Single-mother families and the gender gap in children’s time investment and non-cognitive skills

Review of Economics of the Household - This paper analyzes the role of family structure in the gender gap in children’s time investment in studying and non-cognitive skills. We focus on...     

Failing ‘Abyan’, ‘Golestan’ and ‘the Estonian Mother’: Refugee Women,Reproductive Coercion and the Australian State

Abstract

In September and October 2015, the story of detained Somali refugee ‘Abyan’ unfolded in the Australian media. A victim of rape on Nauru and seeking an abortion that could not be obtained on the island nation, Abyan was escorted to Sydney where she was to attend an abortion clinic. She was ultimately returned to Nauru without having had an abortion. This paper situates Abyan’s story alongside other stories from Nauru and in a longer history of reproductive coercion in Australian Immigration Department accommodation since the Second World War.