Caring during COVID‐19: A gendered analysis of Australian university responses to managing remote working and caring responsibilities

COVID‐19 is dramatically reconfiguring paid work and care. Emerging evidence in the global media suggests that academic women with caring responsibilities are being disproportionately impacted. This article fills a key knowledge gap by examining how Australian universities are supporting academics to manage remote work and caring during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We conducted a desktop analysis of public information about remote working and care from 41 Australian universities and compared them to the world’s top ten ranked universities. Findings suggest that during the pandemic, the Australian higher education sector positions decisions about caring leave and participation in the paid labour force as ‘private’ matters in which employees (mainly women) design their own ‘solutions’ when compared with international institutional counterparts. We argue that COVID‐19 provides another context in which universities have evaded their responsibility to ensure women’s full participation in the labour force.     

Social psychology,consumer culture and neoliberalism: A response to Phelps and White (2018)

The following essay responds to three main issues raised by Phelps and White (2018) in their critical commentary on our article (McDonald, Gough, Wearing & Deville, 2017). The first concerns the lack of precision in the conceptualisation of neoliberalism and the recent threats to it as we enter a potentially new phase of capitalism. While we share Phelps and White's concern, we argue that there is value in continuing to use neoliberalism as a concept for understanding some aspects of social behaviour. As to recent threats to neoliberalism, evidence indicates that it will continue to persist in the immediate future. To deal with neoliberalism's conceptual problems in social psychology, Phelps and White advance the potential theory of a ‘market‐derived logics’. We commend the authors for pursuing this endeavor, however, we caution that care needs to be taken in its conceptualisation. Lastly, we discuss Phelps and White's disciplinary reflections on social psychology.     

Restricted Funding: Restricting Development?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This paper examines, from a management accounting perspective, the efficacy of the dominant ‘restricted’...     

Practising politics: Technical project templates and political practice in a DFID country office

Development agencies including the UK Department for International Development (DFID) increasingly agree that if aid is to be effective, it should be politically smart and locally led. However, both the critical and the reformist literature have argued that development agencies persist with technical, template‐driven programming: political analysis and practice have not been widely institutionalized. This study aims to identify why development representations are persistently technical in their form, and what blockages have existed for developing locally grounded and politically aware programmes. The article presents an ethnography of the process of developing the core elements of the governance portfolio in an (anonymized) DFID country office. Focusing on a key design workshop, the study is situated within a wider organizational ethnography. The persistently technical justifications for programmes are a result of the bureaucratic form itself, its accountability and approval processes. Political analyses represent countries in such a way that officials can prioritize selection from a repertoire of technical models. However, scepticism about the tractability of governance problems to such analyses and programming has led to an emerging understanding of politics that creates space within the bureaucratic form for politically aware practice. Politically aware programming should emphasize good operational practice over explicit analysis and should continue to emphasize technical models like the adaptive management models which create room for such practice.     

Undisciplined: Tracing Criminology's Growing Divergence From Sociology

Several influential sociologists have questioned the wisdom of criminology's departure from sociology. Omitted from these reflections are the rationale explaining the schism. The present work grants a historical account to fill that absence. Oral histories with 17 leading criminologists, 13 of whom trained as sociologists, have been collected and analyzed. Two domains are explored, professional/organizational and informal/intellectual. First, the departments evidence different hiring patterns, journal content preferences, and journal structures over the past half‐century. Second, there are contrasts regarding ideology; sociology trends leftward. Criminological research concentrates on a dependent variable; sociology links to a unifying orientation. There are concerns that the field's training and research may be too narrow and that the lure of influencing policy could undermine its opportunity to offer critical commentary. Criminology's focus on addressing crime as a practical concern serves some advantages. However, many respondents were conflicted over the loss of an abiding identity. If the field fails to confront its preference for multitheoretical, policy‐driven discussion, it risks being pruned or subsumed without a more fixed sense of identity.     

The impact of infertility on men's work and finances: Findings from a qualitative questionnaire study

The impact of infertility on the emotional, social and relational aspects of men's lives is now more widely understood. Yet the impact of infertility on men's working lives and financial status remains largely overlooked. Drawing on a qualitative questionnaire study into men's experiences of infertility (n = 41), this article examines how work and finances are managed and negotiated during infertility, including treatment cycles. Three key themes were identified from our thematic analysis: managing infertility in the workplace; compromised job performance, (in)security and progression; the financial burden of infertility, suggesting that infertility can have significant implications for men's working lives, including their identities as productive workers. The impact had a gendered dimension, with threats to masculine‐relevant breadwinner roles and career ambitions. Awareness and management of infertility as a chronic health condition could be a useful way for employers to support disclosure of infertility and to allow men to navigate infertility and their working lives and identities in less stress‐inducing ways. This article contributes to our growing understanding of the stigma men experience in relation to infertility and how such stigma may intersect with masculinity in general and breadwinning in particular.     

‘What the country wanted’: The houses of parliament,the press and the origins of media management in Britain,c. 1780–1900

This paper considers a topic that has received scant attention in the historiography of public relations: official attempts to manage the press in Britain in the Houses of Parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Existing accounts of the emergence of government public relations in the UK have tended to focus on the civil service in the first half of the twentieth century, but this article sheds light on a series of earlier developments, including the allocation of seats for reporters in the viewing gallery of the Commons in 1803, the construction of dedicated Reporters’ Galleries in both parliamentary chambers in 1847–52 and the creation of a Westminster Lobby in 1884. Taken together, these reforms improved journalists’ access to parliament in an era in which direct governmental control over newspapers lapsed. Yet, they also allowed politicians to influence media commentary by determining who was permitted access to parliament and what type of content made its way into print. A case can thus be made that Westminster, not Whitehall, played host to the earliest official attempts to manage the media in Britain, and this has important repercussions for current understandings of public relations history.     

Reevaluating the Concrete–Explanatory Animation Creation as a Digital Catalyst for Cross-Modal Cognition

This article explores the relationship between abstract and concrete as categories of knowledge and Wilensky’s (1991) theory that all ideas are abstract until they become concrete. Dewey (1910/1997) made a similar claim by suggesting that ideas are initially beyond our comprehension until they have become consolidated. This article documents the evolving mental models of 11- and 12-year-old children as they designed and made explanatory animations for the sake of their own learning. The conclusion from this research is that transferring ideas from thought to word, word to image, or transmediation of any kind, is a semiotic tool for cross-modal cognition.     

The Puzzle of Intelligence Expertise: Spaces of Intelligence Analysis and the Production of “Political” Knowledge

Intelligence expertise presents a theoretical puzzle that challenges ideal-typical understandings of professional fields. Intelligence is not a strongly autonomous field where experts control the production and accreditation of knowledge. Yet, intelligence is not a field in decline. This paper explores this puzzle through the example of fusion centers, a national network of 78 interagency intelligence centers recognized by the Department of Homeland Security. It draws from over a year of fieldwork and interviews with 75 people who work in fusion centers in New York and New Jersey. It finds that the jurisdictional rivalries within fusion centers produce a dialectic tension: Efforts to secure professional autonomy are frustrated by forces that marshal intelligence expertise as a resource in larger battles in the bureaucratic field. This dialectic produces continual battles over institutional resources and a deeper definitional struggle over the nature of intelligence. Theoretically, this paper suggests that intelligence expertise is located in “spaces between fields.” While some have positioned “spaces between fields” as a transitional stage in the formation or decline of a field, intelligence expertise constitutes a unique form of expert knowledge that persists in the interstices between more established fields. As a result of this liminal and ambiguous position, intelligence expertise does not produce “rational” knowledge on its own terms. Instead, it produces “political” knowledge shaped by the shifting dynamics of the bureaucratic field.