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This paper discusses experiences of everyday racism as narrated by South Sudanese refugee-background informants living in Australia. The paper draws on accounts of verbal and physical attacks reported during a sociolinguistic interview about the refugee experience and adaptation to the Australian lifestyle. The study contributes to the exploration of features of refugee narratives, using the socio-interactional approach to narrative analysis. Selected stories about racism are explored using positioning theory, paying attention to the discursive strategies narrators use to position themselves in the interactional world of the interview setting as well as the story-world. Their narratives demonstrate that despite the harsh experiences of everyday racism, they position themselves as resilient and strong individuals. They do this by drawing on their refugee history and making references to harder times. However, the stories also reveal their mitigation strategies to soften the accounts and either downplay or deny racism. However, by sharing their stories and making explicit evaluative statements about social injustice, they mobilise their agency to make their story heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Rupert Murdoch announced in April 2004 that he intended to see his company, News Corporation, reincorporated in the United States, two competing representations of the 'media mogul' came to dominate the press's interpretation of this event. The first of these 'Murdoch representations' was the most common, and painted an image of a successful entrepreneur, a 'celebrity CEO'. Yet, the second 'Murdoch representation' painted a different image, a more detailed portrait, with critical attention paid to the modus operandi of the world's most notorious media proprietor. This article deconstructs these representations of Murdoch, a mythic fracturing of image resulting from the political economy of the Australian press. In essence, the article explores issues of media diversity, myth and ideology, and the propensity of the press for critical, impartial, journalism. The empirical data are drawn from an analysis of two of Australia's pre-eminent newspapers: The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a tribute to the late Steve Crook who shared with us the excitement of research on environmentalism. As we predicted, environmental activism in Australia remains socially circumscribed, but its scope, and the scope of environmental concerns, have been widening. Differentiation and proliferation of environmental issues combine with social diffusion and routinization. The pro- portion of people who see the environment as a salient issue continues to be relatively high, in spite of an increasing competition from new issue concerns, including security and illegal migration. The new `white' environmental issues enter the public arena reflecting widespread (though less urgent) concerns about genetic modification of food-crops and cloning of human tissue - all interpreted as `interference with nature'. The `white' environmental issues attract the concern of new social categories of `conscience environmentalists' who are more likely to be women, tend to be older, religious; and less attracted by green organizations. They are also less metropolitan in their location, and not as leftist and postmaterial in their value preferences as their `green' and `brown' predecessors. The formation of the `white' environmental issue cluster and constituency opens the way for new ideological reinterpretations of environmental outlook - and for new political alliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses micro-data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey to examine the relationship between gender role attitudes and the labour supply of men and women. Using the Wellington decomposition technique, the paper also considers how much of the change in the gender gap in labour force participation (LFP) between 2001/5 and 2015/19 may be explained by changes in the gender role attitudes of adult women and men. The results show a 6.5 percentage point convergence in the gender gap in LFP between the two periods. Nearly half the convergence arises from a change in the schooling attainment of men and women. Just over one-third is due to changes in gender role attitudes (faster adoption of egalitarian gender role attitudes by women). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Posthumous conception, the ability to conceive a child after the death of one partner, is increasingly prevalent due to advances in Artificial Reproduction Technology (ART). This paper considers the complexities surrounding the practice in Australia, focusing primarily on the ethical and legal dimensions. It observes that state-based regulations in Australia create disparities in accessibility: some states prohibit the procedure without the deceased's written consent, while others permit it based on guidelines or lack explicit prohibitions. Addressing the juxtaposition of Will Theory and Interest Theory, it emphasises the ongoing debate on whether rights, particularly reproductive autonomy, outlive a person's demise. Finally, the paper highlights an evident inconsistency in Australian legislation and promotes a uniform approach across states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant educational disruption globally. When the pandemic forced schools to switch to emergency home-schooling, parental engagement in education became more critical. Some parents found home-schooling as an opportunity to form stronger relationships with their children. Others acquired an enhanced insight into their children's schoolwork. However, the emerging literature shows that, as not all parents were equally positioned to support their children's learning at home, emergency home-schooling has resulted in a significant learning loss. Guided by the concept of capital interaction, this article reports on a qualitative case study that investigated the experiences of 20 migrant parents in Victoria, Australia. A thematic analysis of the data reveals challenges associated with parental self-efficacy, financial hardship, language and technological barriers, time constraints, and disengagement and exhaustion. Remote learning may return in the future, and we must prepare for such disruption by improving equitable access to education delivered online and at home. To this end, the paper outlines some policy ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Along with the logistic planning, the important focus of international student mobility programmes in social work is on the field supervision process and measuring its outcome. Without a social work council in India for setting uniform standards in field education, this paper proposes a framework for field supervision to support inbound mobility students in India. The study predominantly explores the qualitative experiences of field supervisors from India, Israel, and Australia on fieldwork supervision. The themes evolved from the study are focused on the supervision process, strategies followed, challenges faced, and outcome measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to describe and exemplify a theoretical perspective for the analysis of music as symbolic action in critical studies of discourse. We use deployments of music by legislatures in Australia, the UK, and the USA as exemplar cases to develop foundations for a critical, non-semiotic perspective that sees music work as gestalt complexes of physical and cultural forces that move people towards or away from specific actions and attitudes. In presenting our perspective we critique some semiotic assertions about music that are commonplaces in discourse studies and elsewhere. Our cases draw on news reports and scholarly discourse about the use of music as a means of torture in warfare and as a means of purifying urban public spaces by keeping youth and homeless people out of them at night. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the under-explored demand-side of active labour market programmes that aim to transition people without jobs into employment. The paper's contribution centres on understanding the benefits that government-funded employment services can offer to employers and how they can work with employment service providers to leverage these. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with employers in Australia, our findings extend pre-existing concepts of employer engagement by illustrating the human resource, corporate social responsibility, and financial benefits to employers of engaging with employment services and how firm size affects their engagement. The findings offer improvements to policymaking and practice to facilitate the effectiveness of employment services in Australia and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from an investigation of nature-based practices, from the perspectives of 10 academics/educators from six nations. Participants engaged in a focus group exploring the prevalence and inclusion of nature in social work practice and education. While the study focused on individual members' experiences and perspectives, the findings highlight important context-specific factors for including nature within social work to reconnect humans with nature for health, well-being, healing, and justice. An Integrative Environmental Model for social work is proposed to assist future practice and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Elite communities' are the areas where the wealthy, and even 'superrich', live, socialize and raise their children as future economic and financial elites; they are the places where a few lead socially and economically privileged lives. Earlier studies have concentrated on the inner dynamics of these settings, focusing on the way residents are constructed and socialized as elites through their social, communicative and aesthetic abilities that are perceived as exemplary in contemporary neoliberal society. In this paper, we broaden the perspective, by exploring how these areas contribute to polarization, that is, how they generate distinctions based on money, morals and manners that are peculiar to neoliberalism's idealization of 'entrepreneurship', 'self-management', 'leadership' and the pursuit of an 'active lifestyle'. Our data come from two major ethnographic studies: one conducted between 2010 and 2015 of Sweden's wealthiest community, Djursholm, that is populated by the country's business and financial elites; the other conducted between 2016 and 2019 of three of Australia's most prestigious and economically privileged suburbs, Toorak (Melbourne), Mosman (Sydney) and Cottesloe (Perth). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This research aims to investigate whether multi/inter-disciplinary research activities are related to research impact and publication counts of scholars. Since researchers with very high levels of multi/inter-disciplinarity might be able to target complex problems, we would expect them to receive more credits than their colleagues with a stronger disciplinary orientation. We analysed Web of Science (WoS) indexed publications of all associate and full professors from a random sample of Australian universities in physics, chemistry and biology (1980–2014). Australian Fields of Research (FoR) codes assigned to journals were used to calculate the diversification of authors' publications. The number of citations in the first 3 years, number of 10% most frequently cited papers, and citation impact percentile were used for impact assessment. A few indicators were used to measure the diversity including 'extent of diversification (ED)' (number of distinct FoR codes divided by the number of publications) and 'diversification ratio (DR)' (ratio of the publications falling outside the dominant code to the total number of publications). A total of 47.76% of biologists' publications, 35.23% of physicists' publications and 20.36% of chemists' publications were published in journals assigned to fields other than the Australian associate and full professors' fields. Publications from biologists had the largest values of diversification. Women (compared with men) and associate professors (compared with full professors) in chemistry, biology and overall were more probably to publish diversely. ED was negatively correlated with output and citation impact. DR also had a negative but weak correlation with the number of publications and 10% most frequently cited paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia has one of the most urbanised and diverse populations in the world, but there is little research that explores fleeting friendships between marginalised/racialised ethnic minority and indigenous populations. In contrast to metropolitan cities in white settler societies that have been the focus of much research, this paper focuses on the small, tropical city of Darwin in Northern Australia. This is a city that is at the centre of public debates on indigenous wellbeing, migrant integration and asylum seeker policies, with social welfare programmes that provide little opportunities for hopeful encounters among indigenous peoples and ethnic minority newcomers in surface spaces. I argue, however, that ‘grass root’ forms of creativity in an ‘underground’ car park bring their affective worlds together through a shared passion for art. The paper draws on gentle methodologies including participatory visual methods to privilege non-Western ways of inhabiting place. Through a ‘quiet politics’ and affective engagement with spacetimes both proximate and distant, the paper shows that it is possible to invoke different futures and crystallise experimental publics in the diverse city. The paper responds to a call to push the boundaries of urban research on social difference through geographies of friendship that are yet to engage with multisensory bodies, emotion, affect and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian children from regional, rural and remote (RRR) areas exhibit lower educational outcomes than their peers in metropolitan areas. The mechanisms driving the comparatively poorer educational outcomes of children in RRR areas, however, are not well understood. This paper proposes and tests two sets of factors that may be responsible for these disparities: population socio-demographic composition and school climate. Using rich survey and linked administrative data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (n = 9,248 observations), we estimate the relative contribution of these sets of factors to RRR children's disadvantage in NAPLAN numeracy test scores. Our results indicate that both socio-demographic and school climate factors account for part of the educational disparities between children in RRR and metropolitan areas. These findings suggest that hybrid policy approaches that tackle both the social determinants of educational success and use schools as an intervention site are required to close the achievement gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate activists and environmental communicators stress that addressing the climate crisis requires both global and local advocacy for transformational change-making. While journalists in small, rural communities are known to actively advocate on issues for the common good, there has been little investigation of local media advocacy on climate change in rural Australia: a region at the forefront of global heating. This paper analyses the accounts of local journalists of their media coverage of the School Strikes 4 Climate in rural and regional Australia, as an empirical entry point for a conceptual discussion of local media advocacy in reporting climate change. We find that normative ideas about journalism coupled with polarised community views on climate change hindered these journalists from taking an advocacy stance. We explore and critique the tacit 'quiet advocacy' practices used by these journalists reporting on climate in rural and regional Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African Australian diasporic literature has drawn attention to the anti-Black racism Black African young people endure in everyday Australia. By drawing on a multi-method approach consisting of social media ethnography and multiple participant interviews, this paper explores the use of social media by Black African young people (n=15) to visibilise their experiences of racism. We situate the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, as a significant ‘turning point’ when the social media practises of our participants radically transformed. Our findings indicate that prior to the murder of George Floyd, participants evoked careful boundaries around the type of racial content they posted for fear of the punishments or backlash that could occur if they disrupted the white racial comfort of their friends and followers. After the murder of Floyd, participants used the resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement to visibilise their own experiences of anti-Black racism and racial violence in Australia, sharing content on social media that marked whiteness, demanded safety and challenged white silence and performative allyship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing, employment and economic conditions in many nations have changed greatly over the past decades. This paper explores the ways in which changing housing markets, economic conditions and government policies have affected vulnerable individuals and households, using Australia as a case study. The paper finds a substantial number and proportion of low income Australians have been affected by housing and employment that is insecure with profound implications for vulnerability. Importantly, the paper suggests that in Australia the economic gains achieved as a consequence of mining-related growth in the early 2000s were translated as greater employment security for some on low incomes, but not all. Enhanced access to employment in this period was differentiated by gender, with women largely missing out on the growth in jobs. For the population as a whole, employment gains were offset by increased housing insecurity as accommodation costs rose. The paper finds low income lone parents were especially vulnerable because they were unable to benefit from a buoyant labour market over the decade 2000–2010. They were also adversely affected by national policy changes intended to encourage engagement with paid work. The outcomes identified for Australia are likely to have been mirrored in other nations, especially those that have embraced, or been forced to adopt, more restrictive welfare and income support regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at movements over time in regional employment–population ratios, an important and much neglected determinant of regional performance. We utilise data on gross flows into and out of employment and focus on information contained in the transition rates. The paper applies an unobserved components econometric model to a panel of Australian data to identify and explain the evolution of regional employment–population ratios over time. The approach identifies a common (i.e. nationwide) factor while allowing for region-specific effects, including region-specific impacts of the common factor. The contribution of the common factor to changes in regional employment–population ratios ranges between 38% and 80%. Conversely, regional elements explain between 20% and 62% of changes. The findings highlight the importance of adopting explicit regional employment policies as a complement to national policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial concentration of recently arrived immigrants in gateway cities and suburbs is usually seen as undesirable by urban academics and policy makers. This paper presents a counter-argument that the concentration of disadvantaged new immigrants in the form of humanitarian refugees and their families can, and does, result in positive outcomes for those groups. In part, our argument is based on making a distinction between people-based disadvantage and place-based disadvantage. The paper examines the changing nature of place-based ‘advantage’ for immigrants in Australian gateway cities through a focus on two metropolitan locations, Auburn (Sydney) and Springvale (Melbourne), known as popular destination suburbs for recent immigrants. While these two cases validate the benefits of such gateway suburbs, they also demonstrate that the capacity of recent migrants to emulate concentrated settlement patterns is now significantly undermined by changes in the labour market and affordability problems in the housing market. The paper concludes with a discussion on the possible future of gateway suburbs and the implications of this shift for the wellbeing of particular groups of disadvantaged residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities all over the world have activated policy support for urban consolidation in recent decades. Rationales for urban consolidation focus on its perceived ability to achieve sustainability goals, including decreased automobile dependence, increased social cohesion and greater walkability. Despite this, there are few international examples of urban consolidation policy implementation that has achieved its stated aims. This paper explores the nature and character of perceptions of urban consolidation held by urban planners, developers, architects and local politicians. The perspectives held by these ‘city shapers’ are integral to urban consolidation debates and delivery, yet the nature and character of their specific views are underexplored in urban studies literature. This paper combines the theoretical lens of Social Representations Theory with the methodological approach of Q-methodology to understand the common sense understandings of urban consolidation held by city shapers in Brisbane, Australia. It identifies, synthesises and critically discusses the social representations employed by city shapers to understand, promote and communicate about urban consolidation. Findings indicate that urban consolidation debates and justifications diverge significantly from stated policy intentions and are based on differing views on ‘good’ urban form, the role of planning and community consultation and the value of higher density housing. We conclude that there is utility and value in identifying how urban consolidation strategies are influenced by the shared beliefs, myths and perceptions held by city shapers. Understanding these narratives and their influence is fundamental to understanding the power-laden manipulation of policy definitions and development outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the degree of commonalities present in the cyclical behaviour of the eight largest metropolitan housing markets in Australia. Using two techniques originally proposed in the business cycle literature we firstly consider the degree of synchronisation present and secondly decompose the series into their permanent and cyclical components. Both empirical approaches reveal similar results. Sydney and Melbourne are closely related to each other and are relatively segmented from the smaller metropolitan areas. In contrast, there is substantial evidence of commonalities in the cyclical behaviour of the remaining cities, especially those on the eastern and southern coasts of Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A policy problem is a discursive construction, and the way in which the problem is framed determines both the nature of the policy responses and the possibility of resolving it. In this paper, drawing on critical frame analysis, we examined three major equity policies in the Australian early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector. In mapping out framing and reasoning devices of the policies, our analytical interest is to highlight the representation of inequality as a problem and unmask underlying assumptions of the equity responses. The findings show that disadvantage in Australia's ECEC sector has been framed as a lack of access, limited navigational capacity and cultural exclusion; and the framings are underpinned by economic, educational and social rationales. The analysis also reveals problematic categories, issue-omissions and conceptual shifts within the texts. The paper draws practical implications of the frame contradictions and silences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposals for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) have a long history, but a surge of interest since the global financial crisis suggests a connection to growing inequality and insecurity. The pandemic intensified interest through the global explosion in the use of cash transfers. This special issue arose from pre-pandemic debates among Australian sociologists connecting global interest around UBI to emerging patterns of inequality and insecurity stemming from Australia's precarious labour market and expensive housing market. Those discussions broadened to reflect on Australia's colonial history and patriarchal economy, and the potential to recognise more diverse contributions and values. Evolving through the Covid crisis, the issue now incorporates the remarkable alternatives that were, briefly, made possible. The articles reflect both scepticism and optimism towards UBI, but all reveal how basic income can provide a useful lens for Australian sociology – a simple tool responding to an increasingly complex society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent international trends towards urban consolidation, intended to reduce outward urban sprawl by concentrating growth within existing neighbourhoods, can cause contention in cities. Understanding how the mass media represents urban consolidation can lead to more informed and democratic planning practices. This paper employs Social Representations Theory to identify and understand representations of urban consolidation in newspaper media. The theory recognises that the media is a key purveyor of public discourse and can reflect, shape or suppress ideas circulating in society. This novel approach has not previously been applied to understanding social representations of urban consolidation strategies in the mass media. The rapidly growing and changing city of Brisbane, Australia, is utilised as a case study. Brisbane is situated in South East Queensland, the fastest growing region in Australia, and is governed by regional and local planning policies that strongly support increased densities in existing urban areas. Findings from a quantitative textual analysis of 449 articles published in Brisbane newspapers between 2007 and 2014 reveal key clusters and classes of co-occurring words that represent dominant social representations apparent in the newspaper corpus. The paper provides two key conclusions. The first is that social representations occurring in mass media represent an important source of information about ‘common sense’ understandings and evaluations of urban consolidation debates. The second is that urban consolidation is represented as a multifaceted issue, including interrelated themes of housing, sustainable population growth, investment strategies and the interplay between politics and planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine how the postpolitical era of planning has created both binaries and intersections in the reimaging of transport futures and how the latter precipitates a redefinition of democratic transport prioritisation. Focusing particularly on the point in the transport planning process when urban transport priorities are identified, the paper explores how citizens respond to the inherently political, yet not always democratic, aspects of setting transport investment priorities. This relationship is investigated through a single case study of Melbourne, Australia where a six km inner city road tunnel was deemed a ‘done deal’ by elected officials in the lead up to a state election, removing the controversial project from open public scrutiny. Drawing upon ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews with community campaigners opposing the proposed East West Link road tunnel, this analysis reveals how community-based groups and individual residents alike can evolve beyond NIMBY-focused agitation to garner a spatially dispersed re-politicisation of urban transport priorities. While the postpolitical framing of infrastructure delivery introduces a binary between state interventionist planning and citizen opposition, it is the mobilisation of action through the spaces of intersection where new political paradigms for transport planning are created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a discourse of 'ethical artificial intelligence' has emerged and gained international traction in response to widely publicised AI failures. In Australia, the discourse around ethical AI does not accord with the reality of AI deployment in the public sector. Drawing on institutional ethnographic approaches, this paper describes the misalignments between how technology is described in government documentation, and how it is deployed in social service delivery. We argue that the propagation of ethical principles legitimates established new public management strategies, and pre-empts questions regarding the efficacy of AI development; instead positioning implementation as inevitable and, provided an ethical framework is adopted, laudable. The ethical AI discourse acknowledges, and ostensibly seeks to move past, widely reported administrative failures involving new technologies. In actuality, this discourse works to make AI implementation a reality, ethical or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon the 2001 census to examine the impact of national economic reform on the growth of regional cities. The paper argues that regional cities in Australia have taken on new roles within both their region and the national economy. It argues that deregulation of the economy has contributed to the growth of some regional cities and especially those that have been able to deepen their economies. Through the use of regression analysis, the paper suggests that regional centres that have witnessed an increase in the level of specialisation within their economy have, on average, grown more quickly than other cities. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for our understanding of the evolution of urban systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Academic and lay discourses around disadvantaged urban areas often draw on the language of ‘dumping grounds’ to encapsulate the poverty, marginalisation and social problems often found there. Yet the concept of a dumping ground remains insufficiently theorised. This paper addresses this issue by identifying five constituent features of the dumping ground: the perception of people as waste whose fate is to be discarded; the need to accommodate this human ‘waste’ and the logic by which places are selected for this purpose; the mechanisms through which this spatial sorting occurs as problem populations are moved to their ‘rightful’ place; the relations of power which enforce or encourage this mobility; and finally, the reactions of incumbent residents in neighbourhoods that are compelled to host unwanted social groups. In the second part of this paper, these themes are illustrated via a case study of the Australian city of Logan where residents complain that their city has been treated as a dumping ground in order to explain its poor reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In self-governing residential communities processes of governance through community appear to be triggering a contractualisation of neighbouring and demise in socially inflected relations. Research to date has examined the socio-political dimensions of neighbouring, highlighting governance frameworks and the social context as key forces shaping transformations in community practice. Meanwhile, the material space of residential estates has largely disappeared from view, assuming a static role as either a container for social relations or a symbol informing estate standards. This paper advances a different perspective, arguing that residential materialities must be taken seriously as agents within community governance and neighbouring. Through a case study examining the management of pets and nuisance noise in strata-titled apartments in Sydney, Australia, the paper shows that community governance takes place through the material environment. Understandings of community self-governance and the ‘building event’ are productively combined to re-place understandings of community self-governance processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Australia has nine different legislative regimes for sentencing and parole, as well as eight prison regimes; it has therefore been described as an ideal penal laboratory. This paper presents an overview of the extensive body of recent Australian research on public opinion on sentencing and, more recently, parole. The discussion on parole is situated in the context of an analysis of the legislative and policy landscape, which has undergone significant changes in recent years. The paper concludes with some comments on future research directions in relation to Australian public opinion on parole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates the contribution that historical property records can make to our understanding of long run urban change. We use a case study of two streets from the suburb of Carlton in Melbourne, Australia between 1870 and 1970. The property records form a panel database that can be interrogated using standard modelling techniques. These data are used to analyse change in the built environment over time, and identify the factors that may be influencing such change. With the assembled data we track built form, land value, ownership and land use over 100 years. We find that stability characterises the built environment over lengthy periods, but when change occurs it does so in bursts, rather than incrementally. Furthermore, these bursts of change are unevenly spread across our two case study streets, despite their proximity. The streetscape’s primary built material is the key factor shaping geographical patterns of land use change in the case study area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The education-to-work pathways for young people with disabilities are becoming more diverse and lengthier in our post-industrial economy. Furthermore, it is recognized that a multitude of barriers still remain in securing employment at the end of these pathways. In this paper, we focus on Australia’s Disability Employment Services (DES) to understand how views of transition in DES policy may be influencing program rules in supporting secondary and tertiary students with physical and/or neurological disabilities in their employability and employment. We do this through critical policy analysis of DES and in-depth Interpretive accounts from service providers and advocacy organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the largest 250 companies in Australia in the early 1990s and their network of interlocking directorates. It examines the institutional profile of Australian big business and the impact of globalisation. It finds that international capital has not, as yet. made major inroads into the core of Australian big business although global finance capital has had a major impact on its mode of operating. It argues that the greatest area for structural change is the privatisation of government-owned enterprises. Following the precedents of US and international studies the paper then explores key features of the theory of financial hegemony. The paper uses network analysis of interlocking directorships to assess the centrality of banks and the direction of ties among big businesses. Australian banks are heavily interlocked and 'attract' executives of other companies to their boards but they do not constitute the core of the intercorporate network as in the US. As outlined by Australian scholars the systemic conditions of capitalist hegemony in this country involve uncritical acceptance of big business leadership. These conditions privilege all large, Australian public companies (the 'private sector') as the core institutions of class power. Centralisation and hierarchy within big business parallels these conditions of public culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societies often respond to a crisis by attributing blame to some groups while constructing others as victims and heroes. While it has received scant sociological attention, 'panic buying' is a critical indicator of such public sentiment at the onset of a crisis, and thus a crucial site for analysis. This article traces dynamics of blame in news media representations of an extreme period of panic buying during COVID-19 in Australia. Analysis reveals that lower socio-economic and ethnically diverse consumers were blamed disproportionately. Unlike wealthier consumers who bulk-bought online, shoppers filling trollies in-store were depicted as selfish and shameful, described using dehumanising language, and portrayed as 'villains' who threatened social order. Supermarkets were cast simultaneously as 'victims' of consumer aggression and 'heroes' for their moral leadership, trustworthiness and problem-solving. This portrayal misunderstands the socio-emotional drivers of panic buying, exacerbates stigma towards already disadvantaged groups, and veils the corporate profiteering that encourages stockpiling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a citation-context analysis of journal articles from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Examining publications from the sociology of health and medicine, the study draws a number of conclusions about the state of sociology, inter-country relationships between knowledge workers, and national systems of sociological knowledge production. It finds that core–periphery relations define significant features of sociological work, impacting on citation patterns, inter-country collaboration and the selection of reference materials. Core–periphery relations are also found to influence the sociological production of knowledge across the Australian university sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the ways in which Sir Joseph Banks served as an informed and energetic patron for the preparations for the Investigator’s expedition, and for the dissemination of its scientific and geographical knowledge. This was the first voyage to circumnavigate Australia, under the command of Matthew Flinders. Banks was an essential facilitator for Flinders’ ambitions: he drew up plans to promote the voyage and mustered the support of relevant officials in the Admiralty, Navy Board, East India Company and Board of Longitude. With his knowledge of sailing on Cook’s Endeavour voyage and his understanding of the expedition’s scientific requirements, Banks took a leading role in recruiting personnel. Banks recognised in Flinders someone who had the ambition and the nautical skill to carry out the Investigator’s expedition with full commitment. Banks and Flinders combined a passion for improving geographical, nautical and scientific knowledge of the last inhabitable continent discovered by explorers. Banks played a crucial role in ensuring that the achievements of the Investigator’s voyage were not lost. He made repeated attempts to have Flinders released from his confinement in the Ile de France. He was updated from time to time on Flinders’ situation through letters received from that island. He corresponded with Flinders and his scientific associates to ensure that the achievements of the expedition—the charts and the natural history specimens—were not abandoned. After Flinders and his ship’s company returned to England, Banks ensured their findings from the voyage were prepared for public dissemination by persuading the Admiralty to pay their salaries and by personally overseeing their work during the several years necessary to complete the tasks required. Banks was closely involved with the production of Flinders’ voyage account and atlas, published in A Voyage to Terra Australis, and with the dissemination of the scientific and artistic achievements of the Investigator expedition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how the conduct of a local festival of fashion retailing—the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival—reinvigorates the commodity fair format of older times. The paper takes a longitudinal view of the festival’s evolution and draws on Lefebvre’s spatiology, complemented by Terranova’s approach to the participatory economy, to explore how it produces monetary value as it produces space. The discussion highlights the contradictory nature of event processes, arguing that they reinforce dominant representations of the city and extend retailers’ reach into public space, but at the same time undermine spaces of business activity. The paper suggests that the event’s use of participatory economies of cultural mobilisation are similar to the tactics of social movement activism, but that in this context mobilisation works to support the value-capturing strategies of local retailers and to reinscribe urban spaces as spaces of consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Waste solar photovoltaic (PV) panels are considered as one of the fastest-growing future waste streams under the category of large electronic waste (e-waste). The lifespan of solar panels varies from 20 to 30 years, and an appropriate reverse logistics network design is essential to manage the waste stream efficiently once their lifetime expires. Mixed-integer programming-based RL model is proposed in this paper for New South Wales, Australia that minimizes the overall cost by identifying optimal locations and sizing of the collection points while determining optimal capacities for recycling facilities. Using the historical data (2001–2017) on the installed capacity of solar panels in the state, the potential waste generation (at council-level) is estimated and optimized solutions are proposed for the year 2047. The results of the study show that the highest waste solar PV will be generated at Murrumbidgee, Berrigan, Balranald, and Bogan councils. Out of 129 councils in the state, the model identifies 78 optimized-locations of the collection points that would be required in the councils. In the councils of Newcastle, Narrandera and Wagga Wagga, three major recycling facilities would need to be established. This is the first systematic attempt in designing an optimized RL network in Australia focusing on waste solar PV. Policy-makers will find this research highly valuable in decision-making on local recycling infrastructure development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, research has emphasised a shift from city government to urban governance. Such a shift brings about its very own challenges, namely governance gaps, uncertain configurations in governance and a limited capacity to act. In this paper, we argue that the concurrent rise of strategy documents in city administration addresses these challenges. Our central claim is that strategy documents can be understood as a distinct discursive device through which local governments enact aspired governance configurations. We illustrate our argument empirically using two prominent examples that, while showing similar features and characteristics, are anchored in different administrative traditions and institutional frameworks: the city administrations of Sydney, Australia, and Vienna, Austria. The contribution of the paper is to show how strategy documents enact governance configurations along four core dimensions: the setting in space and time, the definition of the public, the framing of the res publica and legitimacy issues. Moreover, our comparative analysis of Sydney and Vienna gives evidence of differences in governance configurations enacted through strategy documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument of this paper is that social ties beyond the boardroom matter. At the structural level, social ties from non-profit foundations, cultural organizations, university boards, policy planning organizations, and private social clubs add unique ties to those established by interlocking directorates. In addition, the multiple configurations of these social affiliations increase the centrality and reduce the social distance among the corporate directors. Although visualizations of these social networks underscore the changing roles these extra-corporate ties play in uniting corporate directors, they cannot precisely capture the unique effects of ties created by social affiliations outside the boardroom. Utilizing the concepts of structural redundancy and multiplicity, the paper describes the unique contribution each set of ties makes in constructing the social mosaic of corporate America during the second half of the 20th century. The results indicate a dramatic reduction in the role private clubs play in supplementing corporate ties, and an equally significant rise in the importance of social ties generated by policy planning organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the housing sub-market literature has focused on establishing methods that allow the partitioning of data into distinct market segments. This paper seeks to move the focus on to the question of how best to model sub-markets once they have been identified. It focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of multilevel models as a technique for modelling sub-markets. The paper uses data on housing transactions from Perth, Western Australia, to develop and compare three competing sub-market modelling strategies. Model 1 consists of a city-wide ‘benchmark’; model 2 provides a series of sub-market-specific hedonic estimates (this is the ‘industry standard’) and models 3 and 4 provide two variants on the multilevel model (differentiated by variation in the degrees of spatial granularity embedded in the model structure). The results suggest that the more granular multilevel specification enhances empirical performance and reduces the incidence of non-random spatial errors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the role that property titling legislation has had on the form of high-density residential development. A conceptual framework is developed for theorising the role of property legislation in moderating the impact of urban land use policy. It is argued that the impact of legislation on urban form is much more significant and direct than is often implied or suggested in reviews of planning policy. It is argued that property legislation has a greater role than simply supporting the implementation of urban planning policy. Property legislation has a moderating influence on policy and provides a barrier to the implementation of urban policy. To support this argument, the paper considers the development and implications of Western Australia’s strata titling legislation for the form of high-density development in that state’s capital city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research has documented a trend towards the individualization of activation policies. This study reviews a radical Australian effort to personalize the delivery of activation policies called the One to One Service initiative, which was abandoned shortly after its introduction. The paper asks: what does the brief and tumultuous tenure of this initiative reveal about the role of the individual in contemporary welfare administration and activation policy? Based on a theoretical engagement with the works of Ulrich Beck, Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Anthony Giddens, and an ethnographic study of frontline interactions in Centrelink, Australia’s national benefits agency, the paper argues we should understand the rise and fall of One to One Service in terms of contradictions between two competing forms of contemporary welfare individualization, referred to as ‘democratic relationships’ and ‘compulsory choice’. One to One Service represented a push for individualized, democratic relationships between staff and clients; yet it was undermined because policy makers chose to emphasize an alternative form of individualization premised on forcing recipients to take responsibility for their lives and move off welfare. The findings have implications for the individualization, street level bureaucracy, and activation policy literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Questions of property rights are central to the organisation of urban space yet remain weakly theorised in the context of sexuality. Tracing battles over spaces of commercial sex in inner Sydney, this paper argues that particular claims to privacy and property underpin exclusionary actions restricting the boundaries of sexual citizenship. However, the paper also notes the potential for the emergence of ‘sexual commons’ where claims to an enhanced notion of sexual citizenship can be made. The paper concludes that property rights consist of overlapping and complex claims to space in which questions of sexuality and the sanctity of family life are often brought to the fore. In arguing this, the paper demonstrates that property rights constitute a key mechanism in the management and regulation of the (nocturnal) city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines whether the employment outcomes of Australian labour market programme participants vary according to whether they receive housing assistance. This issue attracted attention when a series of US studies showed that clients of welfare-to-work programmes are more likely to achieve positive employment outcomes if housing assistance is also received. This paper tracks the employment outcomes of labour market programme participants utilising six waves of data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) database. Findings from a random effects model suggest that housing assistance status has little impact (either negative or positive) on employment outcomes. Differences in the institutional arrangements governing access to housing assistance could be responsible for the absence of any effect in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Resettlement of former offenders and their ongoing desistance from further offending should be a priority for any community, but in many countries criminal records are increasingly accessed in employment and other decision making. The criminal record then becomes an indelible brand, undermining rehabilitation and making reoffending more likely. Common law-based countries such as the UK and Australia demonstrate this phenomenon more clearly than some mainland European countries, and political and cultural factors are clearly relevant. This paper addresses the scope in Australia for rehabilitation processes that might contribute to the desistance process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the geography of corporate headquarters in the Australian urban system, giving consideration to their location, control of capital and performance. The paper argues that, while considerable recent attention has been given to global cities in the networks of corporate power, the spatial organisation of company headquarters remains important within national urban systems. In the case of Australia, Sydney and Melbourne dominate the corporate landscape, although the smaller cities of Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth occupy important niches. The paper demonstrates that there are clear variations in the relative performance of companies across the Australian urban system. There is also a pattern of sectoral specialisation within Australia’s cities which, in part, helps to explain the different development trajectories and relative levels of corporate performance. The paper concludes by exploring some of the implications of the study for the understanding of urban systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]