Archive for the 'Sociology' Category

Writing the city

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Brisbane, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Life, Media, Photography and Urbanism
. 10 Comments

No, this is not, as you may expect a post about the recent Brisbane Writers Festival. They deserve a few brickbats in my opinion, for always scheduling the event just before the uni break at the very time when folks associated with universities find it very hard to find any time for extra-curricular stuff. A couple of weeks later, and they could instantly solve that “getting teh yoof” to attend thing and magic themselves up a crowd of uni students. Maybe some marketing wiz is reading this - if so, please take note!

What I actually wanted to share was a writing experience I really enjoyed. I was auditioning - as it were - providing a writing sample on demand - for a gig (which I got, and which I’ll talk about later on when I can link to the finished product). The brief was to write about something in Brisbane in a hundred words - a restaurant, a bar, a street, whatever. It’s really quite a neat exercise to try, particularly because what you are attempting to do is convey something of your own city, and something about the bits of it you love, to people who might have varying levels of knowledge and perhaps varying preconceptions.

So here’s my 98 words about The Alibi Room. I haven’t gone back and edited the passage, as I will be doing for the rest of what I’m writing for this project.

Continue reading ‘Writing the city’

The future of journalism - or its vanishing present

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Media and Sociology
. 0 Comments

As a supplement to my post on the Walkley Foundation Future of Journalism event I recently spoke at in Brisbane, here’s a link to the thoughts of my colleague and co-panelist Axel Bruns.

Terror academics! Feud!

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 1 day ago
in Authoritarianism, Education, Media, Security, Terrorism and War
. 58 Comments

My colleague Terry Flew takes a look on his blog at the latest controversy over teh evils of postmodernism (and neo-Marxism!) in academia. In regard to The Australian, he writes:

In two articles (Sat and Mon) referring to the Culture Wars and ‘Terror Academics’ , it discussed claims made in the most recent edition of Quadrant by James Cook University academic Mervyn Bendle that Tony Burke was ‘pro-terrorist’, and should not hold a position at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Flew goes on to say:

Whether a new McCarthyism is too strong a word for this is a moot point. What is apparent is that The Australian has taken on a extraordinarily partisan position in relation to scholarly disagreements, and is looking like a sounding-board for Quadrant and the Young Liberals. Bendle, Donnelly and Windschuttle have received a lot of space in its opinion pages, in what looks like an orchestrated campaign to use the paper to politically shape university teaching in directions that would be at odds with assumption about academic freedom.

I think that’s right, but there’s the added dimension here of links between the security state and academia, and also of the willingness of academics to prosecute basically private (and often employment related) disputes through the pages of the public press. The latter was a significant component of the attacks former QUT academics John Hookham and Gary Maclennan launched on Michael Noonan’s PhD project on disability and humour. It doesn’t appear to have occurred to Bendle, with all his complaints about so-called breaches of “scholarly etiquette”, that he might have committed one himself by attacking Burke publicly in such risibly inquisitorial terms.

Continue reading ‘Terror academics! Feud!’

The end of financialisation? II

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Economics, International, Markets, Media, Sociology and USA
. 62 Comments

As a supplement to earlier posts on the sociology of the global financial crisis from Kim and dk.au, I thought I’d note something very interesting written by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber. Farrell traces the shift in paradigm in the regulatory architecture of finance, one that has supplemented the first shift away from direct involvement of the state in economic ownership:

The second is more specific and recent – the tendency to replace ‘heavy-handed’ forms of regulation with ‘regulation with a light touch’ and self-regulation. This has been most marked in Anglo-American economies, but other countries (in continental Europe and elsewhere) have faced persistent ideological pressures to move in this direction. This is a large chunk of the so-called ‘reform’ agenda that the Economist magazine, the OECD and other such bodies keep pushing. Both of these shifts are largely ideological – that is, they gained much of their impetus from changes in the ideas which constitute policy-makers’ shared collective wisdom about how to deal with the economy.

The second shift (the reform agenda) is now a busted flush. Its proponents are in disarray (if I’m feeling in a vindictive mood, I may well buy a copy of the next Economist to see how its editorialists try to rationalize all of this).

Any reasonable assessment of the actions of the Fed and the US Treasury would suggest that they’re driven by confusion and are very much ad-hoc measures. Neither Bernanke nor Paulson seems to have much of a big picture grip, and politicians reciting “the fundamentals are sound” is clearly not going to cut the mustard now, even, as with John McCain, precipitating something of a backlash.

John Quiggin has speculated on how all this will play out. The confusion has led to some quite bizarre moments, such as pundits on Lateline Business declaiming “capitalism is in crisis” and “the financial markets may not be viable”. What we’re seeing - among other things - is a decomposition of that abstraction “the markets” and a reduction of these so-called impersonal forces to the panicked reactions of individuals. If Robert Skidelsky is right, and a tipping point has been reached, it begs a very big question, which Farrell answers in terms of process (because no one can know the outcome of such a fluid conjuncture). Continue reading ‘The end of financialisation? II’

The spirit of the Paralympics: Beijing 2008

Published
by
Kim
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Disability, Photography and Sport
. 3 Comments

I’m sorry that I didn’t get a chance to do as much Paralympics blogging as I intended. But I wanted to endorse all the sentiments on the last open thread. And - in an illustration of how much photography can speak - to share this image of Cuban athlete Yunidis Castillo winning the Women’s T46 200m final on the track. It’s one of the most powerful and beautiful images I can remember seeing. Credit goes to Laurent Baheux and the French Paralympics website, where you can see a much larger version of the image. [Another couple of photos of the race are here.]

The end of financialisation?

Published
by
Kim
2 weeks, 6 days ago
in Economics, Markets and Sociology
. 139 Comments

As a bit of a follow up to the recent posts here on the crisis in the financial markets, and in particular dk.au’s piece on the way “facts” work in collective economic behaviour, I wanted to draw attention, firstly, to a comment from John Quiggin:

Having reached this point, it’s hard to see how the US can turn back from a massive extension of financial regulation, starting with the derivative markets where AIG got into so much trouble, notably those for credit default swaps (CDS). Along with winding up the affairs of AIG, Lehman and others, the authorities will need to oversee an orderly unwinding of the transactions in these markets which they are now effectively guaranteeing. More generally, it’s time for a partial or complete reversal of the financialisation of the economy that took place after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system back in the 1970s.

That needs to be read in conjunction with a column in The Guardian by Robert Skidelsky, the distinguished biographer of Keynes. Skidelsky argues that we’re at a conjuncture - a tipping point where one “cycle of economic fashion” gives way to another.

Continue reading ‘The end of financialisation?’

Guest post by SocProf: When Management Creates Labour Pain

Published
by
Guest Poster
2 weeks, 6 days ago
in Activism, Authoritarianism, Ethics, Feminism, Health, Industrial Relations, International, Markets, Sociology and Women
. 20 Comments

MB writes: Lost, it would appear, in the government’s focus on productivity as the ruling motif of the workplace is any consideration of the human costs of work in the new economy. I had hoped that Julia Gillard might bring a focus on industrial democracy and the quality of working life to her role as Industrial Relations Minister, but, to date, that’s a hope that appears a futile one. Nevertheless, I agree with David Coats that we need to politicise “bad work”, as I’ve suggested before, and that may well be a contribution largely to be made by civil society. Anyway, when I read this post at The Global Sociology Blog, I thought it cohered well with this effort, and so I asked SocProf if we could post it at LP, and I’m delighted that she agreed.

Dominic Huez, an MD specialized in questions of labor-related medical conditions, has a book out, Souffrir au Travail: Comprendre Pour Agir, that connects illness and suffering to management practices. He recently had a chat hosted by Le Monde. Here is the digest version of what was discussed.

Rejecting “stress” as the proper concept to define his subject, Huez prefers to use “suffering at work” as the correct one that can be caused by a lack of recognition by one’s peers or bosses. In a very Durkheimian fashion, he explains that the dynamics of recognition are essential to one’s identity-at-work and to one’s health.

For Huez, there are two main mechanisms at the root of psychopathologies at work (in both senses):

Continue reading ‘Guest post by SocProf: When Management Creates Labour Pain’

The heroism of Malcolm Turnbull

Published
by
Paul Norton
3 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, History, Politics and Polls
. 69 Comments

The OO, without the slightest hint of self-parody, has indulged itself in an orgy of hagiography for new Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull, including the following offering from Paul Kelly:

Malcolm Turnbull is a natural leader: bold, clever and visionary… Turnbull fought a heroic campaign to win the republic. In the end he was damned by many republicans, none of whom made anything approaching Turnbull’s contribution and who made the absurd claim that Turnbull had been the architect of defeat (unlike those who actually supported the monarchy).

Students of 20th century history know that it is in the nature of personality cults to rewrite history. However, I cannot allow Kelly’s attempt to exonerate Turnbull’s misleadership of the Australian Republican Movement (admittedly, an organisation chockfull of followers eager to be misled) to go unanswered, not least because Turnbull’s “heroism” included, in November 1997, a gratuitous smear in the national media of a 19 year old Brisbane university student who had the temerity to run for election to the 1998 Constitutional Convention on an alternative republican ticket.
Continue reading ‘The heroism of Malcolm Turnbull’

Diagnosing Market Collapse

Published
by
dk.au
3 weeks ago
in Consumerism, Disasters, Government, Markets, Media and Policy
. 39 Comments

Whether exuberant or pessimistic, market expectations tend to gather momentum:

“It is a chicken-and-egg issue,” said Tanya Azarchs, an analyst at S&P. “When Lehman looks as if it’s having trouble raising capital, shares fall. When shares fall, raising capital by selling shares gets harder. Regardless of whether the rumour is true or not, in a way it becomes self-fulfilling.”

Continue reading ‘Diagnosing Market Collapse’

Crikey goes bloggy

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 1 day ago
in Blogging, Media, Politics and Sociology
. 16 Comments

I wasn’t the only person to notice on Friday night that Possum, The Poll Bludger and Andrew Bartlett (among others) popped up on a new blog platform at Crikey. One take on this move from Duncan Reilly - writing at The Inquisitr - was that it constitutes “a welcomed step in legitimizing blogging in Australia”. From my point of view, that’s the wrong way round. I very much doubt that any of those bloggers lacked “legitimacy” - Possum’s performance in outgunning the GG crew in the pseph analysis stakes, The Poll Bludger’s hosting of a rolling psephological conversation and the quality of the informational and analytical blogging he does and Andrew Bartlett’s commitment to a transparent and open political debate all have that quality in spades already.

I think what’s more significant here is a recognition from Crikey of a shift from a relatively static form of internet publishing to a more dynamic and interactive one. It’s a better model in some ways than cherry picking bloggers to write static articles, because it encompasses the whole context of the form.

There’s obviously also a commercial element in the decision - frequently updated sites with lively and long comments threads multiply the page views and thus the advertising revenue. And, as with the general trend towards blog networks, it should be possible for Possum and the rest of the mob to earn a modest living from what they do without all the hassles of being their own advertising agent, and to concentrate on the content and the community without being their own tech support. What will be interesting is the degree to which there’ll be a crossover from Crikey “readers” to Crikey blog participants/commenters.

What does this imply for the independent blogosphere? Continue reading ‘Crikey goes bloggy’

The Future of Journalism - reflections

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 2 days ago
in Blogging, Media, Politics and Sociology
. 33 Comments

As noted here and here, I attended the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism event in Brisbane yesterday. Courtesy of the lovely folks at the ABC, the sessions were all recorded and will be viewable online, so that absolves me from the difficult task of trying to reconstruct a session in which I was a panelist after the fact. So what I wanted to do in this post is thank the organisers of the day - particularly Jonathan Este of the MEAA - and of my session - particularly Cristen Tilley from the ABC as Chair and my co-panelists Axel Bruns from QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty and blogger/journalist Marian Edmunds - for what I found was a stimulating and enjoyable experience. I also wanted to note some reflections which were prompted by many of the discussions.

The caveat I want to enter before proceeding further is that there’s a real sense in which I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m not a journalist or a journalism educator, and I don’t think “citizen journalism” is the best way of conceptualising what I do in my online writing, even when it most closely approaches reportage. My stake in all this is really that of a citizen and that of a media participant, and precisely because participation is a better model for engament in/with the media now than “audience” or “reader”, I don’t regard myself as being a privileged participant in these conversations, let alone in some way representative of the figure of “the blogger” which is in a real way a mythical one. A lot of what I bring to all this is probably more to do with my background and worldview as a sociologist.

That takes me to the first point I want to make - as I argued previously, I think the “bloggers v. journos” stoush is badly framed and misses most of what’s actually going on. It’s also worth noting, as I did at the outset of the session yesterday, that the debate as it plays out in the opinion columns and (ironically) the “blogs” at The Australian is more accurately seen as a subset of the culture wars and a struggle for hegemony and control over information and analysis than anything much to do with either the conditions of media work or the “fourth estate” role that the media supposedly plays. But more on that later. A lot of actually existing journos aside from columnists and right wing editors aren’t actually suffused with antagonism for blogs. It’s also interesting, and here I’d refer to the paragraph above, that some bloggers or “web evangelists” have an equal stake in continuing the “journos v. blogger wars”. (But for those interested in the latest series of “blogs are no longer the future of journalism” pronunciatos from the “fact and balance” crew, see this post from Stilgherrian, and my previous post.)

Continue reading ‘The Future of Journalism - reflections’

Reassembling Journalism and Objectivity

Published
by
dk.au
3 weeks, 4 days ago
in Authoritarianism, Blogging, Climate change, Media, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 40 Comments

This is a very belated, ambitious response to the Future of Media 08 summit which I attended on behalf of LP.

We need facts.

They underpin all the modern abstract systems we’ve come to know, love and get angry with from time to time. So when facts collapse, we need publics more than at any other time to gather around, examine what went wrong and piece things and institutions together again. In this sense, the rise of projects reattaching facts to theory in recent decades probably corresponds to the decline of the liberal model of Journalism whereby the facts (’just the facts’) are disseminated. Continue reading ‘Reassembling Journalism and Objectivity’

Republicans have hijacked 9/11 remembrance and re-branded it as 9/11TM

Published
by
tigtog
3 weeks, 4 days ago
in Ethics, Foreign Elections, Language, Media, Nationalism, Terrorism, USA and War
. 18 Comments

An American tragedy made into a political commodity: top political commentator Keith Olbermann is distinctly unimpressed at the cynicism of the invocation of 9/11 at the Republican National Convention.

9/11 (TM) has made possible the greatest sleight-of-hand in our nation’s history.

The political party in office at the time of the attacks, at the local, state and national levels, the party which uniformly ignored the warnings and the presidential administration already through twenty percent of its first term and no longer wet behind the ears, have not only thus far escaped any blame for the malfeasance and criminal neglect that allowed the attacks to occur, but that presidency and that party, have managed to make it seem as if the other political party would be solely and irredeemably responsible for any similar catastrophe in the future.

The misrepresentations and manipulations of the terror of seven years ago are laid out clearly in Olberman’s analysis, starting with his contempt for the choice of Giuliani, who has no other bandwagon to ride other than 9/11, as a keynote speaker at the convention.

his childish, squealing, braying, Tourette’s-like repetition of 9/11 (TM), was greeted not as conclusive evidence that he is consumed by massive guilt - hard-earned guilt, in fact but rather as some kind of political tour-de-force, an endorsement of your Vice Presidential nominee, a rookie governor , a facile and slick con artist.

The blind endorsing the bland, to a chorus of 9/11 (TM), 9/11 (TM), 9/11 (TM.)

Your ringing mindless cheer of “We’ve Kept You Safe Since Then.” While nobody asks “doesn’t then count?”

All of this, sadistically disrespecting the dead of New York, and Washington, and Shanksville. Endorsed, Sen. McCain. Exploited, Sen. McCain. Trademarked, Sen. McCain by you.

Continue reading ‘Republicans have hijacked 9/11 remembrance and re-branded it as 9/11TM‘

Climate change and electoral politics

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 5 days ago
in Climate change, Federal Elections, Industrial Relations, Polls and Sociology
. 18 Comments

There’s lots more interesting stuff in this report at Australian Policy Online about two exit polls taken at the time of the 2007 federal election (and the AES), but this might be a relevant thing for Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong and the ALP to remember in the context of the emissions trading scheme and international negotiations on climate change response:

Industrial relations and global warming were key issues for the Labor voters who took part in all three polls, with two of the polls revealing that global warming was the prime concern among voters who changed their vote between the 2004 and 2007 elections.

The future of journalism in Brisbane

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 5 days ago
in Blogging, Brisbane, Media, Notices, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 13 Comments

As Kim mentioned the other day, the Future of Journalism roadshow is coming to Brisbane on Saturday, and I’m speaking on a panel at 2pm called “Bloggers: amateur netizens or professionals of the future?”… Full details of the program are here if you’d like to attend. Starting points (at this stage, anyway) for my contribution are over the fold. They’re very rough notes, pasted in with just a bit of an edit from an email thread with my co-panelists, so I’d be really grateful for input.

Continue reading ‘The future of journalism in Brisbane’