Sociology and Social Policy

Previous studies of ‘New Age’ travellers have paid no attention to generational differences within the travellers’ scene. This paper looks at these differences to reflect upon the new social movement (NSM) literature. It is argued that NSM theory only analyses those movements with ‘post-material’ concerns about culture, identity and symbolic challenges. It thus ignores less privileged movements which are concerned with apparently ‘traditional’ issues, such as survival, political opposition and citizenship rights. A number of such movements have emerged during the past few years in the wake of economic and social restructuring under post-Fordist conditions and the dismantling of a Keynesian-style welfare state that is associated with these processes. While the older generation of travellers was tied to the NSM movements and chose to move onto the road, the younger travellers have been forced to do so for lack of any reasonable alternative, having faced unemployment and homelessness in a post-Fordist/Keynesian era. They are, therefore, part of the contemporary movement scene to which ‘old’ issues are seemingly still applicable. The article concludes by showing how both the older and the younger travellers are now struggling to survive in the face of legislation which effectively criminalises their way of life.

This article offers a preliminary comparative account and evaluation of approaches to antisocial behaviour in New South Wales (NSW) in light of experiences under the more established British system. Specifically, it compares the British regime of 'Anti-Social Behaviour Orders' or ASBOs with the scheme of 'Youth Conduct Orders' in NSW. While the UK system is largely punitive, the NSW scheme seeks to integrate justice and welfare considerations, and to address the underlying causes of antisocial behaviour. However, because the nature and scope of antisocial behaviour are not clearly delineated, there is potential for the NSW system to suffer a similar fate as the UK system, which stands accused of 'criminalising incivility' and eliding antisocial behaviour and criminal conduct, thus undermining some of the traditional safeguards and protections that are integral to the administration of criminal justice.

Martin Luther King Jr understood the link between individual violence at home and state violence abroad. In part of his message that is often downplayed, he told an audience at Riverside Church, New York in 1967 that the promotion of nonviolent direct action (or the prevention of violent extremism) among young Americans depended on opposing the violence of US foreign policy in places like Vietnam. Arun Kundnani ends his book arguing this point remains as valid today in the global war on terror. Indeed, in many ways, the material presented in the book paints a depressingly familiar picture of state secrecy and surveillance, the normalisation of preventative measures in the post-9/11 era, governments instilling fear and anxiety across populations, and the criminalisation of formerly lawful activities. It is now beyond dispute that these developments have eroded human rights and civil liberties in Western societies. But they have also impinged, more broadly, upon social relations and p...

Vuosi 1900 oli tuskin ehtinyt käynnistyä, kun perjantaina 4. tammikuuta Keisarillisen Aleksanterin yliopiston konsistorin huoneeseen kokoontui innostunut ryhmä akateemista väkeä. Yliopiston rehtorin, professori Edvard Hjeltin johdolla valmistauduttiin poikkeukselliseen seremoniaan, jota varten konsistori oli asettanut valtuuskunnan. Arvovaltaiseen ryhmään kuuluivat professorit J. R. Danielson-Kalmari ja Ernst Gustaf Palmén, molemmat historioitsijoita, ja talousoikeuden ja kansantalouden professori Joel Napoleon Lang, joukko yliopiston muita opettajia ja tutkijoita sekä arkkipiispa Jakob Tengströmin perikunnan jäseniä. Mediatapahtuman luonnetta korosti se, että paikalle oli kutsuttu myös lehdistön edustajia, joiden tehtävä oli raportoida Suomen kansalle tapahtuman kulusta ja sen kulttuurisesta merkityksestä. 1 Juhlallisen seremonian syynä oli Suomen tieteen isäksi kutsutun Henrik Gabriel Porthanin (1739-1804) jälkeensä jättämä arkku, jonka avaamiseen liittyi ymmärrettävästi poikkeuksellisen suuria odotuksia. Porthan oli kuollut 16. maaliskuuta 1804, ja hän oli määrännyt testamentissaan Jakob Tengströmin järjestämään paperinsa kuoleman jälkeen. Samalla Tengströmin tuli saattaa aineisto Turun Akatemian haltuun. 2 Tengström oli juuri ennen Porthanin kuolemaa vuonna 1803 tullut Turun piispaksi ja akatemian varakansleriksi. 3 Tengström käsitteli Porthanin jälkeensä jättämiä papereita kolmetoista vuotta ja luovutti ne Akatemialle vasta vuonna 1817. Tammikuussa 1900 Uusimaa-lehti tulkitsi pitkän viiveen johtuneen Tengströmin varovaisuudesta. Lehti kirjoitti sarkastiseen tyyliin: Mutta, kuten tunnettu, piispa Tengström oli hyvin varovainen valtiomies. Melkein kaikki valtiomiehet ovat varovaisia, mutta hän oli vielä niistä erityisempi. Kolmentoista vuoden aikana järjesteli hän noita papereita ja vihdoin v. 1817 jätti ne lisän kanssa yliopistolle-käytettäväksikö? Eihän toki, silloinhan hän ei olisi ansainnutkaan varovaisen valtiomiehen nimeä. Hän kätki ne rautavanteilla vyötettyyn arkkuun ja pani määräyksen, että se 'Porthanin arkku' saadaan avata vasta v. 1900. 4

This Special Issue, Frontiers in Coronial Justice, reflects on the future of death investigation studies in the coronial context. Where the uptake of the death studies movement in the social sciences more broadly has expanded the interdisciplinary study of death, comparatively little attention has focused on the work of coroners or their death investigation practices. Important, but albeit ad hoc, contributions from the disciplines of medicine, law, public health and criminology, highlight both the possibilities for coronial scholarship and how coronial studies continue to percolate at disciplinary margins. And yet, there is growing social attention to death generally, from death cafés to death salons, and the 'positive death movement' more broadly. Society is clustering around conversations seeking social change in facing death, including preparatory discussions around end of life wishes and options. Yet, by their very nature, unexpected, sudden or violent deathsthose that fall under the jurisdiction of the coronerconstitute a distinct category of death; one that is, in many ways, incapable of being prepared for. Nevertheless, such deaths present instances of considerable medical, legal and social industry, with attendant issues around autopsy and inquests, for example. This industry is also changing, as coronial law and policy reform across international jurisdictions has refined, clarified and sought to evolve the coronial role. Together, these developments evidence why coronial law and practice deserve sustained attention. Correspondingly, a theme that unites the papers in this special issue is a greater appreciation of the principles and practices of coronial death investigation. It is intended that, by showcasing work that cuts across law, socio-legal studies, criminology and history, this Special Issue will contribute to delivering new frontiers in coronial research. At a snapshot, the genres of scholarly attention to the coronial jurisdiction are wide and varied. Coroners' work has intermittently piqued the attention of socio-legal scholars (e.g.

Sometimes secrecy in law is required to protect vulnerable witnesses or suppress sensitive evidence. However, particularly since the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, governments in liberal democratic societies have increased secrecy and the use of clandestine procedures under the pretext of safeguarding national security. In many instances, these developments have eroded civil liberties, infringed upon constitutional guarantees, and had negative effects on due process rights. In Australia, where individual rights and freedoms have only limited constitutional expression, it is hoped the doctrine of representative and responsible government will act as sufficient protection for human rights. Conversely, drawing on examples ranging from the regulation of immigration to the control of serious organised crime, this article proposes that escalating secrecy in the current era has a corrupting effect on democratic principles and the rule of law.

Australia's refugee policy can be characterized as crimmigration since it constructs asylum seekers as illegal and subjects them to indefinite detention in offshore processing centres where human rights abuses occur. In addition, Australia's highly secretive refugee processing arrangements in remote locations, where a multiplicity of state actors and private security firms are involved, makes human rights monitoring by lawyers, journalists, medical professionals and refugee advocates virtually impossible, and also means it is hard to assign responsibility for human rights violations under state-centric international law. Transparency and accountability are further impeded by the Australian state's creative use of law, or 'rule with law', to deter refugees and keep its border enforcement operations secret. While criminal prosecution under Australian federal law is conceivable, that is itself complicated by the fact human rights infringements have occurred wholly outside Australia. In light of these factors, and given the Australian Government refuses to change its asylum policy, this chapter considers some of the small ways both asylum seekers and employees resist significant levels of surveillance and control within detention centres, as well as some of the 'counterveillance' tactics, such as letter writing and social media messaging, they have employed to tell stories of detention centre conditions as a direct challenge to state secrecy.

A central argument of this article is that the exercise of police power in respect of protests is relatively autonomous of judicial pronouncements affirming or upholding rights of free speech and peaceful public assembly. Using mostly Australian examples, but also drawing on UK material and some American references, the article shows how protests have gone ahead regardless of prohibitions on mass gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic. In New South Wales, courts have sometimes allowed protests to proceed when public health experts have assessed the risk to community transmission of coronavirus to be sufficiently low. Notwithstanding that, as they did prior to the pandemic, police have moved to prevent protests and repress protestors. Accordingly, the article takes issue with the ‘negotiated management’ model of protest policing, which perpetuates a fiction of police-protestor cooperation. Indeed, protest policing has often been conflictual and heavy-handed, even militaristic, which...

Since the 1980s, changes in government policy, including legislation to enable third party insurance contracting, increased levels of state support for private health insurance, and public-private partnerships,  have encouraged corporate investment into the hospitals, medical centres, pathology laboratories and diagnostic facilities of the Australian healthcare system. Driven by the New Public Management (NPM) reform agenda (English 2005, p. 93), and in conformity with the contradictory and crisis-driven nature of neo-liberalism (Peck, Theodor & Brenner 2012, p. 25), the government’s explicit agenda of privatisation and marketisation has profoundly altered the way the system is financed and organised. The sector, once dominated by public and not-for-profit, charity or religious institutions, with their own distinct but complementary functions, has lost its universal character and been transformed into a highly-protected market system. This new system has been very much a creation of government, intent on building private healthcare and health insurance markets, and its presence raises questions about the financial sustainability of a system which is largely uncapped, and about the extent to which healthcare, driven by market rather than medical considerations, can continue to deliver the high quality, accessible healthcare services once envisaged under the concept of Medibank.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the Australian healthcare system and relevant policies. This leads on to an exploration of the history of private and public health insurance schemes, followed by the history of private and public healthcare services. These narratives reveal the extent to which the system has become corporatised and privatised, demonstrating the connections between government policy, the entry of corporate investment, the growth of for-profit organisations, and the changing balance between the private and public sectors. The chapter concludes by examining some of the implications of these changes for the healthcare budget, for the effective planning and delivery of services, and for access to essential healthcare services for all Australians.

In a context of marketisation and the growth of academic capitalism, universities are theorised to have become sites of contestation where the de-professionalisation of the academic profession has been envisaged as a possible outcome. Empirical examination based on interviews with staff from four disparate universities, reveals these struggles to be more accurately described as contests between the new professional managers and the established academic profession over control of the conditions of academic work, the production and dissemination of expert knowledge and the worksite itself. Pierre Bourdieu’s inter-linked concepts of capital, habitus and the field are employed to reveal the nature of this contestation, revealing a dynamic process in which academics innovatively respond to threats to reduce their autonomy, to increased levels of surveillance and a variety of constraints on practice. Bourdieu’s conceptual schema is then developed to focus on the way actors within the sector, through acts of both conformity and resistance, contribute collectively to the creation and growth of academic capitalism.

This paper 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.

Since the 1980s, universities in all countries have become subject to the increasing pressures of globalisation and marketisation. Despite rising concern amongst academic workers about these new conditions, their impact on the production of scholarly knowledge has yet to be fully assessed. This study draws on an analysis of journal publications to ascertain some of the effects of this new employment context on sociological practices and production ‘outputs’. The field selected for examination is the sociology of health and medicine: an arena of sociological investigation which has continued to thrive since the beginning of its institutionalisation process in the 1950s. Comparing the publications of authors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, findings suggest relationships between a sociologist’s location within the world knowledge system, their place in the university system and the knowledge they produce. Specifically, the study offers evidence for the impact of recent changes to the university system on sociological practices and the production of sociological theory. Some of the implications of these findings for the discipline are examined.

The production of sociological knowledge in Australian universities is explored through an empirical study of research papers published in a selection of academic outlets between 1960 and 2011. Drawing on theories concerning scholarly practices, institutional formation and the sociology of knowledge, questions are posed about the factors that shape and structure the production of sociological knowledge about health and medicine. The concept of intellectual schools is examined, with evidence sought for the presence of these ‘knowledge networks’ in the Australian context. The study suggests the formation and maintenance of schools are subject to structural factors within the university sector, specifically the relative wealth and prestige of the university and the dictates of the higher education market.

The relationships between disciplines and the institutions within which they are situated is a fertile area for researching the shaping of sociological knowledge. Applying theoretical insights from the sociology of knowledge, this paper draws on an empirical study of research publications in the sociology of health and medicine to show which institutions in the Australian context are most likely to use sociological theory. When the institutions are positioned within the global university ranking system, an inverse association between sociological theory and the relative wealth and prestige of the originating institution becomes evident. Some of the implications of this finding are discussed with reference to the on-going viability of disciplines.

This paper offers a study of the specialist field of the sociology of health and medicine, and examines its institutional development in Australia. A thesis is developed about the relationship between the field and the parent discipline of sociology. The formation of the discipline and the specialist field are proposed to have occurred in stages: the formative years, a period of inter-disciplinarity and collaboration, a stage of intensification and organisation, the years of institutional growth and specialisation, the decade of consolidation and fragmentation, and, its most recent phase, a time of ‘new’ internationalisation. Moreover, the institutionalisation of the sociology of health and medicine has closely followed the developmental trajectory of its parent discipline, even though its disciplinary boundaries have been, and continue to be, less rigid.