Description:
Neoliberalism emerged as a dominant doctrine of political-economic practice during the late 1970s. Its influence over the last three decades on social policy in both Western developed economies, such as the United States of America (USA or US) and Australia, and in developing economies, such as Chile and China, has been widely analysed but its influence on business-level industrial relations strategy is less well-known. Despite this limited understanding, its influence over management strategies cannot be ignored. Therefore, this paper aims to explore what might be regarded as neoliberal management strategies and practices. While this is a very broad canvas, this paper will focus specifically on management industrial relations strategies and practices in the US and Australian meat processing industries.
Description:
Neoliberalism would have us believe that we should each be someone who (a) accepts full responsibility for her life achievements and trajectory and is (b) able to rationally weigh choices objectively- consider risks, respond to incentives, etc - in order to maked the decisions that would best fulfil her desires. With this focus on the searching out and seizing opportunities for personal advancement , repsonsibility for success is considered to lie entirely with each individual as does failure. In this chapter -drawing on our combined 15 years plus of experience in teaching in applied ethics, risk management, and governance in Australian higher education institutions at undergraduated and post graduate levels- we wish to examine the process of engaging students in a process of values renegotiation. This is a process, which promotes and supports their shift from the indivualist orientation of neoliberalism to a relational virtues-based understanding of ethics, personal motivation, and leadership.
Description:
Public space is being increasingly managed by defensive architecture, surveillance and other subtle filtering mechanisms to make it more palatable and attendant to the needs of capital. This reinforces social boundaries, making space inhospitable to those people whose presence is not welcome, and serves to ‘discipline’ city inhabitants into primarily consumption based modes of interacting with and in the city. However, disenfranchised urban populations still find ways to exist in and navigate these spaces. The purpose of this article is to highlight these ways by introducing the concept of ‘desire lines’ as a means of overcoming or re-imagining defensive space. We use Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire as productive force, combined with De Certeau’s notion of ‘walking the city’, to explore how individuals and social movements might practically, and in a metaphorical sense, create new collective paths, creating ‘desire lines’ of resistance and change within what is often an increasingly unforgiving and dominated urban environment, created by and for capital at the expense of a vibrant public realm.
Description:
In Victoria, Australia, the family services system is characterised by high referral rates and ongoing challenges to meet the needs of families who are experiencing risks and vulnerabilities. These issues are demonstrating the fact that there is a need to strengthen the level of community support that is being provided to children and their families prior to the escalation of their circumstances. Although the current neoliberal family services system has a key policy priority of reducing and managing family risk and vulnerability, it is neglecting to account for what families no longer want or are yet to experience. This is a shortcoming that the research study that is the subject of this thesis has addressed. In the context of a place-based, government–industry–university collaboration, this research study used a human-centred design methodology to engage with eight parents who were living in the south-west region of Ballarat, Victoria – an area characterised by socio-spatial disadvantage – and receiving a family service. This research study collected data over two phases of investigation. First, it explored the parents’ conceptualisations and experiences of community support in semi-structured interviews. Second, in a design workshop and post-workshop feedback and review interviews, it examined their views, priorities and recommendations for how their self-defined communities might support them in ways that would meet their own and their families’ needs. The research study found that parents conceptualise and experience community support as primarily informal, relational and bound to interpersonal characteristics such as reciprocity, trust, connection and belonging. It also found that their key priorities were supporting their children’s needs, their growing minds and their social skills, as well as bringing people together to promote equality. The parents who participated in this study proposed four recommendations: address the systemic constraints that are impacting on social cohesion; provide more opportunities for parents to support each other; provide non-judgemental and tailored services that can be accessed as a last resort; and enable greater self-determination, equality, trust and safety. These recommendations indicate that parents do not view community support as synonymous with risk and vulnerability; rather, they consider such support enables transformative change to occur in spite of it. Therefore, this research study has provided an understanding of the support that Victorian families want from their communities and has indicated that the paradigms that underpin the family services system are potentially incompatible with parents’ needs and desires.
Description:
In Victoria, Australia, the family services system is characterised by high referral rates and ongoing challenges to meet the needs of families who are experiencing risks and vulnerabilities. These issues are demonstrating the fact that there is a need to strengthen the level of community support that is being provided to children and their families prior to the escalation of their circumstances. Although the current neoliberal family services system has a key policy priority of reducing and managing family risk and vulnerability, it is neglecting to account for what families no longer want or are yet to experience. This is a shortcoming that the research study that is the subject of this thesis has addressed. In the context of a place-based, government–industry–university collaboration, this research study used a human-centred design methodology to engage with eight parents who were living in the south-west region of Ballarat, Victoria – an area characterised by socio-spatial disadvantage – and receiving a family service. This research study collected data over two phases of investigation. First, it explored the parents’ conceptualisations and experiences of community support in semi-structured interviews. Second, in a design workshop and post-workshop feedback and review interviews, it examined their views, priorities and recommendations for how their self-defined communities might support them in ways that would meet their own and their families’ needs. The research study found that parents conceptualise and experience community support as primarily informal, relational and bound to interpersonal characteristics such as reciprocity, trust, connection and belonging. It also found that their key priorities were supporting their children’s needs, their growing minds and their social skills, as well as bringing people together to promote equality. The parents who participated in this study proposed four recommendations: address the systemic constraints that are impacting on social cohesion; provide more opportunities for parents to support each other; provide non-judgemental and tailored services that can be accessed as a last resort; and enable greater self-determination, equality, trust and safety. These recommendations indicate that parents do not view community support as synonymous with risk and vulnerability; rather, they consider such support enables transformative change to occur in spite of it. Therefore, this research study has provided an understanding of the support that Victorian families want from their communities and has indicated that the paradigms that underpin the family services system are potentially incompatible with parents’ needs and desires.
Description:
Neoliberalism emerged as a dominant doctrine of political and economic practice in the US and Australia during the late 1970s. Its influence over the last three or four decades on economic and social policy in both western developed economies and in developing economies has been widely analysed, but its influence on business-level industrial relations strategy is less wellknown. Despite this limited understanding, its influence over management strategies cannot be ignored. Therefore, this chapter aims to explore what might be regarded as neoliberal management strategies and practices, particularly in an industrial relations framework. While this is a very broad canvas, the focus will be specifically on management industrial relations strategies and practices in the US and Australian meat processing industries, as a case example of how neoliberalism has affected the world of work.
Description:
Insecurity is no longer a condition that is specific to a set class of workers it has become a global issue. It can affect workers of any age, gender or ethnicity, across industrial or service sectors, and even our universities are no longer safe from casualisation, underemployment and outsourcing. To be sure, employment has always had elements of precariousness associated with it, particularly in the primary sectors. However, the steady intensification of capitalism around the world, and its intrusion into almost every facet of human endeavour, has meant that precarious work, as Arne Kalleberg writes, 'has become much more pervasive and generalized: [even] professional and managerial jobs are also precarious these days'. The telltale signs of precarity, such as insecurity, uncertainty and atomisation/individualisation, are frequently associated with the neoliberalisation of global societies. The twin mantras of flexibility and mobility across the economic market are further evidence of neoliberal principles, as an increasingly casualised work force allows employers the flexibility to shed and acquire labourers in accordance with the demands of capital rather than any humanitarian concern.
Description:
In recent decades, the governance of arts and culture in Australia has been dominated by the “creative industries” model, which is a market-driven approach to cultural policy that seeks to bring together those workers who operate in the realm of creativity with those who have the knowledge and resources to monetise their creative output. The increased focus on market outcomes has resulted in the need for arts organisation to pay much greater attention to developing audiences and cultivating consumers for the arts. However, strikingly absent from much of the discussion concerning audience development in the arts has been the voices of the artists and arts workers themselves, whose work sits at the very heart of any relationship with the audience. The research study that is the subject of this thesis sought to better understand the audience relationship from the perspective of artists and arts workers operating in Melbourne’s small-to-medium performing arts sector, which is a not-for-profit niche of the performing arts industry that has been charged with creating new works and pushing creative boundaries. In light of the increasingly marketised environment for cultural production, the study asked two broad questions: How do these arts professionals conceptualise their relationship with the audience?; and What role do they envisage for the performing arts in their communities? Through individual interviews and a series of group discussions occurring over a 12-month period between 2017 and 2018, arts professionals from the small-to-medium performing arts sector in Melbourne, Australia, discussed the ways in which the rise of the market-oriented creative industries had been impacting on their understanding of, and relationship with, the audience. The study found that the growing demands of the market and the commodification of artistic work had, for many arts professionals, increased the sense of distance between the artist and the audience and had resulted in confusion over the role and value of art in contemporary society. Despite this, arts workers, through their craft, were seeking greater engagement with their communities and were contributing to a more diverse and robust public sphere. As the authors and architects of the aesthetic experience, artists, arts workers and arts organisations have a profound impact in shaping the audience’s understanding of, and relationship with, the arts (Belfiore & Bennett, 2008). Yet much audience development research and practice has focused on understanding the attitudes and motivations of audience members in relation to the arts and ignored or minimised the important contribution that artists themselves might be making to developing audiences. This study’s aim was to address a significant gap in the understanding of the needs and motivations of arts professionals with regard to their relationship with the audience, and, in so doing, argued for a re-imagining of the field and practice of audience development that considers the needs of both the producers and consumers of culture.
Description:
In recent decades, the governance of arts and culture in Australia has been dominated by the “creative industries” model, which is a market-driven approach to cultural policy that seeks to bring together those workers who operate in the realm of creativity with those who have the knowledge and resources to monetise their creative output. The increased focus on market outcomes has resulted in the need for arts organisation to pay much greater attention to developing audiences and cultivating consumers for the arts. However, strikingly absent from much of the discussion concerning audience development in the arts has been the voices of the artists and arts workers themselves, whose work sits at the very heart of any relationship with the audience. The research study that is the subject of this thesis sought to better understand the audience relationship from the perspective of artists and arts workers operating in Melbourne’s small-to-medium performing arts sector, which is a not-for-profit niche of the performing arts industry that has been charged with creating new works and pushing creative boundaries. In light of the increasingly marketised environment for cultural production, the study asked two broad questions: How do these arts professionals conceptualise their relationship with the audience?; and What role do they envisage for the performing arts in their communities? Through individual interviews and a series of group discussions occurring over a 12-month period between 2017 and 2018, arts professionals from the small-to-medium performing arts sector in Melbourne, Australia, discussed the ways in which the rise of the market-oriented creative industries had been impacting on their understanding of, and relationship with, the audience. The study found that the growing demands of the market and the commodification of artistic work had, for many arts professionals, increased the sense of distance between the artist and the audience and had resulted in confusion over the role and value of art in contemporary society. Despite this, arts workers, through their craft, were seeking greater engagement with their communities and were contributing to a more diverse and robust public sphere. As the authors and architects of the aesthetic experience, artists, arts workers and arts organisations have a profound impact in shaping the audience’s understanding of, and relationship with, the arts (Belfiore & Bennett, 2008). Yet much audience development research and practice has focused on understanding the attitudes and motivations of audience members in relation to the arts and ignored or minimised the important contribution that artists themselves might be making to developing audiences. This study’s aim was to address a significant gap in the understanding of the needs and motivations of arts professionals with regard to their relationship with the audience, and, in so doing, argued for a re-imagining of the field and practice of audience development that considers the needs of both the producers and consumers of culture.
Description:
This paper looks at policy initiatives in the vocational education and training sector in Australia. The paper draws on exiting work on neoliberalism in education and its impact on VET in the Australian setting and adds some new insights into the working practices of coordinators in the Victorian setting (author abstract)
Description:
This paper looks at policy initiatives in the vocational education and training sector in Australia. The paper draws on exiting work on neoliberalism in education and its impact on VET in the Australian setting and adds some new insights into the working practices of coordinators in the Victorian setting (author abstract)