171 resultados para political union


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The purpose of this paper is to explore the changing nature of employee voice through trade union representation in the retail industry. The retail industry is a major employer in the UK and is one of the few private sector service industries with union representation (Griffin et al 2003). The requisite union: the Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW) union is one of the biggest unions in the country. However, the characteristics of the industry provide unique challenges for employee voice and representation including: high labour turnover; high use of casual, female and student labour; and, variable levels of union recognition (Reynolds et al 2005). Irrespective of these challenges, any extension of representation and organisation by unions in the retail sector is inherently valuable, socially and politically, given that retail workers are often categorised as vulnerable, due to the fact that they are among the lowest paid in the economy, sourced from disadvantages labour markets and increasingly subject to atypical employment arrangements (Broadbridge 2002; Henley 2006; Lynch 2005; Roan 2003).

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The 2007 Australian Federal election not only saw the election of a Labor government after 11 years of John Howards conservative Coalition government. It also saw new levels of political engagement through the Internet, including the rise of citizen journalism as an alternative outlet and mode of reporting on the election. This paper reports on the You Decide 2007 project, an initiative undertaken by a QUT-based research team to facilitate online news reporting on the election on a hyper-local, electorate-based model. We evaluate the You Decide initiative on the basis of: promoting greater citizen participation in Australian politics; new ways of engaging citizens and key stakeholders in policy deliberation; establishing new links between mainstream media and independent online media; and broadening the base of political participation to include a wider range of citizen and groups.

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Network crawling and visualisation tools and other datamining systems are now advanced enough to provide significant new impulses to the study of cultural activity on the Web. A growing range of studies focus on communicative processes in the blogosphere including for example Adamic & Glances 2005 map of political allegiances during the 2004 U.S. presidential election and Kelly & Etlings 2008 study of blogging practices in Iran. There remain a number of significant shortcomings in the application of such tools and methodologies to the study of blogging; these relate both to how the content of blogs is analysed, and to how the network maps resulting from such studies are understood. Our project highlights and addresses such shortcomings.

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There is a need to take a fresh look at the traditional application of the marketing concept to political marketing. As many businesses have learned, Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) practices and principles will help them to build customer relationships and profitable brands. Political marketing must also change with the times and implement IMC practices toward building and nourishing brand relationships with voters and other important stakeholders. The nature of the contribution of this paper is the identification of a gap in the political marketing literature - the stagnation of political marketing at the 4P's marketing concept, and to play a role in the future development of political marketing. In recent developments, it is seen that there is a gradual movement away from this traditional marketing theory. There are a growing number of academics who have approached very closely to the IMC concept or aspects of it, but have not however embraced or have been reluctant to, the prospect of applying it to political marketing. IMC is a practical, logical and ultimately inevitable future for political marketing.

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This paper draws on a study of gender and politics in the Australian parliament in order to make a contribution to methodological debates in feminist political science. The paper begins by outlining the different dimensions of feminist political science methodology that have been identified in the literature. According to this literature five key principles can be seen to constitute feminist approaches to political science. These are: a focus on gender, a deconstruction of the public/private divide, giving voice to women, using research as a basis for transformation, and using reflexivity to critique researcher positionality. The next part of the paper focuses more specifically on reflexivity tracing arguments about its definition, usefulness and the criticisms it has attracted from researchers. Following this, I explore how my background as a member of the Australian House of Representatives from 1987 to 1996 provided an important academic resource in my doctoral study of gender and politics in the national parliament. Through this process I highlight the value of a reflexive approach to research.

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This paper is a comparative exploratory study of the changing nature of employee voice through trade union representation in the retail industry in the UK and Australia. In both countries, the retail industry is a major employer and is one of the few private sector service industries with significant union membership (Griffin et al 2003). The relevant unions, the Distributive and Allied Workers Union (USDAW) and the Shop, Distributive and Allied Union (SDA), are the fourth largest and largest unions in the UK and Australia respectively. However, despite this seeming numerical strength in membership, the characteristics of the industry provide unique challenges for employee voice and representation. The significance of the study is that any extension of representation and organisation by unions in the retail sector is valuable socially and politically, given that retail workers are often categorised a s vulnerable, due to their low pay, the predominance of disadvantaged labour market groups such a s women and young people, workers atypical employment arrangements and, in the case of the UK, variable levels of union recognition which inhibit representation (Broadbridge 2002; Henley 2006; Lynch 2005; Roan & Diamond 2003; Reynolds et al 2005). In addition, specifically comparative projects have value in that they allow some variables relating to the industry to be held constant, thus reducing the range of potential explanations of differences in union strategy. They also have value in that the research partners may be more likely to notice and problematise taken-for-granted aspects of practices in another country, thus bringing to the fore key features and potentially leading to theoretical innovation. Finally, such projects may assist in transnational diffusion of union strategy.

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In this chapter, ideas from ecological psychology and nonlinear dynamics are integrated to characterise decision-making as an emergent property of self-organisation processes in the interpersonal interactions that occur in sports teams. A conceptual model is proposed to capture constraints on dynamics of decisions and actions in dyadic systems, which has been empirically evaluated in simulations of interpersonal interactions in team sports. For this purpose, co-adaptive interpersonal dynamics in team sports such as rubgy union have been studied to reveal control parameter and collective variable relations in attacker-defender dyads. Although interpersonal dynamics of attackers and defenders in 1 vs 1 situations showed characteristics of chaotic attractors, the informational constraints of rugby union typically bounded dyadic systems into low dimensional attractors. Our work suggests that the dynamics of attacker-defender dyads can be characterised as an evolving sequence since players' positioning and movements are connected in diverse ways over time.

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The range of political information sources available to modern Australians is greater and more varied today than at any point in the nations history, incorporating print, broadcast, Internet, mainstream and non-mainstream media. In such a competitive media environment, the factors which influence the selection of some information sources above others are of interest to political agents, media institutions and communications researchers alike. A key factor in information source selection is credibility. At the same time that the range of political information sources is increasing rapidly, due to the development of new information and communication technologies, audience research suggests that trust in mainstream media organisations in many countries is declining. So if people distrust the mainstream media, but have a vast array of alternative political information sources available to them, what do their personal media consumption patterns look like? How can we analyse such media consumption patterns in a meaningful way? In this paper I will briefly map the development of media credibility research in the US and Australia, leading to a discussion of one of the most recent media credibility constructs to be shown to influence political information consumption, media scepticism. Looking at the consequences of media scepticism, I will then consider the associated media consumption construct, media diet, and evaluate its usefulness in an Australian, as opposed to US, context. Finally, I will suggest alternative conceptualisations of media diets which may be more suited to Australian political communications research.

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In the region of self-organized criticality (SOC) interdependency between multi-agent system components exists and slight changes in near-neighbor interactions can break the balance of equally poised options leading to transitions in system order. In this region, frequency of events of differing magnitudes exhibits a power law distribution. The aim of this paper was to investigate whether a power law distribution characterized attacker-defender interactions in team sports. For this purpose we observed attacker and defender in a dyadic sub-phase of rugby union near the try line. Videogrammetry was used to capture players motion over time as player locations were digitized. Power laws were calculated for the rate of change of players relative position. Data revealed that three emergent patterns from dyadic system interactions (i.e., try; unsuccessful tackle; effective tackle) displayed a power law distribution. Results suggested that pattern forming dynamics dyads in rugby union exhibited SOC. It was concluded that rugby union dyads evolve in SOC regions suggesting that players decisions and actions are governed by local interactions rules.

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This essay--part of a special issue on the work of Gunther Kress--uses the idea of affordances and constraints to explore the (im)possibilities of new environments for engaging with literature written for children (see Kress, 2003). In particular, it examines a festival of children's literature from an Australian education context that occurs online. The festival is part of a technologically mediated library space designated by the term libr@ry (Kapitzke & Bruce, 2006). The @ symbol (French word "arobase") inserted into the word library indicates that technological mediation has a history, an established set of social practices, and a political economy, which even chatrooms with "real" authors may alter but not fully supplant.

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An emergent form of political economy, facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICTs), is widely propagated as the apotheosis of unmitigated social, economic, and technological progress. Meanwhile, throughout the world, social degradation and economic inequality are increasing logarithmically. Valued categories of thought are, axiomatically, the basic commodities of the knowledge economy. Language is its means of exchange. This paper proposes a sociolinguistic method with which to critically engage the hyperbole of the Information Age. The method is grounded in a systemic social theory that synthesises aspects of autopoiesis and Marxist political economy. A trade policy statement is analysed to exemplify the sociolinguistically created aberrations that are today most often construed as social and political determinants.

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Hypercapitalism, with its "knowledge economy", is the form of capitalism under which thought itself is produced, commodified, and exchanged within the globally integrated system of communication technologies. As such, hypercapitalism may be seen as not so much a revolution, but rather an evolution: the progressively thorough, inexorable totalisation of social relations by Capital. The study on which this paper is based synthesises the sociological perspectives of Marx (1970, 1844/1975, 1846/1972, 1976, 1978, 1981) and Adorno (1951/1974, 1991; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944/1998), and the Critical Discourse perspectives of Fairclough (1989, 1992) and Lemke (1995) to argue that alienated thought and language are the fundamental, irreducible commodity-forms of Cybersocietys knowledge economy.