Aspects of comparative active citizenship

This paper reports results from surveys of community organisation members, workers and volunteers designed to measure aspects of active citizenship in four locations: Ballarat (Australia); Norwich and Downham Market (England), and Mitischi (Russia). These data are drawn from an ongoing comparative study that will include six countries in the final analysis. The aggregated data considered here lend support to propositions that tolerance is positively associated with both civic participation and trust but do not show evidence for association between civic participation and trust. However, the existence of considerable locality level variation underlines the importance of taking context into account when assessing the role and nature of civic participation. Across the four locations, two broad patterns of (relative) active citizenship are described by means of a typology of active citizens. Predictors of tolerance and civic participation are identified through standard multiple regressions. It is concluded that future research needs to uncover the explanatory factors that lie behind these representations and which could further specify not just the similarities but also the differences between the locations.

Exploring the relationship between customer loyalty to the service worker and customer citizenship behaviors to the service organization

This paper conceptualizes the positive relationship between customer loyalty to the service worker (personal loyalty) and customer citizenship behaviors to the service organization including: positive word of mouth; suggestions for improvements; customer participation in activities; benevolent acts of service facilitation; customer policing; customer flexibility; customer voice and displays of relationship affiliation.

Civil society and global governance : the possibilities for global citizenship

In this article we reassert the role of governance as well as of civil society in the analysis of citizenship. We argue that to analyse global civil society and global citizenship it is necessary to focus on global governance. Just as states may facilitate or obstruct the emergence and development of national civil society, so too global governance institutions may facilitate or obstruct an emerging global civil society. Our key contention is that civil society at the global level thrives through its interaction with strong facilitating institutions of global governance. We start with a discussion of civil society and citizenship within the nation-state, and from there develop a model of global civil society and citizenship. Through analysing the impacts of various modes of global governance, we identify strategically appropriate forms of political and social engagement that best advance the prospects for global citizenship.

Australian citizenship and the two World Wars

This article surveys Australian citizenship: its distinctive characteristics in the first half of the twentieth century, and how these were changed by the experience of the two world wars. It argues that Australian citizenship, at the time of Federation, was racially exclusive, imperial, masculine and deeply anchored in the traditional view of the military obligation of the individual to the state. The world wars, especially the war of 1939-45, encouraged some adjustment to these ideas, particularly in terms of the imperial link, women's status and the social rights of Australians. However, these conflicts were fought within a context of imperial loyalty and the intensity of their demands reinforced military service in defence of the nation as the primary civic virtue. The centrality of Anzac to Australian nationalism also perpetuated a gendered dimension to Australian citizenship. The world wars therefore, for all their dramatic impact on the lives of Australian families and the national political culture, did not force a major reconceptualisation of Australian citizenship.

Citizenship for the future - educating the adolescent in 1960s Australia

This paper explores the planning of adolescent subjectivity in Australian education during the 1960s and 70s in relation to citizenship formation. Citizenship encompasses questions about social values and subjectivity - the kind of people adolescents will become. Debates in Australian education during this time convey ambivalence towards modernity and change, with adolescents both exhorted to abide by existing social values, and to embrace the future of changed values. The paper first maps some of the dominant concerns about managing adolescents and their (desirable or lacking) capacities, set against a claimed collapse in social and personal values and the responsibility of schools to prepare adolescents for future citizenship. Second, key ideas that underpinned these debates - notably the future, role and socialization, and forms of reasoning derived from social psychology – are examined from a genealogical or Foucauldian perspective. Finally, the paper, as a part of an attempt to understand the history of the present, briefly raises some questions in relation to contemporary initiatives and concerns about citizenship and social values education.

Framing the discourses of harm and loss: a case study of power relations, mobile phones, and children in Australia

The current penetration of mobile phones in Australia is 92% and it records one of the world’s highest rates of ownership among children under 18. The paper reviews the literature on mobile phones and Australian children and examines the various discourses dominating the public debates; the systematic frames used in these discourses; and whose interests are served in the process. The frames discussed fall under the optimistic (gains); pessimistic (losses, costs or harms); pluralistic (technology per se is neutral but how it is used matters); historical development (skills learnt and the importance of using mobiles); futuristic predictions (promises and dangers for the future); current uses (connectivity, convergence and interactivity); and the techno-realist view (as a mixed blessing) views of technology. Taking the critical perspective and borrowing from Joshua Meyrowitz, the paper illustrates how mobile phones have eroded parental power over how, when, where and with whom their children communicate, surpassing adult supervision, intervention or knowledge, while at the same time, becoming a ‘digital leash’ for parents to re-establish their control an d an ‘umbilical cord’ for their off spring to remain connect! ed with parents, at all times.