Accountability and the affective labour of teachers: a Marxist-Vygotskian perspective

This article addresses the issue of affective labour in education in the context of standards-based reforms and accountability. In particular, it focuses on neoliberal strategies of rationalization and control that produce a number of social pathologies, such as alienated teaching and learning and reified social relations between teachers and students. The article turns to affective labour as something that enables teachers to counteract these effects. This argument arises from the analysis of interviews with teachers who continue to generate and sustain the sociality of teaching and learning. Affect directs teachers’ commitment to practice that is governed by feeling, passion and the ethics of care. What gives affective labour such an important position is that it is both outside and beyond accountability and performativity measures. It is identified with the general pedagogical activity that cannot be structured by measuring devices such as students’ test scores or standards. The article concludes with the application of Vygotsky’s ideas about the role of affect in education and argues that affective labour has an expansive power of ontological freedom that cannot be controlled. of ontological freedom that cannot be controlled.

Lost in translation? Emotional intelligence, affective economies, leadership and organizational change

Not until the late 1990s did the rational/emotional binary embedded in mainstream literature on educational leadership and management come under challenge. Now the emotional dimensions of organisational change and leadership are widely recognised in the leadership, organisational change and school improvement literature. However, the dissolution of the binary did not draw from feminist social theory, critical organisational theory, the sociology of emotions or critical pedagogy. Instead, the strongest influence in educational leadership and administration has been from psychological theory, management theory and brain science, mobilised particularly through Goleman's notion of emotional intelligence. This article undertakes a feminist deconstruction of two texts: one from organisational theory by Goleman and the other on educational leadership and school improvement, in order to explore how ‘emotion’ has been translated into educational leadership. As a counterpoint, I identify the gaps and silences, appropriations and marginalisation identified from feminist perspectives. I argue that the emotional labour of teaching and leading cannot be individualised because emotion is both relational and contextual.

Biography and the project of labour history: Marxist anticipations and Australian examples

The popularity of biography among the general public and historians has been despite a theoretical ambivalence among historians about the validity of the project. This has particularly been the case for labour historians who aspire to write the history of a class rather than that of individuals. This article identifies two divergent traditions within labour biography, broadly defined as reflection on the role of the individual in historical movements. One, uniting traditional Marxists and labourists, regards individuals as no more than the symbol of a class. Examples are Karl Kautsky and in Australia Fin Crisp. Another, unites activist revolutionaries and revisionist social democrats, and argues that the individual can make a difference. Examples include Trotsky and in Australia the young Evatt and Gordon Childe. Political disillusionment encouraged both Childe and Evatt to move towards the determinist position. This article suggest that recent discussions of the inherently divided nature of the self may offer an alternative to both these positions.

Re-gendering labour: class and gender determinants of New South Wales electoral behaviour 1930-32

Historians have neglected tbe impact of female enfranchisement on Australian electoral outcomes. This papers employs multivariate analysis to explore electoral behaviour in New South Wales during the Great Depression. It argues that women were less prone to support Labor than men, but that women in paid employment constituted a partial exception to this pattern. In 1932 the conservative parties significantly eroded Labor's working-class support. Part of this success was due to the ability of employers to coerce workers with the threat of dismissal. Female wage earners were particularly vulnerable to this coercion. Conservative electoral appeals recast masculinity in terms of family responsibility rather than class assertion. Conflict in the household economy possibly influenced women to vote against Labor due to its identification with the cause of male breadwinners. Overall female voting behaviour was more stable than that of men and this despite the higb profile of issues that would have been expected particularly to influence female voters.

A model of the affective and congnitive events in expatriate assignments

In this paper, we take a step toward explaining how events occurring within the expatriate assignment are perceived and interpreted. In particular, we consider the conditions under which individuals perceive hassles and uplifts during intercultural interactions as a cognitive or affective event and, how the type of event influences the outcomes associated with a given event. In doing so, we develop a model to propose how characteristics of the perceiver and the event influence whether interactions in the expatriate assignment are perceived as a cognitive or affective event and, how the type of event influences the outcomes associated with a given event.

Case note - Roosters, ducks and labour hire arrangements : Damevski v Guidice (2003) 202 ALR 494 (FCA Full Court)

One of the features of the current Australian labour market is the growth in the number of businesses "contracting out" work that was previously performed by their employees. The "contracting out" is often done through labour hire arrangements: the business engages a labour hire agency to provide it with suitable labour on an "as needs" basis. A common scenario is that the labour hire agency contracts both with the workers who provide the services to the agency's client, and with the client to whom those services are provided. Often the agency pays the workers and bills its client for the labour costs, plus a service fee. Research indicates that during the first half of the 1990s, "the number of agency workers more or less doubled."1 Analysis of the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics on the number of workers employed through labour hire arrangements has suggested: "290,100 employees were 'on-hired' through agencies in June 2002 and 162,000 workers were paid by labour hire firms in November 2001 (almost doubling from 84,300 some three years earlier)." The value of the employment services industry in 2001-02 was $10.2 billion. 2

In the service of the society: the labour management practices of an Australian life Insurer to 1940

This article considers the labour management practices in use in the Australian life insurance industry during the inter-war period. Using the Australian Mutual Provident as a case study, it is argued that the specific human resource management practices evolved to deal with separate sets of problems arising from the functions of the life insurance business and the manner in which the principal/agent problem was manifested. The differing nature of work associated with the sales and management of life insurance fostered the development of primary and secondary labour markets in which the benefits flowing to one were superior to those accruing to the other.

Labour hire employment and independent contracting in Australia: two inquiries, how much change?

In the past 18 months, two inquiries into labour hire employment have been held in Australia. The first was conducted by the Victorian Parliament's Economic Development Committee, and reported in June 2005. The second, the Federal Government's House of Representatives Standing Committee Inquiry into Independent Contracting and Labour Hire Arrangements, reported in August 2005. This review outlines the findings of those inquiries, and questions the extent to which they have contributed to improving protection for vulnerable workers. It commences with the Victorian inquiry, then turns to the Federal inquiry. Common themes are drawn together in the concluding discussion.

Transitional labour markets : a social investment and risk mitigation strategy for social policy

Drawing on transitional labor market (TLM) theory, this introductory chapter highlights major themes, overviews the contributions to this volume and suggests a future agenda for policy makers. The focus of applied research projects has been the impact of post-modem social transformations on systems of social protection, looking through the lens of the labor market and shifts in household and family structure. The Transitional Labor Market project uses the TLM model as a means of developing new thinking on how flexibility and innovation might be paired with social investment and new forms of social protection. TLM theory emphasizes the importance of institutions and of the links between different institutions which frequently operate as policy silos, rather than integrated systems to buffer risks and support capability and enhance employability. The great advantage of the TLM model is that it draws attention to the right places for strategic reform. It does not offer a standard set of institutions to facilitate transitions however.

The Chinese state enterprise sector: labour market reform and the impact on male-female wage structure

The paper examines the wage structure in the Chinese state enterprise sector between 1981 and 1987. This period is of particular interest given the introduction of major labour market reforms in China during the early 1980s. In essence the reforms represented a movement away from administratively determined prices towards a market–oriented system combined with a relatively flexible system of labour allocation. The Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1991) decomposition is employed to shed light on the role of changing labour market institutions over the period.

Labour market institutions and the gender wage gap in Britain and Australia, 1973-90

The importance of wage structure is frequently interpreted as indirect evidence of the role played by labour market institutions. The current paper follows in this tradition, examining the role of wage structure in explaining the trend in the gender wage gap over the period 1973–91 for both Australia and the UK. The focus is upon whether changes in wage structure (and associated gender wage gap) both across country and over time are compatible with institutional explanations. Combining comparisons both cross‐country and over time yields a more stringent, albeit indirect, test of the role of institutions.

The effects of unions on labour productivity: a meta-analytic review

The impact of unions on productivity has been an important area of debate in
industrial relations and economics. The theoretical and empirical literature has produced conflicting results. In this paper, meta-analysis is used to quantify the association between unions and productivity and reach a quantitative assessment of the empirical literature. The results suggest that the union-productivity association is not invariant, and is country, industry and time specific.