Corporate social responsibility, new activism and public relations

Purpose – This paper aims to analyse why some contemporary corporate organisations are reluctant to articulate the effect of their market positioning behaviour on the unwilling communities that oppose their activities. It describes the communicative interactions between several large corporate organisations and the grassroots activist groups opposing their activities, in Victoria, Australia.

Design/methodology/approach – Extensive secondary data were collected, including extensive newspaper and radio transcripts from the campaign periods, web site downloads, letters and other campaign documents. The research design applied to the data, a qualitative, interpretative analysis, drawing on key theoretical frameworks.

Findings – The research findings suggest that powerful protest strategies, combined with the right political and social conditions, and a shift in the locus of politics and expertise, bring to light public concerns about the ethics of corporate practices, such as public relations, used egocentrically by organisations, to harmonise their activities in late modern Western society. It finds that no serious overhaul of business ethics can occur until the unity of public relations is critically scrutinised and reformed. It helps define an alternative holistic communicative approach which could be applied more widely to business practice that helps avoid the limitations and relativism of public relations.

Originality/value – The research flags new ways of thinking expressed in the notion of public communication that could lead to creative and unusual coherences vital to deal with the apparent ecological challenges for society in late modernity.

Dialogical ethics in a global society : cultural difference and answerability

Debates about multiculturalism are common to many late-modern societies today. Globalization has triggered a massive flow of people across state borders, challenging and changing assumptions about national identities and cultural politics. How to deal with difference without reducing it to sameness is becoming one of the main issues discussed by policy-makers, researchers and educators. This paper argues for the importance of turning to dialogical ethics before developing and implementing largescale political strategies in managing differences. It draws on the ideas of Bakhtin and Levinas to transcend the notion of ‘caring at a distance’ that is embedded in the neo-liberal construction of moral selfhood. As an alternative, the emphasis is made on spatial proximity – on ‘face-to-face’ relations with alterity – to conceptualize the dialogical self who is both responsive to and responsible for the Other. Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act and Levinas’ ethics of responsibility are mutually enriching in thinking about the role of the dialogical self in building a pluralistic society. The paper concludes with the implications of dialogical ethics for multicultural education.

Editorial : the construction of academic literacy and difference

In recent years, academic literacy has been a subject of heated scholarly and political debates. How academic literacy is defined, whom it serves, and what its purposes are shape both educational policies and the pedagogical practices adopted in classrooms. Any definition of academic literacy, its purposes and its learners also constructs powerful notions of difference. For instance, many traditional definitions of academic literacy posit “out of school” literacy (or literacies) as its opposite; current literacy standards and performance measures create categories of students as able or struggling; and so on. At a time when English classrooms around the world are becoming more multicultural, multilingual and international, how might understandings of academic literacy respond to cultural, linguistic, gender, economic, (dis)ability and other differences? How can literacy be taught to difference without reducing it to sameness? Framing the curriculum around dominant cultural literacy and establishing communal homogeneity, whilst de-legitimizing the Other and announcing ever-new strangers, is not feasible in a new multilingual, multiculural order. There is an increasing need to resist conservative tendencies and to continue a socially critical model of literacy education that is more response-able to the lives of strangers and other forms of difference in a late-modern, globalized society at the same time that it provides opportunities for all students to expand their communicative repertoires and to gain agency in the “design of their social futures” (New London Group, 2000). Articles in this issue respond in different ways to this agenda.

Dossier Chris Marker : the suffering image

Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image is a study of a late-modern chiasmus, impersonal-personal agency, as it comes to expression in the works of French artist and filmmaker, Chris Marker, as the dynamic interplay of political and subjective agency. As chiasmus, the complementary halves of this often-apocalyptic dynamis (a semi-catastrophic, temporal or historical force-field) also – arguably – secretly agree to meet, through the work of art, in the futural. Consistent with the classical figure of concordia discors, these irreducible warring aspects of life experience are, in fact, resolved in an atemporal and ahistorical moment that inhabits the work of art from its inception. This redemptive aspect in art is also the ultimate gesture of the artwork as “mask” or “screen” for forces that reside beyond the frame of the image or work, as its proverbial Other, or within the frame, as other to that Other. A topological “knot,” or ontological “problem,” it is this very conflict that animates all of Marker’s extensive works – filmic and otherwise.

Paranormal politics and the romance of urban subcultures: youth mobility in Cassandra Clare’s and Melissa Marr’s fantasy texts

This essay examines the political and social significance of the intrusion of the supernatural into youth subcultures in two urban fantasy series: Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments and Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely. Both series represent the idea of human youth mobility and social affiliation based on volition. The tolerant urban spaces through which their girl protagonists initially move accommodate a diversity of subcultural aesthetics. By contrast, the supernatural subcultures with which these girls become involved are fraught with conflict, and the mobility of their members is limited. Drawing on post-subcultural theory, we identify a tension between late modern and premodern social organization and political values in contemporary urban fantasy for young adults and compare how it is resolved in Clare’s and Marr’s texts.

Social inclusion, social movements, and the characteristics of late modernity

In discussing the ideology of social inclusion, this paper demonstrates that the composition of community groups in a period of late modernity is worthy of consideration. Although it would appear, on the surface at least, that previously stable community institutions, such as family, organised religion, trade unions, occupation and residential stability, and so on, are being challenged by a broad rejection of the once powerful tool of tradition, society's attachment to a belief in the symbolic value of community remains strong. In an environment however, in which the interaction and interdependence of human activity is subject to continual re-evaluation as the current processes of industrialisation and globalisation unfold, the template of what constitutes 'community' may need to be re-defined. It is to this end that the present paper is concerned, in that it seeks to identify new community formations. Of particular interest, is the rise and reach of modern day 'social movements', and why, when analysing the subject from a macro-sociological perspective, they have come to assume such a pivotal role in occupying community spaces left vacant by the demise of traditional social institutions. The paper is exploratory in its focus, using relevant literature to posit some broad theoretical themes, with the aim of presenting such themes to encourage a shift in community debates away from traditional concerns about 'who' and 'how many', towards questions of why new community forms are emerging.

Organisational capabilities and the role of routines in the emergence of a modern life insurer : The story of the AMP

In 1954 the Australian Mutual Provident Society (AMP) undertook a major organisational restructure. This reform provided the foundation upon which the Society was able to develop into a diversified financial intermediary in the following decades. This paper investigates the changing organisational structure within Australia's largest life insurer as it evolved from a branch structure to a multi-divisional form of management in the 1950s. The specialisation encouraged by the divisional system allowed the development of higher order routines upon which the executive could draw. The resulting growth and sophistication of the organisation in the late 1950s ensured higher order routines were able to develop to promote further development.

People's war under modern conditions : an investigation into Chinese defence strategy, 1977-2049

This thesis is an investigation of the relevance of ‘people's war’ to contemporary Chinese defence policy. This loose concept has been eroded by 'modernity’, but a guerilla-based defence remains the essential theme. Prior to China's acquisition of nuclear weapons, people's war was the sole element of the state's deterrent policy, aiming to swamp an invader with China's numerical strength. In the 1980s and beyond people's war finds effectiveness through a combination of materiel of middle range technology and the traditional usage of massive manpower. People's war under modern conditions remains essentially defensive, but now incorporates 'active defence’ with accent on greater mobility. However, the central thesis of this work relates to how the traditional strategy may influence nuclear doctrine. This thesis proposes that China could abandon long-range ballistic missiles and adopt a new concept in nuclear strategy: that of, Guerilla Nuclear Warfare. Trained in guerilla tactics and equipped with battlefield nuclear weapons, this would represent the logical extension of China's people's war strategy to the new nuclear conditions associated with superpower research into space-based ballistic missile defences and which, in full deployment, could nullify a Chinese nuclear deterrent based only on 'mid-tech' delivery systems. Guerilla Nuclear Warfare, as a strategy, would involve the irregular use of locally held and controlled tactical nuclear weapons, but it would also be a method of circumventing the proposed Soviet missile defence shield by not challenging it. Guerilla Nuclear Warfare does not exist in the late 1980s, but evidence exists to suggest its development. It cannot yet be proven as the new direction but China's strategic circumstances add weight to available indications: unless the Strategic Defence programs of the established superpowers are arrested then it appears the sole option available to the Chinese for the maintenance of a nuclear deterrent in the early part of the 21st Century.

Controls on body size during the Late Permian mass extinction event

This study examines the morphological responses of Late Permian brachiopods to environmental changes. Quantitative analysis of body size data from Permian–Triassic brachiopods has demonstrated significant, directional changes in body size before, during and after the Late Permian mass extinction event. Brachiopod size significantly reduced before and during the extinction interval, increased for a short time in more extinction-resistant taxa in the latter stages of extinction and then dramatically reduced again across the Permian ⁄ Triassic boundary. Relative abundances of trace elements and acritarchs demonstrate that the body size reductions which happened before, during and after extinction were driven by primary productivity collapse, whereas declining oxygen levels had less effect. An episode of size increase in two of the more extinction-resistant brachiopod species is unrelated to environmental change and possibly was the result of reduced interspecific competition for resources following the extinction of competitors. Based on the results of this study, predictions can be made for the possible responses of modern benthos to present-day environmental changes.

Looking to Sweden in order to reconstruct Australia

The most prominent interest in the 'Swedish model' in Australian political history came after a high-level union delegation visit in 1986 produced a major report titled Australia Reconstructed, which had the nominal endorsement of the Labor Government then in office. However, at this very time, the characteristics of the Swedish policy approach which were most admired by the visiting Australian unionists were undergoing important changes, to which they paid little attention but which critics from the Right strongly emphasized in response.

The Australian labour movement interest in Sweden in the 1980s had some distinctive features. It focused on manufacturing industry and skills training policy, reflecting priorities of the main participating unionists. It was also particularly concerned with industrial democracy and work design, as a result of important earlier links between Swedish, Norwegian and Australian industrial relations scholars and practitioners which were forged from the late 1960s. Increased interest in Sweden partly arose from the search for a new political vision by particular elements of the Australian Left following their disillusionment with the Soviet Union after the 1968 Prague Spring.

This article presents the results of interviews with participants and extensive archival research to provide new information and perspective on Scandinavian influences on the Australian labour movement; and the political background of the main people involved.

It also analyzes how discussion of the 'Swedish model' receded in Australia following the economic setbacks of the early 1990s amid a perception that 'the model' had collapsed, but how policy interest in the continuing evident achievements of Sweden and the other Nordic nations has gradually re-emerged in Australia since then, though in a somewhat different way to before.

Popular fiction and the emotional turn : the case of women in late Victorian Britain

Many within the history profession today consider that we are experiencing an ‘emotional turn’, a perception that has been spurred by a recent proliferation of research centres and outpouring of publications exploring the concept of emotion. Interest in this field looks likely to grow, although there are methodological challenges that have yet to be overcome, as, of course, there are with any newly emerging field of study. One main concern is source material. Attempting to access such an elusive and intensely subjective area of historical inquiry as emotions requires seeking out new sources, as well as returning to old ones with a fresh eye, with new questions in mind. In the specific realm of the emotional lives of women living in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, fiction proves a promising source – popular fiction especially. This is due to the fact that this was the era that ushered in the modern bestseller, novels that more often than not explored the everyday and the emotional, novels that were thought to have been ‘devoured’ by women in particular. This essay plots recent developments in the burgeoning area of emotions history, as well as those that have taken place in relation to the use of fiction as evidence in a history of women’s interior lives. It argues that, at this point in the development of emotions history, when questions of methodology, interdisciplinarity and sources are being addressed more widely, consideration should be given to popular fiction as a readily available pathway, if not an uncomplicated one, into the emotions of the past.

Pliocene reversal of late Neogene aridification.

The Pliocene epoch (5.3-2.6 Ma) represents the most recent geological interval in which global temperatures were several degrees warmer than today and is therefore considered our best analog for a future anthropogenic greenhouse world. However, our understanding of Pliocene climates is limited by poor age control on existing terrestrial climate archives, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, and by persistent disagreement between paleo-data and models concerning the magnitude of regional warming and/or wetting that occurred in response to increased greenhouse forcing. To address these problems, here we document the evolution of Southern Hemisphere hydroclimate from the latest Miocene to the middle Pliocene using radiometrically-dated fossil pollen records preserved in speleothems from semiarid southern Australia. These data reveal an abrupt onset of warm and wet climates early within the Pliocene, driving complete biome turnover. Pliocene warmth thus clearly represents a discrete interval which reversed a long-term trend of late Neogene cooling and aridification, rather than being simply the most recent period of greater-than-modern warmth within a continuously cooling trajectory. These findings demonstrate the importance of high-resolution chronologies to accompany paleoclimate data and also highlight the question of what initiated the sustained interval of Pliocene warmth.