Family literacy practices and home literacy resources : an Australian pilot study

The combined impact of social class, cultural background and experience upon early literacy achievement in the first year of schooling is among the most durable questions in educational research. Links have been established between social class and achievement but literacy involves complex social and cognitive practices that are not necessarily reflected in the connections that have been made. The complexity of relationships between social class, cultural background and experience, and their impact on early literacy achievement have received little research attention. Recent refinements of the broad terms of social class or socioeconomic status have questioned the established links between social class and achievement. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to move beyond deficit and mismatch models of explaining and understanding the underperformance of children from lower socioeconomic and cultural minority groups when conventional measures are used. The data from an Australian pilot study reported here add to the increasing evidence that income is not necessarily related directly to home literacy resources or to how those resources are used. Further, the data show that the level of print resources in the home may not be a good indicator of the level of use of those resources.

Educational markets in space : gamekeeping professionals across Australian communities

This paper argues that the logic of neoliberal choice policy is typically blind to considerations of space and place, but inevitably impacts on rural and remote locations in the way that middle class professionals view the opportunities available in their local educational markets. The paper considers the value of middle class professionals’ educational capitals in regional communities and their problematic distribution, given that class fraction’s particular investment in choice strategies to ensure their children’s future. It then profiles the educational market in six communities along a transect between a major regional centre and a remote ‘outback’ town, using publicly available data from the Australian government’s ‘My School’ website. Comparison of the local markets shows how educational outcomes are distributed across the local markets and how dimensions of ‘choice’ thin out over the transect. Interview data offers insights into how professional families in these localities engage selectively with these local educational markets, or plan to transcend them. The discussion reflects on the growing importance of educational choices as a marker of place in the competition between localities to attract and retain professionals to staff vital human services in their communities.

Theorizing Police Response to Domestic Violence in Singapore: Police Subculture Revisited

This article focuses on the well documented, yet potentially contested concept of rank-and-file policesubculture to conceptualize policeresponse to situations of domesticviolence in Singapore. It argues that the utility of the concept to explaining police behavior is often undermined by an all-powerful, homogenous, and deterministic conception of it that fails to take into account the value of agency in police decision-making and the range of differentiated policeresponse in situations of domesticviolence. Through reviewing the literature on policeresponse to domesticviolence, this study called for the need to rework the concept of policesubculture by treating it as having a relationship with, and response to, the structural conditions of policing, while retaining a conception of the active role played by street-level officers in instituting a situational practice. Using Pierre Bourdieu's relational concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field,’ designating the cultural dispositions of policesubculture and structural conditions of policing respectively, the study attempted to reconceptualize the problem of policing domesticviolence with reference to the Singaporean context.

Emotions, Crime and Justice: Exploring Durkheimian Themes

The process of ‘emotionalization’ of law and criminal justice has decisively changed criminological perspectives on the role of emotions in crime and justice during the last decade. ‘Reintegrative Shaming’ and Restorative Justice have been influential in re-shaping criminal justice around the globe, and the ‘return of emotions’ into criminological perspectives, theories and research is presently re-configuring notions of the ‘rational offender’ and criminal justice policies based on these. This paper seeks to carve out a distinctly sociological perspective on the link between emotions, crime and justice, and explores its potential through four ‘Durkheimian themes’.

The SAGE Handbook of Criminological Research Methods

Conducting research into crime and criminal justice carries unique challenges. This Handbook focuses on the application of 'methods' to address the core substantive questions that currently motivate contemporary criminological research. It maps a canon of methods that are more elaborated than in most other fields of social science, and the intellectual terrain of research problems with which criminologists are routinely confronted. Drawing on exemplary studies, chapters in each section illustrate the techniques (qualitative and quantitative) that are commonly applied in empirical studies, as well as the logic of criminological enquiry. Organized into five sections, each prefaced by an editorial introduction, the Handbook covers: • Crime and Criminals • Contextualizing Crimes in Space and Time: Networks, Communities and Culture • Perceptual Dimensions of Crime • Criminal Justice Systems: Organizations and Institutions • Preventing Crime and Improving Justice Edited by leaders in the field of criminological research, and with contributions from internationally renowned experts, The SAGE Handbook of Criminological Research Methods is set to become the definitive resource for postgraduates, researchers and academics in criminology, criminal justice, policing, law, and sociology.

Men, wage work and family

In the last two decades there has been a plethora of research on a range of subjects collectively and rhetorically known as ‘work-life balance’. The bulk of this research, which spans disciplines including feminist sociology, industrial relations and management, has focused on the significant concerns of employed women and/or dual career couples. Less attention has been devoted to scholarship which explicitly examines men and masculinities in this context. Meanwhile, public and organizational discourse is largely espoused in gender neutral terms, often neglecting salient gendered issues which differentially impact the ability of women and men to successfully integrate their work and non-work lives. This edited book brings together empirical studies of the work-life nexus with a specific focus on men’s working time arrangements, how men navigate and traverse paid work and family commitments, and the impact of public and organizational policies on men’s participation in work, leisure, and other life domains. The book is innovative in that it presents both macro (institutional, how policy affects practice) and micro (individual, from men’s own perspectives) level studies, allowing for a rich and contrasting exploration of how men’s participation in paid work and other domains is divided, conflicted, or integrated. The essays in this volume address issues of fundamental social, labor market, and economic change which have occurred over the last 20 years and which have profoundly affected the way work, care, leisure and community have evolved in different contexts. Taking an international focus, Men, Wage Work and Family contrasts various public and organizational policies and how these policies impact men’s opportunities and participation in paid work and non-work domains in industrialised countries in Europe, North America, and Australia.

Critical applied linguistics

This chapter provides a historical materialist review of the development of applied and critical linguistics and their extensions and applications to the fields of English Language studies. Following Bourdieu, we view intellectual fields and their affiliated discourses as constructed in relation to specific economic and political formations and sociocultural contexts. We therefore take ‘applied linguistics’, ‘critical language studies’ and ‘English language studies’ as fields in dynamic and contested formation and relationship. Our review focuses on three historical moments. In the postwar period, we describe the technologisation of linguistics – with the enlistment of linguistics in the applied fields of language planning, literacy education and second/foreign language teaching. We then turn to document the multinationalisation of English, which, we argue entails a rationalisation of English as a universal form of economic capital in globalised economic and cultural flows. We conclude by exploring scenarios for the displacement of English language studies as a major field by other emergent economic lingua franca (e.g., Mandarin, Spanish) and shifts in the economic and cultural nexus of control over English from an Anglo/American centre to East and West Asia.