School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemContaining anxiety : a socio-analytic contribution to the study of organisational stress( 2003)The aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of anxiety as it is experienced in group and organisational settings. A 1997 study commissioned by the ACTU found that workplace stress was becoming increasingly prevalent in Australia, with the three most stressful conditions at work being increased workload, organisational change and job insecurity. According to the literature, stress appears to be a highly complex phenomenon, involving a myriad of psychological and physical symptoms which impact at the individual and social level. The "causes" of stress appear to be similarly complex, with some research suggesting that the occurrence of stress is a function of individual predisposition. Other studies attribute the origin of stress to environmental factors, whilst still other approaches regard stress as he product of interactions between person and environment. Apart from difficulties involved in alleviating the effects of stress given such conflicting accounts of its aetiology, there are also different political implications depending upon which approach is given precedence. For example, employers tend to adopt "person-centred" explanation of job stress, at the expense of accounts which attribute stress to poor working conditions - a move which might be regarded as "blaming the victim". The thesis attempts to resolve the dilemma of whether anxiety/stress is an individual or social phenomenon by investigating the various assumptions about the constitution of the "subject of stress" which are implicit in existing approaches. By drawing on debates in broader social theory, I suggest that stress cannot be adequately theorised, or addressed in practice, without paying attention to the concept of "inter-subjectivity". Psychoanalytically-informed social theory, by virtue of its concept of the "unconscious", I argue, provides a model of the subject in which the rigid distinction between person and environment, made by existing approaches to stress, is problematised. A particular branch of psychoanalytic organisational theory, known as "socioanalysis", emphasises the centrality of anxiety to both the constitution of the subject and the establishment of organisational systems. As such, I contend that this theory provides a useful base from which to construct a model of organisational stress which avoids the person-environment dilemma encountered by existing approaches. I explore the implications of a model of this kind with reference to a case study of the Australian social security organisation Centrelink. The empirical material consists of interviews with Centrelink staff, a content analysis of Centrelink internal policy documents, and observations of a range of Centrelink work practices undertaken during my own tenure as a Centrelink employee. The case material is interpreted using a socio-analytic methodology to investigate the effects of change on the various individuals and groups who interact with Centrelink. By reflecting on the case study, I make predictions about Centrelink and its changing role in Australian society, and also develop suggestions for ways of addressing the negative effects of stress as it is experienced in Centrelink.
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ItemA culture of speed: the dilemma of being modern in 1930s Australia( 2003)This thesis explores the reaction of Australians living in Melbourne in the 1930s, to changes in technology, social organisation, and personal attitudes that together constituted what they saw as innovations in modern life. Taking the Victorian Centenary of 1934 as a starting point, it analyses the anxieties and excitements of a society selfconsciously defining itself as part of a progressive potion of the western world. They reflected on the place of the city as locus of modernity; they analysed what appeared to be the quickening pace of human communications. They knew increasing leisure but deprecated the concomitant condition of boredom. They were concerned whether modernity was disease. They faced the ambiguities of the racial exclusivity of Australian modernity, centred in part on their ambivalence about Aborigines as Australians, but also incorporating long-held fears of populous Asian neighbours. They were not Britons, but their concerns for “men, money and markets”—and defence—kept the British connection uppermost. They participated in competing visions of the meanings of the past, and the directions of the future. Modern life, it seemed, was accused of overturning fundamental, and natural, race and gender norms, sapping the vital force of white Australia. Spurred by the increasing likelihood of a major conflict at the decade’s end, and drawing on much older and deepseated anxieties in Australia’s past, pessimists predicted a future where the technologies of modernity would make Australia vulnerable to attack. Australians in Melbourne, however, were excited about modernity and not just anxious. People were prepared to take risks, to seek novel experiences, and the reasons for this probably stemmed from the same causes that made other people turn away from the new to find comfort in the familiar. Modernity, in terms of changing mental processes as much as in its technological dimension, offered the chance for Melburnians to escape the often grim realities of life in the 1930s. Despite clearly expressed uncertainties, interwar Australians had committed themselves to a project of modernity.
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ItemDeparting from their sphere: Australian women and science, 1880-1960( 2003)This thesis charts, predominantly elite, white women's engagement with science in Australia over a relatively long period, in a way which has been attempted for few other countries. Noting women's relatively strong visibility in many scientific arenas prior to the 1940s, it argues that, despite the widespread coding of science as masculine, their experiences cannot be explained through simple exclusionary models or notions of hegemonic gender discourses and spheres. Beginning in the nineteenth century, elite women showed a surprising, strong, enthusiasm for scientific education and employment. By the early twentieth century, women comprised a significant proportion of the local scientific community and made substantial contributions in this critical phrase of the development of the field in Australia. In the broader cultural arena, such women were prominent promoters of the scientific cause within social reform movements. It is suggested that a specific set of circumstances was required for the masculine image of science to be fully reflected in the gendered structure and composition of the Australian scientific community. It was only in the years after World War II, as scientific education and employment expanded enormously, that men were attracted to the field in large numbers and women's participation decreased. It was only then that the masculine image of science came to be more completely reflected in gender composition of the scientific community. Patterns set in place in period were enduring and many are still evident today. Apart from simply documenting uncharted territory, it also seeks to suggest new approaches which might be fruitful. It offers a new interpretation of elite women's engagement in 'traditionally' masculine spheres, in Australia and other western countries, by focusing on the relative privileges they enjoyed. Indeed, it will be suggested that studies of 'women in science' reveal as much about the, sometimes significant, disruptions to the discursive construction of science as masculine as they do about any disjunction between the feminine and the scientific. The experiences of Australian women in science reveal that positive subcultures supportive of women's scientific engagements could coexist quite easily with discourses positing a close alignment between science and masculinity. The ideological construction of science as a masculine domain did not necessarily represent or create the experiences of all women in all times and places.
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ItemA distant grief: Australians, war graves and the Great War( 2003)This thesis investigates the ways in which distance shaped bereaved Australians' reactions to separation from the bodies of their dead during and after the Great War 1914-18. It attempts to capture experiences of bereavement at a time when war had radically disrupted Australians' expectations and experiences of death, and as they struggled to find consolation. This study brings distance to the fore as a key condition of death in the Great War, through which we can better understand Australians' individual mourning. This thesis argues that the grave, though absent, remained of central importance to Australian grief. Mourners developed mental images of graves, and imagined their care by others as they sought to engage in familiar practices of mourning. These images formed a basis for relationships between mourners and graves: the bereaved insisted on this kind of proxy care for their loved ones as they grieved at a distance. Distance produced the conditions for a more obviously communal response to bereavement, based on creating and sustaining links between mourners and the graves that most understood they would never see. A widespread recognition of this condition among Australian mourners resulted in a community keenly aware of the shared nature of their grief. The common assumption that graves remained perpetually out of reach produced a range of individual and communal efforts to bring them to mourners in Australia, and mourners to the graves. Relics and images of the dead, photographs of their graves, war memorials, exhibitions, even flowers and ultimately pilgrimages, provided the vehicles by which Australian mourners might make connections with the sites of death abroad, even where graves themselves might not exist. The private and public processes by which Australians attempted to make these links contest the view that soldiers and civilians experienced exclusive realities of war. Distance added poignancy to grief, but it also compelled the bereaved in their attempts to meet their terrible losses.
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ItemMass performances: a study of eucharistic ritual in Australian catholic culture 1900-1962( 2003)This thesis explores the performance of eucharistic ritual within Australian Catholic culture between 1900 and 1962, focusing specifically on the archdioceses of Melbourne and Adelaide. It forms part of an increasing interest within Australian Catholic historiography towards questions of spirituality and ritual practice. By paying close attention to a variety of 'eucharistic' rituals - the mass, extra-liturgical rituals such as Benediction and the Forty Hours' Prayer, efforts to encourage frequent communion and earlier first communion, eucharistic congresses, and various expressions of liturgical renewal such as dialogue masses and congregational singing - this thesis has sought to elucidate the nature of Catholic worship in Australia during the pre-Vatican II era. Using performance theory and, in particular, 'framing' theory, this thesis argues that while the basic form governing eucharistic ritual did not change, multiple ritual frames were operating which significantly altered and re-fashioned the nature of the ritual activity. Through the operation of these differential frames, eucharistic ritual became a powerful instrument in the Australian church's re-negotiation of modernity during the early-to-mid twentieth century. In particular, the thesis identifies two key paradigm shifts within Australian Catholic culture where eucharistic ritual played a decisive role. The first - the cultivation of an 'interior life' through which the church encouraged Catholics to separate from the world and give priority to securing a place in the world to come - began in earnest in the nineteenth century, but was most effectively continued in the twentieth century through the re-framing of eucharistic ritual as an inward-looking spirituality. This process was championed through two key movements: a 'eucharistic' movement which emphasised devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and an early liturgical movement linked to the pontificate of Pius X. The second key paradigm shift - the expression of a more 'explicit' faith - represented a complex development in Australian Catholic culture, evident from the late 1920s and 30s. On the one hand, the outward reorientation of the eucharistic movement, expressed principally through the staging of eucharistic congresses, represented a 'defensive offensive' in the cause of the interior life. In the context of growing alarm over secularism and communism, the church cultivated a more aggressive and triumphalist ritual culture. On the other hand, the outward reorientation of the liturgical movement witnessed the emergence of a more progressive and lay-centred approach to the church's apostolic mission in the world. Through active participation in the liturgy, the laity were called to share in the re-Christianising of society.
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ItemLow, degraded broots? Industry and entrepreneurialism in Melbourne's Little Lon, 1860-1950( 2003)Since C J Dennis wrote The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke in 1915 the Little Lonsdale Street precinct has been a symbol of rough, immoral inner Melbourne working-class community life. Scholars and journalists have perpetuated this negative image, and the major archaeological survey conducted by Justin McCarthy in 1989 confirmed the impression of a "lowlife slum". The only industry of substance that was acknowledged by these writers was prostitution. The Museum of Victoria has erected an exhibition, and prepared a web-site, about Little Lon based on McCarthy’s report. In recent years Alan Mayne, Tim Murray and Susan Lawrence have published research questioning the slum image and have argued instead that the precinct was, essentially, a residential neighbourhood. My hypothesis is that Little Lon was much more than a poor, working-class area. Over a long period it contained a significant enclave of successful family firms engaged in manufacture and other diverse activities. My research has involved a macro-survey of all the industries in the precinct from 1860-1950 and micro-surveys of seven individual firms. Careful note has been taken of the manner in which Nonconformist, Lebanese and Chinese entrepreneurs clustered separately, but within the same small precinct. The influence within Little Lon of Chinese cabinetmakers between about 1905 and 1925, both industrially and residentially, was strong indeed. Preceding the Chinese was a cluster of Lebanese traders (some later becoming clothing manufacturers) and, throughout the century the Nonconformist industrialists consolidated their respective positions. Research questions concerning their motivation and effectiveness have been asked of each entrepreneur. The impact of religion has been noted. My research has produced a set of commercial histories of relatively long-term small enterprises, located within a defined city area. The development of each firm has been monitored by comparison with its respective industry as a whole.