School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemDamaged goods : hepatitis C and the politics of the Victorian Blood exchange( 2000)In February 1990, the Victorian Blood Transfusion Service (VIC BTS) became one of the first transfusion services in the world, to implement testing for the newly isolated hepatitis C virus. In this thesis, I trace the development of hepatitis C policy by the Victorian Transfusion Service. Policy development was complicated by the known indeterminacy of some hepatitis C test results, as well as the Service's desire to avoid a further AIDS-like crisis. In particular, the Service had to decide how to minimise the risk of hepatitis C infection to recipients, and what to do with the donors and recipients infected with the hepatitis C virus. In making these decisions, the VIC BTS was reshaping its relationship with donors and recipients, and this re-configuring of the relationships of Victorian blood exchange through the development of hepatitis C policy, is an underlying theme of this thesis. From its inception in 1929, the Victorian Service maintained a donor-oriented culture in which the health of donors and recipients was always a key priority. For Service staff, the voluntary gifts of donors made blood-banking a special enterprise, informing a 'moral economy' whereby the Service felt obligated to meet the needs of both donors and recipients. However, with the advent of the AIDS crisis in 1980s, the confidence of donors (and the public) in the safety of the Victorian blood supply fell, and some recipients, allegedly infected with HIV, initiated litigation against the Service's parent body, the Australian Red Cross Society. In response, the Victorian Service came to distrust the gift of blood, controlling and managing its risks by way of practices designed to assess other ordinary commodities. Blood came to be treated by the Service, and the Federal Government, not so much as a gift, but as an ambiguous commodity. The development of hepatitis C policy produced a growing tension between the Transfusion Service's longstanding 'moral economy', and its new, pharmaceutically informed, risk-assessment practices. On the one hand, the Service was very risk-averse in its policy development, implementing testing with great swiftness, and deferring all donors with indeterminate test results. Even when the Service later became aware that some of these donors had probably never been infected with hepatitis C, its desire to maintain as safe a blood supply as possible, necessitated the continuing deferral of all donors with indeterminate results. On the other hand, the Service felt obligated to provide the best care and treatment feasible for potentially infected donors. With few government resources available for the management of hepatitis C, the Victorian Service devoted great time and energy to ensure deferred donors could be confident in the interpretation of their test results, and would receive expert care and treatment if necessary. The tension between the special ethical nature of Victorian blood exchange, and the management of blood as a dubious commodity, came to a head in the development of lookback policy. The Victorian Service felt a clinically-informed, 'moral obligation' to 'look back' and locate individual recipients who may have been infected by blood transfusions contaminated with hepatitis C. However, others viewed hepatitis C lookback from a more distanced, population perspective, arguing that it was a technical issue to be resolved through a cost-assessment analysis. Such an analysis showed hepatitis C lookback would be inefficient and expensive as a public health intervention. Although major hepatitis C lookback programs were eventually supported at a national level, the `correct' way of developing Victorian transfusion policy remains open to debate. What is clear, however, is that future policy development by the Victorian Service will continue to reflect, and to reshape, its relationships with donors and recipients.
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ItemMulti-domain incommensurability( 2000)Interesting instances of Incommensurability sometimes arise in the mental health sciences that cannot be accounted for with our currently available understanding of that phenomenon. I focus on what happens when there is ambiguity between a methodological-value use of a term and a theoretical-entity use of the same term. I call the kind of Incommensurability that can arise in such cases multi-domain Incommensurability. I propose that an interpretation of taxonomic Incommensurability offered by Howard Sankey represents "the sententialist current state of play" and that it may be used as the standard within the semantic/analytic tradition. I contend that Sankey's analysis fails to accommodate multi-domain Incommensurability in social sciences. I diagnose this failure and explore several possible reactions. This diagnosis highlights important features of social sciences that suggest reasons why this particular sort of Incommensurability will be so difficult to accommodate within the semantic/analytic tradition. We may be tempted to either reject social sciences or reject sententialism as a way to make the problems seem to disappear. I find neither of these alternatives satisfactory. The road that suggests rejection of the scientific status of social sciences is pyrrhic, self-defeating, and ultimately begs the question of multi-domain Incommensurability. The road that suggests rejection of sententialism simply abandons valuable insights and tools of investigation before having fully gone down the road. A form of argument extracted from the controversy in social science over dual relationships points to three constraints on a semantics capable of addressing multi-domain Incommensurability. I show why both intentional (roughly Fregegn - description views) and extentional ( roughly Kripkean - Essentialist views) solutions must fail to adequately resolve multi-domain Incommensurability. S suggest a hybrid analysis, consistent with many proposed alternatives to sententialism, that expands upon the current state of sententialist analysis of Incommensurability and draws upon a pragmatic, naturalised approach to semantics.
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ItemMeaning and meaningful work( 2000)The thesis takes a 'first principles' approach to defining meaningful work. Although a great deal of philosophical effort has been directed at the analysis and discussion of linguistic meaning, the same is not true of other contexts in which we describe objects and actions as meaningful. This is reflected in the widely divergent definitions and conceptions of meaningful work employed in philosophical and other literature that is directly concerned with the topic of the meaning of work. In the first chapter the central themes in our use of `meaning' and its derivatives to describe actions and objects is mapped out. This process identifies three senses of `meaning', two of which are central to the discussion of meaningful work and the meaning of actions generally. The first of these senses, that I call `evaluative', concerns the value of activities and the role that they play in the life of the agent. The second chapter begins by producing necessary criteria any successful account of the evaluative meaning of actions must fulfil. It is then argued that the process of strong evaluation developed by Charles Taylor can be used to differentiate actions that are evaluatively meaningful from those that are merely valuable. This technique, can be used to produce different accounts of evaluative meaning and assess the consistency of their claims regarding the meaningfulness of actions and work. The third chapter argues that objects, activities and work are meaningful, in what I call the `generative' sense, when they "change the way that we think". This occurs in the case of actions when the agent cares for them in a stipulatively defined sense. It is then concluded that actions have this ability when they involve what Adrian Walsh calls 'activity processing' or a 'dialectical' relationship between theory and practice. The `dialectical' nature of this type of relationship between worker and activity is the source of the ability of generatively meaningful actions to "change the way that we think". Having discussed these two senses of meaning it is possible to begin rigorous discussion of the meaningfulness of work. The final chapter consists in a criticism of the focus of the existing texts on the meaning of work and sketches how the discussion of meaningful work might be further developed. Several practical suggestions regarding how work might be made more meaningful are also proposed
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ItemHealing without hospitals : homeopathy and medical pluralism in nineteenth century New South Wales (1840-1880)( 2000)As in the neighbouring colony of Victoria, homeopathy in colonial New South Wales attracted the support and attention of a wide cross section of society. In this thesis I concentrate on the varying ways in which homeopathy made its presence felt within New South Wales - with particular focus on the period 1840-1880. Linking itself with colonial ideals of progressive social reform, homeopathy in New South Wales, much like its counterpart in the United States, managed to establish itself in opposition to the `conservative' element within nineteenth century society. In a colony which has been described as `excessive' in its preoccupation with liberalism, the New System of homeopathy in New South Wales fitted neatly with both the anti-orthodox sentiment prevalent within New South Wales society, as well as the vision of a better, more egalitarian world which many colonists brought with them to the new country. During the 1850s the homeopaths and their supporters concentrated their efforts on the Sydney Homeopathic Dispensary both as a symbol of progress of the New System within the colony and as a means by which to extend the social benefits of this cheaper, milder and (for many) more effective medicine to the broader community. During the 1860s, with the Dispensary struggling to remain viable, the homeopaths attempted to secure legal support for the New System, petitioning the government to provide homeopathic treatments in government funded hospitals. During the 1870s, the homeopaths made their presence felt primarily through their role in blocking the repeated attempts of the regular medical profession to secure regulatory (restrictive) medical legislation within the colony. Focussing in particular on the public and political debates surrounding Sir Alfred Stephen's 1875 Medical Bill, I focus in the last section of my thesis on the nature of the opposition to restrictive legislation in the colony. I argue that this opposition needs to be understood not only in terms of the lack of unity within the regular medical profession itself, as has often been emphasised, but on the existence of a coherent and self-conscious defence of medical pluralism within the colony - a campaign within which the homeopathic movement in New South Wales played a central role. Working primarily outside of the bounds of the symbolic markers of professionalism (institutions, journals, societies,) often associated with a mature and influential medical tradition, homeopathy in New South Wales was less visible than in many comparable places during the nineteenth century, but no less influential.
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ItemHistorical context, patronage and decoration of the Melbourne Livy( 2000)The end of the fourteenth century saw the production in Paris of translations of the Latin classics in large, de luxe format, such as the Melbourne Livy manuscript. This study examines the historical development of French vernacular literature prior to these productions. It is argued that the demand for vernacular translations was not a sudden phenomenon but resulted from a tradition that had begun three hundred years earlier, a tradition that was aided by the political, social and cultural climate existing in France at that time. Possible reasons why Jean le Bon chose Pierre Bersuire for the task of translating Livy's History of Rome are investigated. It is concluded that Bersuire was ideally suited for the task because he had access to the most complete Livy texts available at the time, he was a renowned academic and humanist and was a respected, senior member of the Church. Examining the linguistics of the translation is outside the scope of this study but the success of the translation is measured by other factors: the dissemination of the text, the lavishness of its copies, the use of the manuscripts and the impact of the translation on other translations. The Melbourne Livy is argued to have belonged to the Burgundian Court and was possibly a New Year's Day gift to Philippe le Hardi from Dino Rapondi in 1400. Because of the lack of documentary evidence, the argument is based on stylistic comparisons between the Melbourne Livy and three other manuscripts, which are the only extant manuscripts that were produced by the Rapondi brothers for Philippe le Hardi. The comparison concentrates mainly on border decorations, but miniatures are also compared. The similarities in the decorative elements identified by these comparisons support the contention that the four manuscripts were all produced in the one workshop so may have been intended for the one patron - Philippe le Hardi. The illustrative programme is then studied from the point of view of influences that impacted upon it as well as its possible aims. Apart from relating the Melbourne Livy programme to previous Livy manuscripts and the wider genre of historical narrative, the political, social and didactic influences are also gauged. It is concluded that the Melbourne Livy adequately served the social and political aims of its patron. Finally, in an attempt to answer the question raised by previous scholars regarding the number of artists involved in the programme, a detailed study of the miniatures is undertaken. It is my belief that three, or possibly four artists were involved. My findings confirm the attribution by Millard Meiss that the miniatures of the 'first artist' relate to the Cite des Dames Master; and that the 'second artist' is most likely the Polycratique Master as suggested by Francois Avril. The remaining artist or artists were strongly influenced by this latter Master. Because of the highly collaborative nature of manuscript illumination, however, no decisive conclusions are drawn.
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ItemWhy women in senior roles leave organisations( 2000)In this thesis I discuss the reasons behind women's decisions to leave their senior positions in organisations in the finance sector. My findings are that all women experience some level of dissatisfaction with their employer. These include dissatisfaction as a result of systemic barriers within their organisations, unconscious discrimination on the part of colleagues as well as tokenism and marginalisation. It is a 'trigger' or 'last straw' that push women into the actual act of resigning from the organisation. I have called these triggers catalysts and categorised them to include the following: • Wanting more time for family and/or more balance in their lives; • High levels of stress which can result in illness; • Pay discrimination; • Passed over for promotion; • Changes to the organisation as a result of retrenchments and downsizing; and • Sexual harassment I have developed a model to show how these two classifications combine to trigger women to resign from their organisations. My research includes a review of current literature as well as face-to-face interviews with 30 respondents at senior levels within the finance industry. The sample included fifteen women who had recently left their organisations and fourteen women and six men who had stayed with their organisations for at least two years. The latter group of men formed a control group. Similar to the findings of other researchers, all thirty of my respondents had underlying reasons for dissatisfaction with their organisations. Those who had left their roles however experienced one or more of the catalysts noted above. The group of respondents had layers of reasons as to why they left their roles, which they would discuss with differing individuals. For example the reasons given to their families may differ to those they gave to their boss or a recruitment agency. My research shows that it is the combination of both the underlying reasons for dissatisfaction as well as catalysts that prompted women to leave their organisations.
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ItemThe truth is out there: the transcendent validation of postmodernism in the X-Files( 2000)The contention of this thesis is that the postmodern thematics and modes of representation of The X-Files are not incompatible with a cohesive ideology that is established on the basis of a transcendent frame of reference. Despite its appeals to anti-authoritarianism, intertextuality, polysemy, and self-reflexivity, The X-Files finds less correspondence with established postmodern theory that claims the untenability of transcendent truth than with New Age theories of identity and culture. Postmodern theory (with its connections to French poststructuralism), and New Age theory share a heritage in the 1960s anti-authoritarian protest movements. However, while theories of postmodernism engaged with neo-Marxist political and cultural theory, questioning the Marxist appeal to the objectivity of scientific knowledge, the antecedents of New Age theory - the American West Coast counterculturalists - turned to ancient mystical traditions to redefine identity and culture. The motivations of the counterculturalists can now be found in seminal New Age theories such as Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) and Marilyn Ferguson's The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), theories that argue for a New Science that connects to pre-modern mysticism and therefore "proves" that postmodernism is the new legitimate form of identification and knowledge. This thesis argues that The X-Files' self-conscious representation of itself as a postmodern television series operating within a postmodern cultural context coalesces with New Age definitions of postmodernism, and that therefore The X-Files is simultaneously postmodern and ideological.