Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson Recent documents in Dr. Mike Donaldson en-us Sun, 31 May 2009 09:16:09 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/15 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/15 Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:36 PDT The Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) Australia's largest corporation, had a virtual monopoly on the steel industry in Australia. In the early 1980's it set about decimating its workforce, blaming an economic downturn, and demanding massive and unusual handouts from the Australian Government. This article exposes the myth of the 'crisis' in the steel industry, and reveals instead that the BHP, embarked upon a modernisation of its plant, held its workforce to ransom to extort concessions from the Government. It then destroyed nearly 4,000 jobs at its Port Kembla steelworks in Wollongong. M. Donaldson http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/14 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/14 Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:33 PDT This chapter is about what ruling-class men do in their daily lives. How do they invest, pass or spend their time? We are dealing here with the exceptional life conditions and activities of the richest and most powerful men in the world: the richest one to five per cent, whose interests and decisions so widely determine, that is rule, the conditions and activities of the rest of us. A 1996 United Nations Human Development Report identified 358 men whose wealth equals the combined income of 2.3 billion people, forty-five per cent of the world's population. Most such people are, of course, men. It takes a very special masculinity, however, to maintain this rule, and many years of work - of servants and educators and many other people, directed by parents - go into producing this. Here we deal with their daily lives. We begin our discussion of ruling-class men's time, work and leisure with a look at their leisure pursuits. For the amount, choice of and control over their leisure, as much as anything else, marks their daily lives as very different from those of the rest of us. We will then compare these with the patterns to be found daily in their work. We conclude with some more general observations about time in the lives of these men. M. Donaldson http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/13 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/13 Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:31 PDT For many years, women have been under-represented in unions and in union leaderships. This article explains why this is the case by examining the gender segmented nature of paid work and occupations and by outlining how this affects women's participation within and representation by trade unions. M. Donaldson http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/12 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/12 Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:29 PDT There may well be no known human societies in which some form of masculinity has not emerged as dominant, more socially central, more associated with power, in which a pattern of practices embodying the currently most honoured way of being male legitimates the superordination of men over women. This paper shows what a small sample of Indonesian men living in Australia thought of Australian masculinity, revealing much about hegemonic masculinity in Indonesia in the process, and disclosing some uncomfortable uniformities concerning men in both countries. M. Donaldson http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/11 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/11 Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:26 PDT This article is an inquiry into evolving forms of masculinity in Indonesia. It refers to data collected during a pilot project on the construction of Indonesian Muslim masculinities in Australia when Indonesian men arrive and encounter Anglo-Australian men. Using the technique of asking the Indonesian interviewees to comment on 'Australian' men allowed analysis of what the Indonesian men thought about their own cultural tropes of masculinity. It emerged that their gender construction coalesced around two important cultural nodes of discourse about how to be a 'man': firstly, the Indonesian urban interpretation of global 'hypermasculinity'; and secondly, the moral role of men in Islamic discourse. P. Nilan http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/10 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/10 Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:23 PDT Many of the best studies of time have been concerned with the transitions from one temporal order to another, and in particular the origins and the pervasive global impact of metric time. This focus risks attributing a facticity and durability to capitalist time at the expense of other temporalities. This study counterbalances this problem by exploring the time use and 'Dreamtime' of Australian Aboriginal people, from pre-history, through the British invasion to the present day. Despite the massive disruptions in temporal order, significant continuities are revealed. M. Donaldson http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/9 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/9 Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:21 PDT Some of the scholars who use the work of Antonio Gramsci, particularly those influenced by Cultural Studies, hold the view that Gramsci rejected the idea of social class, particularly in his Prison Notebooks. This paper traces the evolution of Gramsci's thinking on class and demonstrates that there is no sharp break between Gramsci's pre-prison and prison writings, and that social class remained fundamental to Gramsci's thinking until the end. M. Donaldson http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/8 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/8 Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:19 PDT Ruling-class boys are taught early that they are inherently different from and essentially superior to other children. Toughening and distancing is one part of the relentless maturation process, which also concerns exclusion of those outside the class who are inherently inferior, and collusion and coherence within it. In addition to learning that they have particular social responsibilities, ruling-class children are taught that they have precious talents and abilities which are shielded and developed so that they may become the best that they know they will become. The boys are prodded as well as toughened and protected, learning also that friendship, even within their circle, is unreliable and dangerous because it threatens the distance established with such effort and maintained with such difficulty, between themselves and others. Such an upbringing produces men who are aloof; insecure; insensitive to their own and others' feelings, desires and mistreatment; capable of surface sociability rather than meaningful relationships. In this way the masculinity of the hegemonic is strongly affected by the maintenance and continuation of the class which shapes its character. Above all it teaches those who bear it, that it alone is the masculinity that they most need to survive in the world they create in their own image. M. Donaldson http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/7 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/7 Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:16 PDT Globalisation has, if anything, made the inequality between classes even more obvious over the last two decades, and class has again become a the topic of lively discussion. Inequalities between classes are accelerating and class has come to play a greater role in the life of ordinary people over the last three decades. With this increasing polarisation have come changes in the composition of the working class itself. This paper traces the origins of the concept and uses some of the ideas of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci to define the working class today and to elucidate its size, dimensions, consciousness and activity. M. Donaldson http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/6 http://works.bepress.com/mdonaldson/6 Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:13 PDT Studies of masculinity and studies of class are incomplete unless they take each other seriously. This article explores the interrelations between class situation and experience, paid work, the family-household, masculinity and male heterosexuality as they are borne and reproduced by labouring men. Against the psycho¬logisation of the 'men's liberationists' this article insists on the salience of structure. It suggests that the working class, of which labouring men are a small part, can be understood in its strategic power and weaknesses only through the study of the whole lives of its members, changing and changed by each other as they stand in contradiction to capital, its forces and agencies. The article is based on personal accounts by about forty labouring men. It relies on and attempts to draw together within an historical materialist framework insights from the sociologies of the labour process and the working class, studies of masculinity and Marxist feminism. M. Donaldson