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This paper starts from the point that our current political‐economic‐climate conjuncture demands new engagements at the dynamic interface of climate capitalism. Using two cases of climate capitalist responses to climate challenges, I demonstrate the reparative potentials that emerge from the tensions and ambiguities that typify that conjuncture. In the first case, I examine financialised climate infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia, that promises to protect the city from flooding while enriching city elites, but against which diverse social movements and collectives have organised. The second case is about a cooperative energy provider in Australia, operating on the terrain of a neoliberalised electricity market and climate change, and working towards multifaceted repair by collectivising and redistributing surplus and modelling democratic engagement. Those involved in these vastly different cases both pursue repair and reparations through climate capitalist projects by reckoning with historical and present climate debts while constructing forward‐looking programs. As such, they chart the first steps towards reparative climate futures. This paper identifies the political and socioecological potentials from two key climate capitalist projects: flood protection infrastructures in Jakarta and cooperative energy in Australia. From this, it builds a framework of repair and reparations for engaging with climate capitalism and argues that the emerging tensions and ambiguities facilitate steps towards reparative climate futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planetary health equity – the equitable enjoyment of good health and wellbeing in a sustainable ecosystem – is under threat from anthropogenic climate change and economic and social inequities. Driving these major challenges is the global consumptogenic system that encourages excessive production and consumption goods and services that are harming human and planetary health. Growth models lie at the core of the consumptogenic system. This paper examines the sources of economic growth in Australia, the coalitions that sustain this approach politically, and the implications of these dynamics for planetary health equity. Australia's consumption-led growth model is underpinned by a combination of rising house prices and a permissive credit regime. This growth model is supported by a dominant growth coalition of producer interests, elements of organised labour, and property owners. The growth coalition has been able to successfully generate growth model policy convergence between the mainstream political parties. In turn this growth model, and associated growth coalition, has undermined the pursuit of planetary health equity in Australia by incentivising and driving excessive consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and economic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the mutually affecting intensities in family households that occur through the use of energy for parenting, care and making home in the societal context of energy capitalism. Our work draws on sensual energy ethnographies with 13 families in regional New South Wales, Australia. We extend Deleuze and Guattarri's related concepts of molar and molecular lines and lines of flight into energy geographies to draw attention to the socio-material, subjective and affective dimensions of being and becoming a parent, providing care and making home. In doing so, we open up questions around how families use energy and how this relates to the politics of care. We consider the possibilities for lines of flight to bring about social change to escape energy capitalism and help care for humans, more-than-humans and the planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian governments and security analysts have long claimed that Australia exercises a sphere of influence in the South Pacific. This paper argues that this assertion of a sphere of influence is driven by a racial capitalist dialectic of possession and dispossession. This dialectic has legitimised and facilitated the expropriation of Pacific land, labour, resources and sovereignty for the building of the Australian colonial settler state. It is premised on geographic moralities consisting of intertwined white supremacist, antiblack, anti-Indigenous and anti-Asian ideologies which confer on Australia a right and obligation to assert influence over the Pacific based on geographic contiguity and racialised discourses of Pacific incapacity. The paper makes this argument using Aileen Moreton-Robinson's notion of white possession, Nancy Fraser's expanded conception of capitalism and José Martí's concept of geographic morality, tracing the evolution of Australia's sphere of influence politics over four periods: the imperial era, the Cold War period, the post-Cold War period until the 2010s, and the present era of inter-imperial rivalry between China and the United States. This analysis brings together perspectives from critical race and indigenous studies, critical geopolitics, and radical geopolitics to connect race, capitalism and the construction of geopolitical space in Australia's assertion of a sphere of influence in the Pacific. It advances recent conceptual discussions of spheres of influence, which are race-blind because they draw on theories that foreground white subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multilevel perspective (MLP) has emerged as an influential framework for analyzing sustainable transitions. Whilst the MLP has recently incorporated valuable geographical perspectives this paper argues that more nuanced accounts of socio-spatial dimensions are still needed to explain how and why some regions miss opportunities for energy transitions. It does this through a study of the restructuring of the Victorian electricity system in Australia in the 1990s and the resulting failure to build demand side management into the energy market design and regulatory framework. The failure of the demand management niche requires a compelling explanation as to why, despite increasingly porous and seemingly unbounded flows of knowledge and capital and emergent actor networks, the territorial-scalar embeddedness of the electricity regime was reinforced. Drawing on geography literature the paper argues that a multidimensional analysis can do the following: address criticisms of the a-spatial and residual character of the landscape level; situate transitions within a geographical political economy context; and reveal the variations and semi-coherency of regimes shedding light on the degree of regime stability and the opportunities for niches to break through. This paper expands the conversation between theories of geographical political economy and sustainable transitions arguing that the geographies of capitalism and the state need to feature more than as a backdrop to socio-technical change, and instead should be brought directly into the MLP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to a recent marketing campaign in Australia, this paper considers how the politics of love suggested in Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth (2009) may have pragmatic application for media studies. The publicity strategies of a major bank in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis provide a rich illustration of the ways love’s genres and registers can be directly co-opted towards commercial interests - and the challenges this presents for critical thinking. Placing Hardt and Negri’s ‘turn to love’ in the context of ongoing debates in feminist and queer theory, the paper isolates both the possibilities and limitations of autonomist thinking. The authors’ distinct contribution is to note the inventiveness characteristic of both love and poverty, which in turn provides a model for the kind of ontological bearing necessary to trouble the ongoing pact between intimacy and property under capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of 'social capital' has met with huge success among governmental agencies, including governments at all levels and transnational entities such as the World Bank. And yet the concept has been subjected to a devastating critique. This paper investigates a number of reasons given in the literature for its popularity. It starts with a brief overview of the social policy context in Australia, where the social capital framework has been influential. It goes on to discuss some of the reasons for the framework's popularity, both admiring, e.g. it broadens our understanding of community well-being beyond the economic, and critical, e.g. it ignores the power of (real) capital. The paper concludes by suggesting that 'social capital' continues to prevail, despite its dubious epistemological status, because it serves a useful ideological function for (real) capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper begins with an investigation of two metaphors central to the 'social capital' framework - 'glue' and 'capital'. Both are found to be inappropriate descriptions of the kinds of human relationships supposedly being alluded to by the term 'social capital'. While the inappropriateness of the term 'glue' is not a major threat to the discourse, the case of 'capital' is more serious. The rest of the paper is devoted to unravelling the connotations of 'capital' and the implications of applying it to relationships where the kinds of calculations necessary for sound economic performance have no place. The competitiveness inherent in the functioning of capital belies the cooperation assumed to exist in 'social capital', while the requirement for 'productiveness' has disquieting implications for those who, for whatever reason, cannot be productive in the economic sense. The final section of the paper argues that those who are supposedly the main, if not the only, beneficiaries of 'social capital' - the `disadvantaged' or the 'socially excluded' - do not in fact benefit from whatever is being alluded to by the term `social capital'. The paper concludes by asking, but not answering, the question: Why, if 'social capital' cannot diminish poverty, is it being posited as a substitute for the welfare state, the only institution that does address poverty (if minimally)? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's poverty has long been a central concern for policy makers and policy researchers. The body of extant research conducted and the range of programmatic interventions undertaken by successive governments in this and other countries is extraordinary. Nevertheless, children remain in poverty. Clearly there are many reasons for this, not least of which is the maintenance and intensification of market capitalism with its attendant blatant inequalities. Even so, the moral, political, social and economic imperatives for developing workable responses to children's poverty remain. This paper argues that we, in Australia, should adopt an approach increasingly taken in the UK. Drawing on, among other things, the new sociology of childhood, this approach begins not with the expertise of adult researchers and policy makers, but with that of children. In doing so, the case is made for why children's perceptions and experiences of poverty are key concerns for policy. The paper outlines in theoretical terms why children's voices matter. Invoking the new sociology of childhood and the sociology of identity, a conceptual framework for understanding why policy scholars and makers should carefully attend to the voices of their subjects is sketched - in this case, the subjects are children. Finally, some methodological implications of this for undertaking policy research informed by this approach are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper makes three claims: first that regulatory state making and market making in higher education is intertwined through a project of market citizenship that shapes the 'publicness' of higher education. Second, we argue that these projects of market citizenship are variegated and in Australia has taken the form of accommodation-via regulation tools-between social democratic and market elements, and finally we argue that the effect of this new regulatory state is a strategy to depoliticise the governance of higher education. Policy making appears to be the application of a set of technical rules rather than political decisions about the allocation of values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring and tracing product and process qualities along global supply chains have become increasingly challenging tasks for companies at the downstream end of the chain. High levels of uncertainty in trade coordination arise among importing companies in the face of these developments. The conceptual aim of this paper is to show, by the example of organic food imports to Germany and Australia, how convention theory can contribute to the analysis of trade coordination in global value chains. Our empirical results affirm that industrial conventions such as standards and third-party certification have gained increasing significance over the past two decades. Simultaneously, however, we argue that industrial conventions are not enough to overcome uncertainties in trade. They do not necessarily lead to reduced differences in perceptions of product quality between suppliers and importers. Less tangible factors such as trust established through relationship management and reputation are likewise significant. Furthermore, not only companies with a certain ideological tradition, but also individual people with altruistic motives within other types of firms, can determine how 'dedicated' a firm is in pushing trade coordination according to civic and domestic conventions. Market conventions (ie, the importance of price and competitiveness) are stressed more by Australian firms reflecting the country's liberal market economy and low state subsidies especially in the area of agriculture. Finally, compromises between conventions are sometimes necessary to end a situation of conflict between buyer and supplier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses contemporary neoliberal mobilisations of community undertaken by private corporations. It does so by examining the ways in which the mining industry, empowered through the legitimising framework of corporate social responsibility, is increasingly and profoundly involved in shaping the meaning, practice, and experience of 'local community'. We draw on a substantial Australian case study, consisting of interviews and document analysis, as a means to examine 'community-engagement' practices undertaken by BHP Billiton's Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation in the Shire of Ravensthorpe in rural Australia. This engagement, we argue, as a process of deepening neoliberalisation simultaneously defines and transforms local community according to the logic of global capital. As such, this study has implications for critical understandings of the intersections among corporate social responsibility, neoliberalisation, community, and capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a hard look at merit and the ideal academic, twin concepts that have been accorded short shrift by the scholarly literature. For the most authoritative positions, the ideal displays all the hallmarks of Benchmark Man. Despite the ostensible ‘feminisation’ of the academy, the liberal myth that merit is stable, objective and calculable lingers on. As a counterpoint to the feminisation thesis, it is argued that a re-masculinisation of the academy is occurring as a result of the transformation of higher education wrought by the new knowledge economy. In response, the ideal academic has become a ‘technopreneur’—a scientific researcher with business acumen who produces academic capitalism. This new ideal academic evinces a distinctly masculinist hue in contrast to the less-than-ideal academic—the humanities or social science teacher with large classes, who is more likely to be both casualised and feminised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Umbilical cord blood banking is one of many biomedical innovations that confront pregnant women with new choices about what they should do to secure their own and their child's best interests. Many mothers can now choose to donate their baby's umbilical cord blood (UCB) to a public cord blood bank or pay to store it in a private cord blood bank. Donation to a public bank is widely regarded as an altruistic act of civic responsibility. Paying to store UCB may be regarded as a 'unique opportunity' to provide 'insurance' for the child's future. This paper reports findings from a survey of Australian women that investigated the decision to either donate or store UCB. We conclude that mothers are faced with competing discourses that force them to choose between being a 'good mother' and fulfilling their role as a 'good citizen.' We discuss this finding with reference to the concept of value pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, a distinct political-educational imagination drives contemporary policy and praxis. This imagination finds root in the social governance models of British Third Way policy and can be considered social capitalist. Central to such politics is a view that social governance is capable of pursuing and achieving the social democratic ideals of equity and social justice, within the architecture of a globalising and competitive capitalist economy. In this paper, I analyse Australian federal and Victorian state education policies to argue that social capitalist politics has significant implications for the ways schools are being imagined and governed. Specifically, I argue that schools are re-imagined as 'learning communities' through which excellence and equity are seen to operate harmoniously amidst a marketising system of educational services. In doing so, I feature empirical data from an ethnographic project conducted in two socially disparate Victorian government secondary schools, to highlight myriad tensions and paradoxes that emerge when each school attempts to govern itself towards policy ideals. In conclusion, I argue that policy imaginations of schools as havens of excellence and equity are difficult to take seriously when infused into the architecture of an education system that is deeply stratified and structured to discriminate between individuals in line with performance hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the spaces where the interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups during the period of contact and cross-cultural interaction took place around the world, was at missions. In Australia, missions were founded, rearranged and closed down over a period of time in which the attitudes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups and official Government policy towards contact relationships were continually changing. By analyzing the use of these contested spaces at Australian Missions by both groups, archaeologists can begin to understand how the new relationships between these groups were negotiated, contested and played out over time. This paper analyses the use of space, using the theoretical frameworks of the archaeologies of capitalism, at Poonindie Mission in South Australia, which was established by the Anglican Church with support from the colonial government and operated between 1850 and 1896. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the apparent contradiction of a transnational capitalist class (TCC) within the Australian nation state and asks if they do exist what is their relationship to the Australian Capitalist Class (ACC)? Is their relationship comfy, cooperative or conflictual? The test for these likely scenarios is material that comes from a longitudinal study of interlocking directors and major shareholders (drawn from the top 30 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) 1992-2007 and 300 top Australian companies listed on the Huntley's 2007 shareholder database) plus interviews with top thirty company directors over a 15 year period 1992-2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian sociologists have barely engaged with the resurgence of economic sociology in the USA and Europe. It might be argued that this lack of engagement arises from a robust local agenda, immune from metropolitan fashions This article argues that this is not the case. Rather, it arises from the enduring residualism of Australian sociology vis-a-vis economics In turn, this residualism is grounded in sociology's late beginnings in Australia, the dominant framework at the time of its institutionalization in the 1950s and 1960s, and the limited challenge presented by critical approaches from the 1970s. The article identifies four major lines of inquiry in the resurgence of economic sociology: network analysis, comparative political economy, field theory and performativity theory Notwithstanding their differences, these approaches direct attention to the social construction of markets. In turn, they challenge both mainstream economics and sociology. The papers in this Special Edition of the Journal of Sociology build upon these lines of inquiry in the Australian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates late modern Anglo-Indian lifeworlds in Australia in a dialogue with the theoretical templates of globalisation and postcolonialism. More particularly it deploys contemporary Anglo-Indian life stories to challenge theoretical positions in the domain of globalisation studies that announce either the demise of postcolonial theory (by suggesting that it has outlived its historical viability) or subsume its varied articulations under the rubric of "globalisation". Both positions find their voice in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri co-authored Empire (2000). I take up the challenge posed to postcolonialism by Hardt and Negri by asking how they would theorise a mode of hybrid belonging in a globalised world that has a long colonial history of racial and cultural mixing and that is not just a by-product of late capitalism's global generation of difference. Such a mode of belonging is manifest in the Anglo-Indian community now residing in the Anglophone countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK. The Anglo-Indian narratives deployed in this analysis are seen as exemplary in addressing the theoretical links between postcolonialism and globalisation. They also unravel global capital's false rhetoric of an even playing field of ever proliferating difference and mixedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In common with other advanced market economies, regional and rural communities in Australia have come under increasing economic and social stress. One manifestation of this phenomenon is the growing spatial inequalities in social and economic conditions. This paper briefly reviews the genesis of spatial inequalities and examines their consequences in the contemporary Australian political milieu. The discussion concludes with an analysis of the policy implications of these inequalities for local governments and communities in disadvantaged regional and rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing 'rationalisation' of tertiary education in Australia is symptomatic, it is argued here, of the deeper tensions inherent in corporate capitalism. This paper examines one aspect of the rationalisation process-amalgamation-based on research carried out at two amalgamated colleges, with the aim of 'demystifying' the rhetoric of 'efficiency and effectiveness' underpinning current managerialist approaches to education. The impact of amalgamation on college life-increased bureaucratisation and centralisation of power harnessed to a form of `entrepreneurial zeal', resulting in administrative inefficiencies and increasing staff alienation-may be partly explained, it is suggested, by the contradictions and limitations of the ideological/economistic parameters within which the amalgamation policy was conceived, namely the `Razor Gang' proposals of the former Liberal government This in turn, it is suggested, reflects something of the interrelationship between education policy, the 'fiscal crisis' of capitalism, and the 'legitimation crisis' of the State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals comparatively with the class structures of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Four hypotheses, which could account for the similarities and differences in class structure, are identified. The first is based on their semi-peripheral status in the world economy; the second, pertaining particularly to Canada, argues for an `Americanisation effect'; the third is based on their similar heritage in the context of dominion capitalism; while the fourth proposes purely endogenous determination. The differences in class structure that the analysis reveals, particularly with respect to the managerial class, can perhaps be more persuasively explained in terms of the different historical circumstances of the three countries rather than by a set of exogenous factors which impact on all of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]