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This paper layers communication theory over a cultural context by examining how Community Action Groups (CAGs) have responded to development along Australian coastlines. It analyses how communication and media strategies and techniques have been adopted by the third sector to challenge commercial and government organisations which have proposed coastal development. As noted by Huntsman (2001): `It is this appropriation of the beach for the purposes of capitalism, and the contesting ideas about the beach that have captured the attention of critics. `Indeed these critics, who in this paper are members of strategic alliances, or CA Gs, exist all along the Australian coastline. The paper seeks to highlight how the connections that are felt with Australia ~ coasts provide a special impetus and motivation for CAGs which have emerged in response to development along Australia's coasts, from Western Australia to New South Wales and Queensland. [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]

Within many coordinated market economies, labour unions have demonstrated to be key actors in shaping corporate social responsibility. Researchers have, however, paid surprisingly little attention to the role of unions in shaping corporate social responsibility strategies and responses in liberal market contexts. This article extends the emerging research on unions and corporate social responsibility through a case study which investigates union influences over corporate social responsibility within the liberal market context of Australia. We conceptualise the role of unions in corporate social responsibility in this context through an industrial relations lens with particular reference to collective bargaining. Drawing on qualitative data, the case study examines the Ford Motor Company's recent closure of its Australian assembly operations which was hailed by a wide range of stakeholders as an exemplar of 'best practice' in their assistance of displaced workers. We conclude that, while highly socially responsible, Ford's actions were far from voluntary but influenced by a combination of union influence and a 'subsidised' corporate social responsibility, where the state, unable and/or powerless to legislate good corporate social behaviour, chose to financially underwrite its cost to the firm. The study represents one of the first studies to demonstrate how unions shape corporate social responsibility strategies of firms in liberal market contexts and how 'subsidised' corporate social responsibility becomes an alternative political solution within such a context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article raises the question of whether comparative national models of communications research can be developed along the lines of Hallin and Mancini's (2004) analysis of comparative media policy, or the work of Perraton and Clift (2004) on comparative national capitalisms. Taking communications research in Australia and New Zealand as its starting point, the article considers what might be the relevant variables in shaping an 'intellectual milieu' for communications research in these countries, compared with those of Europe, North America and Asia. Some possibly relevant variables include: type of media system (e.g. how significant is public service media?); political culture (e.g. are there significant left-of-centre political parties?); dominant intellectual traditions; level and types of research funding; the overall structure of the higher education system; and where communications sits within it. In considering whether such an exercise can or should be undertaken, we can also evaluate, as Hallin and Mancini do, the significance of potentially homogenising forces. These would include globalisation, new media technologies, and the rise of a global 'audit culture'. The article raises these issues as questions that emerge when we consider, as Curran and Park (2000) and Thussu (2009) have proposed, what a 'de-Westernized' media and communications research paradigm may look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article reports on a qualitative study of social capital within an urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander context. Using data generated from 100 Aboriginal and Tortes Strait Islander participants in focus group discussions and in-depth interviews collected by Aboriginal community development workers, this article describes two worlds of social capital available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The primary source of bonding social capital comes from family and wider Aboriginal and Tortes Strait Islander community connections. In the context of an oppressive history and experiences of ongoing racism and discrimination, a second world of bridging social capital remains elusive to many Indigenous Australians. Our findings suggest that to understand the tensions between the two social capitals requires an engagement with the complexities of identity. We argue that it is vital to explore the texture of social capital, rather than just measure its volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the nature of modernity in Australia, or in the Antipodes? This article presents the view that Australia is an unhappy country because its modernity is caught between at least two different images of pasts and futures possible. There are at least two Australias, one closer to the image of modern tradition or settler capitalism, the other heading in the direction of globalism via its world cities. On contemplation, the image of doubling or pluralization spreads. For there are also at least two distinct little narratives of national foundation, one dystopic, as the halfway modern society begot by penal origins in 1788, the other utopian, as the field of the transtasman social laboratory mooted into the 20th century. These divisions resonate with the theme of the two nations, from Disraeli through to Bauman, but the logical implication of the argument for the discourse about multiple modernities suggests the pluralization rather than dualization of lifeworlds and social forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]