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The discussion about the relationship between globalization and journalism has stressed the westernization of information flows, contra-flows, and the globalization of news practices. Beyond information flows and news practices, it is important to examine the impact that globalization has on news narratives. With the emergence of the extra-national WikiLeaks, it is possible that the ‘national narrative’ through which journalists interpret information is eroded and replaced by an increasingly autonomous journalism. This study tests this possibility by examining how an Israeli newspaper and an Australian newspaper incorporated leaked documents into news coverage and how they framed WikiLeaks’ contribution to journalism. It finds that the papers in each country mined the leaks for geopolitical relevance to their respective countries, but did so in a way that facilitated debate about what the national interest should be. In doing so, the papers reframed WikiLeaks from a problem for the state to a whistleblower against their countries’ and US officials. By extension, the papers positioned themselves as whistleblowers and democratic facilitators. A ‘national lens’ continues to inform newswork, but the ‘national narrative’ has eroded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on data from a study of an Australian public broadcaster (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), this paper demonstrates how the marketization of public sector organizations involves a ‘discourse of globalization’ that legitimates marketization initiatives by making them appear inevitable. This discursive dimension also becomes a site of con testation. We examine three oppositional groups that challenge the apparent inevitability of globalization through a range of discursive tactics. They are surfacing implicitly shared values, appropriating dominant themes of globalization, and recovering traditional notions of public service. The paper explores the socio-political effects of such discursive tactics as they relate to understandings of globalization ‘from below’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the concept of mediascapes in relation to the production and distribution of television dramas set in the countryside. The concept involves two distinct, but inter-related media geographies, one focused on material dimensions of 'media in space' and the other concerned with symbolic aspects of 'space in media'. The paper explores these in relation to ten television drama series produced and distributed within Australia, Britain and New Zealand. It is argued that whilst television research has often overlooked the rural in favour of the urban, there is clear evidence that the countryside is an important global mediascape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

STRATEGIES FOR BECOMING GLOBAL in orientation are now embedded in the policies and practices of most universities in Australia. Such policies, if implemented effectively, contribute to the university's international profile. With this thrust come the implementation of so-called 'transnational' programs--that is, the offering of a university program in another country tailored to meet the cultural needs of a specific group of students yet maintain the integrity and content offered on campus. This paper discusses some of the challenges in assisting early childhood students undertaking a BEd in early childhood education in Singapore. Specifically, the focus of undertaking research is examined, including the topics selected, research paradigms that frame the research and the cultural sensitivity needed in such a context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an historical account of conditions and actions which gave rise to the decision to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards in Australia. This decision is seen as a 'moment' within a much broader movement of history, namely, the emergence of a transnational neoliberal global order comprising networks of multilateral arrangements and strategic alliances, as well as ambiguous but powerful social, political and cultural forces. Those phenomena and their force in the context of accounting standard setting are examined here through a conflation of Castells' work on globalisation with the strong structuration model of Stones. This article demonstrates the potential of the Stones/Castells theoretical nexus to contribute to future accounting research, not only within the narrow realm of rule-making but more broadly in our attempts to understand and critique the manner in which global neoliberal processes have come to impact contemporary experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the internationalization of public relations education, by examining public relations education in Australia, its relation with the public relations industry, and its growth in response to international student- and market-led demand. The discussion highlights the tensions within what is essentially an education project driven in part by stakeholders seeking to professionalize the industry and in part by university staff seeking academic legitimacy and disciplinary status for public relations within a rapidly changing higher education sector. Tensions between the local, national, and global contexts of higher education, and academic, industry and market factors are evident. In particular, the process of developing an internationalized curriculum exposes the narrow disciplinarity and weak theoretical foundations of a field, which emerged out of industry practice and is strongly influenced by U.S. scholarship. It is concluded that internationalization of the public relations curriculum offers scholars the possibility to address the ethnocentric values and narratives of their discipline and improve learning outcomes for students. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• Summary: Since the mid-1970s the Australian welfare state has faced a continuing crisis of resourcing and legitimation. Social work as a central entity within the welfare state has been challenged in terms of to its value base and relevance. As with much of the Western world, this challenge has been heightened with the rise of neoliberalism, which has pervaded most aspects of Australian society. Neoliberalism has consequently had a profound effect upon Australian social workers. The challenges to the Australian welfare state and social work are from without and within, by neoliberal ideas and its practices.• Findings: While neoliberalism’s relationship to social work as a broad theme is explored in the literature, the complexity of marketization and inclusive aspects have not been considered in any detail in relation to social work. The evidence in the Australian context is even slimmer, and as a consequence the particularity of the Australian welfare state and its relationship to neoliberalism, and the consequences for Australian social work, remains largely untested. Furthermore, while there are some indications of the day to day impact on social work in the context of a post-welfare state regime, little work has been conducted on the capacity of neoliberalism to infiltrate social work through its new institutions of the social and thus become embedded in social work.• Application: This article lays the foundations for a research project to examine the extent to which neoliberalism has become embedded in Australian social work and how social workers and social work educators are responding to these hegemonic influences. What are the ways in which social workers have become complicit in neoliberalism? Is Australian social work part of the neoliberal project to the point where neoliberalism has become part of its understandings and everyday activity? It is hoped that through this research, a more sophisticated understanding of the impact of neoliberalism on social work will contribute to the revitalization of critical social work in Australia and forms of resistance to the neoliberal project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of International Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Current Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recent accounts of Habermas's conception of the public sphere concern the interlocking of multiple networks and spaces. In a global context new interfaces between existing (counter-) public spheres can lead to multiple counter-publics. This article explores this phenomenon through the examination of the communicative spaces that offer alternatives to Australia's mainstream public sphere from three different strands of Sydney's community media: diasporic media (Assyrian Radio SBS), lndigenous media (Koori Radio) and discursive sites that operate in between ethnic and mainstream media (Forum for Australia's Islamic Relations). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is on the Business Council of Australia (BCA), an association of the CEOs of the 100 or so largest companies operating in Australia. Since its inception the BCA has been an influential supporter of largely successful efforts to neoliberalize and internationalize the Australian economy. Running in parallel with these developments, however, the BCA has moved from being a "somewhat strong" to a relatively weak policy organization. This article argues these two trends are causally related. Neoliberal-inspired economic restructuring and economic internationalization have weakened the "logic of membership" and the "logic of influence" of the BCA, leading to a process of organizational involution. Furthermore, potential offsets to what I describe as the organizational predations of neoliberalism and internationalization--especially via a willingness or capacity to forge supportive or mutualistic relations with the state--have not been realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has not led, and is unlikely to lead, to a global homogenization of penal policy and practices. Drawing on a study of penal systems in 12 contemporary capitalist countries (the United States of America, England and Wales, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Sweden, Finland and Japan), this article demonstrates that the political economies of such countries can be broadly categorized as neo-liberal, conservative corporatist, social democratic or oriental corporatist. This categorization is strongly related to the punitiveness of the penal culture and the rates of imprisonment to be found in each country. The reasons for this association are discussed. One crucial factor may be the degree to which societies with different types of political economy are 'inclusive' rather than 'exclusive' towards deviant individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtually unheard of since the Great Depression, lockouts have reemerged strongly in Australia and New Zealand just as they have all but disappeared in Germany. The decline of lockouts in Germany is convincingly attributed to the enhanced vulnerability of firms to stoppages in certain circumstances amid globalization, but the small, open economies of Australia and New Zealand are equally subject to these pressures. Using macro- and micro-level data, this article illustrates that neoliberal legislative reforms and institutional change have reconfigured the risks, costs, and payoffs associated with lockouts amid globalization. In doing so, some flaws in the varieties of capitalism/dual convergence literature are highlighted. In particular, the post hoc classification of the antipodes as liberal market economies bypasses the role of legislative reform in reconstituting employer interests and the differences in electoral, party, and state structures that impeded/facilitated the rise of neoliberal reformers in Germany and the antipodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Current Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Based on an account of the internationalisation of education in Australian government schools, this article challenges the enthusiastic recruitment of full-fee-paying students in the state sector. The author argues that a major problem for state schooling is the implementation of policies and practices arising from the context of higher education such as the idea that internationalisation invariably strengthens international and intercultural relationships and the idea that the competitive market-driven approach is an inevitable effect of globalisation. The author contends that issues raised in the context of state schools highlight existing orthodoxies and the need to move beyond the neoliberal priorities of international education to explore strategic and innovative new directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both sport and the associated images of sporting bodies that are routinely packaged for the consumption of international audiences are heavily gendered. However, academic analyses of the trend to global sport have rarely considered the situation of women and their relationships as participants or consumers to sport and its imagery. Women's sporting contests almost never receive the media coverage required to enter the national, let alone the global, sporting marketplaces; consequently, women and their sports are rendered marginal. But women occupy complex, often contradictory, positions in the global media-sport nexus that require investigation in relation to the sports they play and the dominant images of the media. It is some of these issues that this article investigates. Using the media coverage of the Australian Tennis Open as a touchstone, the article explores the contradictory ways in which women players were represented and "packaged" for the consumption of the Australian audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]