Australian Sociology Research Articles

Publishing during a sociology PhD in Australia: Differences by elite and non-elite universities and gender

We examined the latest decade of Australian sociology PhD completions for differences in the number and quality of research outputs students published during doctoral enrolment. There was no evidence of a statistically significant difference between Go8 PhD students and their non-Go8 PhD counterparts in terms of either the quantity of research publications achieved, or the quality of these publications as measured by high-impact journals. There was also insufficient evidence statistically to conclude that Go8 men and Go8 women differed from one another, or that non-Go8 men and non-Go8 women differed from one another in overall quantity of outputs and publishing in high-impact journals. However, publishing success of men and women, when combined, regardless of whether they were at elite Go8 or non-Go8 institutions, showed gender had a marginally significant effect on publication productivity, men outperforming women, in both publication counts and in publishing in high-impact journals.

Wellbeing

Wellbeing

A basic income for a complex society: Introduction

Proposals for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) have a long history, but a surge of interest since the global financial crisis suggests a connection to growing inequality and insecurity. The pandemic intensified interest through the global explosion in the use of cash transfers. This special issue arose from pre-pandemic debates among Australian sociologists connecting global interest around UBI to emerging patterns of inequality and insecurity stemming from Australia's precarious labour market and expensive housing market. Those discussions broadened to reflect on Australia's colonial history and patriarchal economy, and the potential to recognise more diverse contributions and values. Evolving through the Covid crisis, the issue now incorporates the remarkable alternatives that were, briefly, made possible. The articles reflect both scepticism and optimism towards UBI, but all reveal how basic income can provide a useful lens for Australian sociology – a simple tool responding to an increasingly complex society.

Interacting with Librarians to Locate Australian Sociology PhDs in the Era of Constant University Restructuring

ABSTRACT University librarians occupied an important role in facilitating our academic research project identifying and locating sociology PhDs completed in Australia from 2010–2019. This project was to be based on the supposedly straightforward collection of sociology doctorates to assess research publication practices during and post PhD. This collection process, however, proved to be complex, arduous and time-consuming. When we approached librarians for information or were referred to them by university administrators, their service ethic was evident. Structural university changes, however, sometimes impacted librarians’ ability to locate and retrieve sociology PhD theses. Successive technological changes had often fragmented catalogue and repository data, affecting librarians’ ability to trace PhDs. Loss of library staff impacted universities’ collective memory of where and how theses were stored or could be accessed. The rich interactive process between researchers and librarians in this project is explored through reviewing the corpus of emails and other exchanges developing strategies to overcome barriers tracking down completed PhD theses within Departments of Sociology or their iterations in interdisciplinary Schools of Social Sciences containing sociology ‘disciplines’, ‘programmes’ or individual sociologists. The present manuscript aims to chronicle the intricacies of gathering data on completed Australia sociology PhDs with the assistance of librarians.

The state of the discipline: Australian sociology and its future

Debates about the state of Australian sociology have raged for as long as sociology has existed in Australia. Concerns about the discipline’s future may be inevitable for a critical, reflexive discipline, but to those entering the discipline, it is neither instructive nor productive to be subjected to lingering disciplinary anxieties. After more than fifty years, it is time to take stock of the differing visions of sociology, and examine the arguments about the health, or otherwise, of Australian sociology. To advance this debate, we consider the signs and benchmarks of a ‘successful’ sociology as expressed in The Australian Sociological Association magazine, NEXUS, and key writings from Australian sociologists. We suggest that much of the disagreement over the status of sociology derives from the way ‘disciplines’ and ‘success’ are defined. Regarding sociology to be an heterogeneous, multi-modal, social institution and practice, we propose a way forward in our efforts to represent ourselves.

Writing national histories of sociology: Methods, approaches and visions

There has been a renewal of interest in the writing of national histories of sociology, with dozens of histories recently published in both the global North and South. Despite this, there has been a dearth of discussion about the methods and methodologies appropriate to such a task. Indeed, few histories of sociology, and fewer still national histories of sociology, explicitly address methodology. In this study, we review the literature on histories of sociology from a variety of countries, focusing on how the authors have approached the writing of history, and their implicit use of methods and methodologies. We suggest the use of a content analysis as an additional, though perhaps unusual, method of historiography, and apply this in the case of an Australian history of sociology. Our content analysis reveals both similarities and differences in the Australian approach, indicating the impact of settler-colonialism on Australian sociology and its historiography.

Book Review: Kirsten Harley and Gary Wickham, Australian Sociology: Fragility, Survival, Rivalry

Book Review: Kirsten Harley and Gary Wickham, <i>Australian Sociology: Fragility, Survival, Rivalry</i>

The publishing practices of Australian sociology PhD students: do they achieve outputs in sociology journals?

The publishing practices of Australian sociology PhD students: do they achieve outputs in sociology journals?

Research productivity of sociology PhD candidates at interdisciplinary schools of social science at elite Australian universities, 2013–17: A gender perspective

Gender data are presented from a study into sociology PhD completions and student research outputs during enrolment at Australian ‘Group of Eight’ interdisciplinary schools of social science. Findings confirm views and impressions offered by Australian sociology academic leaders. The present data contributes to this wider discussion by describing patterns in the contemporary cohort of sociology PhD students. First, we document a stable gender composition of the discipline in Australia reflective of the literature across several decades rather than a recent feminisation process. Second, we report for this cohort of contemporary PhD sociology completions in Australia women and men publish at similar rates during candidacy. Third, there is no significant gendered difference between students at any level of research output production. Fourth, methodological approaches used by sociology doctoral students confirm the epistemological domination of qualitative analysis in this current cohort of sociology PhD theses.

Economic rationalism in Canberra 25 years on?

This article, based on an edited transcript of a speech at The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) conference in Melbourne in December 2016, summarises the criticisms of ‘economic rationalism’, cum neoliberalism, that emerged from the ‘economic rationalism debate’ in Australia of the early 1990s to the present. Economic rationalism reversed Australia’s historic nation-building legacy. Free market neoliberal doctrines have captured the central Canberra policy-making apparatus and radically reduced the coordinating role of the state in most areas of public policy. Economic ‘reform’ is seen primarily as a political project led by international and domestic corporate interest groupings and aimed at the transformation of Australia’s institutions. The neoliberal orthodoxy continues to distort the policy process as it has become functionally indispensable for the process of policy making and government, despite its failing intellectual legitimacy.

Designing First-year Sociology Curricula and Practice

Many countries are now specifying standards for graduates in different disciplines, including sociology. In Australia, the Australian Sociological Association (TASA) has developed Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) for sociology to provide the learning outcomes that students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology should achieve. These TLOs have encouraged universities to think explicitly about their sociology curriculum in a holistic way. This paper reports on a project that investigated the skills and concepts sociology students need to learn in first year to meet the TLOs by the time they graduate. The project identified the needs of students as they transition from school or work into the study of sociology in first year through a study of literature of first-year pedagogy and a student survey. A workshop was held for sociology that involved 37 academics from 14 universities. The workshop was used to promote a rethink of teaching of sociology in the light of the new TLOs as well as to collect ideas from the participants. The student surveys, workshop ideas and relevant literature were analyzed and synthesized for each TLO to determine what skills and concepts first-year students needed to learn, identify what they might find difficult and propose strategies for teaching. The paper also provides practical ideas for engaging academics with thinking holistically about the sociology curriculum and for teaching and learning sociology in the first year of an undergraduate degree.

Ideology and utopia: Historic crisis of economic rationality and the role of public sociology

This article reflects on the role of public sociology in the debate on the systemic crisis of western capitalism reinvigorated by the 2007–8 global financial crisis. The article argues that, in the current moment in history, sociologists have a professional duty to challenge the growing irrationality of the economically rational public discourse and to more vigorously uphold the formulation of alternative ‘real-utopian’ discourses. The article first introduces capitalism’s core ideology – economic rationality – arguing that it has hardened into the irrational dogma of the ostensibly rational West, with an unrelenting grip on the public discourse, especially in the ‘neoliberal’ Anglosphere. The ideology suppresses measures needed to address issues such as global warming and global financial disorder. Contemporary ‘Anglo’ sociology, including Australian sociology, is internally compartmentalized, self-referential and of marginal influence in the public sphere. Moreover, it espouses economic rationality in its practice within increasingly corporatized universities, while maintaining a progressive cloak over its intellectual products.

The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain, Australian Sociology, Sociology in Ireland

Book Review of:&#x0D; John Holmwood and John Scott (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in BritainBasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2014Hardcover, 631 pp.ISBN 978-0-230-29981-8Price: € 234,33&#x0D; Kirsten Harley and Gary Wickham, Australian Sociology: Fragility, Survival, RivalryBasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2014 (Sociology Transformed)Hardcover, 123 pp.ISBN 978-1-137-37974-0Price: € 69,54&#x0D; Bryan Fanning and Andreas Hess, Sociology in Ireland: A Short HistoryBasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015 (Sociology Transformed)Hardcover, 89 pp.ISBN 978-1-137-45035-7Price: € 69,54

Authentic Lives, Authentic Times: A Cultural and Media Analysis

Authentic Lives, Authentic Times: A Cultural and Media Analysis

Ethnic Background and Meanings of Authenticity: A Qualitative Study of University Students

Ethnic Background and Meanings of Authenticity: A Qualitative Study of University Students

Introducing the Complete Case Study into an Australian Undergraduate Sociology Major

In recent years, higher education institutions have paid greater attention to establishing learning thresholds, benchmarks and outcomes for the teaching of sociology. This paper explores how course...

Teaching race to teach Indigeneity

Australia is a relatively new nation state built on colonisation and settler migration. These origins situate Australia’s First Peoples and Indigenous/settler and nation-state relationships as central aspects of contemporary Australian society. It would seem logical to conclude that Australian sociology curricula would include a substantial range of units and courses with Indigenous themes and content. Yet, this is not the case. Indigenous sociology is largely absent from the sociology curriculum within tertiary education. In this article we argue that the lack of the Indigenous is not an oversight but can be linked to a normalisation of a more general disengagement of the discipline with the key social force of race. Apart from consistent description of Indigenous disadvantage, Indigenous and race issues are presumed to sit outside the realm of mainstream Australian sociology. We use Whiteness and Critical Race theories to explain how this curriculum absence can be seen as a particular Australian praxis of Whiteness and colour-blind racism. Our own experiences as Aboriginal sociologists in mainstream sociology departments provide the empirical base to show how Whiteness, and its privileging practices, pervades the Australian sociology curricula. Our argument extends to addressing the pedagogic challenges faced by lecturers presenting Indigenous content to a largely Euro-Australian student body.

Reflections on teaching gender to Australian sociology undergraduates in the neoliberal postfeminist classroom

This article doubles as a reflection piece and a primer in thinking about how to negotiate teaching gender in an evolving institutional climate. I argue that teaching gender in sociology sits at odds with the increasing neoliberal and postfeminist discourses, attitudes, and economics that currently structure Australian universities. First, I locate the context in which teachers of gender in sociology find themselves in Australia with an emphasis on how neoliberal and postfeminist discourses challenge students in developing a sociological imagination. Next, I examine the utility of feminist pedagogies based on my own experiences as a teacher. Specifically, I explore two strategies that I have employed in one gender-focused unit that I teach to address the challenges posed by neoliberal and postfeminist orthodoxy.

The Sociology of Education in Australia: A Political and Intellectual Trajectory

The sociology of education is fundamentally concerned with the role of education in social reproduction and change. In Australia such a focus informs fields like gender and education, vocational education and lifelong learning, policy sociology in education, cultural sociology of education, literacy, social justice and education, globalisation and education.This article examines the political and intellectual trajectory of Australian sociology of education. It points to the productivity of educational research in areas such as gender, literacy, and policy and to the failure of sociology of education to address the reproduction of Indigenous and ethnic disadvantage. The paper argues that the theoretical and methodological innovations that characterise sociology are a disciplinary strength, but that it is necessary for the sociology of education to fully grapple with issues of Indigenous and minority education and more recently issues of environmental sustainability.

Challenges for Australian sociology

Sociologist Nicole Asquith argues that, in Australia, when it ‘comes to population ageing, sociology has been, in large part, silent in the face of neo-liberal policies of positive ageing’ (2009: 255). In the absence of such critical research, governments at all levels since the 1990s have pursued policies of ageing that tends to subordinate the social needs of older Australians to the nation’s economic needs. This paper seeks to explain why the critical social gerontology movement has not taken root in Australia through an historical analysis of ageing research in Australia. Furthermore, it aims to demonstrate the rewards of critical analysis through new research into the discourses of positive ageing. It also shows how older Australians resist ‘responsible’ ageing and its regulation of them. This analysis is designed to inspire further critical engagement, which recognizes the diversity of older Australians, giving voice to their resistance, and better inform policy development.