National Masculinity Research Articles

Red Badge of Courage and Jalan Tak Ada Ujung: Comparing Indonesia’s and America’s National Masculinity

Masculinity linked to conflict or war is often seen as hegemonic. This research offers two literary texts from two different countries: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (2005) and Muchtar Lubis’ Jalan Tak Ada Ujung (The Endless Road) (1952). By comparing and contrasting both countries in terms of non-hegemonic masculinities of the protagonist characters, the pattern of masculinities of each nation, which is often overlooked, can be explainable. We can identify variations of masculinities in classic fiction, which reflect the national discourses. By utilizing the notion of focalization, the method of narratology can locate the power relation and agency in the story. Post-war anxiety as well as the ideology of fatherism and momism constructs the national gendered discoures. Indonesia’s masculinity resists the legitimate and privileged as well as the status-quo concept of national masculinity. The resistance implies that Indonesia’s national masculinity is more diverse and progressive than America’s is.

The Sokol Movement, the Sokol Culture, and Gender Relations in Bohemia and Moravia from the 1860s to the early 1870s

Socially constructed gender relations are explored by the example of the Sokol (Czech for “falcon”) movement and the Sokol culture in Bohemia and Moravia in the 1860s and at the beginning of the 1870s. The Sokol clubs combined Czech nationalism with gymnastics. The study is based on the analysis of newspapers and other primary sources. The majority of Czech nationalists followed the pre-modern gender discourse, which implied the subordination of women. This discourse included the idea of male virtues that influenced the image of Sokol as the embodiment of Czech national masculinity. The Czech nationalist image of Germans, as well as the German nationalist image of Czechs, was associated with the others’ lack of masculinity. Another important component of the Sokol identity was the sense of beauty. Although nineteenth-century society had acknowledged the existence of only two genders and had denied the possibility of gender transition, there were some cases of crossing traditional gender boundaries. The role of women in Sokol events reflected gender inequality and gender stereotypes. As a political religion, nationalism assigned political meaning to the romantic relationships between men and women. The positive approach of Czech nationalists to the women’s movement was to a great extent caused by the mother’s role in the formation of the child’s identity. Sokols cooperated with the Prague American Ladies’ Club and supported the Gymnastic Club of the Ladies and Girls of Prague (1869). This club sought to avoid public attention, didn’t use the masculine elements of Sokol culture and promoted gymnastics as a part of female education. In the late 1860s the club was the only one of its kind in Central Europe. Limited dissemination of the modern gender discourse and its interrelation with the premodern one corresponded with the intermediate phase of modernization processes and their non-linear nature.

Masculinity, victimhood and national identity in 1970s Australian ocker cinema

Historians have long understood ocker cinema in terms of a more distinct and assertive national identity in Whitlam’s 1970s, yet only recently have begun to consider the context of the women’s liberation movement unfolding at the time. Adding to this emerging body of scholarship, this article reads the rise of ocker cinema both in the context of, and as a response to, second-wave feminism. Turning to the films Stork (1971), The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Alvin Purple (1973), this article argues that the cinematic articulation of the ocker in the 1970s not only asserted a masculinist national identity, but also positioned this national masculinity as the victim of (and in danger from) threatening feminist challenges.

ГЕНДЕРНЫЕ АЛЛЕГОРИИ ШОТЛАНДСКОЙ НАЦИИ В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ А. ГРЕЯ

Being an ardent patriot and Scottish nationalist Alasdair Gray has created a whole gallery of national allegories in his fiction. Until recently, researchers’ attention (K. Stirling, I. Platt, C. Blomeley) has been mainly focused on female national figures. Nevertheless, one of the basic categories of Scottish cultural identity has always been masculinity rather than femininity. Consequently, the key cultural trope of national literature is considered the “hard man”. The aim of this research is to provide a comprehensive analysis of male characters in A. Gray’s fiction based on J. Homberg-Schramm’s classification of national masculinity types: traditional man, compensatory man, and the man in transition. In his novels, traditional masculinity is associated with the generation of “fathers”, and is hugely criticized as a relic of the past. Toxic masculinity is embodied in the figures of “justified sinners” (misfits, and men suffering from mental disorders) whose viciousness results from colonial trauma. In order to fight degrading national stereotypes A. Gray has produced a number of positive images of male characters who, interestingly enough, serve as an illustration of writer’s changing views on Scottish masculinity. The given article may be of special interest to scholars whose expertise lies in the area of contemporary British fiction as well as Postcolonial and Gender Studies.

Making, Unmaking, and Remaking “Men”: New Work in Feminist Masculinity Studies

Making, Unmaking, and Remaking “Men”: New Work in Feminist Masculinity Studies Sally Robinson (bio) BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity. By Arlene Stein. New York: Pantheon Books, 2018. Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America. By Miriam J. Abelson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools. By Freeden Blume Oeur. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism. By Michael Kimmel. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing. By Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. when eve sedgwick published Between Men in 1985, she launched feminist masculinity studies in the United States, followed a few years later by Susan Jeffords’s painstaking documentation of the “remasculinization of America” through representations of the Vietnam War.1 While Sedgwick’s brilliantly articulated critique of homosocial bonding in English literature has been hugely influential, it is to Jeffords that a particular strain of feminist masculinity studies owes its aims and objectives. What Jeffords did was to raise the alarm about a set of ideological maneuverings that were not only literary, but also, frighteningly, real and material. The violence that attends the remasculinization of the United States was not, in Jeffords account, the mere side effect of efforts to heal the wound to national masculinity; it was, instead, a primary mode for the articulation of that masculinity. Although the texts she attends to in her study reflect a subgroup or subculture of American masculinity, embodied in the Vietnam veteran, her analysis suggests that responses to a threatened national masculinity are perhaps first glimpsed in a [End Page 455] subculture, only to spread out to the wider cultural and social terrain. Subcultures of masculinity are a particularly fertile place to look not only for what’s new in feminist masculinity studies, but also what’s new in the social construction and experience of masculinity. As many scholars have noted, masculinity is not monolithic, and much of the work produced by feminist scholars has focused on the relationships between dominant and subordinate forms and constructions of masculinity. Phillip Brian Harper’s Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American Identity,2 published in 1996, was one among many books that addressed the specific dilemmas of men of color as they measured themselves against dominant white ideals of male identity. Peter M. Nardi’s Gay Masculinities3 and Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity4 [End Page 456] pushed masculinity studies to think and to unthink the relation of gender to sexuality, a direction institutionalized by renaming “Women’s Studies” programs “Gender and Sexuality” programs and including courses on men and masculinities within university curricula.5 More recently, the focus on masculine identities — on how different groups of men embody different modes of masculinity — has given way to an emphasis on performances of masculinity, on how different groups of men and different modes of discourse illustrate complex negotiations of power and powerlessness and, in the process, remake the meanings of masculinity. The idea that hegemonic masculinity structures the social and psychological meanings of masculinity differentially for different groups of men and in different local contexts, first developed by R. W. Connell,6 remains a guiding force in feminist masculinity studies even as scholars have questioned the utility of posing one form of masculinity as hegemonic. We have, I think, moved away from the impulse to theorize masculinity per se and moved toward analyzing how struggles over the meaning of masculinity can best be understood by paying attention to specific configurations of gender, race, class, sexuality, and geographical location. Although I am a literary and cultural studies scholar by training, I have found myself most compelled by the books that aim to understand masculinity not by reading texts, but by paying attention to how men talk about their relation to dominant and subordinate ideas about masculinity within particular social and institutional contexts. Each of the books I discuss here focuses on a specific subculture of masculinity and, together, they constitute flashpoints...

«Матеревбивство» як симптом мутації національної психіки під колоніально-тоталітарним пресингом (на матеріалі української лірики 1920–1930-х років)

The article deals with the specific art representation of moral, ethic, psychical shifts of the national masculine character in Ukrainian lyrics of the first third of XXth century. They are conveyed in particular through the masculine intention to destroy the maternal figure of Motherland. Sometimes aggressiveness and hostility expressed in the poetic texts are equal to symbolical “killing of the Mother”, if taking into consideration a convergence of the images of Mother and Motherland in poetic consciousness. The article employs analytical and structural as well as historical and typological literary techniques. The theoretical base of the investigation is postcolonial theory integrated with psychoanalysis as well as gender studies to deal effectively with such concepts as maternal figure of the Motherland, national colonial masculinity, masculine art consciousness, the notions of trauma, aggression and others as well. This theoretical direction can provide help with outlining of the “killing of the Mother” symptom as Ukrainian poets’ destructive gesture toward their Motherland represented in the 1920th proletarian poetry (Vasyl Ellan-Blakytnyi, Volodymyr Sosiura, Heo Shkurupii) and also in a number of works of emigrant poets between two World Wars (Yevhen Malaniuk, Ostap Tarnavskii and others). Diverse lyric tendencies to express the urge to kill the Mother extrapolated on the image of Ukraine are highlighted. Ethic transformation of Ukrainians poets’ patriotic feelings is predicated upon different reasons, but the common one is that they had equally suffered colonial and totalitarian pressure of Soviet Russia. The moods of depiction of Ukraine’s “death” are, on the contrary, differentiate; in the 1920th, proletarian Ukrainian poets defused the tension between Bolshevistic and nationalistic ideologies through splitting the image of Ukraine into the negative “bourgeois” one and the positive “proletarian” one. In some works of emigrant poets devaluated image of Ukraine acquires demonic “deathly” features and is dishonored as “a betrayer”.

The Men’s Shed Movement in Australia: Rights, Needs and the Politics of Settler National Manhood

This article explores the cultural and political history of the men’s shed movement in Australia. This movement, which is ongoing, gathered steam after the first men’s sheds were opened in the mid-1990s, propelling the development of the community men’s shed model over the next decade and its widespread expansion across Australian communities. This article situates this movement in the context of broader contests over men’s rights in Australia and suggests that it deserves much closer and critical historical attention. Tracing the claims made about the experience, nature and needs of Australian men by the movement and its supporters, this article argues that a conservative politics of masculinist restoration and rehabilitation underpins what has been framed as a program of community-led public health. A closer examination of these claims reveals a persistent attachment to forms of settler national masculinity that had been politically undermined in the late twentieth century.

Gendering the new hero narratives: Military death in Denmark and Sweden

During the 20th century, wars were fought primarily in the name of protecting the homeland. Making the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ was a national masculine duty and a key feature of military heroism. Today, human rights and international values justify war-making and legitimise military action. In one of these post-national wars, the International Security Assistance Force operation in Afghanistan, more than 700 European soldiers have lost their lives. How have these deaths been legitimised, and how has the new security discourse affected notions of masculinised heroism and sacrifice? This article investigates how the dimensions of national/international and masculinity/femininity are negotiated in media narratives of heroism and sacrifice in Denmark and Sweden. Regarding scholarly discussions on the professionalisation, individualisation and domestication of military heroism, the empirical analysis demonstrates that the Danish/Swedish nation remains posited as the core context for military heroism and sacrifice. In the media narratives, professionalism is represented as an expression of specific national qualities. The media narratives conflate nation and family and represent military heroes as distinctively masculine and national figures. It is argued that a family trope has become vital in present-day hero narratives. This trope is disposed towards collective emotions, national loyalty and conservative gender ideals.

Women as Symbols of National Honour and Masculinity in Crisis in Chaman Nahal's Azadi

The simultaneous Independence and Partition of India is considered to be the single most traumatic experience, a cataclysm that forever changed the contours of the country and the lives of the people. In the Punjab it resulted in a mass migration that dislocated millions. In the large-scale insensate, communal violence that followed Partition became a defining moment in shaping and strengthening a communitarian consciousness wherein religion became the prime explanatory category of nationhood. While Independence in India and Pakistan is celebrated, there has been a collective amnesia about the event despite the harrowing experiences the refugees testified to. Accompanying the official Indian erasure of the violence has been the historiographical lacuna on the moment until recently. Historical debates centre round the causes and the high politics of Partition but are unable to deal with violence. Moreover, this does not deal with the narrative of popular history. To deal with history from below and to recover marginal voices, history has become revisionist. Subaltern studies and Feminist research have focused on recording the oral testimonies of Partition survivors and witnesses. Revisionist feminist historiographers have investigated women's experiences of the violence and have shown how it became a gendered narrative of displacement which led to the realignment of family, community and national identities. They have also investigated the violence women were subjected to by men of their own as well as the other community and within their own families as they became symbols of national honour. Similarly, men too experienced violence during the Partition but questions like what happens to men's roles, male bodies and conceptions of masculinity remain unanswered and hidden. Ashuman voices are silent on the violence, historians have observed that literature has stepped in to supplement the lacuna. Based on his personal experiences of the Partition, Chaman Nahal's Azadi deals with the gendered, sexual violence women faced while on the move in kafilas or foot convoys. The other, embedded in the narrative, is about a little dealt aspect of Partition violence: violence committed on male bodies. This paper will show how both women and men faced violence from the perspective of a male writer and whether Nahal has succeeded in his enterprise or not.

The Nation as a “Gentleman’s Agreement”

Carole Pateman’s idea of the “sexual contract” can be adapted to study the nationalist imagination. If a society defined through a sexual contract is equated to the “civic nation,” then the sexual basis of an “ethnic nation” might be called the “gentleman’s agreement.” The terms of the gentleman’s agreement, while never articulated as clearly as the sexual contract, nevertheless reveal themselves in cultural practices. Hungarians presupposed a nation consisting of ennobled men capable of seducing women to the “national brotherhood.” Hungarian ideas about the nation evolved during the nineteenth century, and Hungarian ideals of masculinity also changed: a manliness of strength increasingly gave way to a masculinity of education or refinement. Although the different types of masculinity implied different attitudes toward women, they both rested on similar cultural assumptions. This article links the cultural history of Hungarian national masculinity to everyday practices, notably moustaches, cigars, and sexuality.

‘The Handsome Man with Hungarian Moustache and Beard’

ABSTRACTGrowing facial hair acquired nationalist symbolism in nineteenth-century Hungary. This article documents and analyses Hungarian moustache patriotism, contrasting Hungarian circumstances with moustache culture elsewhere in Europe. In various eras of Hungarian history, starting with the Reform Era (1825–48), continuing through the 1848 Revolution and ending with Dualism and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, Hungarian moustaches variously symbolized class inclusiveness, martial manliness, Magyar supremacy, anti-monarchist liberalism, public service and masculine privilege. As a contribution to European gender history, finally, this article provides a case study in relatively neglected non-violent national masculinity.

Love Is a Man's Thing: Hollywood and the Spanish “Homme-com”

:The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of the Hollywood “homme-com,” a romantic comedy cycle primarily focused on the male half of the couple. This essay explores Spanish cinema's take on this emergent genre, interrogating contemporary notions of Spanish national identity and masculinity along the way.

Proximity of Paired Nations Reveals Correlation of Masculinity With Individualism

Hofstede measured four dimensions of national differences: Masculinity, Individualism, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Power Distance. The information was obtained from IBM employees in more than 60 nations. Correlations applied to the national scores were close to zero for Masculinity with each of the three other dimensions. Correlations can be misleading because of regional and other variations in a world sample of nations. Undesirable effects of regional variations can be minimized by correlating differences between paired nearby nations in their scores on the two dimensions. Differences between pair members revealed that the nation with a higher score on Masculinity usually had a higher score on Individualism. A wide range of quantitative scores enabled large differences between the pair members and minimized omissions of data because of the same score for both members on either of the correlated dimensions. National Masculinity is highly correlated with national Individualism when regional differences are controlled.

Masculinities and The Contemporary Irish Theatre by Brian Singleton (review)

Reviewed by: Masculinities and The Contemporary Irish Theatre by Brian Singleton Nelson Barre Masculinities and The Contemporary Irish Theatre. By Brian Singleton. Performance Interventions series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; pp. 240. A joking remark at the book launch of Melissa Sihra’s 2009 Women in Irish Drama prompted Brian Singleton to write this book, a volume that explores new territories of Irish representations of masculinity. In addition to seeing more stories told by and for women, the past twenty years in Ireland have been characterized by the appearance of new types of Irish male. Singleton argues that Irish masculinity is described by no single narrative, but rather by a plurality of new voices spawned during the last decade of the twentieth century. The decriminalization of homosexuality, along with the shifting cultural and economic climate of Ireland before, during, and after the Celtic Tiger economic boom has sparked a theatrical creativity among men that “tears apart the notion that masculinity is a pre-ordained or fixed identity and to pluralize the construction of that identity” (3). Singleton’s book restructures the conversation on masculinity, shifting the dialogue from long-held views of Irish theatre as a stage for conventional masculinity to a space that houses a multiplicity of experiences and stories of Irish men who perform their masculinity—and “Irishness”—in nontraditional ways. Singleton’s focus is the 1990s and onward, a period characterized by significant social and political changes. The author looks at historical contexts and developments as theatre flourished well beyond the major Dublin theatres to smaller, experimental, regional companies. He introduces readers to more than seventy performances from new companies like The Corn Exchange and THISISPOPBABY and playwrights like Conor McPherson and Martin Mc-Donagh that appeared during this period, articulating how their stories and styles from the margins deconstructed traditional “kitchen sink drama,” with its patriarchal Irish values and their attendant gendered stereotypes. Singleton uses a spectrum of interdisciplinary analyses—including gender [End Page 178] performance studies by R. W. Connell and Judith Butler, the postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon and Declan Kiberd, and Irish theatre scholarship from Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan—to scrutinize the “canonized” representations of masculinity in Ireland. In his rich analysis, contesting the canon becomes an act of remaking the traditional subjectivities of Irish identity into variations that embrace Other masculinities that do not simply conform to the stereotypes of white, male, Catholic. Singleton begins by moving chronologically through Ireland’s theatrical history since the Irish literary revival of the early twentieth century, examining the creation and distillation of a patriarchal masculinity that dominated the stage in Ireland for nearly a hundred years. In particular, he attends to notable productions (including Garry Hynes’s re-envisioning of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and several re-stagings of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World) that dispelled sentimental myths about a singular Irish national masculinity. Singleton argues that recent cultural trends in modern Irish society resist the pastoral idyllic or nationalistic traditions and finally join a globalized discussion of identity. Singleton is particularly strong when he unpacks the conflicted patriarchal narratives of performances like Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland and Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce. He contends that staging father/son relationships poses metaphors for Irish culture and its gendered international perception, renouncing its place under the patriarchal colonizer Britain. Here, Singleton identifies Ireland’s history of performing the masculinist social order while simultaneously staging “theatrical patricide.” He notes, however, that this move is often critiqued as the “arrested development of the son”; that is, Ireland may have killed the father, but the nation remains cyclically emasculated (61). Singleton finds similarly self-abnegating trends in monologue plays where recent male playwrights stage the antithesis of (dominant) masculinity, presenting “socially subordinated males . . . performing their own abjection in a society in which they have lost their place” (71). He notes that these personal acts of revelation fall within a much-lauded storytelling tradition, but with tales full of self-loathing, alienation, and an inability to cope with the expectations of society. Singleton argues that this refusal to perform normativity represents a major shift in Irish theatrical history...

FIGHTING WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN CINEMA

This essay provides a comparative reading of the female protagonists in two action films from Korea (My Wife is a Gangster) and Thailand (Chocolate), focusing on how representations of their fighting abilities and non-feminine behavior rework dominant masculine discourses of bodily and national authenticity in action cinema. The first half of the essay looks at how Eun-jin, the heroine of MWG, humorously critiques cinematic Korean ‘soft’ femininity and ‘hard’ masculinity, the latter itself a transnational hybrid of indigenous codes of manhood and those invoked in the action films of Hong Kong, Japan and the USA. It then proceeds to consider how the cultural and ontological hybridity of heroine Zen in Chocolate and her lack of conflict with a foreign other likewise revises existing notions of national masculinity in Thai action cinema. The essay shows how both protagonists diverge from conventional representations of fighting women insofar as their sexuality is not emphasized but rather parodied or elided. It argues that the films ultimately celebrate the heroines' proficiency at mimicking Korean and Thai forms of masculinity. In the process, the essay critiques the idea that aesthetic imitation is linked to cultural inauthenticity – an idea that has characterized the nationalist discourses of the postcolonial West and the anticolonial non-West – and suggests unpacking this notion of masculine mimicry to expand existing theoretical frameworks for understanding popular images of physically aggressive, ‘masculine’ women on screen.

The Trickster in Bulgarian identity discourses and his manifestations in postcommunist Bulgarian cinema

ABSTRACTThe collapse of communism in 1989 left Bulgarians reeling between one failed great project (the building of communism), and the hardships of a new one (the long and winding road to the European Union). The place of the traditional communist cinema heroes has been either suspended or arrogated by a compelling bunch of clowns, reluctant heroes, drifters and losers, and other ambivalent figures. These multifaceted, controversial, marginal and generally complex character types, which were pushed into the unconscious, or into the objective (or collective) psyche as a result of relentless social engineering on collective and individual level, have been emerging with a vengeance, and predominantly as aspects of what Carl Gustav Jung describes as the archetype of the Trickster. In mythology and the arts, the Trickster is mostly likely to appear in time of crisis and in the no-man's land between two epochs, cutting an uncannily familiar figure, both ‘subhuman and superhuman, bestial and divine, whose chief and most alarming characteristics is his unconsciousness’ (Jung ([1954] 1990: 263). This study focuses on the aetiology of the infamous Bulgarian literary hero Bai Ganio cum Trickster figure, and in light of discourses on Bulgarian national identity and masculinity. It first looks at Bai Ganio's representation in two films from the early 1990s — Ivan Nichev's Bai Ganio (1990) and Bai Ganio on His Way To Europe (1991), and then at two of his most recent manifestations in the fiction film Mission London (Mitovski and Popov, 2010), as well as in the documentary Encounters with Ireček (Stoyanov, 2011), where this resilient Bulgarian national archetype is featured along with other major archetypes of the collective unconscious like that of the Hero and the Wise Old Man.

Nationalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Climate Change in the Novels of Kim Stanley Robinson and Michael Crichton

This paper explores the complex interplay between narratives of American masculinity, nationalism, and environmentalism in novels by Michael Crichton (State of Fear) and Kim Stanley Robinson (Science in the Capital trilogy). Considered in the context of public debates about climate change as well as the discourse of the "war on terror," this article argues that these novels enlist climate change as an occasion to dramatize the recovery of an imperiled national masculinity, adding to the crowded stage of perceived challenges to the privileges of an elite majority whose supposed "citizen trauma" (Berlant) threatens to overshadow the real consequences of environmental calamity.

Reach for the Frontier: 'The Pleasure Culture of War', Kenneth More and 1950s Rank Organisation film posters

This article, taking its methodological prompt from The New Film History (2007), will utilize film posters from British war/war-themed motion pictures produced by the Rank Organisation during the mid-to-late 1950s to facilitate an analysis exploring how central protagonists played by Kenneth More were presented in promotional materials of the era. By discussing the compositional arrangements of the poster images accompanying the releases of Reach for the Sky (1956) directed by Lewis Gilbert and North West Frontier (1959) by J. Lee Thompson, this article will illuminate the marketing strategies employed in film promotion at the time, whilst also drawing attention to the inherent tensions and, at times, incompatibilities between still visual representations and the corresponding motion picture texts. By using Graham Dawson's conception of the 'Pleasure Culture of War' as an initial prism of investigation, the motivations behind these artistic choices will be explored and their implications rendered, with the topics of national identity, empire, war and masculinity forming the cornerstones by which the images under examination can be understood and interpreted.

Cross-cultural validity of the scale for interpersonal behavior

The Scale for Interpersonal Behavior (SIB) is a 50-item multidimensional measure of difficulty and distress in assertiveness. The SIB assesses negative assertion, expression of and dealing with personal limitations, initiating assertiveness and positive assertion. The SIB was originally developed in the Netherlands. The present study attempted to replicate the original factors with an Italian student sample (n = 995). The four distress and four performance factors were replicable across two methods of analysis (the multiple group method of confirmatory analysis and Tucker's coefficient of congruence (phi). The corresponding scales were internally consistent and showed predicted patterns of correlations with a measure of self-efficacy. Sex and age differences in assertiveness were generally negligible. Italian students had higher positive assertion-performance scores than the Dutch and comparable scores on other performance scales; by contrast, the Italian subjects had significantly higher scores on all SIB distress scales than their Dutch equivalents. This was ascribed to the stronger pressure on people in Italian society to behave assertively (Hofstede's National Masculinity score = 70) as opposed to the Dutch society (National Masculinity score = 14).

The acceptance of mobile communication technologies in student communities

In this paper, the acceptance and use of mobile phone-mediated communication technologies are studied in three different cultural student communities. The analysis is based on the Mobile Information System Adoption and Use (MISAU) model developed here. The model combines elements of the technology acceptance and information success models into a single framework. The results of the study indicate similar acceptance patterns in all three subcommunities, but social network analysis reveals interesting cultural differences in how mobile communication technology is used. When the results are analysed with Hofstede's dimensions of a national culture (Hofstede, 2001), power distance, individualism and masculinity have a strong correlation with the communication intensity of the subcommunity.