Justine Rogers

Corporate political activity through constituency stitching: Intertextually aligning a phantom community

Corporations play an increasingly significant role in public policy and democratic politics. This article seeks to understand how corporate political activities gain political influence through intertextual strategies. The analysis is conducted on the texts produced by the Australian government in proposing a new tax as well as the texts produced by the mining industry in campaigning against the tax. We show how the government texts represent the proposed tax as a fair opportunity, while the mining industry texts represent the tax as an unfair threat. The findings attend to the processes of how the mining industry ‘stitched’ together constituencies in support of their representation. This article contributes to the existing literature on corporate political activity by showing how overt and indirect corporate activities and communications influence public policy agendas. It also contributes to critical studies of corporate political activity by theorizing how textual strategies can be used to align corporate interests in hegemonic political struggles through the creation of a phantom community. Finally, the article contributes to theories of intertextuality by developing a typology to analyse textual representation.

Pupillage: The Shaping of a Professional Elite

The UK professions have come under pressure, both commercial and governmental, in the last decades of the twentieth century. Commercial forces have had an impact on their structures and labor processes, while what has been termed a new culture of “managerialism” is evident in increased bureaucratization and regulation, both internal and external. There is disagreement among analysts, as we outline later in this chapter, over the extent and effects of such pressures—some writers allege that they have resulted in deprofessionalization and loss of identity, whereas others emphasize the professions’ resilience and continuity in identity and professional commitment. In anthropological terms, this raises the question of whether professions can still be considered as elite groups, in the sense outlined by Cohen (1981). In this chapter we take an anthropological approach to these issues, in the case of the Bar of England and Wales (the Bar), one of the longest established of the UK’s professions. We ask whether the new managerial ethos has undermined barristers’ identity and status, and whether commercial pressures have undermined their position as legal professionals. We do this by examining recruitment and the vocational training undertaken by new entrants, given that barriers to entry have often be regarded as one of the most notable characteristics of an elite or status group (Abel 2003).

Since Lawyers Work in Teams, We Must Focus on Team Ethics

1 Lecturer, University of New South Wales Law School. 2 Christopher P Neck and Charles C Manz, ‘From Groupthink to Teamthink: Toward the Creation of Constructive Thought Patterns in Self-managing Work Teams’ (1994) 47(8) Human Relations 929; Janet Weinstein and Linda H Morton, ‘Collaboration and Teamwork’ (2015) Faculty Scholarship Paper 163, 1. 3 H Gardner and M A Valentine, ‘Collaboration Among Highly Autonomous Professionals: Costs, Benefits and Future Research Directions’ in Shane Thyre and Edward J Lawler (eds), Advances in Group Processes (Emerald Group Publishing, 2015) 209; Weinstein and Morton, above n 2, 2. Since Lawyers Work in Teams, We Must Focus on Team Ethics

Feeling Bad and Being Elite: A Comparative Analysis of the Anxieties and Uncertainties of Aspiring Barristers

This paper examines the anxieties and uncertainties of aspiring barristers in order to understand the workings of elite professional status. The literature poses two diverging conceptions of negative feelings: as mechanisms for power and solidarity, concentrated at initiation, or else indicators of diminished control and breakdown. To allow for both potential meanings, this paper draws on an ethnographic study of two cohorts of trainee English barristers: one private, one public. The findings detail and compare the sources, nature, and consequences of bad feeling across the sectors. This innovative analysis detects the modes and blends of authority and cohesion, as well as differentiation, declining status, and even separation. This paper argues for intra-professional analyses as valuable groundwork for wider comparisons.