Malcolm Waters

The impact of organizational form on gendered labour markets in engineering and law

It is well known that occupations are differentially gendered and explanations for such gendering usually focus on structure and process in the labour market. However little is known of the fine detail of the way in which labour markets perform for particular occupations in particular local contexts. This article is based on micro-sociological research on the professional labour markets for law and engineering professionals in the city of Hobart, Australia. It addresses a discrepancy in womens participation and promotion rates in each of these professions: the proportion of women in high positions in engineering matches their educational qualification rates while that in law is considerably lower than educational qualification rates would suggest. The paper proposes that the explanation can be found in the respective organizational patterns of the two professions. Engineering is practised in large-scale bureaucratic organizations where formal rules govern recruitment and promotion, where equal opportunities legislation literally applies, and where a strict separation is maintained between public and domestic spheres. By contrast, law is practised in collegial partnerships where informal judgements govern recruitment and promotion, where the letter of equal opportunities legislation need not be applied, and where advancement depends on the subordination of the domestic to the public sphere.

Alternative organizational formations: a neoWeberian typology of polycratic administrative systems

Much of the critical attention given to Webers tripartite scheme of legitimate domination has focused on the issue of its supposed incapacity to accommodate forms of organization not based on instrumental rationality. In fact substantive rationality is a continuous point of reference in Webers analysis and surfaces in his brief and fragmentary outlines of three polycratic organizational forms: collegiality, mass democracy, and direct democracy. This article locates polycratic organizations in relation to the three monocratic structures indicated by the typology of legitimate domination. Extant examples of polycratic organizations are compared substantively. The three forms are then typologized in terms first of characteristics of participation by personnel, and second of the processes by which decisions are made.

Dietary studies on Tasmanian high school students: intakes of energy and nutrients.

ABSTRACT. In July 1979 the authors obtained 24‐hour diet records from 1055 students in school‐grades 7–10 (age‐range 11–16 years) in Tasmania, Australia. For ages 12–15, our respondents appear representative of the Tasmanian population.

Modernist Radicalism, Postmodernization and Orderings The Work of Stephen Crook

The article is a survey of the opus of the late Stephen Crook. The work is analysed in three phases: meta-theoretical treatments of foundationalism and mundaneity; substantive theoretical analyses of postmodernization, especially in the areas of culture, science and the environment; and principles along which everyday life is ordered under conditions of structural complexity, uncertainty and radical change. Crook’s work is found to have the potential to offer superior analytic capacity relative to other arguments.

Course orientations of staff and students: A procedure for curriculum evaluation

A description of the construction and use of a questionnaire designed to evaluate first year university science courses. The questionnaire employs a “forced choice” technique to measure three variables: expectations of students, influences upon students, and aims of staff. Field test results are reported. These are used to estimate the validity and reliability of the procedure and to show the way in which data may be analysed.

Book Reviews : Trends, Patterns and Impact of Strikes

By Y. R. K. Reddy. SPADE, Hyderabad, 1991, viii + 114 pp., no price stated Reddy’s book on strikes in India, a reference to which might have provided a more informative title, has a familiar feel to it. It treads the familiar ground that begins with Ross and Hartman’s inter-country comparison and Kerr and Siegel’s inter-industry comparison, and then offers an argument about whether the country under examination follows the pattern. So it addresses the following issues one after the other: whether strike data are an adequate indicator of the level of industrial conflict; secular trends in frequency and duration; causes and outcomes as so described in the official statistics; seasonal trends; inter-industry comparisons; inter-state comparisons (i.e. within India); and a conclusion on impacts and implications. If the book appears familiar, it also appears slightly old-fashioned. This may be because the literature on strike propensity has not been researched adequately. Reddy makes no reference even to the comparative material of the 1970s and early 1980s by Hibbs, Tilly, Clegg, Edwards and others, which might have lifted the analysis above the routine. However, the results of that analysis, which cover the period from 1951-87, are as follows:

Political preferences in the new middle class: A ‘correspondence analysis’ of the orientations of Australian professional workers

Abstract Most discussions of the relationship between class and political orientation assume a coherent and homogeneous class response. Here, the new middle class of professional workers is disassembled into constituent occupations. An analysis of political preference data by means of ‘correspondence analysis’ reveals a pattern which is consistent with a structural relationship between occupational experience and political preference.

Industrial Militancy and the New Middle Class: Professional Workers in Australia

Most theories of the new middle class assume a homogeneity of responses to class location. However, the arena of industrial militancy is particularly problematic in this regard. The results of a survey of 256 employed professional workers in Australia reveal a diversity of responses ranging from defensive, self-interested orientations to altruistic, politically motivated and socially conscious orientations. The so called new middle class may therefore be better analysed as a status group within the working class rather than as a coherent class fraction.

Book Reviews : THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT. CONTROL AND RESISTANCE IN THE WORKPLACE. By P.K. Edwards and Hugh Scullion. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982. (Warwick Studies in Industrial Relations). xii + 314 pp.

The Industrial Relations Research Unit at the University of Warwick is possibly the most important and influential in the English-speaking world. Research studies produced there are usually empirical and institutional in character, providing detailed accounts of social process but without making any serious contribution to more general debates. Edwards and Scullion’s book reflects this pedigree quite closely so that the general sociological reader may in fact be misled by the title. The book is not an analysis of general processes of conflict but rather a discussion of conflict behaviour specific in time and place. This does not mean that the book is not a useful contribution to the