Russell Lansbury

The Suburban Community

was a ’looking glass’ which reflected the character, behaviour, and culture of middle-class society. Characteristics which together constituted the suburban syndrome might be categorised as follows: Many suburbanites are self-consciously friendly and outgoing in their social relations with one another, as if they are engaged in a search for reassurance from those around them, as well as status. The architectural uniformity of the suburb also produces a standardisation of the people in them. Homogeneity is accompanied by inconspicuous consumption because individuals are unable and/or unwilling to differentiate themselves from their neighbours. Even though activities within the suburb are typically community oriented, they are also home centred. The differentiation between the primary or family group and the secondary or social group breaks down where a highly mobile (spatially and socially) population moves too rapidly between places to enable individuals to form stable primary group ties. As a consequence, secondary organisations, such

Unemployment and Social Class: The End of Embourgeoisement?1

The era of full employment in Australia appears to have come to an end. For almost three decades, with the exception of one or two brief periods, Australia experienced neither unemployment nor inflation of any magnitude. Following a White Paper issued by the Labor government in 1944, full employment and economic expansion became the major national priorities irrespective of the party in power (Coombs, 1944). During the 1970s, however, the level of unemployment was allowed to rise in the hope of reducing the rate of inflation, and government ministers sought to lay much of the blame on the unemployed themselves.’ When unemployment first began to increase during 1974, the Labor government argued that some people were taking advantage of unemployment benefits rather than accepting available work, and responded by making unemployment benefits more difficult to obtain. Later, the government also tightened the ’work test’ making it more difficult for people out of work to obtain unemployment benefits. Under the Liberal National Country Party government, after 1975, the rate of inflation

Book Reviews : Staff Appraisal and Development

of organizational integration as their adversaries&dquo;. &dquo;The IIU would conduct negotiations around specifically defined matters of a general nature at global and European level ...&dquo; (p. 327). This thesis of Kendall, namely the likely development of Europe-wide framework bargaining, is plausible and may emerge sooner than most people believe. Along with this centralization, Kendall projects a process of decentralized bargaining in areas &dquo;no longer exclusively demarcated by national boundaries ... More bargaining would take place both above and below national level&dquo; (p. 327). This may well be a likely development, but Kendall fails to analyse the specific bargaining issues he has in mind, and, more importantly, how the decentralization would occur in the European and multinational company contexts. Kendall’s final poin,t regarding the strategic advance of working class and socialist influence is even more unconvincing. &dquo;The lesson of nationalization in the West and total state ownership in she East seems to be that working class rule does not arrive simply by the expropriation of part or the whole of the bourgeoisie ... Ownership, to be meaningful, cannot be separated from control&dquo; (p. 331). In an obvious attempt to advance a somewhat modified Syndicalist view, Kendall’s thesis that &dquo;The use of aggressive unionism steadily to encroach on entrepreneurial authority, prerogative and control, may here serve to provide the so far missing link between reform and revolution&dquo; (p. 331), which in substance is no different from the North American collective bargaining model, or expressions of advanced industrial democracy in Western Europe, sounds quite orthodox. This volume, nevertheless, is a challenging reading for all serious students of international labour movements.

Book Reviews : Occupations and Society

have been positive rather than normative. If wage theory is in a state of flux there is a need then to re-examine the structure and processes through which wages are determined. In so doing we will also glean a clearer idea of the political dimensions associated with wage determination. It is only by having a clear idea of how wages are in fact determined that we will be in a position to develop useful theories on which we can base policy recommendations.

Book Reviews : Industrial Australia 1975-2000: Preparing for Change, Gordon McCarthy (ed.), Australian Institute of Political Science, Australian and New Zealand Book Company, 1974, pp. 182,

identify the significant social experiences which explain the growth of political participation among citizens in economically advanced countries’. He isolates and defines four types of political behaviour and offers a ’tentative model’ of immigrant political participation that should prove most valuable to students of other immigrant groups. He also analyses immigrant participation in the U.S.A. and in Australia, pointing out the persistence of ethnic voting patterns in America as compared to the general political apathy displayed by immigrants in Australia.

A3.95 (copy supplied by the ANZ Book Co. Pty. Ltd.)

Although they share a number of characteristics in common, trade unions and professional associations are often portrayed as fulfilling distinctly separate functions. K. Prandy (1965:184) for example, has characterised trade unions as ’class bodies’, concerned primarily with improving the socio-economic position of their members. Professional associations, in contrast, are ’status bodies’, which bestow qualifications and seek to maintain or enhance the

Unionisation of New Professionals

Huw BEYNON has never worked for Ford. He first visited the Ford plant at Halewood in Liverpool in 1967, as a university research student. Then, for two years, he witnessed the growing turbulence at Halewood which led, in 1969, to the first national stoppage of Ford plants in Britain. In &dquo;Working for Ford&dquo;, Beynon attempts to explain some of the factors which influenced the strike by describing the attitudes of men on the assembly line to their work, the company and the unions. The main focus of Beynon’s study, however, is