Susan Goodwin

Masculinised jobs, feminised jobs and men’s ‘gender capital’ experiences: Understanding occupational segregation in Australia:

Australia features a highly segregated workforce where certain occupational spaces appear to privilege particular gendered dispositions. While research on gender and work highlights the association between occupational segregation and gender inequality, conventional explanations of why men and women continue to be concentrated in different occupations, and in different roles within occupations, can be considered problematic. This article argues that we may be able to achieve a deeper understanding of gendered occupational segregation than previous explanations have offered by appropriating Bourdieu’s concept, ‘capital’. Drawing on qualitative research with Australian workers we explore men’s ‘gender capital experiences’ within masculinised and feminised occupations. The article discusses how male, masculine and feminine embodiments can operate as capitals which may be accumulated and transacted, perpetuating horizontal gender segregation in the workforce but also vertical segregation within occupations. In doing so, we expand the work of feminist Bourdieusian scholars who have reworked Bourdieu’s approach so that gender, as well as class, may be understood as a central form of stratification in the social order.

Social policy for social change

and that practitioners are obligated to continually evaluate their practice to critically respond to age-related social policy agendas in a meaningful way that respects and acknowledges the diversity, contestability, and ever-changing nature of the social work with older people. Each chapter is previewed by a summary of the issues canvassed. In addition, each includes case profiles, a chapter summary, ‘‘key lessons’’, and to engage the reader further, an activity section and suggestions for additional reading. Overall, this is a clearly written, easy-to-read, well-structured text, which provides an important perspective that challenges current practice with older people. This text offers an approach consistent with the principles of a profession committed to human rights and social justice focusing on practice driven by theory. I recommend this text to social work students and to practitioners in the field who are continuously seeking to make a positive and noticeable difference in the lives of older clients and are committed to challenging the obstacles to achieving this agenda.

Gender Politics and Public Policy Making: Prospects for Advancing Gender Equality

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to stimulate a re-envisioning of gender politics in public policy making by applying a new approach to understanding them. Our approach is based on, and illustrated by, a study of gender dynamics in policy-making processes in the NSW public sector in Australia. The study draws on theoretical developments in the sociological study of gender arrangements in large organisations. Central to the analysis is the concept of gender regime (Connell 2002). The study finds that gender dynamics in policy making are not played out in a uniform and generalised way that stifles opportunities for resistance and change. Nor, however, are they random and contingent. There are various structures of gendered policy-making practice that suggest both possibilities for, and obstacles to, the advancement of gender equality in policy making. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a new method and language for studying, and advancing change in, gender and policy making in public sector settings.

Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre for Social Change: Defamilarising Key Words in the Field

A key aim of the research project reported on in this volume was to broadly explore texts related to applied theatre and map the intentions, values, understanding of success and references to change. In exploring the recruitment of these themes in 139 documents related to applied theatre, there emerged a repetition of key discourses – social justice, community, education, and participation. The repetition suggests orthodoxy in certain ways of thinking about applied theatre. It is clear that contemporary rationales for applied theatre have developed and depend upon these kinds of ideals. In this chapter we take stock of these repetitions in order to ask critical questions and interrogate the logics at play in the field. Essentially, we are interested in how and why dominant ideas in applied theatre make sense. The discussion presented here attempts to understand the ways representations of applied theatre work in public documents (evaluations, academic papers, websites and so on) produce ‘truths’ and therefore, in turn, exercise power (Ball, What is policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes, The Australian Journal of Education Studies, 13(2), 10–17, 1993).

Making and Unmaking “objects”

Through applications of the WPR approach from several policy fields, this chapter explores the proposition that policies produce “objects”. It draws upon theory introduced in Chapter 3, with emphasis upon the notions of discursive practice, genealogy, and governmentality. The following questions guide the analysis: What does it mean to problematize an assumed “object for thought”? How are “objects” constituted through governing practices? What role do expert knowledges play in constituting “objects for thought”? How do concepts become “objects” through measurement? How does rethinking “objects” as the products of practices open up space to cultivate alternative problematizations?

Making and Unmaking “problems”

This chapter pursues a central task in the book, explaining what is accomplished by focusing on how policies produce or constitute “problems”. To begin, it canvasses how “problems” are conceptualized in classic rationalist, and in more recent interpretive and critical realist approaches to policy analysis, and indicates the possible deleterious implications of assuming the existence of problems as objective and uncontroversial states. Second, the chapter draws on WPR applications in two policy areas—alcohol and drugs policy and gender equality policy—to show how the interrogation of problematizations provides important insights into how governing takes place. In this way it illustrates the distinctive contribution of a poststructural questioning of “problems”.

Making Politics Visible: The WPR Approach

This chapter offers an analytic strategy, or “tool”, called “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (the WPR approach), to facilitate poststructural policy analysis. It elaborates a poststructural understanding of politics as strategic relations and practices, and of theorizing as political practice. The WPR approach is introduced as a means to engage in such theorizing and to assist in the analytic task of making politics visible. To this end it offers seven interrelated forms of questioning and analysis to critically scrutinize problematizations (the ways in which “problems” are produced and represented) in governmental policies and practices, understood in broad terms. Policy workers and other analysts are enjoined to deploy WPR in practices of interrogating problematizations, reproblematization, and self-problematization.

Making and Unmaking “subjects”

This chapter draws on applications of the WPR approach to illustrate the usefulness of reflecting on how policies produce “subjects” through problematization. The argument is made that it is both relevant and important, in terms of policy development, to reflect on the ways in which policies constitute “subjects” as particular kinds of subjects, with possible impact on people’s sense of self and behaviors. The chapter shows that, through identifying the “people categories” and the subject positions available in policies, it becomes possible to consider how “subjects” are governed through subjectification effects. Such a form of analysis directs attention to the dividing practices often generated in policies. Further, it shows how specific problem representations produce targeted groups as responsible for an assumed “problem”, creating stigma and silencing the operation of other factors.

Key Themes and Concepts

The “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach invokes a number of concepts that require elaboration. Many rely, at least to an extent, upon the writings of Michel Foucault, indicated in the quotations from his works. This chapter explains how these concepts are interlinked and how they function to produce the form of theorizing enabled by a WPR form of analysis. The following topics are addressed: what it means to describe policy as productive; the kinds of practices targeted for scrutiny; how discourses feature in the analysis; what is involved in problematizing and problematization; what is achieved by expanding “government” to include the roles of professionals, experts, and allied agencies; how genealogy produces a “history of the present”; the place of political “subjects” in a Foucault-influenced analysis.

Making and Unmaking “places”

The challenge in this chapter is to rethink commonly assumed geographical “entities” or “places”. Such “entities” play a pivotal role in how governing takes place and are most often treated by policy makers as taken-for-granted physical sites or locations. The chapter shows how poststructural policy analysis, illustrated in applications of WPR, encourages policy workers/analysts to consider “places” as political creations. Specifically, it illustrates how, through the lens of problematization and a focus on practices, it becomes possible to interrogate the underlying precepts and assumptions that are necessary to the constitution of named “places”. The following questions guide the account: What does it mean to challenge the existence of “places” as fixed and stable “entities”? What is accomplished through this form of analysis? What strategies are available to problematize named “places”? What are the implications of a poststructural perspective for research on assumed “places”, such as “nation-states”, “cities”, and “public places”?