This thesis is concerned with making explicit the role that language plays in apprenticing social subjects into different social or 'discourse' communities. It focuses specifically on the textual and rhetorical strategies of school history texts written by students, aiming to bring a close linguistic analysis of the texts into relationship with the wider social and cultural context. In particular it focuses on three semantic domains. These are Cause, Time and an area of interpersonal evaluation known as Appraisal. The main questions addressed are ???How do the semantic motifs of Cause, Time and Appraisal function within the discourse of school history? How are they grammatically and lexically realised? What are the semantic and grammatical shifts and interactions that occur as a result of students moving through the different levels of their apprenticeship? In order to answer these questions the analytical tools of systemic-functional grammar are applied to a corpus of texts produced within the context of Australian secondary schooling. These texts represent the range of written genres that history students need to produce in order to fulfil the objectives and outcomes of the history curriculum. A major feature of the research is the use of Appraisal theory, a framework recently developed in systemic-functional linguistics, for analysing the linguistic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgements and social valuations. This theory proves valuable in taking us beyond more traditional linguistic concerns with interpersonal meaning, which focus on modality and mood structure. The main findings of the linguistic analysis show that construals of Cause, Time and Appraisal are core linguistic tools both for interpreting the past and for persuading audiences of the validity of such interpretations. Analysis also reveals that induction into the (discourse) community of historians can be generally characterised as a process of the student expanding their repertoire of metaphorical and specialised language resources as they move from recording the past to arguing about the past. By providing a fine grained linguistic analysis of the different types of texts that make up school history writing, the research is able to provide insights into the apprenticeship process and into the function and role of history both within and beyond the school context. The major conclusion reached here is that history inducts students into an abstract world of grammatical metaphor and in so doing provides them with the linguistic means to talk about people and time as abstract entities. It also provides them with the positioning and persuading strategies (the ???intellectual flexibility???) necessary for social positions of responsibility.

Bibliography: leaves.

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Business. / The thesis critically analyses the gaps among management literatures as discourses of ambition and evaluates them against the realities that constitute praxis. The work provides a different insight into organisational and management theory that encourages critical thinking about the normalising effects of discourse, and points to the possibilities that can emerge from engaging with alternative perspectives, such as those emanating from practitioners. The analytic framework that is used to identify and explicate this hiatus is drawn from Foucault’s genealogy, which is used as a method for conceptualising and explaining relationships between and among discourses. Genealogy is also used to show that there is not merely one way of perceiving an object of discourse and thus creating meaning, but many. The topic of the thesis is knowledge work. The assumption that there is a clear and abiding descriptor of knowledge work supports an erroneous perception that there is consensus in interpretation and that its meanings are fixed and uncontested. Rather, the concept of knowledge work is ambiguous and highly contested. It is inconsistently conceptualised in the literature and scholars frequently omit any definition or clarification of what knowledge work is, perhaps assuming that their readers will have an inherent and automatic understanding of it. The thesis navigates the many discourses of knowledge work. It shows that in practical terms, inferences of neutrality and normality are instead prescriptions, through which different interpretations pit those who prescribe against those who do. Knowledge work has emerged as a significant domain of practice and discourse that resonates within the fields of organisational and management theory, and within the circuits of business, consulting, education, and policy formation. Knowledge has become the business of business, such that the discourse of knowledge work has become significant within the discursive knowledge fields of organisation studies, management studies, economics, technology, intellectual property, globalisation, and finance. The importance of knowledge work is such, that in contemporary discourses it is seen as facilitating a new golden age of a knowledge society. The dissertation tackles this hypothesis through two historical illustrations. The first shows that the modern concept of knowledge work emerged as a response to particular historical conditions to refract social, economic and political circumstances. The second illuminates an antecedent of the contemporary ‘knowledge society’ to show that it is neither new nor unique.

This thesis contributes to the established literature on farm women within the context of family farming. It recognises that not enough is yet known about the discourses and agency which influence their lives. Consequently, this study has sought to establish what dominant discourses shape the lives of farm women, their responses to these discourses and how their discursive positioning influences their agency. This study employed a qualitative case study approach involving interviews with a diverse mixture of independent farm women, along with women farming in marital relationships. This thesis engages these narratives to showcase the colourful, complex life-experiences of farm women. In addition, and where present, women�s partners were interviewed to provide male farmers� perspectives about women in family farming. This research has found that women�s lives are shaped by positioning and contextualising discourses, with which they comply to ensure that the family farm survives. Their subservient discursive positioning limits the agency they can express, although they are able to mobilise indirect agency through supporting their partner; an implicit form of agency which has previously been unrecognised or understated. Cumulatively, this thesis highlights the need to recognise the diversity of farm women, and how they are able to exercise agency from their constrained subject positions within the family farming context. Furthermore it emphasises that agency is a dynamic, and far more varied concept than previously understood.

Chapter 1 considers culture as a product of communication. The central problem is to understand how an array of influencing factors such as food supply, technology and physical and intellectual environment are represented, stored and shared as 'food culture'. It considers mechanisms by which culture might be transmitted from one location to another including the relevance of historical literature and Louis Hartz's notion of Australia as a 'cultural fragment' cast off from the Old World. Chapter 2 shows that the Australian literature represents a discourse in which information about various aspects of feeding was gathered from local and overseas sources and circulated for instruction, entertainment and use. The discourse and the means of conducting it were products of their age. Public participation was evident in the correspondence columns of weekly newspapers and in 'contributory' cookery books. The discourse drew on various themes that were prominent in other Western discourses and reflected social and moral values of the times. It evidenced beliefs that the manner of a society's feeding demonstrates the extent of its' civilisation and that refinement of food and feeding contributes to the improvement of society. It also reflected nationalist sentiment and demonstrated some attempts to develop a distinctive Australian cuisine. Chapter 3 supports these claims with detailed analysis of recipes published in a sample of journals and cookery books. Chapter 4 describes five instances which illustrate in more depth the influence of print media in culture development. The first two show deliberate use of print media to reform cookery practice. The third shows the role of print in cookery education, suggesting an alternative mechanism by which cookery in Australia retained its British character. The fourth tests the idea that the transmission of food and science cultural influences from the Old World to the New followed broadly similar paths and questions the origins of the domestic science movement. The fifth examines commercial influences exerted through print media and notes that food production, processing and distribution enterprise was to become increasingly influential as Australia (and other countries) turned to industrial feeding. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the processes of culture formation and the role of mass communications. It suggests that food culture is both an expression of conceptions of character and identity and a formative influence on them, that the engine of cultural change has been industrial progress and, finally, that the communication system which supports and enriches food culture may also tend to undermine it.

This thesis examines how Taiwan's three English language newspapers covered the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed between the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People’s Republic of China (China). By gaining an understanding of the discourse structure of how these newspapers reported ECFA will demonstrate the role they play in either trying to create a nationalistic Taiwanese or pan-Chinese identity to their English speaking audience. This identity construction is important because it will add legitimacy to whichever direction Taiwan eventually sets its social and political course towards. Examining how the Taipei Times, The China Post and The Taiwan New use discourse in their headlines, articles and editorials when reporting and interpreting ECFA, the thesis has found that they all use similar strategies to present their respective position. These strategies can be broken down into the omission of only reporting either the pros or cons of the agreement, the exclusion of the public voice, and the dominant voice of the elite who either support or oppose ECFA. The Taipei Times and The Taiwan News appear to both structure their dominant discourses around overlapping themes that ECFA is a highly controversial agreement that will quickly lead an irreversible loss of sovereignty in Taiwan. In contrast, The China Post establishes a dominant discourse around ECFA’s economic benefits, while ignoring the negative aspects of the agreement.

In recent years an extensive body of discursive research has accumulated on race, immigration and asylum seeker debates in western liberal democracies. This work has primarily focussed on oppressive discourses that are employed to exclude and marginalise minority groups. Comparatively, however, there has been significantly less research on anti-racist and pro-asylum seeker accounts in these debates, despite the potential of such work to provide a greater understanding of contemporary race and immigration discourse, and to contribute to the development of anti-racism and refugee advocacy. The present thesis adds to the further analysis of exclusionary discourse and asylum seeking, and examines this in the as yet unexplored context of the Australian parliament, but its primary focus is on refugee advocates' accounts. Using critical discursive social psychology ( Wetherell, 1998 ), this thesis examines Hansard transcripts of speeches made in the Australian parliament on the new restrictions against asylum seekers introduced in 2001. Analysis focuses on the interpretative repertoires that proscribe and deny responsibility for asylum seekers, and those that are used to construct ' the nation ' and ' racism '. These repertoires are explored with a view to tracing their intellectual history, the subject positions for asylum seekers and Australia/ns they make possible, and the rhetorical tools and strategies used in building them. It was found that those supporting the new legislation positioned asylum seekers as having made a personal choice to come to Australia, and presented the legislation as : a rational, practical response to the emotionally-driven, unreasonable demands of humanitarianism ; as the necessary defence of sovereign rights, the national space and Australian citizens from the incursions of asylum seekers ; and as non-racist. These discourses reproduced the liberal valorisation of reasonableness and rationality, the liberal concepts of sovereign and citizens' rights and individualism, and utilised new racist strategies to present their position as ' not racist '. On the other side of the debate, advocates criticised the legislation as a violation of : the duty of care owed to those who have been persecuted ; human rights and the liberal principle to assist those in need ; and of Australia's national values. Advocates also worked up some aspects of the new laws and the debate on this issue as racist. These repertoires drew upon the liberal discourses of internationalism, human rights, humanitarianism, multiculturalism, equality and egalitarianism. Although these advocacy discourses have considerable cultural currency, they were constrained and marginalised by the hegemonic representations of asylum seekers as ' bogus ' and ' illegal ', of humanitarianism ( as refugee advocates understand it ) as dangerous, and of the new legislation as an assertion of threatened sovereign rights. In addition, some of these discourses, such as multiculturalism and a construction of racism as ' generated by politicians ', functioned to minimise and deny racism. On the basis of this analysis, I conclude that the study of anti-racist and pro-refugee discourse contributes to a broader understanding of the language of contemporary debates about race, ethnicity and immigration as a dynamic, argumentative dialogue, and to critical evaluations of the discourses used in these contexts. However, I also argue that discourse analysis may not offer the requisite tools for developing, as well as critiquing, anti-racist and refugee advocacy discourses. I also suggest that there may be sites of resistance other than political discourse where change to refugee policies may be better effected. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Psychology, 2006.

Politeness Phenomena and Mild Conflict in Japanese Casual Conversation

This study explores the meanings that people attributed to their involvement in a participatory on-farm practice change project. Three techniques of discourse analysis were used. The first two identify the diversity among narratives of the participants and explores the origin of these differences. The third technique examined differences and tensions within and across the narratives to identify the discourses that were operating. Participation was found to be mediated through discourse as agents created and reproduced some discourses through their many social acts. For example, some participants recalled incidences of feeling excluded when they presented an alternative understanding of the project. As a result, these people tended to reduced their involvement rather than explore the differences. The project's discourses therefore routinised the participatory experience and tended to lock the narrative in time despite over two decades of rapid social change. Thi s meant the project discourse mediated a favoured type of participation, one that met a symbolic character rather than the particular farming practices it promoted. The discourses reveal different patterns of sense making among participants involved in the same event. Uneven participation is comprehended from the multiple patterns as a consequence of the participants' discursive practices. Articulating differences in discursive design will assist to create conditions useful for an authentic communication among participants engaged in change programs.

This thesis is positioned at the intersection of two fields of research: language and gender and language development, to address the lack of linguistically informed investigation into the emergence of gendered subjectivity. Rather than treat the domain of language and gender research as a site of resolve, the research problematises the area to create a site of contestation by drawing attention to the limitations of research based on a single theoretical framework which proposes unified gender identity as gender difference. Gender will be read not as singular identity but multiple, as a Foucauldian 'nexus of subjectivities'. The study is an investigation into the construction of gendered subjectivity through a critical discourse analysis of a family playing games. The initial contention is that gender is a process which may be performed in multiple ways which are linked to the subject positions taken up in competing discourses. Focusing on children playing games, the study examines how gendered relationships are constructed in discursive practices to propose that it is possible to identify the performance of multiple femininities/masculinites through an analysis of patterns of interaction where the negotiation of power relationships is made visible in language and action. The study is a reflexive ethnographic case study based on data collected of two siblings, a boy and a girl, and their parents playing games at home. Conducted from within a framework which strategically combines poststructuralist readings with linguistic analysis, the research is an example of the viability of 'postlinguistic' approach to discourse analysis. The thesis argues that the study of a culture as it is lived in a family reveals the emergence of gendered subjectivity in the constitutive relationship which exits language, subjectivity and discourse. It is suggested that the development of a child's multiple gendered identities towards normative gender patterns may be traced in the discursive practices which s/he mobilises as a result of the subject positions in which s/he is positioned during the research period / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)