This investigation was prompted by a personal concern about what I perceived to be unacceptable practices and outcomes in senior secondary schooling in the Australian Capital Territory. For me, an unacceptable practice and/or outcome is one which could be said to contribute to social control by dominant elites. Liberation, in the sense of the acquisition of personal autonomy based on reason, and equality, in the sense of parity of esteem or the right of people to develop differently but within the parameters of concern for others, are the goals I seek in relation to education and schooling. They are goals which are ascribed to by many teachers, and which partially underpin the major reports which prompted and continue to influence supposedly reformist or progressive moves in secondary schooling in the Australian Capital Territory in the 1970's. However, an examination of the framework of these reports suggest that they concealed - non too deeply - contradictions and invalid assumptions which wider examination shows to be common also to what we can call the dominant or liberal educational framework. This framework of ideas, beliefs, assumptions, values and practices, has come under strong attack in recent years by those educationists, sociologists, historians and philosophers whom we can call Marxian. That is, those people who seek to understand and transform their world within a consciousness largely informed by those theories and insights which were first given major prominance by Karl Marx. It is a consciousness which I share. In my investigation of schooling, and of my part in it, as a teacher, I have come to the point where I think that the beliefs, assumptions, and practices associated with the dominant educational ideology do contribute to the formation of a distorted consciousness; that is, people in schools do not perceive that they are oppressed, and that public schooling does not work in what I consider to be the interests of most people. I believe, therefore, that radical change is needed. If we assume that the capitalist mode of production and, consequently, its concomitant set of social relations, are likely to persist in Australia, we can also assume that radical change will be very difficult, and a long term goal. However, I believe that teachers can play a significant role in the development of a more liberating and egalitarian form of schooling for all children. First, teachers have to develop a more critical view of the schooling process and in this way enable themselves to move beyond the limits set up by the traditional and dominant, liberal ideological framework. They have to develop a pedagogy based on the concept of consciousness-raising or critical thinking. This study represents the efforts of one teacher to do just that.

This study emanates from a concern about social injustice. I believe that a number of people in our society, by virtue of their race, gender or class, are disadvantaged in the distribution of wealth and privilege. Some people have suggested that schools contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of this situation because, in various ways, they replicate inequitable social, political and economic arrangements. I accept this claim and argue that any attempt to improve schooling must focus on the social, economic and political outcomes of education, as well as on curricular, pedagogical and administrative concerns. In this study one recent attempt to improve Australian education, the move to school-level curriculum evaluation, is examined to ascertain if it represents a challenge to existing school practices and the beliefs and assumptions which underpin these. Dominant ideological orientations to improvement are examined and their key features and assumptions delineated. Because I believe that these exclude any consideration of the relationship between school knowledge and the distribution of power and privilege within society, an attempt is made to reconceptualize school-level curriculum evaluation in a way that will permit teachers to unpack what schools do socially, politically and economically. Theories of cultural and economic reproduction and the work of Freire are drawn on to help with this task. Evaluation policy statements and guidelines and examples of evaluation practice are then analysed in terms of dominant and reconceptualized notions of evaluation. What emerges is that although many of these are engulfed by dominant and limiting ideologies, school-level curriculum may be reconceptualized in a way that will permit the penetration and contestation of dominant practices and beliefs and thereby will offer educators a possible means of addressing problems of social injustice.

<p>The starting point of this thesis is the debate surrounding the two referenda’s in France and the Netherlands in May and June 2005, regarding the proposal of a European constitution. The aim of this study is to analyse how democratic legitimacy and the role of the citizens portrays within the democratic discourse of the European Union. The empirical material is based upon both speeches from the European Commission and news articles from the French newspaper Libération and the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Discourse analysis is used as a theoretical frame of reference combined with models of democracy. The results of the study is that democracy is still defined by it’s traditional values but have also shifted into being a concept combined with effectivity. This has effects on the citizens and their role in the EU has been stripped down to only legitimize the decisions, the people should simply ”say yes to yes”.</p>

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This dissertation examines the influence of executive ideological orientation on state foreign policy behavior. I advance an analytical model which asserts that foreign policy decisionmakers act in a manner consistent with the ideological principles presented in their political platforms, party manifestos, and their voters' expectations. Thus, I assert that within developed democracies, the further right a government is, the higher the propensity to behave more aggressively. Oppositely, the further left a government is, the more likely it is to behave more cooperatively. I empirically analyze this theoretical argument by developing three models where the foreign policy behavior is measured uniquely in each separate model. I estimate executive ideology by using two proxies: one which estimates the overall ideology of the executive while the other captures only the foreign policy dimension of executive ideology. To test the hypotheses derived from the theoretical model, I create a new dataset of responses to international crises. Foreign policy behavior is operationalized as an ordinal variable which takes into account a complex range of actions that governments take in the international arena, such as providing aid, mediation, non intervention, condemnation, sanctions, and the use of force. I employ Logit and Orderd Logit statistical analyses on a large-N cross national model. My dissertation focuses on all 22 OECD countries, during the period 1977 to 2001. The empirical findings partially support my theoretical argument, contingent upon the proxy used for executive ideology and the way state behavior is estimated. I find consistent support to my argument if executive ideology is estimated with the proxy which contains only the party manifestos' foreign policy variables.

This dissertation aims at describing the worldview and the ontological boundary work that descriptions of ”the information society” presuppose as well as understanding how these relate to technocratic descriptions of the world. The theoretical point of origin of this work is that worldviews are communicated, and that when this transpires, three worlds are related to (the objective, the social, and the subjective) which contain ideological components that make them plausible. The material that has been studied is public documents from 1994 – 2004. These materials have been analysed with the help of text analysis, where a reconstruction of the ideological components of the worldview is the objective. The results of the analysis show that these descriptions, first of all, presuppose an objective world where an ontological boundary between technology and values is drawn. Technology is driven by one form of logic and values are driven by another. Technology does not in itself contain values, but when put to use, only certain types of value can be created. The subsequent theoretical consequences are that these values (for instance effectiveness) are presented as objective, independent of value conflicts in society. Second, the analysis shows that descriptions partly presuppose a social world that is divided into a normative centre and a normative periphery, and partly a historicist description of historical development. These two ideological components provide a logical consequence, that in the social world, identifiable groups who live according to lifestyle patterns of the future can already be found today. Third, results show that descriptions presuppose a subjective world that is possible to change and direct. Man is to be made responsive to certain aspects of his existence and unresponsive toward others. This requires causing him to be responsive to change and unresponsive to that which hinders change. The logical consequences become a description of a system integrated information society where the individual is to adapt himself to changes on the system level. All in all, the three results of the study show that the world view which the descriptions presuppose have clear elements of technocracy and the art of social engineering.

The object of my investigation is Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen (SAF) (The Swedish Employer’s Association) and the concrete questions I wish to raise are: (i) How did SAF articulate their ideal of liberty during the period 1902-1948? (ii) How did they combine this ideal with the demands of an ascetic work ethic among the workers? My ambition with this investigation has been to spread some light on how SAF, one of the market’s most important actors in Sweden during the twentieth century, has combined an alleged strong belief in personal freedom with the demands of adjustment to specific virtues and how the proclaimed freedom has, in fact, been subject to a number of conditions. It would be fair to say that the survival of a market economy depends on a broad foundation of workers that in practice are not allowed to make use of the freedom that they are proclaimed to have in theory. The workers must not only be convinced to go to work but also to work efficiently. If this were not the case, then capitalism, built on competition, would collapse. This is congruent with the conclusions made in my investigation. SAF’s proclamations of freedom were indeed a freedom for the believers; for those who could take advantage of the competition. But for those who did not believe in the system or who did not feel that they could find themselves justice in it, SAF demanded a high moral standard. As a consequence of this we are confronted with the following paradox: Freedom for the rich, morality to the poor.

Ett allmänt forskningsintresse jag har är vad som passerar som kunskap i ett givet sammanhang. Det sammanhang jag intresserar mig för i denna avhandling  är varför yrkesgruppen personalspecialister många gånger har sådana statusproblem i organisationer och företag, samtidigt som det återkommande i allmänna managementdiskurser hävdas att människan är företagets viktigaste resurs. Om HRM, kompetens, lärande och så vidare är viktiga frågor för företag borde inte personalspecialisterna vara självklara experter i kunskapssamhället? I avhandlingen söker jag svar på denna paradox genom att studera personalspecialisters identitetsarbete. Mer specifikt studerar jag hur yrkesgruppen argumentativt positionerar sig i sina försök att etablera sig som en strategiskt viktig yrkesgrupp. Den övergripande frågeställningen är: Kan man förstå och förklara den relativt låga status yrkesgruppen har jämfört med andra yrkesgrupper genom att studera hur personalspecialister i ett argumentativt sammanhang försökt att positionera sig som en strategiskt viktig yrkesgrupp? / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2002

The starting point of this thesis is the debate surrounding the two referenda’s in France and the Netherlands in May and June 2005, regarding the proposal of a European constitution. The aim of this study is to analyse how democratic legitimacy and the role of the citizens portrays within the democratic discourse of the European Union. The empirical material is based upon both speeches from the European Commission and news articles from the French newspaper Libération and the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Discourse analysis is used as a theoretical frame of reference combined with models of democracy. The results of the study is that democracy is still defined by it’s traditional values but have also shifted into being a concept combined with effectivity. This has effects on the citizens and their role in the EU has been stripped down to only legitimize the decisions, the people should simply ”say yes to yes”.

This study looks at how professional male athletes—particularly undersized athletes—are represented throughout televised sport. Based on the assumption that televised sport is a gendered and predominantly masculine genre, the focus of this analysis is to demonstrate whether or not professional male athletes are evaluated differently based on physical stature, and whether or not such representations reinforce a dominant—mythic—male ideology. Grounded mainly in Gramscian hegemony and Peircean semiotics, the subsequent analysis compares broadcast commentary and visuals taken from the 2010 men’s Olympic ice hockey tournament and the 2010 men’s FIFA World Cup. In both events, it was generally found that taller athletes were praised more positively than smaller athletes. These findings appear to support common sports-related stereotypes, such as, the apparent media-reinforced expectation that professional male athletes be almost inhuman, mythical representations of ordinary men, i.e., the best athletes should be large, intimidating, aggressive, and hyper-masculine symbols.