In the 300 years since the magazine originated, this mass medium has become synonymous with women and their worlds. Today, publications for, by and about women still dominate the global magazine market, and the selection and circulation of women’s magazines increase annually – indicative of the popularity of this mixed medium of information, instruction and entertainment. Since the 1980s, academics from different human sciences branches, such as Joke Hermes and Marloes Hülsken in the Netherlands and Angela Gough-Yates, Margaret Beetham, Ros Ballaster and Marjorie Ferguson in the United Kingdom, have proven the academic worth of women’s magazines, by using them as information sources about women’s social knowledge, positions and roles, their relationships and consumer behaviour in (amongst others) historical, sociological, psychological, mass media and women’s studies research. In South Africa, however, academic research on women’s magazines is still largely unexploited: apart from a few dissertations, information is mostly limited to single paragraphs in larger mass media studies. Magazines for black women have, for example, not been researched yet. In this study, South African and Dutch magazines from 2006 are studied as sociocultural journals: accounts or collections of the major trains of thought representative of a specific context and time frame. When magazine content is viewed as the textual distillation of the shared consciousness or culture of a particular audience, and discourse as ways of acting and thinking underlying this shared consciousness, magazines, by drawing on different discourses, report on the norms, values and habits particular to a specific era – yielding information that can be applied in reconstructing images of reality. This study aimed to research, within the context of current women’s magazines, the way in which women’s presence in the career world is accepted and legitimised as standard practice, and to explore the influence of the pursuit of a career on other female roles. It was assumed that the range of ‘superwoman’ roles (career woman, mother, wife, homemaker, lover, friend …) resonates in the ‘work discourse’ – and that all women experience similar frustrations, fears, dreams and expectations, irrespective of linguistic, cultural and socio-economic factors. A selection of sixteen magazines – two issues each of four South African and four Dutch magazine titles, aimed at diverse readerships – were singled out as primary research material. Magazine content was subsequently submitted to close reading, in order to examine as closely as possible the approaches towards women’s deployment in the career world, as made evident in the text. Theoretical concepts from mass media studies, cultural studies, discourse analysis and feminist criticism underpinned the identification of textual patterns, leading to the establishment of links between text and reality and meaningful interpretations of eventual findings. The results indicated that the work discourse in all the examined magazines is informed by three interpretative repertoires – that ultimately determine the way in which this discourse is developed and maintained, both in the magazine content and in everyday life. When the findings resulting from the textual analysis of the work discourse represented in these magazines were compared with actual statistics on the career world, it became obvious, however, that magazine content does not necessarily reflect reality – but that internalising the ambitious, larger-than-life dream aspects contained between a magazine’s covers is precisely the aspect from which readers derive pleasure and satisfaction. / Dissertation (MA (Afrikaans))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Afrikaans / unrestricted

The chief aim of my thesis is to study and analyse how the multiculturalism of schools is reflected in research and reports in Sweden and in the way in which teachers talk about multicultural issues at school. Part of the work is done in the form of reflecting talks with two groups of teachers in two different schools on issues and situations taken from their own everyday experience. The talks are conducted over two years. One partial aim is therefore to study whether this working method can help teachers to develop their strategies with regard to multicultural issues at school. I describe how the talks develop over two years in an ethnically heterogeneous group of teachers in one of the schools, some areas related to multicultural issues in the school that the teachers find problematic, and how the talks to some extent influence the teachers’ choice of strategies in the school’s practice. Part of the work is an analysis of a talk from each group of teachers and their conceptions of “the immigrant pupil” and her/his parents are focused on. The analytical tool of interpretive repertoires is used to visualise patterns of common points of departure and values in the talks. Also part of the work is an analysis of how research and reports reflect the discourse on multicultural issues from 1980 to 2005. I emphasise some themes and how these change over time. Through the study, parts of the content of the discourse about the multicultural Swedish education are made visible. The discourse contains expressions of a focus on shortcomings and problems that are regarded as linked to pupils, parents and to some extent to teachers with foreign backgrounds. The discourse also contains expressions of seeing differences, chiefly between groups of pupils with foreign and ethnic Swedish backgrounds respectively. By focusing on differences and shortcomings a boundary is at the same time set up between “us” and “them”. The composition of teachers in Swedish schools is relatively homogeneous as regards ethnicity. When, in addition, it is many times teachers that have the responsibility and power to define what are seen as problems and to find solutions in schools’ practice, the problems and solutions are often defined from a majority perspective. It is also from a majority perspective that decisions are made about to what extent, to what degree and in what way minority perspectives should be represented in these contexts. It is a matter of who has the power to define themselves and the others and the others’ shortcomings.