Thesis, LLD--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Includes summaries in Afrikaans and English. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of how gender inequalities are reproduced in the spaces of a progressive Secondary School in the UK. It explores how knowledge is constructed in a school committed to diversity and equality, and considers how and when gender becomes an obscured but pivotal point in the negotiation of power. Through observations of student and staff in lessons, focus groups and interviews, this research contributes to the understanding of how girls are expected to perform femininities in pedagogic spaces. Focusing on how girls read and make meaning of local knowledge I explore how their choices of accommodation or resistance to traditional femininities are shaped. Through a detailed ethnographic narrative of the girls’ lived experiences, this thesis maps the ways and the extent to which girls are willing to step outside traditional gender expectations. Mapping this movement highlights the girls’ enactment of agency and resistance to gender limitations in pedagogy that historically conflate masculinities with spaces such as science and athletics, naturalizing gender inequalities in the classroom. In doing so, this study contributes to the growing body of literature regarding the relevance of gender in pedagogic spaces and how it informs social status and power. Central to this argument is how girls work within and across different sets of competing discursive narratives as their intersectionalities create multiple and often conflicting expectations. As these multiplicities are revealed, the girls develop an awareness of the contradictions of traditional binary beliefs allowing them to deconstruct dominant gender narratives. Highlighting the girls’ alternative positional choices troubles normalizing gender notions exposing the schools’ taken-for-granted knowledge. In viewing the schools’ normalizing discourses as remarkable this thesis furthers the understanding of how schools become sites for the production of gender. By exploring how girls make meaning of their daily gendered experiences and how they conceptualize and navigate the successes or sacrifices of their actions, this research suggests further focus on girls’ empowerment with the goal of decreasing pedagogic inequalities.

Our society has a rhetoric of equality which has spread through all areas highlighting or sometimes concealing manifest inequalities. In the context of marriage the language of equality suggests that marriage is becoming a more equal partnership and that bringing up children is becoming a similar experience for both parents. In this study this suggestion of increasing equality, especially increasing paternal involvement with children was investigated in the small community known locally as the 'Denton Estate'. This is a middle class community and traditionally the middle class have considered themselves in the vanguard of changes regarding good childcare practice. The context and history of present patterns of family life is the first part of the study considering how motherhood and fatherhood have changed over time to become the kinds of institutions they are today. The present social context has also been considered as the caring and nurturing of children demands both time and money and these are usually organised in ways which reflect the pre-existent patterns of society. Few families are isolated from society and its influence and this is certainly not the case on the 'Denton Estate'. The study goes on to look at the organisation of motherhood and fatherhood. If there are 'new fathers' participating fully in the care of their children then there must also be new mothers with the time and energy to pursue careers out in the world. Is this the case in this community? The study took place in the community as a whole and focused on interviews with 24 families both two parent and one parent families to understand the father's and mother's role. It became clear that the lives of men and women remain very different and part of the work investigates how mothers and fathers spend their time and set priorities. Another aspect of the study was to look at the way people described their lives to see how differences and inequalities are explained and justified. Later chapter reflect on grandparents' lives to see how changes have been made by this generation of parents compared to the last generation. Also to see how the lives of people in this community relate to or have been influenced by their own treatment as children. This study, then, is a reflection on the possible changes in parenthood in this community and a consideration of issues about equality and what equality in the family might mean.

This study examines the politics of redress in South Africa's private sector and the implication of race based affirmative action for a society in the throes of national reconciliation. Renewed racial classifications to eliminate the legacy of past racism seem to contradict the official state ideology of colour-blind nonracialism. Resentment among some whites on whose skills and loyalty a growing economy also relies, makes affirmative action a most divisive issue. Unlike most other countries in which minorities are targeted, in South Africa a previously disenfranchised majority is the beneficiary of preferential labour policies. Quite distinct from North American quotas for minorities, South African unions aim at transforming the workplace of the undertrained majority, which contrasts with business visions characterised by black advancement in management and ethnic diversity on company boards. However, even this initial window-dressing exercise for political expediency encounters resistance among a colonial establishment that still equates promotion of the previously disadvantaged with lowering standards. The changing discourse about affirmative action is probed through written surveys among two hundred business executives, focus groups, more in-depth personal interviews, and participant observation at selected companies in South Africa between 1992-97. An increased readiness to broaden the recruitment pool emerged among white male executives and would seem to have been triggered by the changed political power relations. This "anticipatory compliance" to potential legislation is justified with different motivations but is still driven by economic considerations rather than moral concerns about past neglect. Keeping up with the "black image" of competitors in securing government contracts or penetrating a township market with higher purchasing power spurs even traditionally conservative firms to vie for black managers. They are poached and head-hunted with generous inducements, at the expense of training the broader spectrum of black workers at a lower level. The unique current South African debate about redress is compared with its historical precedents of Afrikaner job reservation and "civilized labour policies", as well as the international experience with preferential hiring in the US, Canada, India and Malaysia. The recent backlash against affirmative action in the US, together with the assertion of counter-productive effects on beneficiaries, is evaluated against the South African case. The literature is divided as to what extent recipients of affirmative action experience self-doubt and low self-esteem. The label "affirmative action beneficiary" is said to stigmatize minorities not considered as having achieved status on merit. However, the vast majority of recipients of affirmative action probed in this research did not consider themselves passive recipients of company largesse, but instead perceived themselves as having rightly earned their place in the accelerated business training program. Far from victimising themselves by claiming compensatory preferential treatment, the respondents in this sample of black management students proudly insist on their past individual achievements as entitlement to their career. This finding contradicts the conventional wisdom among critics, that appointees on merit differ from affirmative action appointees in their approach to work. While a new rapidly growing black elite who least needs affirmative action, nonetheless benefits most from racial preference policies in senior management, the majority of impoverished and unemployed are not affected by these policies at all. To avoid the danger of racialised competition, a policy of non-racial, class-based affirmative action is suggested as the most feasible way to facilitate reconciliation.

The thesis examines the enactment of workplace equality through an analysis of HR generalist talk. The primary data is contextualised by a review of the literature on HR, equality and diversity, and the regulatory terrain. The study is based on interviews with HR practitioners from 40 UK organisations of different sizes/sectors in 2014. The methodology underpinning the analysis is informed by a form of critical discourse analysis which considers lived experiences in their broader contexts (Edley, 2001). The findings indicate that operational HR practice in respect of equality and diversity is constituted mainly of compliance to the equality legislation. HR practitioners enact a ‘legal guardian’ (Wright & Snell, 2005) role, seeking first and foremost to protect their organisations from the threat of litigation. Legal guardianship is delegitimised by the dominant discourses of strategic HRM and diversity management. Nonetheless, the legal guardian role is orientated to mainstream HRM expectations of ‘contribution’ whilst also incorporating a more covert employee advocacy role, which is accomplished through various proxies. The level of complexity and breadth of HR practices associated with the achievement of equality compliance challenges perspectives of equality law as providing a low threshold of rights in the employment relationship. The findings and discussion further challenge the neat demarcation of HR from personnel management in the literature, presenting a perspective of HR practice that is both nuanced and relatively consistent across sectors. The thesis considers the means by which a regulatory role for HR is unintentionally ensured by the dominant HRM discourse. Talk of the HR/line manager relationship in the enactment of equality highlights that roles are relatively stable and that the HR function retains considerable control of processes and outcomes whilst demonstrating a commitment in talk to the principle of devolution. The thesis thereby problematizes the ongoing predication of ‘successful’ HRM on the devolution of operational people management to line managers, and the perspective that continuing devolution is the trajectory of practice. HR practitioner talk indicates the processes by which the equality legislation is given meaning and highlights the significance of the (thus far under-acknowledged) employment lawyer/HR practitioner relationship to understandings of HR and the enactment of equality.

Thesis advisor: Christopher J. Kelly / This dissertation aims to understand the origins, effects, and limits of commerce in the modern world, taking Montesquieu as a guide in The Spirit of the Laws. It asks: To what extent is commerce natural, and how does commerce shape or constrain our understanding of happiness? I consider the extent to which commerce changes our nature, how it effects this change, and why it might fail to effect this change universally or permanently. Finally, I give an account of the best remedies or solutions for the problems we necessarily encounter in free commercial societies. We moderns are superior to the ancients, Montesquieu claims, on account of the knowledge we have gained concerning commerce. I argue that this epistemic superiority consists in knowledge concerning the best arrangement between the two sexes: “a kind of equality between the two sexes” that attaches men for the first time to “commerce with women.” Against standard readings that put forth political liberty or moderation as Montesquieu’s standard of the good in The Spirit of the Laws, I argue that Montesquieu also points to equality between the sexes as an alternative standard of the good. To show why and how his idea of sexual equality emerges with commerce, I begin by examining the natural origins of modern commerce. Modern commerce originates in the diversity of non-human nature, or a diversity of climates; so I begin by arguing that climate, Montesquieu’s new understanding of nature, is the natural basis of modern commerce. After elaborating on this new natural philosophy, I show how commerce, amidst this nonhuman natural diversity, paradoxically results in human uniformity or homogeneity: “everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores.” Commerce revolutionizes our mores by appealing to human flexibility and the ease of changing manners and mores rather than laws. Commerce does not result in a political universalism but a consensus concerning the most desirable sexual mores. Equality between the sexes is introduced by nature (as an accident of the physical environment), but a moral consensus only emerges through “history”: by comparing mores across time and place we see which mores are most desirable. However, neither reason nor passion is sufficient to secure these mores. Only by unleashing the imagination can we introduce equality between the sexes and attach men to “commerce with women” not by love itself, but by the “illusions” and “accessories” of love. The nature and history of commerce show, however, the limits of this human flexibility and this new standard. After all, why does sexual inequality persist, not least in despotisms and republics? On the one hand, humans are not only flexible and imaginative but also inflexible and attached to virtue in accord with “pure mores.” On the other hand, commerce is not, in fact, necessarily accompanied by gentle mores (and the luxury and vanity that accompany these mores): in contradistinction to “commerce of luxury,” “economic commerce” depends less on the imagination than on reason. These two alternatives (the life of virtue and that of economic commerce) not only show the limits of universalizing this new morality rooted in sexual equality but also clarify the challenges of reconciling the realms of domestic and political governance, or commerce at home with commerce abroad. Nonetheless, anyone unwilling or unable to retreat from the “worldliness” of modern commerce or insufficiently lucky to be born in a commercial republic should heed Montesquieu’s advice for how best to live rationally and freely in commercial societies. Thus I turn to his solutions for how to reconcile an openness to human diversity and strangers (as commerce consists of communication among diverse peoples) with a preservation of natural differences and “strength.” By conceiving of gentleness as a political virtue and cultivating a conventional form of jealousy, we can reconcile the demands of commerce with those of the virtue of humanity properly understood. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Yes / FP7

No / FP7

No / Invited keynote address at a lecture series. / FP7

No / Invited lecture. / FP7