Women and labour organizing in Asia: diversity, autonomy and activism

Women have become the new face of industrial labour – and of labour activism – not only in Korea, in all but the most and least developed countries of Asia. Export-oriented industrialization strategies favoured throughout East and Southeast Asia, and more recently in parts of the sub-continent, brought with them a feminization first of factory labour and then of the diverse agglomeration of contract and home workers that now produce consumer goods for the world. The rapidly increasing economic importance of the Asian region in the global context highlights the need for detailed analysis of the institutions and practices which constitute civil society in Asia. Globalization, with its opening up of Asia’s economies, and the concomitant growth of feminized labour-intensive industries, has shone a spotlight on male-dominated union organizations in the region and their failure to protect women’s interests. The chapters in this volume explore women’s responses to these unions’ shortcomings. They examine the strategies female labour activists have employed within and outside the organized labour movements in nine very different Asian contexts, the challenges they face, their frustrations, and their successes

Australia\u27s health 2002 : the eighth biennial report of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

Australia\u27s Health 2002 is the eighth biennial health report of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. It is the nation\u27s authoritative source of information on patterns of health and illness, determinants of health, the supply and use of health services, and health service costs and performance. Australia\u27s Health 2002 is an essential reference and information resource for all Australians with an interest in health

Splitting ‘intervocalic’: Expanding the typology of lenition environments

The basic types of lenition environments (‘initial’, ‘intervocalic’, ‘final’) need to be separately evaluated as they differ along parameters like word position (e.g., pre-consonantal vs. final codas) or stress relations. This paper argues that we need to recognise an additional such parameter: the length of the vowel preceding an intervocalic consonant. We show that a number of phenomena from varieties of English and German show lenition patterns which draw a distinction between reflexes found in post-short (vc) and post-long (vvc) environments. The theoretical consequence of our observations is that phonological theory needs to be able to account for the post-short vs. post-long distinction in the form of a parametrically-determined representational difference

Sense of agency in the human brain

In adult life, people normally know what they are doing. This experience of controlling one's own actions and, through them, the course of events in the outside world is called 'sense of agency'. It forms a central feature of human experience; however, the brain mechanisms that produce the sense of agency have only recently begun to be investigated systematically. This recent progress has been driven by the development of better measures of the experience of agency, improved design of cognitive and behavioural experiments, and a growing understanding of the brain circuits that generate this distinctive but elusive experience. The sense of agency is a mental and neural state of cardinal importance in human civilization, because it is frequently altered in psychopathology and because it underpins the concept of responsibility in human societies

Academic pay loadings and gender in Australian universities

Academic pay loadings are one potential mechanism of gender pay disparity in universities. Drawing on a large-scale survey of Australian academics with over 8000 respondents, we analyse how ‘discretionary’ and higher duties loadings (or bonuses) are distributed between men and women, and investigate the reasons for such distributions. Investigating both incidence and quantum, we find that discretionary loadings are particularly susceptible to gender influences. We explain this finding in terms of the concepts of regulation distance and the meritocracy paradox. The findings have implications for the design of loadings schemes in universities, and, by implication, in other kinds of organisations that provide loadings

Self-reported harassment and bullying in Australian universities: explaining differences between regional, metropolitan and elite institutions

We analyse data from the largest survey of university staff in Australia to determine whether bullying and harassment are more common in regional than metropolitan and Go8 universities, and to what extent any differences could be attributed to other factors. While professional staff showed no difference in harassment rates between regional and metropolitan and Go8 universities, academic staff at regional universities reported significantly higher levels of harassment. This probably reflected the labour market and resource context of regional universities. Binary logistic regression indicated that a perceived lack of support for professional development partially explained the effect of regional status on differences in the rates of harassment/bullying across university types. Markers of organisational culture only partially account for differences in the rates of harassment/bullying between university types