Embedded ethics: Discourse and power in the New South Wales police service

In this paper we report an ethnographic research study conducted in one of the world's largest police organizations, the New South Wales Police Service. Our research question was, 'How do forms of power shape organizational members' ethical practices?' We look at existing theories that propose the deployment of two interrelated arguments: that ethics are embedded in organizational practices and discourse at a micro-level of everyday organizational life, which is contrasted with a focus on the macro-organizational, institutional forces that are seen to have an impact on ethics. Resisting this distinction between the 'micro' and the 'macro', we build on these two bodies of knowledge to explain ethical change as deeply embedded in power relations that traverse the scale of social action. copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications

Penality and Modes of Regulating Indigenous Peoples in Australia

The article proposes that race is central to the historical sociology and contemporary practice of punishment in settler societies such as Australia. The roots of massively disproportionate indigenous incarceration rates at the present time must be explored in relation to the history of regimes and cultures of racial segregation and governance in which indigenous peoples were coercively managed, for the most part outside `normal' legal and penal institutions, until the third quarter of the 20th century. The advent of high indigenous incarceration coincides with the cessation of overtly segregationist policies and continues to produce some of the same social consequences for indigenous communities - of social marginalization and civic disenfranchisement - behind a façade of legal impartiality. The reasons for this are, however, complex rather than simple. They are to be found in the legacy of segregationist policies, especially the wholesale removal of children and attempts to annihilate the means of reproduction of Aboriginal culture, and in the manner in which punitive sensibilities can serve as a vehicle for the expression of racial anxieties and antipathies in a liberal political culture in which overtly racist policy has no place