James Reveley - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by James Reveley

E-Learning and Digital Media, 2013

This article outlines a model for teaching both computer games and videogames in the classroom fo... more This article outlines a model for teaching both computer games and videogames in the classroom for teachers. The model illustrates the connections between in-game actions and youth gaming culture. The article explains how the out-of-school knowledge building, creation and collaboration that occurs in gaming and gaming culture has an impact on students' understanding of their own lifeworlds. The authors demonstrate how the development of curricula around and with games and gaming cultures can incorporate and capitalise on approaches to learning and collaboration, design and identity that students have developed in their own gaming practices.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, Sep 9, 2021

This thesis examines patterns of power relations between waterfront workers and waterfront employ... more This thesis examines patterns of power relations between waterfront workers and waterfront employers during the years 1953 to 1993. It argues that the key actors on each side, and the relationships between them, were constituted by the Waterfront Industry Act 1953 which established a 'bureau system' oflabour administration. This legislative intervention created an occupational registration scheme which was complemented by the registration, as legal entities, of the main organized interests I would like to acknowledge the University of Canterbury in awarding me a Canterbury Scholarship, and the Institute for Industrial Relations Research in providing me with a grant from its scholarships fund. Also, I would like to thank Professor David Thoms and Dr Arnold Parr for employing me each year as a teaching assistant. Without these sources of income I would not have been able to embark on, let alone complete, the thesis. I am also very grateful to the members and officials of the Waterfront Workers Union who cooperated in the research. Special thanks are owed to the late Warren Collins, and to Steve Guest, for sparing me some moments of their valuable time. Many thanks also to Ted Thompson for answering my numerous questions, and also for giving me copies of some crucial documents which I would not have otherwise been able to secure. Thanks also to Robyn and Tony Robinson, for making me fee1like part of their family, and for taking a keen interest in my thesis. My especial thanks to Tony for his assistance with computer equipment. Without Tony's help I would not be able to type (or print!) these words. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to my partner, Emma, for her support and patience while I was writing the thesis. Emma has been encouraging and helpful throughout, and I am deeply grateful to her. Finally I would like to thank my parents, Anna and Doug, for their unfailing support of my university studies, which extend over some 12 years. Hopefully this thesis will go some way towards repaying the debt of gratitude that lowe them. It is to Mum & Dad, and to Emma, that I dedicate the thesis.

Science & Society, Jul 1, 2011

Originated by Paul Adler, paleo-Marxism represents the fullest engagement with Marx's work by a m... more Originated by Paul Adler, paleo-Marxism represents the fullest engagement with Marx's work by a management scholar in the American milieu. As the pinnacle of Marxist thinking within Critical Management Studies, paleo-Marxism merits critical attention. By focusing on technological change, Adler aims to overcome contemporary poststructuralist labor process theory's subjectivism. When subjected to a fi ne-grained analysis, however, paleo-Marxism is revealed to be equally defi cient. Adler compounds the labor process theorists' neglect of Marx's discoveries about how capital is valorized; he prioritizes the subjective matter of recognition at the expense of redistribution; and he fails to explain adequately the crisis potential of technical progress. Only a wholly new Marxist version of Critical Management Studies, one with a "crisis sites" model at its core, can surmount paleo-Marxism's inherent weaknesses.

Social Science Research Network, Sep 21, 2003

New Zealand’s Employment Contracts Act 1991 consigned to history almost 100 years of pervasive st... more New Zealand’s Employment Contracts Act 1991 consigned to history almost 100 years of pervasive state regulation of collective employment relations. Many unions experienced a sharp decline in influence after the introduction of this piece of legislation. The traditional wharfies’ union, the Waterfront Workers’ Union, is a case in point. Following a decade of neo-liberal industrial relations deregulation, a centre-left Labour/Alliance

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2012

The Australian and New Zealand port industries in the post-World War II period exhibit strong ele... more The Australian and New Zealand port industries in the post-World War II period exhibit strong elements of path dependence. Simply put, economic and political actors’ purposive decisions pushed the development of port institutions down a pathway which became hard to step off: institutional lock-ins impeded strategic flexibility and the growth of port productivity; inefficient macro- and micro-level institutional arrangements reduced Australian and New Zealand port efficiency. Given this experience, our chapter uses path dependence as a method to explain institutional stability and change within New Zealand’s and Australia’s respective port systems. While port institutions in both countries were slow to adapt to shifts in the wider industry environment, they eventually succumbed to reformist change. As we explain, this occurred more strongly in New Zealand through pathbreaking institutional transformation in 1989, the pressures for which mounted over several decades. In Australia, by contrast, there were many false starts and change was slower even after the ports were caught up in the federal government’s late 1980s economy-wide programme of microeconomic reform.

Open Review of Educational Research, 2015

Abstract By focusing on positive education, this article draws out the educational implications o... more Abstract By focusing on positive education, this article draws out the educational implications of Binkley's Foucauldian critique of neoliberal subjects being pressured to learn how to manage their emotions. From the latter author's perspective, positive education self-technologies such as school-based mindfulness training can be construed as functioning to relay systemic neoliberal imperatives down to individuals. What this interpretation overlooks, however, is that young people are not automatically and unambiguously disempowered by the emotion management strategies they are taught at school. Arguably, positive education contributes to the formation of resistant educational subjects with an emotional toolkit that equips them to mount oppositional action against neoliberalism. Foucault's work can be interpreted in a way that is not inconsistent with seeing positive education as having such liberatory potential.

Liverpool University Press eBooks, 2003

This chapter details the pattern of employment, work relations, and the shift in power between th... more This chapter details the pattern of employment, work relations, and the shift in power between the unions and employers, after the changes brought about by containerisation. It considers the strategies of unions, the reorganisation of employers, and the actions of the New Zealand Association of Waterfront Employers in particular detail. The chapter concludes by suggesting that difficult negotiations would later lead to union downfall

This study is bookended by two major events in New Zealand’s maritime history. The first is the 1... more This study is bookended by two major events in New Zealand’s maritime history. The first is the 1951 waterfront dispute that led to the dissolution of the Waterside Workers’ Union (WWU) and the creation of twenty-six port unions in its place. The second is a mirror event occuring in 2001, where a reconsitituted WWU and two other unions competed for members, leading to widespread protest. Though historians have treated the events leading up to 1951 with interest, little attention has been given to the fifty-year period between events, a history which this journal attempts to fill. Author James Reveley considers the following questions in his history of union-management interactions. Firstly, why employer prerogative did not increase after the 1951 dissolution of the WWU; second, how the unions regained power so quickly; and third, why the WWU’s substantial industrial power was so friable during the 1990s. The conclusion assesses the relationship between government and unions, and believes that union response when facing globalisation within maritime industries, which alliances they will form, for example, will have a significant impact on the future direction of maritime activity in New Zealand.

Labour, Employment and Work in New Zealand, 1970

Policy Futures in Education, Jan 14, 2021

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the biopolitical trade-offs inherent to contemporary capitalism are... more Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the biopolitical trade-offs inherent to contemporary capitalism are cascading down to higher education. Based on insights derived from theories of digitalized capitalism, this article argues that the emergency shift of educational activities online has much potential to heighten the expropriation of digital academic labour. The net result is an intensification of the master process of digitally driven academic proletarianization. At the same time, the reopening of campuses in countries and regions with high infection rates demonstrably puts academics and others at risk. Both of these developments provide reasons, the article maintains, to support the introduction of universal basic income (UBI). After drawing the crucial distinction between UBI as an emergency response and UBI as an institutionally frame-breaking initiative, the latter-non-emergency UBI-is advocated as a solution to the increasingly binaristic choice between work and life in the neoliberal university and beyond.

Law and Financial Markets Review, Apr 2, 2020

By failing to consider that the types of financial misconduct witnessed in Australia in recent ye... more By failing to consider that the types of financial misconduct witnessed in Australia in recent years are relatively commonplace in other countries, the Hayne Royal Commission exaggerates the level of miscreance within the local financial sector. This paper seeks to rectify this neglect by offering an explicit comparison of misconduct in Australian and major British and American banks. It also suggests that the Commission's work and findings inadvertently provide support for the populist view that Australian financial institutions are exceptionally unethical in their treatment of customers and clients. Given the emergence of Fintech and the potential for Big Tech firms to penetrate financial services markets, large incumbent Australian firms are already facing a serious challenge. If the net effect of the Royal Commission is to deepen mistrust of large Australian banks and insurers, their capacity to resist this challenge will be diminished with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, Jun 16, 2017

Running like a leitmotif through Peter Roberts' recently published philosophico-educational writi... more Running like a leitmotif through Peter Roberts' recently published philosophico-educational writings there is a humanistic thread, which this article picks out. In order to ascertain the quality of this humanism, Roberts is positioned in relation to a pair of extant humanisms: radical and integral. Points of comparability and contrast are identified in several of the writer's genre-crossing essays. These texts, it is argued, rectify deficiencies in how the two humanisms envision alternatives to capitalism. Roberts skilfully teases out the non-obvious futurological implications of the work of a diverse array of authors, spanning the boundaries of philosophy, social criticism, and literature. In so doing, he underscores the intimate connection between personal self-transformation and ideal-driven social transformation. Further, Roberts challenges humanists of both radical and integral stripes to reconsider the moral grounds of their critique of capitalism.

Management & Organizational History, Nov 1, 2013

Whittle and Mueller's discursive psychological analysis of banker storying during the recent ... more Whittle and Mueller's discursive psychological analysis of banker storying during the recent British Treasury Select Committee hearings is the latest twist in the financial crisis storytelling genre. Although Whittle and Mueller focus on storytellers' use of classically derived story tropes, they otherwise pay scant attention to how history enters into stories in which bankers are blamed for economic turmoil. The current paper moves beyond their work by showing how culturally transmitted historical narratives provide potent discursive resources for banker bashers. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, our examples are the American Catholic priest-cum-broadcaster Charles Coughlin and the British fascist Oswald Mosley. Each drew their banker stories from content-laden, culturally supplied master narratives: traditional American populism and British declinism, respectively. Studying the emplotment of bankers within a nation's deep-seated historical storylines, we argue, is the key to factoring history back into the banker storytelling debate.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, May 25, 2023

Liverpool University Press eBooks, 2003

<p>This chapter considers the development of the companies that employed watersiders, and t... more <p>This chapter considers the development of the companies that employed watersiders, and the difficulties and problems inherent in their dealings with the labour organisations that represented these workers. The chapter ends by introducing harbour boards and independent stevedoring companies as the primary employers of watersiders, rather than shipping companies, and outlines the further fragmentation that occured as a result</p>

Journal of Industrial Relations, Jun 1, 2002

E-learning and Digital Media, Feb 1, 2013

The opportunities social media provide for agential expressions of subjectivity and experiential ... more The opportunities social media provide for agential expressions of subjectivity and experiential learning, relative to social media's role in reproducing digital-era capitalism, are the subject of keen debate. There is now a burgeoning academic literature which suggests that social media users are, to a greater or lesser degree, alienated by the activities of mega-corporations like Google and Facebook. Within this literature two broad perspectives are clearly identifiable. The first insists that social media platforms strongly alienate their users. To the extent that critical media scholars who advance this proposition are preoccupied with ideological hegemony, their work emblematises the idealist tendency of (old) media theorists that Dallas W. Smythe criticises. Contributors to the second perspective posit a trade-off between social media user alienation and exploitation. Not only is this idea inherently problematical, it does not go far enough towards resetting the analysis of social media back onto a materialist track. This article seeks to do just that. Frequently, Marxists and those radical social critics who use Marxist terminology locate the significance of mass communications systems in their capacity to produce 'ideology' which is held to act as a sort of invisible glue that holds together the capitalist system .... But for Marxists, such an explanatory notion should be unsatisfactory. The first question that historical materialists should ask about mass communications is what economic function for capital do they serve, attempting to understand their role in the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.

Journal of Industrial Relations, Sep 1, 1997

New Zealand's programmes of waterfront reform, and of labour market deregula tion through the... more New Zealand's programmes of waterfront reform, and of labour market deregula tion through the Employment Contracts Act 1991, have both attracted considerable attention from state reformers and organised business interests in Aus tralia. This article examines the combined effects of these legislative interventions on employment relations on the waterfront, and sounds a note of warning to tbose wbo seek to emulate the New Zealand experience. It argues that the causes and consequences of the process of waterfront labour reform can only be understood in the context of the historic effects of tbe 'bureau' system of labour administration, the scheme that regu lated the employment of watersiders for almost fifty years. While the abolition of this scheme in 1989, together with award restructuring, has increased the efficiency of New Zealand ports, recent moves by employers to increase labour flexibility' using the Employment Contracts Act 1991 have the potential to undermine these gains. This piece of legislation has eroded union coverage, led to the re-casualisation of a significant proportion of waterfront employment, allowed opportunistic small firms back, onto the waterfront, and opened up unbridled competition based on cutting labour costs in a manner that is having a detrimental effect on the work lives of watersiders. This development is counterproductive, given tbe continuing centrality of labour to tbe workflow systems, both container and conventional, on the waterfront.

E-Learning and Digital Media, 2013

This article outlines a model for teaching both computer games and videogames in the classroom fo... more This article outlines a model for teaching both computer games and videogames in the classroom for teachers. The model illustrates the connections between in-game actions and youth gaming culture. The article explains how the out-of-school knowledge building, creation and collaboration that occurs in gaming and gaming culture has an impact on students' understanding of their own lifeworlds. The authors demonstrate how the development of curricula around and with games and gaming cultures can incorporate and capitalise on approaches to learning and collaboration, design and identity that students have developed in their own gaming practices.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, Sep 9, 2021

This thesis examines patterns of power relations between waterfront workers and waterfront employ... more This thesis examines patterns of power relations between waterfront workers and waterfront employers during the years 1953 to 1993. It argues that the key actors on each side, and the relationships between them, were constituted by the Waterfront Industry Act 1953 which established a 'bureau system' oflabour administration. This legislative intervention created an occupational registration scheme which was complemented by the registration, as legal entities, of the main organized interests I would like to acknowledge the University of Canterbury in awarding me a Canterbury Scholarship, and the Institute for Industrial Relations Research in providing me with a grant from its scholarships fund. Also, I would like to thank Professor David Thoms and Dr Arnold Parr for employing me each year as a teaching assistant. Without these sources of income I would not have been able to embark on, let alone complete, the thesis. I am also very grateful to the members and officials of the Waterfront Workers Union who cooperated in the research. Special thanks are owed to the late Warren Collins, and to Steve Guest, for sparing me some moments of their valuable time. Many thanks also to Ted Thompson for answering my numerous questions, and also for giving me copies of some crucial documents which I would not have otherwise been able to secure. Thanks also to Robyn and Tony Robinson, for making me fee1like part of their family, and for taking a keen interest in my thesis. My especial thanks to Tony for his assistance with computer equipment. Without Tony's help I would not be able to type (or print!) these words. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to my partner, Emma, for her support and patience while I was writing the thesis. Emma has been encouraging and helpful throughout, and I am deeply grateful to her. Finally I would like to thank my parents, Anna and Doug, for their unfailing support of my university studies, which extend over some 12 years. Hopefully this thesis will go some way towards repaying the debt of gratitude that lowe them. It is to Mum & Dad, and to Emma, that I dedicate the thesis.

Science & Society, Jul 1, 2011

Originated by Paul Adler, paleo-Marxism represents the fullest engagement with Marx's work by a m... more Originated by Paul Adler, paleo-Marxism represents the fullest engagement with Marx's work by a management scholar in the American milieu. As the pinnacle of Marxist thinking within Critical Management Studies, paleo-Marxism merits critical attention. By focusing on technological change, Adler aims to overcome contemporary poststructuralist labor process theory's subjectivism. When subjected to a fi ne-grained analysis, however, paleo-Marxism is revealed to be equally defi cient. Adler compounds the labor process theorists' neglect of Marx's discoveries about how capital is valorized; he prioritizes the subjective matter of recognition at the expense of redistribution; and he fails to explain adequately the crisis potential of technical progress. Only a wholly new Marxist version of Critical Management Studies, one with a "crisis sites" model at its core, can surmount paleo-Marxism's inherent weaknesses.

Social Science Research Network, Sep 21, 2003

New Zealand’s Employment Contracts Act 1991 consigned to history almost 100 years of pervasive st... more New Zealand’s Employment Contracts Act 1991 consigned to history almost 100 years of pervasive state regulation of collective employment relations. Many unions experienced a sharp decline in influence after the introduction of this piece of legislation. The traditional wharfies’ union, the Waterfront Workers’ Union, is a case in point. Following a decade of neo-liberal industrial relations deregulation, a centre-left Labour/Alliance

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2012

The Australian and New Zealand port industries in the post-World War II period exhibit strong ele... more The Australian and New Zealand port industries in the post-World War II period exhibit strong elements of path dependence. Simply put, economic and political actors’ purposive decisions pushed the development of port institutions down a pathway which became hard to step off: institutional lock-ins impeded strategic flexibility and the growth of port productivity; inefficient macro- and micro-level institutional arrangements reduced Australian and New Zealand port efficiency. Given this experience, our chapter uses path dependence as a method to explain institutional stability and change within New Zealand’s and Australia’s respective port systems. While port institutions in both countries were slow to adapt to shifts in the wider industry environment, they eventually succumbed to reformist change. As we explain, this occurred more strongly in New Zealand through pathbreaking institutional transformation in 1989, the pressures for which mounted over several decades. In Australia, by contrast, there were many false starts and change was slower even after the ports were caught up in the federal government’s late 1980s economy-wide programme of microeconomic reform.

Open Review of Educational Research, 2015

Abstract By focusing on positive education, this article draws out the educational implications o... more Abstract By focusing on positive education, this article draws out the educational implications of Binkley's Foucauldian critique of neoliberal subjects being pressured to learn how to manage their emotions. From the latter author's perspective, positive education self-technologies such as school-based mindfulness training can be construed as functioning to relay systemic neoliberal imperatives down to individuals. What this interpretation overlooks, however, is that young people are not automatically and unambiguously disempowered by the emotion management strategies they are taught at school. Arguably, positive education contributes to the formation of resistant educational subjects with an emotional toolkit that equips them to mount oppositional action against neoliberalism. Foucault's work can be interpreted in a way that is not inconsistent with seeing positive education as having such liberatory potential.

Liverpool University Press eBooks, 2003

This chapter details the pattern of employment, work relations, and the shift in power between th... more This chapter details the pattern of employment, work relations, and the shift in power between the unions and employers, after the changes brought about by containerisation. It considers the strategies of unions, the reorganisation of employers, and the actions of the New Zealand Association of Waterfront Employers in particular detail. The chapter concludes by suggesting that difficult negotiations would later lead to union downfall

This study is bookended by two major events in New Zealand’s maritime history. The first is the 1... more This study is bookended by two major events in New Zealand’s maritime history. The first is the 1951 waterfront dispute that led to the dissolution of the Waterside Workers’ Union (WWU) and the creation of twenty-six port unions in its place. The second is a mirror event occuring in 2001, where a reconsitituted WWU and two other unions competed for members, leading to widespread protest. Though historians have treated the events leading up to 1951 with interest, little attention has been given to the fifty-year period between events, a history which this journal attempts to fill. Author James Reveley considers the following questions in his history of union-management interactions. Firstly, why employer prerogative did not increase after the 1951 dissolution of the WWU; second, how the unions regained power so quickly; and third, why the WWU’s substantial industrial power was so friable during the 1990s. The conclusion assesses the relationship between government and unions, and believes that union response when facing globalisation within maritime industries, which alliances they will form, for example, will have a significant impact on the future direction of maritime activity in New Zealand.

Labour, Employment and Work in New Zealand, 1970

Policy Futures in Education, Jan 14, 2021

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the biopolitical trade-offs inherent to contemporary capitalism are... more Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the biopolitical trade-offs inherent to contemporary capitalism are cascading down to higher education. Based on insights derived from theories of digitalized capitalism, this article argues that the emergency shift of educational activities online has much potential to heighten the expropriation of digital academic labour. The net result is an intensification of the master process of digitally driven academic proletarianization. At the same time, the reopening of campuses in countries and regions with high infection rates demonstrably puts academics and others at risk. Both of these developments provide reasons, the article maintains, to support the introduction of universal basic income (UBI). After drawing the crucial distinction between UBI as an emergency response and UBI as an institutionally frame-breaking initiative, the latter-non-emergency UBI-is advocated as a solution to the increasingly binaristic choice between work and life in the neoliberal university and beyond.

Law and Financial Markets Review, Apr 2, 2020

By failing to consider that the types of financial misconduct witnessed in Australia in recent ye... more By failing to consider that the types of financial misconduct witnessed in Australia in recent years are relatively commonplace in other countries, the Hayne Royal Commission exaggerates the level of miscreance within the local financial sector. This paper seeks to rectify this neglect by offering an explicit comparison of misconduct in Australian and major British and American banks. It also suggests that the Commission's work and findings inadvertently provide support for the populist view that Australian financial institutions are exceptionally unethical in their treatment of customers and clients. Given the emergence of Fintech and the potential for Big Tech firms to penetrate financial services markets, large incumbent Australian firms are already facing a serious challenge. If the net effect of the Royal Commission is to deepen mistrust of large Australian banks and insurers, their capacity to resist this challenge will be diminished with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, Jun 16, 2017

Running like a leitmotif through Peter Roberts' recently published philosophico-educational writi... more Running like a leitmotif through Peter Roberts' recently published philosophico-educational writings there is a humanistic thread, which this article picks out. In order to ascertain the quality of this humanism, Roberts is positioned in relation to a pair of extant humanisms: radical and integral. Points of comparability and contrast are identified in several of the writer's genre-crossing essays. These texts, it is argued, rectify deficiencies in how the two humanisms envision alternatives to capitalism. Roberts skilfully teases out the non-obvious futurological implications of the work of a diverse array of authors, spanning the boundaries of philosophy, social criticism, and literature. In so doing, he underscores the intimate connection between personal self-transformation and ideal-driven social transformation. Further, Roberts challenges humanists of both radical and integral stripes to reconsider the moral grounds of their critique of capitalism.

Management & Organizational History, Nov 1, 2013

Whittle and Mueller's discursive psychological analysis of banker storying during the recent ... more Whittle and Mueller's discursive psychological analysis of banker storying during the recent British Treasury Select Committee hearings is the latest twist in the financial crisis storytelling genre. Although Whittle and Mueller focus on storytellers' use of classically derived story tropes, they otherwise pay scant attention to how history enters into stories in which bankers are blamed for economic turmoil. The current paper moves beyond their work by showing how culturally transmitted historical narratives provide potent discursive resources for banker bashers. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, our examples are the American Catholic priest-cum-broadcaster Charles Coughlin and the British fascist Oswald Mosley. Each drew their banker stories from content-laden, culturally supplied master narratives: traditional American populism and British declinism, respectively. Studying the emplotment of bankers within a nation's deep-seated historical storylines, we argue, is the key to factoring history back into the banker storytelling debate.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, May 25, 2023

Liverpool University Press eBooks, 2003

<p>This chapter considers the development of the companies that employed watersiders, and t... more <p>This chapter considers the development of the companies that employed watersiders, and the difficulties and problems inherent in their dealings with the labour organisations that represented these workers. The chapter ends by introducing harbour boards and independent stevedoring companies as the primary employers of watersiders, rather than shipping companies, and outlines the further fragmentation that occured as a result</p>

Journal of Industrial Relations, Jun 1, 2002

E-learning and Digital Media, Feb 1, 2013

The opportunities social media provide for agential expressions of subjectivity and experiential ... more The opportunities social media provide for agential expressions of subjectivity and experiential learning, relative to social media's role in reproducing digital-era capitalism, are the subject of keen debate. There is now a burgeoning academic literature which suggests that social media users are, to a greater or lesser degree, alienated by the activities of mega-corporations like Google and Facebook. Within this literature two broad perspectives are clearly identifiable. The first insists that social media platforms strongly alienate their users. To the extent that critical media scholars who advance this proposition are preoccupied with ideological hegemony, their work emblematises the idealist tendency of (old) media theorists that Dallas W. Smythe criticises. Contributors to the second perspective posit a trade-off between social media user alienation and exploitation. Not only is this idea inherently problematical, it does not go far enough towards resetting the analysis of social media back onto a materialist track. This article seeks to do just that. Frequently, Marxists and those radical social critics who use Marxist terminology locate the significance of mass communications systems in their capacity to produce 'ideology' which is held to act as a sort of invisible glue that holds together the capitalist system .... But for Marxists, such an explanatory notion should be unsatisfactory. The first question that historical materialists should ask about mass communications is what economic function for capital do they serve, attempting to understand their role in the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.

Journal of Industrial Relations, Sep 1, 1997

New Zealand's programmes of waterfront reform, and of labour market deregula tion through the... more New Zealand's programmes of waterfront reform, and of labour market deregula tion through the Employment Contracts Act 1991, have both attracted considerable attention from state reformers and organised business interests in Aus tralia. This article examines the combined effects of these legislative interventions on employment relations on the waterfront, and sounds a note of warning to tbose wbo seek to emulate the New Zealand experience. It argues that the causes and consequences of the process of waterfront labour reform can only be understood in the context of the historic effects of tbe 'bureau' system of labour administration, the scheme that regu lated the employment of watersiders for almost fifty years. While the abolition of this scheme in 1989, together with award restructuring, has increased the efficiency of New Zealand ports, recent moves by employers to increase labour flexibility' using the Employment Contracts Act 1991 have the potential to undermine these gains. This piece of legislation has eroded union coverage, led to the re-casualisation of a significant proportion of waterfront employment, allowed opportunistic small firms back, onto the waterfront, and opened up unbridled competition based on cutting labour costs in a manner that is having a detrimental effect on the work lives of watersiders. This development is counterproductive, given tbe continuing centrality of labour to tbe workflow systems, both container and conventional, on the waterfront.