Secular Façade,Neoliberal Islamisation: Textbook Nationalism from Mubarak to Sisi

Beneath the secular veneer of official rhetoric, nationally unified school textbooks provide a striking image of the Islamist message promoted to young people in Egypt. While distorting the struggles and complexity of Egyptian history and heritage, the textbooks construct patriotic devotion and a form of docile ‘neoliberal Islamism’ as the route to national renaissance. They present a notion of ideal citizenship where personal piety, charity and entrepreneurship are the proposed solutions to ‘Egypt's problems’. However, to actually relieve its ‘problems’, the regime has relied on religious associations for the provision of social services, depended on significant foreign assistance and periodically activated anti‐western nationalism. This article details textbook constructions of national identity and citizenship in the late Mubarak era and reflects on whether the 2011 uprising proves their failure in securing his legitimacy. It describes key changes since 2011 and explores whether the Sisi regime is offering alternative formulas of legitimation.     

Places of difference: narratives of heart-felt warmth,ethnicisation, and female care-migrants in Swiss live-in care

Care for the elderly is a contemporary issue of multi-level, feminist concern. In Switzerland, private agencies offer so-called 24-h care services, for which they place or employ mobile women as live-in caregivers in private households. The larger discourse has debated care workers’ movements to Switzerland with much controversy. The article explores this interest in issues of mobility and place in an analysis of three central narratives within the larger discourse: care agencies’ ‘warmth’ discourse, scholarship’s uses of ‘ethnicisation’, and public discussions of ‘female care migrants’. Analysis of the narratives shows how care agencies ascribe care workers a particular ‘heart-felt warmth’ based on their so-called countries of origin. Scholarship’s reference to processes of ‘ethnicisation’ in live-in care illustrates a similar focus on care workers’ characteristics, nation-states, and nationalities. While the public discussion of care workers as ‘female care migrants’ frames care workers’ movements as a migration between discreet and distant places. The article argues that the ways in which the three narratives emphasise the places associated with care workers position these places in terms of difference. From a feminist perspective, this focus on difference is of underlying significance for the perpetuation of fundamental inequities in live-in care. In particular, the discursive differentiation between nation states serves to continually justify lower pay for workers associated with ‘other’ places. As such, the article’s analysis suggests that the discursive invocation of places of difference underlies the marked inequities in Swiss live-in care.     

An investigation of factors determining cycling experience and frequency

A bicycle tourism destination is composed of complexes of different attributes that are crucial for the determination of tourist satisfaction levels. However, the relative impact of sector-specific destination attributes on bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience and frequency has been both poorly understood and studied. This study is an attempt to fill this literature gap by exploring a demand-side perspective on the important contributors of overall satisfaction with cycling experience and the key determinants of cycling frequency. The 28 sector-specific destination attributes were drawn from the relevant literature, and then modified by a panel of industry experts. Using exploratory factor analysis, three destination-specific attribute-level satisfaction factors were identified in descending order of satisfaction degree: ‘provision of signage services,’ ‘provision of safety and emergency services,’ and ‘quality of bicycle routes.’ Among these factors, ‘provision of safety and security services’ and ‘provision of signage services’ were found to be the most important contributors to overall satisfaction. Finally, ‘monthly income’ was proven to be a significant predictor of cycling frequency. This study is of great importance as there is a growing body of evidence that the use of bicycle for leisure, recreation, and tourism is undergoing a resurgence worldwide. The findings of this study may be of interest to scholars in Western countries where bicycle tourism is mature and highly developed and in Asian countries where the sector is at an early stage of development. Since bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience and frequency can be increased by modifying destination marketing and management practices, the government and industry sectors should focus more attention on ensuring the provision of multi-functional grocery and convenience stores along designated bicycle routes, developing an informative and visible signage system for designated bicycle routes, and targeting middle- to high-income bicyclists with diverse bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience options.     

Kinship,Organisations and ‘wannabes’: Aboriginal Identity Negotiation in South‐western Sydney

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ambiguous and dynamic nature of Aboriginal identity in south‐western Sydney. While for most of the Aboriginal people in rural and remote areas, identity has been primarily a matter of kinship ties associated with their perceived place of origin, Aboriginal people often recognize each other as Aboriginal by sharing and recognizing certain ‘Aboriginal’ cultural mores and traits. These two principles of identity are flexible enough to be extended to those who are not raised in an Aboriginal family environment; one meeting with their Aboriginal family is a minimum requirement. In south‐western Sydney, where organizations dealing with Aboriginal issues provide ways of connecting Aboriginal people from various backgrounds, in line with the government's homogenized notion of Aboriginality, Aboriginal people from Aboriginal family environments encounter those who cannot even meet this compromised criterion. Their presence gives rise to tension and conflict revolving around the concept of Aboriginality. Aboriginal cultural values that emphasize actual engagement provide ways of overcoming such dilemmas. Through common participation in the activities of the aforesaid organisations, Aboriginal people in south‐western Sydney develop a new sense of ‘Aboriginality’, which embraces those who cannot claim kinship ties.     

‘Lockout’ laws or ‘rock out’ laws? Governing Sydney’s night-time economy and implications for the ‘music city’

‘Lockout laws’ are not new in Australia – variants exist and have been trialled or continue to operate in Newcastle (since 2008), Melbourne (abandoned in 2008), and Adelaide (since 2013) and Darwin (since 2007). In February 2014, the New South Wales O’Farrell Coalition government introduced 1.30 am lockout and 3 am last drink laws for the Sydney CBD (Central Business District), among a series of other measures. The subsequent controversies about the ‘lockout laws’ in Sydney have provoked a curious and vivid set of debates encompassing crime, medical, moral, social, libertarian, cultural and industrial discourses. In this paper I wish to assess the new regulatory landscape within historical and contemporary perspectives of nightlife economies increasingly privileging cultural and entertainment city uses. Beyond unpacking the ‘lockout’ debate in terms of ‘liveability’ and ‘cultural city’ meanings as practised by Australian cities, this article will focus on the implications for Sydney’s ability to maintain its national and global status as a music city.     

Questioning the Rhetoric of Social Mix: Courteous Community or Hidden Hostility?

This paper explores the increasingly important role of ‘social mix’ in the management practices of the NSW Department of Housing. Social mix is a policy response to the many perceived social, cultural and economic problems related to the concentration of public tenants within larger housing estates. Social mix involves the integration and assimilation of public housing tenants into areas dominated by private home ownership and private rental. Such policies are based upon the belief that social mix has the ability to alter many of these problems simply through the presence of a ‘community’. However, this paper questions the normative construction of homeowners as possessing a ‘community’ which, by implication, will be passed on to public tenants. Through an in‐depth case‐study, it is shown that ‘community’, as constructed by social mix policy rhetoric, may in fact further disadvantage public tenants through processes of othering, stigmatisation and oppression, which operate outside these traditional understandings of community. In addition, this research shows that, rather than increased community integration, it is the physical function of neighbourhood and its direct role in service provision which is the most advantageous constituent of social mix for public housing tenants.     

The Debate that Had to Happen But Never Did: The Changing Role of Australian Local Government

The past few decades have witnessed a significant transformation in the composition of Australian local government service provision away from its traditional narrow emphasis on ‘services to property’ towards a broader ‘services to people’ approach. This process has occurred by default in an ad hoc incremental manner with virtually no debate on the changing role of local councils, unlike the New Zealand experience where a similar transition in service delivery generated public debate. In an effort to stimulate a ‘debate that had to happen but never did’, this paper seeks to establish whether a significant shift in the service mix of Australian municipalities has indeed taken place and then evaluates three stylized models of local government that could be adopted in Australia: minimalist councils; optimalist councils; and maximalist councils.     

Metropolitan Governance in Sydney: A Case of ‘Joint Decision-Making’

This article analyses metropolitan governance arrangements in contemporary Sydney. Debate about the efficacy of these arrangements typically degenerates into an argument about the pros and cons of institutional consolidation. The article moves beyond this dispute, drawing on the concept of ‘actor-centred institutionalism’ to argue that Sydney's urban sprawl, combined with its rigid institutional setting, has produced what can be described as a ‘joint decision system’ of governance. Effective metropolitan governance in Sydney mainly depends on the ability to reach negotiated agreements within this system. However, a rising level of conflict between the New South Wales State government and local councils located within metropolitan Sydney increases the likeliness of undesirable blockades within the joint decision system. The article concludes that a cautious exercise of new overriding powers by the State government is crucial to promoting more effective metropolitan governance in Sydney.     

Progressive localism for an ethics of care: Local Area Co-ordination with people with learning disabilities

In the UK devolution to ‘new’ nations and localities is generating differences in the tone and substance of social care. In Scotland there is an apparent rejection of the ‘personalisation’ model dominant in England and other neoliberal welfare states; in its place, there is an emphasis on locally based co-produced care provision, involving local organisations, practitioners and individuals. The paper argues that this is an outcome of the open and deliberative nature of policy-making, and the further devolution of social care provision to local authorities in Scotland. Local scale networks and spaces of provision are generating a ‘progressive localism’, contesting the association between the local scale and financial austerity, drawing on a relational understanding of place. Non-commodified and locally-based provision expands the discourse of care from ‘caring for’ individuals to ‘caring about’ people and places, in what is termed an ‘ethics of care’. The paper uses the example of people with learning disabilities to examine a more broadly conceived ‘caring’ within local communities, offering possibilities for inclusion and belonging. The paper draws on interviews with key policy makers and place-based care practitioners, known as ‘Local Area Co-ordinators’.     

Suburban Affairs: Groups and Political Communities Across Sydney

According to recent international research, political mobilisation at the local level no longer reflects socioeconomic divisions in society, but is instead based on a post-material oriented ‘politics of choice’. This proposition is applied to group politics within six Sydney communities. We broaden the examination of political activity undertaken by local groups to include lobbying, advocacy and community organising. This leads us to find that the primary variance among communities is in the type of activities undertaken rather than the level of group activity. In more privileged areas of Sydney, local groups are more likely to be constituted as traditional interest groups, including those that focus on post-materialist concerns. However, group activity remains substantial in less affluent areas, but manifests in different forms, including hybrid groups that combine service provision and advocacy.     

Neoliberalism and Suburban Employment: Western Sydney in the 1990s

During the past 15 years metropolitan planning strategies of the NSW state government have done little to address the spatial distribution of either employment or labour market equity within the metropolis. In the fast‐growing outer western suburbs, the government has focused on attracting business investment to increase the stock of local jobs and to improve employment ‘self‐sufficiency’— a dominantly neoliberal policy framework. This paper explores a widening gulf between the reality of outer urban change and this policy framework by considering changes in the location of jobs and in the employment experiences of residents in Greater Western Sydney (GWS). Evidence is drawn from census journey‐to‐work data (1991–2001). While holding a majority of manufacturing jobs in Sydney, GWS also experienced continued growth of jobs in service industries during the 1990s. Yet the relative importance of employment in the city's fast‐growth finance and business services sector still lags well behind that of inner and northern parts of the city. The focus on growing the regional stock of jobs has not addressed problems of labour market access faced by residents of particular localities and the goal of employment self‐sufficiency has not delivered greater equity to outer suburban labour markets. A focus on sufficiency of access to employment for residents of GWS draws attention not only to regional stocks of jobs but also to the provision of social infrastructure and state‐provided services to outer suburban populations as they continue to expand.     

Redfern as the Heart(h): Living (Black) in Inner Sydney

Before the arrival of the ‘white fella’ over 200 years ago, the Gadigal people and others of the Eora Darug occupied the place where the city of Sydney now stands. At the heart of this second tier global city, the inner‐city suburb of Redfern has become a mainstay of urban Aboriginal identity. Yet, this troubled and stigmatised focal point of populist media representations and government policy does not reflect the diversity of urban Aboriginal life in inner Sydney. This paper draws on a range of sources about living in Redfern, from the difficult politics of establishing and retaining an Aboriginal urban space and place in the contemporary gentrifying city – achieved in large part through the establishment of now long‐standing service provision – through to the rise of alternate visions and lives and many more ‘ordinary’ ways of living in the city. This paper seeks to highlight that Aboriginal people variously inhabit, occupy, and sometimes thrive in Australia's first colonial city and the site of invasion. It also provides several of the author's personal experiences of engagement with some of these processes.     

Improving Efficiency in Australian Local Government: Structural Reform as a Catalyst for Effective Reform

Municipal amalgamation has been the main policy instrument of local government structural reform programmes in Australia for well over a century. However, council consolidation programs have not achieved the intended cost savings or improved service provision promised by advocates of this means of structural reorganisation. This paper considers whether the failure of municipal amalgamation processes to produce significant economic benefits necessarily implies that structural reform programs that invoke consolidation have no place in Australian local government policy. It is argued that ‘top-down’ state government structural reform policy initiatives carrying the threat of amalgamation constitute an efficient mechanism for evoking optimal ‘bottom-up’ structural change models.     

Human security in Australia: public interest and political consequences

The new human security paradigm has reconceptualised security beyond traditional physical threats to encompass ‘lifestyle’ concerns, such as health and environmental security. This article uses national survey data collected in Australia in 2007 to examine how public opinion views this new paradigm and to evaluate its political consequences. The results show that the public makes a clear distinction between all four types of human security—health, the environment, national security and the economy. Longitudinal analysis shows that health and the environment have gained greater prominence with the public since 1990. Each dimension of human security has only limited roots in the social structure. However, each has important consequences for the ideological orientation of the public, and for party support. The authors conclude that as ‘lifestyle’ concerns become more prominent for the public, parties of the right will have to adapt to the new paradigm in order to ensure that they are not electorally disadvantaged.     

Human rights in a global ecumene

How should we understand the cultural politics that has surrounded the development of international human rights? Two perspectives frame contemporary debate. For ‘cultural particularists’, human rights are western artefacts; alien to other societies, and an inappropriate basis for international institutional development. For ‘negotiated universalists’, a widespread global consensus undergirds international human rights norms, with few states openly contesting their status as fundamental standards of political legitimacy. This article advances an alternative understanding, pursuing John Vincent's provocative, yet undeveloped, suggestion that while the notion of human rights has its origins in European culture, its spread internationally is best understood as the product of a ‘universal social process’. The international politics of individual/human rights is located within an evolving global ecumene, a field of dynamic cultural engagement, characterized over time by the development of multiple modernities. Within this field, individual/human rights have been at the heart of diverse forms of historically transformative contentious politics, not the least being the struggles for imperial reform and change waged by subject peoples of diverse cultural backgrounds; struggles that not only played a key role in the construction of the contemporary global system of sovereign states, but also transformed the idea of ‘human’ rights itself. In developing this alternative understanding, the article advances a different understanding of the relation between power and human rights, one in which rights are seen as neither simple expressions of, or vehicles for, western domination, nor robbed of all power‐political content by simple notions of negotiation or consensus. The article concludes by considering, in a very preliminary fashion, the implications of this new account for normative theorizing about human rights. If a prima facie case exists for the normative justifiability of such rights, it lies first in their radical nature—in their role in historically transformative contentious politics—and second in their universalizability, in the fact that one cannot plausibly claim them for oneself while denying them to others.     

Devolution,equity and the English question*

ABSTRACT. Following devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, does England need a stronger political voice and/or constitutional changes to safeguard its identity and interests? (the ‘English question’). Polling and other evidence suggests that it does, albeit more to redress inequities associated with voting in parliament (the ‘West Lothian question’) and the distribution of public spending (the ‘Barnett formula’) than to safeguard its identity. Although campaigners for English devolution have had little impact, and alternative institutional responses to the English question are all problematic, it would be imprudent of the major parties to do nothing. The least difficult course would be adoption of English votes on English matters and reform or replacement of the Barnett formula.     

Pathways to Homelessness: a Comparison of Gender and Schizophrenia in Inner-Sydney

The study compares residential ‘pathways’ into homelessness of a sample of 50 homeless people in inner city Sydney, in an attempt to see whether gender difference or schizophrenia is more important in the determination of mobility patterns leading in and out of homelessness. Three structural processes contributing to the present pattern of homelessness in inner Sydney are identified, providing the context for observed differences in residential histories leading to inner city homelessness. A hypothesis of the study is that women would be likely to experience different factors in the pathway to homelessness such as child raising or partnerships that may influence their residential history. However, after the breakdown of marriage, partnerships appear to play a minor role in the residential mobility of both schizophrenic women and men.     

Policymaking in the Parallelogram of Forces: Common Agency and Human Service Provision

The "congressional dominance" literature in political science provides valuable insights into the legislative control of administrative agencies. However, this literature tends to be conceptualized with respect to regulatory agencies, and it is not especially helpful in understanding the dynamics of policymaking in the provision of human services. After distinguishing the tasks of regulation and human services provision, we present an alternative: a common agency model of human service policy as the outcome of interest group bargaining. We illustrate its implications with an analytic narrative of service provision for the seriously mentally ill.     

Policymaking in the Parallelogram of Forces: Common Agency and Human Service Provision

The "congressional dominance" literature in political science provides valuable insights into the legislative control of administrative agencies. However, this literature tends to be conceptualized with respect to regulatory agencies, and it is not especially helpful in understanding the dynamics of policymaking in the provision of human services. After distinguishing the tasks of regulation and human services provision, we present an alternative: a common agency model of human service policy as the outcome of interest group bargaining. We illustrate its implications with an analytic narrative of service provision for the seriously mentally ill.