Journal articles on the topic 'Job satisfaction Victoria'

A postal survey was sent to anaesthetic trainees in Hong Kong and Victoria, Australia to compare work-related stress levels. Demographic data were collected. Anaesthetist-specific stressors, Maslach Burnout Inventory and Global Job Satisfaction scores were used for psychological testing. The response rates from Hong Kong and Melbourne were 64 of 133 (48.1%) and 108 of 196 (55.1%), respectively. Victorian respondents were older with greater family commitments, but more advanced in fulfilling training requirements. Hong Kong respondents, being faced with both the challenge of dual College requirements, exhibited consistently higher indices of stress (P <0.001) and less job satisfaction (P <0.001). Common occupational stressors related to dealing with critically ill patients and medicolegal concerns. Higher stress scores observed in Hong Kong trainees related to service provision and a perceived lack of resources. Despite the complex nature of stress, its antecedents and manifestations, an inverse relationship between emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction was evident in correlation analysis (P <0.001). This survey suggests that stress was present in some trainees in both areas. Hong Kong trainees may benefit from local development to address mental wellbeing as being important to fulfil this highly competitive training program.

The constituents of job satisfaction and morale amongst police workers have received some research attention overseas, but to date there has been relatively little work in this area in Australia. Recent controversy has been generated in Victoria concerning the issue of police morale amidst the introduction of a new superannuation scheme which has seen a dramatic increase in voluntary departures from the Victoria Police since 1987. This article reports the findings of a survey of departed and serving members of that organisation, conducted to identify the reason for departure and to gauge the importance of work-related attitudes in the decision to leave. The findings suggest that work dissatisfaction was strongly implicated in the decision to leave, particularly for those departures who resigned before 50 years of age. A comparable degree of work dissatisfaction was found amongst a sample of serving police workers, who expressed significantly more negative attitudes towards police work than those who retired early after reaching 50 years. The most prominent sources of dissatisfaction appeared to derive from the organisation and management of the Victoria Police, rather than from the nature of police work itself or factors external to the police organisation.

This analysis is to know the influence of attitude, knowledge and skill on the performance of Victoria Hotel School alumni at the hotel. The method in this research is quantitative method using multiple linear regression as its analysis tool. a questionnaire was given to several HRD hotels to assess the 80 alumni of Victoria Hotel School who had worked. The result of this research attitude, Knowledge and skill influence simultaneously and partially to the performance at Hotel. for the influence of variable independent attitude, Knowledge and skill have percentage equal to 51,3% while the rest 48,7% influenced by other free variable like motivation, leadership style, work environment and job satisfaction .

ABSTRACTPopulation ageing will significantly impact labour markets in most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries and as a result individuals will need to remain in paid employment for longer to fund their retirement years. This study examines the retirement intentions of employees of a large public-sector organisation located in Victoria, Australia that was interested in developing policies to assist with retention of their mature-age workforce. Multivariate regression analyses were used to identify the most important predictors of intention to retire. The dependent variable, Intended timing of retirement, was analysed in two forms, as continuous and dichotomised measures. Age and Length of service were strong independent predictors of Intention to retire soon (within five years). Of the work factors that were analysed (Job satisfaction, Job demands, Job control, and Social cohesion), low Job satisfaction and high Social cohesion scores indicated an increased likelihood of retiring soon. The results provide some insight into the development of organisational interventions that might assist with retaining older employees for longer.

Objective. The aims were to determine Australian registered pharmacists’ current employment status, practice profile and professional satisfaction. Method. A questionnaire was mailed to all registered pharmacists (n = 7764) on the Pharmacy Boards of Victoria and South Australia’s registers; 19 were returned undeliverable. Quantitative data were entered and analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences Version 17. Qualitative data were subjected to a thematic analysis. Results. 1627 (21%) pharmacists responded: 259 (16%) were registered as pharmacists but no longer worked in the pharmacy profession. A total of 1366 respondents reported still working as pharmacists. Of the 1366, 912 (67%) indicated that they spend most of their time in a clinical area; 233 (17%) spend most of their time in ‘non-clinical pharmacist work (i.e. dispensing as technical supply)’; 216 (16%) worked in other non-clinical roles and; 1053 (77%) were professionally satisfied. Conclusion. Measuring the pharmacist workforce based on registration data significantly overestimates the available clinical pharmacist workforce: 708 (44%) respondents were no longer working in the profession, were not mainly involved in clinical practice or were working in non-clinical roles. A significant re-professionalisation program is needed if pharmacists’ unique knowledge and skills are to contribute to better healthcare delivery. What is known about the topic? A well trained and sufficient workforce is an essential requirement if the objectives of Australia’s healthcare reform agenda are to be met. For the pharmacy profession, a change in practice profile of pharmacists from a product supply focus to a patient care focus is also required. Recent workforce studies have used pharmacist registration data to model the supply of pharmacists. What does this paper add? This paper reports on a survey of registered pharmacists to more closely examine the available pharmacist workforce. The insights into the current employment status and practice profile of pharmacists provide an understanding of the available clinical pharmacist workforce. What are the implications for practitioners? Previous workforce modelling may seriously overestimate the ‘available’ pharmacist workforce to meet the needs of the community as the health reform agenda rolls out. Strategies are needed to retain pharmacists within the pharmacy profession, and to attract and retain pharmacists in clinical roles.

Objective: Develop and evaluate pilot of a new role to support nursing care delivery in hospital settings. Design: A naturalistic, three-stage pre-post, multimethod pilot design used data collected from hospital administrative datasets, and surveys and focus groups with staff participants. Setting: Three wards at three hospital sites of a large tertiary health service in Victoria, Australia. Subjects: Staff performing the new role and registered nurses working on participating wards. Intervention: Pilot of a new Health Assistant in Nursing (HAN) role. Main outcome measures: Staff outcomes were work satisfaction and workload of registered nurses; quality outcomes included reported patient falls and medication errors; organisational outcomes included service costs and sick leave. Results: Work satisfaction and workload of registered nurses remained stable after introducing the new role. The frequency of reported patient falls reduced in two of the three wards. Costing outcomes suggested potential for cost benefits attributed to reduced falls in acute wards. Conclusions: This pilot identified the new HAN role has capacity to contribute to improved patient quality and safety outcomes without compromising nurse job satisfaction and workload. Potential cost benefits of thenew role warrant further consideration in the acute care sector. Abbreviations: CPO – Constant Patient Observer; CSN – Clinical Support Nurse; HAN – Health Assistant in Nursing. NWSQ – Nursing Workplace Satisfaction

Recruiting caregivers for children with an intellectual disability who require out-of-home respite or longer-term care is a problem which has challenged service providers for many years. This paper summarises findings of a recent evaluation of Shared Family Care, a foster care program in Victoria for children with intellectual disabilities/developmental delay. Current recruiting is not succeeding in meeting the demand for either respite, short term or long term care. Findings of the evaluation suggest that factors such as use of appropriate media, and running effective recruitment campaigns is only part of the answer. It is also important at every stage to address caregiver satisfaction with the job and employ strategies to find potential caregivers in the community.

Occupational therapy departments of tertiary care hospitals can provide staff with opportunities to gain diverse clinical experience if they rotate through the various services such as surgery, medicine, geriatrics, plastic surgery and orthopedics. The system of rotation offers both advantages and disadvantages for the staff and the institution. The Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, a large university teaching hospital, had traditionally offered staff the opportunity to rotate. Changes in staffing and their needs however, resulted in rotation becoming an important issue within the department. This article presents the pros and the cons of rotation and non-rotation systems as identified by therapists and administrators across Canada. Staff rotation was found to have an effect on job satisfaction and a therapist's career orientation. Given these findings, administrators may want to reconsider the role of the generalist and specialist in their facilities.

The care of people living with HIV/AIDS in the home and community can be complex and challenging, requiring high levels of knowledge, skill, preparedness and, importantly, the ability to engage with people belonging to marginalised groups. In 2003, the Royal District Nursing Service (RDNS) HIV/AIDS Team in Victoria, Australia, developed the new role of HIV Resource Nurse at two RDNS centres in Melbourne serving high numbers of people living with HIV/AIDS. Drawing from two case studies and interviews with two HIV Resource Nurses from one of the centres, this paper describes this practice innovation. Benefits (including a positive impact on client engagement with services, client care, relationships with other health care workers and job satisfaction) are outlined, along with challenges in the implementation and evolution of the role. Strategies to sustain and develop the HIV Resource Nurse role are proposed.

Abstract:The graduates and students of the School of Health Information Science (HIS) at the University of Victoria (UVic) have pioneered the Canadian sphere in health informatics since 1982. After six years of growth this co-operative education program has matured and establishment of a research base and graduate school has become a recent focus. In this context an evaluation of the HIS curriculum and co-op work experience from the student perspective was undertaken. Eighty-five persons, including 50 upper level students were surveyed. Thirty-five graduates were tracked and queried regarding their present employment, job satisfaction, future goals and perception oftheir professional status. In particular, students were queried on the retrospective value and/or shortcomings of the HIS co-op program. Their perceptions on the training that they have had or that they observe as leading to successful careers is documented. The student view on the ascribed role of ´change agent´ and concerns regarding the lack of professional identity are noted. The implications ofthese findings on the future form ofthe Health Information Science curriculum and the direction of its educational model are subsequently discussed.

The level of motivation received by an employee as reflected in the satisfaction with the base pay package and other incentives goes a long way to influencing the employees’ attitude to work, loyalty, performance and job satisfaction. Employee’s motivation and organization performance has been investigated across different fields and economic sectors. This study takes it further by examining incentive package, employees and organization productivity in real estate firms in Nigeria. Panel survey approach was adopted and three questionnaires administered in each of the one hundred and seventeen (117) estate firms in Ikeja, Victoria Island and Lekki Area of Lagos State. Respondents were two employees and one other in employers’/management capacity. Descriptive tools such as frequency and percentage were used to identify and determine the proportion of firms that make use of incentive package/option while a 5-point Likert scale and ranking were used to determine and rank the options in order of importance among these firms. Panel data regression model was used to determine the strength of relationship between firms’ performance/productivity and incentives whilst holding other factors constant. Findings showed amongst others that there is strong positive correlation between incentive and employee productivity, employees are largely dissatisfied with the incentives offered by majority of estate firms and that incentive package is not the most important determinants of performance in real estate firms. The study therefore concludes that employers in real estate firms pay attention to other factors identified and review remuneration and incentive package to boost the morale of their employees for better performance.

e18324 Background: Discussion of cancer cases at multi-disciplinary meetings (MDMs) for treatment planning is expected standard care in Australia. There has been rapid uptake of MDMs in the last 10 - 15 years and in the state of Victoria approximately 70% of cancer cases are discussed. MDMs have strong support from medical staff and we investigated their motivation in attending MDMs. Methods: Over 12 months, Austin Health in Melbourne, Victoria, hosted 452 cancer MDMs discussing 5943 patients. MDMs covered 15 tumour areas: 11 solid tumour, one lymphoma and three haematological. Over a 4-week period, medical staff attending MDMs were surveyed and asked to rank what they valued most about cancer MDMs, over and above the benefits for patients. Results: Responses were received from 84% of the 285 medical staff surveyed, which included consultants as well as trainees (registrars and fellows). For 75% of respondents the highest ranking was given to multi-disciplinary communication, 9% gave the highest ranking to quality assurance and governance, 5% ongoing learning for consultants, 5% collegiate relationships, 2% learning and teaching for non-consultant staff, 2% peer support 1% job satisfaction and 1% clinical trials engagement. Similar results were obtained for consultant staff and for registrars / fellows. For consultant medical staff, if multidisciplinary communication was excluded, 44% of respondents gave the highest ranking to quality assurance and governance, 23% to collegiate relationships, 20% ongoing learning for consultants, 10% peer support and 3% clinical trials engagement. Conclusions: When we asked doctors what they valued most about attending cancer MDMs, besides the benefits for patients, communication between disciplines was clearly the most valued aspect. The benefits for quality and governance was the next most valued, then collegiate relationships and peer support, and ongoing learning.

A gap in physical literacy (PL) oriented professional development (PD) for generalist teachers exists and thus their capacity to develop PL and maximize student health is potentially limited. We explored the feasibility of a novel job-embedded professional development (JEPD) program (10 weeks) and its impact on teachers’ capacity to deliver PL-enriched physical education (PE) and student PL. A pragmatic feasibility trial with mixed methods included quantitative measurements of teacher PL, knowledge and confidence (pre), and knowledge, confidence, satisfaction and intention (post), as well as self-reported change, to evaluate the impact on teacher capacity and practices. A pre–post comparison of student PL outcomes (motor skills using PLAYbasic, Sport for Life, Victoria, BC, Canada) during the JEPD and teacher implementation phase explored the impact on student PL. In total, 15/44 teachers participated in surveys and 11/44 completed interviews (87% female, mean age bracket = 25–44 years). Confidence to deliver PL enhancing PE increased significantly after JEPD (p < 0.0001). Teachers were highly satisfied with the JEPD (X = 4.67/5) and intended to change their practices (X = 4.09/5). At three months, teachers reported changes including enhanced lesson planning, increased activity variety (often from the JEPD), intentional skill development, student-focused discussions, introductory, transition, and closing activities, and more equipment adaptations. During JEPD, with the exception of throwing (p < 0.0001), children’s (47% female, mean age = 7.9 (1.7)) change in running, jumping, kicking and balance walking backwards did not differ from usual practice (UP). During teacher implementation, motor skill competence regressed; confounding factors could not be ruled out. JEPD appears feasible and effective for changing teacher capacity to deliver PL and enhancing PE; however, post-JEPD teacher implementation and outcomes need further exploration.

The growing demand for Health Information Managers (HIMs) in Victorian hospitals has increased the importance of job satisfaction in maximising performance and ensuring high retention levels both within the profession and the state. This report outlines the results of a job satisfaction questionnaire completed by a sample of HIMs working in Victorian hospitals. The questionnaire focuses on task design, autonomy, performance feedback and professional development opportunities. While the study demonstrates a scope for improvement, it also highlights the general satisfaction of the Victorian HIM population.

Objective To date, there are few data on pharmacy-specific placement programs and their impact on students’ work after graduation. The present study evaluated an innovative rural pharmacy placement program targeted at influencing students to work and live in rural areas after graduation. A secondary aim of the study was to explore the students’ intentions to come back and practice in rural areas as a result of their involvement in the rural pharmacy program. Methods A questionnaire was distributed, by hand, to a total of 58 third and fourth (final) year pharmacy students undertaking their rural placement in the Gippsland region, in rural Victoria in 2011 and 2012. Results Fifty-seven responses were returned (response rate = 98%). Students stated that understanding pharmacy practice from a rural perspective, visits to rural health professionals and sites and the attitude of their preceptors were essential to their satisfaction with their rural placements. A significant number of students (72%) intend to seek employment in rural areas if opportunities arise as a result of their increased rural awareness. The key components for a successful rural placement program were described by the surveyed students as social awareness, recognising job opportunities and interprofessional learning. Conclusion The evaluation of the rural placement program revealed that students valued their visits to rural sites and their interaction with other rural health professionals the most. What is known about the topic? Rural undergraduate student programs have been initiated as a result of several Australian government strategies to address shortages in rural health workforce. Subsequently, various rural placement programs have been integral parts of several disciplines, including medicine, dentistry, nursing, occupational therapy and pharmacy among others. To date, there are few data on pharmacy-specific placement programs and their impact on students’ work after graduation What does this paper add? The rural pharmacy program is important in influencing students’ perceptions and interest in a career in rural areas. The key components for a successful rural placement program were described by the surveyed students as social awareness, recognising job opportunities and interprofessional learning. What are the implications for practitioners? Interprofessional learning and collaboration are inevitable due to the shortage of health professionals and the move towards holistic management of patients in healthcare settings. The development of an interprofessional rural education that combines rural medical and pharmacy students together highlights the importance of an interprofessional approach to preparing students to work in rural areas.

The aims of the present study were to understand enablers to participation in postgraduate education for primary care nurses (PCNs), and to explore how postgraduate education has advanced their nursing practice. Cross-sectional questionnaires were mailed out in April 2012 to current and past students undertaking postgraduate studies in primary care nursing at The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Questionnaires were returned by 100 out of 243 nurses (response rate 41%). Ninety-one per cent (91/100) of the respondents were first registered as nurses in Australia. Fifty-seven per cent were hospital trained and 43% were university educated to attain their initial nurse qualification. The respondents reported opportunities to expand scope of practice (99%; 97/98), improve clinical practice (98%; 97/99), increase work satisfaction (93%; 91/98) and increase practice autonomy (92%; 89/97) as factors that most influenced participation in postgraduate education in primary care nursing. Major enablers for postgraduate studies were scholarship access (75%; 71/95) and access to distance education (74%; 72/98). Many respondents reported an increased scope of practice (98%; 95/97) and increased job satisfaction (71%; 70/98) as an education outcome. Only 29% (28/97) cited an increase in pay-rate as an outcome. Of the 73 PCNs currently working in general practice, many anticipated an increase in time spent on the preparation of chronic disease management plans (63%; 45/72), multidisciplinary care plans (56%; 40/72) and adult health checks (56%; 40/72) in the preceding 12 months. Recommendations emerging from findings include: (1) increased access to scholarships for nurses undertaking postgraduate education in primary care nursing is imperative; (2) alternative modes of course delivery need to be embedded in primary care nursing education; (3) the development of Australian primary care policy, including policy on funding models, needs to more accurately reflect the educational level of PCNs, PCN role expansion and the extent of interprofessional collaboration that is evident from research undertaken to date. Nurses with postgraduate education have the potential to increase their scope of practice, take on a greater teaching role and provide more preventive and chronic disease services in primary care. Policies aimed at increasing access to education for nurses working in primary care would strengthen the primary care nursing profession, and enhance the delivery of primary health care services in Australia.

Objective The aim of the present study was to describe the Ambulance Victoria (AV) secondary telephone triage service, called the Referral Service (RS), for low-priority patients calling triple zero. This service provides alternatives to ambulance dispatch, such as doctor or nurse home visits. Methods A descriptive epidemiological review of all the cases managed between 2009 and 2012 was conducted, using data from AV case records, the Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Cases were reviewed for patient demographics, condition, final disposition and RS outcome. Results In all, 107148 cases were included in the study, accounting for 10.3% of the total calls for ambulance attendance. Median patient age was 54 years and 55% were female. Geographically based socioeconomic status was associated with the rate of calls to the RS (r = –0.72; 95% confidence interval CI –0.104, –0.049; P < 0.001). Abdominal pain and back symptoms were the most common patient problems. Although 68% of patients were referred to the emergency department, only 27.6% of the total cases were by emergency ambulance; the remainder were diverted to non-emergency ambulance or the patient’s own private transport. The remaining 32% of cases were referred to alternative service providers or given home care advice. Conclusions This paper describes the use of an ongoing secondary triage service, providing an effective strategy for managing emergency ambulance demand. What is known about the topic? Some calls to emergency services telephone numbers for ambulance assistance consist of cases deemed to be low-acuity that could potentially be better managed in the primary care setting. The demand on ambulance resources is increasing each year. Secondary telephone triage systems have been trialled in ambulance services in the US and UK with minimal success in terms of overall impact on ambulance resourcing. What does this paper add? This study describes a model of secondary telephone triage in the ambulance setting that has provided an effective way to divert patients to more suitable forms of health care to meet their needs. What are the implications for practitioners? The implications for practitioners are vast. Some of the issues that currently face paramedics include: fatigue because of high workloads; skills decay because of a lack of exposure to patients requiring intervention with skills the paramedics have, as well as a lack of time for paramedics to practice these skills during their downtime; and decreasing job satisfaction linked to both these factors. Implications for patients include quicker response times because more ambulances will be available to respond and increased patient safety because of decreased fatigue and higher skill levels in paramedics.

This study consisted of a survey of dairy farmers and their milking sheds at 198 Victorian dairy farms to examine the relationships between physical features in the milking shed and a number of job-related characteristics of the farmer, such as attitudes to handling cows and job satisfaction. Furthermore, farmers’ opinions of the effects of specific design features of the milking shed on cow behaviour were sought. A further objective of this survey was to use the relationships between shed characteristics and job-related characteristics of the farmer to identify, for future research, possible features of the milking shed that may affect cow behaviour. There was substantial variation in both the behavioural beliefs of farmers about cow behaviour in the milking shed and reports by farmers on comfort and working conditions in the dairy, indicating that considerable opportunities exist to improve these key job-related characteristics. A principal component analysis (PCA) of the responses to the questions on job-related characteristics of the farmer identified 6 factors: 2 of the factors identified were related to behavioural beliefs by farmers about cow behaviour (labelled ‘Cow Movement’ and ‘Cow Behaviour’); one of the factors related to comfort of the farmer in the shed (labelled ‘Operator Comfort’); and 3 of the factors related to aspects of the quality of life of the farmer (labelled ‘Workload’, ‘Farmer Mood’, and ‘Job Characteristics’). Positive beliefs about both cow movement (factor called Cow Movement) and cow behaviour (factor called Cow Behaviour) were correlated with farmers being more positive about working in the dairy (factor called Operator Comfort; P < 0.05 and P < 0.01, respectively) and the characteristics of the job (factor called Job Characteristics; P < 0.01). These relationships suggest that improvements in cow behaviour may lead to improvements in both job satisfaction and the quality of life of the farmer. Furthermore, regression analysis revealed that a number of the shed features, such as height of the breast rail, presence of stall gates, length and width of the platform and solid side on first milking bail, were significant predictors of one or more of these 6 PCA factors. Although these results may not reflect causal relationships, these relationships between shed characteristics and a number of job-related characteristics of the farmer highlight the potential importance of shed design to both the cow and the farmer and provide a valuable guide in identifying features of milking sheds that require future examination as to their effects on cow behaviour.

This study assessed the link of patient care outcome to occupational differences in response to human resource management. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in three large regional hospitals in China. A total of 700 questionnaires were distributed to doctors, nurses, allied health workers, and managers and 499 (71%) were completed. Data were analyzed using a final sample of 193 doctors and 180 nurses. Quality of patient care was rated by the participants using a modified version of the Victorian Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire. Human resource management was measured on seven aspects: job security, recruitment, training, transformational leadership, information sharing, job quality, and teams. The differences between doctors and nurses in response to the human resource management practices and their associations with quality of care were compared through independent samples t-tests, correlational analyses, and moderator regressions. Doctors gave a higher rating on quality of patient care than their nurse counterparts. ‘Training’, ‘transformational leadership’, and ‘information sharing’ were more likely to be associated with higher ratings on quality of patient care in nurses. By contrast, a greater association between ‘teams’ and quality of patient care was found in doctors. Although doctors and nurses in China are exposed to the same hospital management environment, professional differences may have led them to respond to management practices in different ways.

Research evidence is required to guide best practice, inform policy and improve the health of communities. Current indicators consider allied health research culture to be low. This study aimed to measure the allied health research culture and capacity in a Victorian regional health service. The Research Capacity and Culture tool was used to evaluate research capacity and culture across individual, team and organisation domains. One-way ANOVA was used to determine differences between allied health professions, whereas responses to open-ended questions were themed using open coding. One hundred thirty-six allied health professionals completed the survey. There were statistically significant differences in the organisation domain between social work, physiotherapy and occupational therapy professions; in the team domain, between social work and all other professions. Motivators for conducting research included providing a high-quality service, developing skills and increasing job satisfaction. Barriers included other work roles taking priority, a lack of time and limited research skills. Multi-layered strategies including establishing conjoint research positions are recommended to increase allied health research culture in this regional area.

Objectives The aim of the present study was to explore nurse perceptions of safety climate in acute Australian hospitals. Methods Participants included 420 nurses who have worked on 24 acute wards from six Australian hospitals. The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) Short Form was used to quantify nurse perceptions of safety climate and benchmarked against international data. Generalised linear mixed models were used to explore factors that may influence safety climate. Results On average, 53.5% of nurses held positive attitudes towards job satisfaction followed by teamwork climate (50.5%). There was variability in SAQ domain scores across hospitals. The safety climate and perceptions of hospital management domains also varied across wards within a hospital. Nurses who had worked longer at a hospital were more likely to have poorer perceptions of hospital management (β = –5.2; P = 0.014). Overall, nurse perceptions of safety climate appeared higher than international data. Conclusions The perceptions of nurses working in acute Victorian and New South Wales hospitals varied between hospitals as well as across wards within each hospital. This highlights the importance of surveying all hospital wards and examining the results at the ward level when implementing strategies to improve patient safety and the culture of safety in organisations. What is known about the topic? Prior studies in American nursing samples have shown that hospitals with higher levels of safety climate have a lower relative incidence of preventable patient complications and adverse events. Developing a culture of safety in hospitals may be useful in targeting efforts to improve patient safety. What does this paper add? This paper has shown that the perceptions of safety climate among nurses working in acute Australian hospitals varied between hospitals and across wards within a hospital. Only half the nurses also reported positive attitudes towards job satisfaction and teamwork climate. What are the implications for practitioners? Programs or strategies that aim to enhance teamwork performance and skills may be beneficial to improving the culture of safety in hospitals. Wards may also have their own safety ‘subculture’ that is distinct from the overall hospital safety culture. This highlights the importance of tailoring and targeting quality improvement initiatives at the ward level.

The Victorian Assistant Workforce Model (VAWM) enables a systematic approach for the identification and quantification of work that can be delegated from allied health professionals (AHPs) to allied health assistants (AHAs). The aim of the present study was to explore the effect of implementation of VAWM in the community and ambulatory health care setting. Data captured using mixed methods from allied health professionals working across the participating health services enabled the measurement of opportunity for workforce redesign in the community and ambulatory allied health workforce. A total of 1112 AHPs and 135 AHAs from the 27 participating organisations took part in the present study. AHPs identified that 24% of their time was spent undertaking tasks that could safely be delegated to an appropriately qualified and supervised AHA. This equates to 6837 h that could be redirected to advanced and expanded AHP practice roles or expanded patient-centred service models. The VAWM demonstrates potential for more efficient implementation of assistant workforce roles across allied health. Data outputs from implementation of the VAWM are vital in informing strategic planning and sustainability of workforce change. A more efficient and effective workforce promotes service delivery by the right person, in the right place, at the right time. What is known about this topic? There are currently workforce shortages that are predicted to grow across the allied health workforce. Ensuring that skill mix is optimal is one way to address these shortages. Matching the right task to right worker will also enable improved job satisfaction for both allied health assistants and allied health professionals. Workforce redesign efforts are more effective when there is strong data to support the redesign. What does this paper add? This paper builds on a previous paper by Somerville et al. with a case study applying the workforce redesign model to a community and ambulatory health care setting. It provides evidence that this workforce redesign model enables data to be collected to identify the opportunity for redesign in the allied health workforce in this clinical setting. What are the implications for practitioners? There are career pathways and opportunity for growth in the allied health assistant workforce in the community and ambulatory health care setting. These opportunities will need to be coupled with the development of supervision and delegation skills in the allied health professional workforce to ensure that an integrated workforce is built to provide optimal clinical care in the community and ambulatory setting.

Abstract: This research aims to determine information regarding the level of job satisfaction of the Mexican Institutes of Technology (TecNM.) in northeastern México with a structural equation model. The methodology designed to explain job satisfaction level consisted of a survey questioner with 37 questions applied to a sample of 485 professors and administrators from the National Institutes of Technology located in Tamaulipas Mexico (Cd. Victoria, Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo), Nuevo León (Linares City) and Coahuila (Saltillo). The sample was random, stratified, and structured with questions mostly using a Likert scale. Six fundamental hypotheses were formulated for testing a structural equation model with job satisfaction as dependent variable. A database of cross section data was created with the sample, and processed with a statistical data analysis software called SmartPLS V. 2.0 (M3). The results of the structural model show that two of the five constructs are highly relevant and statistically significant on their impact on job satisfaction and they refer to the benefits received by employees and the working environment we live in institutions. It is concluded generally that the perception we have in relation to variables that influence job satisfaction are not significant as we thinkKeywords: job satisfaction, region, structural equation modelJEL: M12, R23Resumen. La presente investigación tuvo como objetivo conocer información respecto al nivel de satisfacción laboral de los Tecnológicos Nacionales de México (TecNM.), de la región Noreste de México mediante un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales. La metodología para conocer la satisfacción laboral, consistió en realizar encuestas con 37 preguntas a una muestra de 485 catedráticos y administrativos de los Tecnológicos Nacionales de México ubicados en Tamaulipas (Cd. Victoria, Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo), Nuevo León (Tecnológicos de Linares y Nuevo León) y Coahuila (Saltillo). La aplicación de los mismos fue de carácter aleatorio, estratificado, y de forma estructurada con preguntas en su mayoría mediante una escala Likert. Se formularon 6 hipótesis que consideramos fundamentales. Para comprobar, se diseñó un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales con la satisfacción laboral como variable dependiente. Con los datos de las encuestas, se creó una base de datos de corte transversal que se introdujo al software especializado en análisis de datos estadísticos denominado Smart PLS V. 2.0 (M3). Los resultados del modelo estadístico presentan que, dos de cinco constructos están relacionados fuertemente con una alta significancia directamente a la satisfacción laboral y éstos refieren a los beneficios que reciben los empleados y el ambiente laboral que se vive en las instituciones. Se concluye de manera general que, contrariamente a lo que pudiera esperarse, la percepción como variable de influencia en la satisfacción laboral no es significativa.Palabras clave: modelo de ecuaciones estructurales, region, satisfacción laboral

Background The professional identity and motivation of qualified health information managers (HIMs) is largely unexplored. Objectives A larger study has investigated the motivators of HIMs in the construction of their professional identity and associated relationships to job satisfaction and engagement with their profession. The aims of this component of the study were to: (i) identify and analyse the characteristics of members of the profession who have different motivation profiles; (ii) obtain HIMs’ perspectives on their professional identity; and (iii) measure correlation between HIMs’ professional identity and different motivating factors. Method: A cross-sectional study design, with a convergent mixed-methods approach to data collection was employed. An online survey was administered to the 1985, 1995, 2005 and 2015 Australian health information management and medical record administration graduate cohorts from one university in Victoria. Results Response rate: 72.7% ( n = 72). There were no statistically significant correlations between the HIMs’ motivation profile and professional identity. The HIMs were largely motivated by a need for achievement (striving for excellence) and continuous improvement; maintained high standards of work quality (95.8%); valued their work (94.4%) and work collaborations (84.7%); satisfactorily applied skills-knowledge (94%); demonstrated a very strong professional association (92% were proud to belong to the profession). Key factors in motivation that were consistently reported by members of all cohorts in the open-ended questions were as follows: intrinsic motivation; colleagues and teamwork; the variety of work performed; and contribution to the bigger picture. Overall, and notwithstanding between-cohort differences: 65.3% confidently directed others, 45.8% aspired to leadership and 38% actively networked. They related difficulty in explaining the profession to outsiders. Conclusion There was no correlation between motivation profile and professional identity. Significantly, the HIMs demonstrated exceptionally strong positive professional identity, reflected particularly in pride in membership of the profession and their belief in the importance of their professional work.

With the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers across the globe felt the need to respond overnight to unprecedented adversity. Rapid adaptation to unfamiliar modes of teaching was required, leading teachers to face overwhelm on two fronts–adapting to a global pandemic, and teaching in the absence of resources and infrastructure. The lack of a physical classroom and face-to-face interaction also impacted a teachers’ sense of purpose and identity. Shifts in teacher identity affect their motivation, commitment, job satisfaction, and self-image, which collectively influences their resilience. By focusing on the impact of COVID-19 on their teaching experience, this study attempted to understand the resilience of the teaching community while exploring the social and emotional factors that helped them adapt. Using the Life Story Interview method, 20 school teachers in the Delhi National Capital Region were asked to reflect on their teaching experiences during the lockdown to explore their resilience in adapting to a new reality. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed adjustment to change and loss, disengagement, and recognising small victories as themes.

This single and critical case study evaluated a faith-based natural family planning program's salient features using a framework on implementation fidelity. Multiple focus group discussions were conducted, with three groups of stakeholders (n=100), to gather qualitative data on their knowledge and experience of the program. Overall, the findings showed that the program primarily adhered to the essential elements of implementation fidelity, such as content, frequency, duration, and coverage prescribed by its designers. Three lessons were drawn to address some issues that have influenced the degree of fidelity in which the program was implemented. The first is the need to secure adequate and sustained human and financial resources. The second is the need to strengthen its partnership with government and non-government organizations that have provided them with much-needed assistance. Finally, there is also the need to provide extensive training, materials, and support to its service providers to preserve their morale and interest. Other faith-based organizations may hold this case as an indicator of how and why an NFP program works and the extent to which the need for family planning can be met adapted to their local conditions and needs. References Arbuckle, Gerald A. Refounding the Church: Dissent for Leadership. Quezon City: Claretian Publications. 1993. Arevalo, Marcos. "Expanding the Availability and improving the delivery of natural family planning services and fertility awareness education: providers' perspectives. Adv Contracept. Jun-Sep 1997; 13(2-3):275-81. Arévalo, Marcos, Victoria Jennings, and Irit Sinai. "Efficacy of a new method of family planning: the Standard Days Method." Contraception 65, no. 5 (2002): 333-338.Arévalo, Marcos, Irit Sinai, and Victoria Jennings. 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Introduction It used to be the case that for the mass of workers, work was something that was done in order to get by. A working class was simply the sum total of all those workers and their dependents whose wages paid for the necessities of life, providing the bare minimum for family reproduction, to secure a place and a lineage within the social order. However, work has now become something else. Work has become the privileged sign of a new kind of class, whose existence is guaranteed not so much by work, but by the very fact of holding a job. Society no longer divides itself between a ruling elite and a subordinated working class, but between a job-holding, job-aspiring class, and those excluded from holding a job; those unable, by virtue of age, infirmity, education, gender, race or demographics, to participate in the rewards of work. Today, these rewards are not only a regular salary and job satisfaction (the traditional consolations of the working class), but also a certain capacity to plan ahead, to gain control of one's destiny through saving and investment, and to enjoy the pleasures of consumption through the fulfilment of self-images. What has happened to transform the worker from a subsistence labourer to an affluent consumer? In what way has the old working class now become part of the consumer society, once the privileged domain of the rich? And what effects has this transformation had on capitalism and its desire for profit? These questions take on an immediacy when we consider that, in the recent Federal election held in Australia (November 11, 2001), voters in the traditional working class areas of western Sydney deserted the Labour Party (the party of the worker) and instead voted Liberal/conservative (the party of capital and small business). The fibro worker cottage valleys of Parramatta are apparently no more, replaced by the gentrified mansions of an aspiring worker formation, in pursuit of the wealth and independence once the privilege of the educated bourgeoisie. In this brief essay, I will outline an understanding of work in terms of its changing relation to capital. My aim is to show how the terrain of work has shifted so that it no longer operates in strict subordination to capital, and has instead become an investment in capital. The worker no longer works to subsist, but does so as an investment in the future. My argument is situated in the rich theoretical field set out by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalism, which described the labour/capital relation in terms of a repressive, extractive force (the power of capital over labour) and which has since been redefined by various poststructuralist theorists including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus) in terms of the forces of productive desire. What follows then, is not a Marxist reading of work, but a reading of the way Marx sets forth work in relation to capital, and how this can be re-read through poststructuralism, in terms of the transformation of work from subordination to capital, to investment in capital; from work as the consequence of repression, to work as the fulfilment of desire. The Discipline of Work In his major work Capital Marx sets out a theory of labour in which the task of the worker is to produce surplus value: "Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is, by its very essence, the production of surplus-value. The worker produces not for himself, but for capital. It is no longer sufficient, therefore, for him simply to produce. He must produce surplus-value." (644) For Marx, surplus-value is generated when commodities are sold in the market for a price greater than the price paid to the worker for producing it: "this increment or excess over the original value I call surplus-value" (251). In order to create surplus value, the time spent by the worker in making a commodity must be strictly controlled, so that the worker produces more than required to fulfil his subsistence needs: ". . . since it is just this excess labour that supplies [the capitalist] with the surplus value" (1011). In other words, capital production is created through a separation between labour and capital: "a division between the product of labour and labour itself, between the objective conditions of labour and the subjective labour-power, was . . . the real foundation and the starting point of the process of capital production" (716). As Michael Ryan has argued, this separation was forced , through an allegiance between capital and the state, to guarantee the conditions for capital renewal by controlling the payment of labour in the form of a wage (84). Marx's analysis of industrialised capital in Capital thus outlines the way in which human labour is transformed into a form of surplus value, by the forced extraction of labour time: "the capitalist forces the worker where possible to exceed the normal rate of intensity [of work] and he forces him as best he can to extend the process of labour beyond the time necessary to replace the amount laid out in wages" (987). For Marx, capitalism is not a voluntary system; workers are not free to enter into and out of their relation with capital, since capital itself cannot survive without the constant supply of labour from which to extract surplus value. Needs and wants can only be satisfied within the labour/capital relation which homogenises labour into exchange value in terms of a wage, pegged to subsistence levels: "the capital earmarked for wages . . . belongs to the worker as soon as it has assumed its true shape of the means of subsistence destined to be consumed by him" (984). The "true shape" of wages, and hence the single, univocal truth of the wage labourer, is that he is condemned to subsistence consumption, because his capacity to share in the surplus value extracted from his own labour is circumscribed by the alliance between capital and the state, where wages are fixed and controlled according to wage market regulations. Marx's account of the labour/capital relation is imposing in its description of the dilemma of labour under the power of capital. Capitalism appears as a thermodynamic system fuelled by labour power, where, in order to make the system homogeneous, to produce exchange value, resistance is reduced: "Because it is capital, the automatic mechanism is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will. As capital, therefore, it is animated by the drive to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by man, that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier." (527) In the capitalist system resistance takes the form of a living residue within the system itself, acting as an "elastic natural barrier" to the extractive force of capital. Marx names this living residue "man". In offering resistance, that is, in being subjected to the force of capital, the figure of man persists as the incommensurable presence of a resistive force composed by a refusal to assimilate. (Lyotard 102) This ambivalent position (the place of many truths) which places man within/outside capital, is not fully recognised by Marx at this stage of his analysis. It suggests the presence of an immanent force, coming from the outside, yet already present in the figure of man (man as "offering" resistance). This force, the counter-force operating through man as the residue of labour, is necessarily active in its effects on the system. That is to say, resistance in the system is not resistance to the system, but the resistance which carries the system elsewhere, to another place, to another time. Unlike the force of capital which works on labour to preserve the system, the resistive force figured in man works its way through the system, transforming it as it goes, with the elusive power to refuse. The separation of labour and capital necessary to create the conditions for capitalism to flourish is achieved by the action of a force operating on labour. This force manifests itself in the strict surveillance of work, through supervisory practices: "the capitalist's ability to supervise and enforce discipline is vital" (Marx 986). Marx's formulation of supervision here and elsewhere, assumes a direct power relation between the supervisor and the supervised: a coercive power in the form of 'the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will'. Surplus value can only be extracted at the maximum rate when workers are entirely subjected to physical surveillance. As Foucault has shown, surveillance practices in the nineteenth century involved a panoptic principle as a form of surveillance: "Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals get caught up." (202) Power is not power over, but a productive power involving the commingling of forces, in which the resistive force of the body does not oppose, but complies with an authoritative force: "there is not a single moment of life from which one cannot extract forces, providing one knows how to differentiate it and combine it with others" (165). This commingling of dominant and resistive forces is distributive and proliferating, allowing the spread of institutions across social terrains, producing both "docile" and "delinquent" bodies at the same time: "this production of delinquency and its investment by the penal apparatus ..." (285, emphasis added). Foucault allows us to think through the dilemma posed by Marx, where labour appears entirely subject to the power of capital, reducing the worker to subsistence levels of existence. Indeed, Foucault's work allows us to see the figure of man, briefly adumbrated in quote from Marx above as "that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier", but refigured as an active, investing, transformative force, operating within the capitalist system, yet sending it on its way to somewhere else. In Foucauldian terms, self-surveillance takes on a normative function during the nineteenth century, producing a set of disciplinary values around the concepts of duty and respectability (Childers 409). These values were not only imposed from above, through education and the state, but enacted and maintained by the workers themselves, through the myriad threads of social conformity operating in daily life, whereby people made themselves suitable to each other for membership of the imagined community of disciplined worker-citizens. In this case, the wellbeing of workers gravitated to self-awareness and self-improvement, seen for instance in the magazines circulating at the time addressed to a worker readership (e.g. The Penny Magazine published in Britain from 1832-1845; see Sinnema 15). Instead of the satisfaction of needs in subsistence consumption, the worker was possessed by a desire for self-improvement, taking place in his spare time which was in turn, consolidated into the ego-ideal of the bourgeois self as the perfected model of civilised, educated man. Here desire takes the form of a repression (Freud 355), where the resistive force of the worker is channelled into maintaining the separation between labour and capital, and where the worker is encouraged to become a little bourgeois himself. The desire for self-improvement by the worker did not lead to a shift into the capitalist classes, but was satisfied in coming to know one's place, in being satisfied with fulfilling one's duty and in living a respectable life; that is in being individuated with respect to the social domain. Figure 1 - "The British Beehive", George Cruickshank's image of the hierarchy of labour in Victorian England (1840, modified 1867). Each profession is assigned an individualised place in the social order. A time must come however, in the accumulation of surplus-value, in the vast accelerating machine of capitalism, when the separation between labour and capital begins to dissolve. This point is reached when the residue left by capital in extracting surplus value is sufficient for the worker to begin consuming for its own sake, to engage in "unproductive expenditure" (Bataille 117) where desire is released as an active force. At this point, workers begin to abandon the repressive disciplines of duty and respectability, and turn instead to the control mechanisms of self-transformation or the "inventing of a self as if from scratch" (Massumi 18). In advanced capitalism, where the accrued wealth has concentrated not only profit but wages as well (a rise in the "standard of living"), workers cease to behave as subordinated to the system, and through their increased spending power re-enter the system as property owners, shareholders, superannuants and debtees with the capacity to access money held in banks and other financial institutions. As investment guru Peter Drucker has pointed out, the accumulated wealth of worker-owned superannuation or "pension" funds, is the most significant driving force of global capital today (Drucker 76-8). In the superannuation fund, workers' labour is not fully expended in the production of surplus value, but re-enters the system as investment on the workers' behalf, indirectly fuelling their capacity to fulfil desires through a rapidly accelerating circulation of money. As a consequence, new consumer industries begin to emerge based on the management of investment, where money becomes a product, subject to consumer choice. The lifestyles of the old capitalist class, itself a simulacra of aristocracy which it replaced, are now reproduced by the new worker-capitalist, but in ersatz forms, proliferating as the sign of wealth and abundance (copies of palatial homes replace real palaces, look-alike Rolex watches become available at cheap prices, medium priced family sedans take on the look and feel of expensive imports, and so forth). Unable to extract the surplus value necessary to feed this new desire for money from its own workforce (which has, in effect, become the main consumer of wealth), capital moves 'offshore' in search of a new labour pool, and repeats what it did to the labour pools in the older social formations in its relentless quest to maximise surplus value. Work and Control We are now witnessing a second kind of labour taking shape out of the deformations of the disciplinary society, where surplus value is not extracted, but incorporated into the labour force itself (Mules). This takes place when the separation between labour and capital dissolves, releasing quantities of "reserve time" (the time set aside from work in order to consume), which then becomes part of the capitalising process itself. In this case workers become "investors in their own lives (conceived of as capital) concerned with obtaining a profitable behaviour through information (conceived of as a production factor) sold to them." (Alliez and Feher 347). Gilles Deleuze has identified this shift in terms of what he calls a "control society" where the individuation of workers guaranteed by the disciplinary society gives way to a cybernetic modulation of "dividuals" or cypher values regulated according to a code (180). For dividualised workers, the resource incorporated into capital is their own lived time, no longer divided between work and leisure, but entirely "consummated" in capital (Alliez and Fehrer 350). A dividualised worker will thus work in order to produce leisure, and conversely enjoy leisure as a form of work. Here we have what appears to be a complete breakdown of the separation of labour and capital instigated by the disciplinary society; a sweeping away of the grounds on which labour once stood as a mass of individuals, conscious of their rivalry with capital over the spoils of surplus value. Here we have a situation where labour itself has become a form of capital (not just a commodity exchangeable on the market), incorporated into the temporalised body of the worker, contributing to the extraction of its own surplus value. Under the disciplinary society, the body of the worker became subject to panoptic surveillance, where "time and motion" studies enabled a more efficient control of work through the application of mathematical models. In the control society there is no need for this kind of panoptic control, since the embodiment of the panoptic principle, anticipated by Foucault and responsible for the individuation of the subject in disciplinary societies, has itself become a resource for extracting surplus value. In effect, dividualised workers survey themselves, not as a form of self-discipline, but as an investment for capitalisation. Dividuals are not motivated by guilt, conscience, duty or devotion to one's self, but by a transubjective desire for the other, the figure of a self projected into the future, and realised through their own bodily becoming. Unlike individuals who watch themselves as an already constituted self in the shadow of a super-ego, dividuals watch themselves in the image of a becoming-other. We might like to think of dividuals as self-correctors operating in teams and groups (franchises) whose "in-ness" as in-dividuals, is derived not from self-reflection, but from directiveness. Directiveness is the disposition of a habitus to find its way within programs designed to maximise performance across a territory. Following Gregory Bateson, we might say that directiveness is the pathway forged between a map and its territory (Bateson 454). A billiard ball sitting on a billiard table needs to be struck in such a way to simultaneously reduce the risk of a rival scoring from it, and maximise the score available, for instance by potting it into a pocket. The actual trajectory of the ball is governed by a logic of "restraint" (399) which sets up a number of virtual pathways, all but one of which is eliminated when the map (the rules and strategies of the game) is applied to the territory of the billiard table. If surveillance was the modus operandi of the old form of capitalism which required a strict control over labour, then directiveness is the new force of capital which wants to eliminate work in the older sense of the word, and replace it with the self-managed flow of capitalising labour. Marx's labour theory of value has led us, via a detour through Foucault and Deleuze, to the edge of the labour/capital divide, where the figure of man reappears, not as a worker subject to capital, but in some kind of partnership with it. This seems to spell the end of the old form of work, which required a strict delineation between labour and capital, where workers became rivals with capital for a share in surplus value. In the new formation of work, workers are themselves little capitalists, whose labour time is produced through their own investments back into the system. Yet, the worker is also subject to the extraction of her labour time in the necessity to submit to capital through the wage relation. This creates a reflexive snarl, embedded in the worker's own self-image, where work appears as leisure and leisure appears as work, causing labour to drift over capital and vice versa, for capital to drift over labour. This drifting, mobile relation between labour and capital cannot be secured through appeals to older forms of worker awareness (duty, responsibility, attentiveness, self-surveillance) since this would require a repression of the desire for self-transformation, and hence a fatal dampening of the dynamics of the market (anathema to the spirit of capitalism). Rather it can only be directed through control mechanisms involving a kind of forced partnership between capital and labour, where both parties recognise their mutual destinies in being "thrown" into the system. In the end, work remains subsumed under capital, but not in its alienated, disciplinary state. Rather work has become a form of capital itself, one's investment in the future, and hence as valuable now as it was before. It's just a little more difficult to see how it can be protected as a 'right' of the worker, since workers are themselves investors of their own labour, and not right-bearing individuals whose position in society has been fixed by the separation of labour from capital. References Alliez, Eric and Michel Feher. "The Luster of Capital." Zone1/2 (1987): 314-359. Bataille, Georges. 'The Notion of Expenditure'. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Trans. and Ed. Alan Stoekl. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985. 116-29. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. Childers, Joseph W. "Observation and Representation: Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor." Victorian Studies37.3 (1994): 405-31. Deleuze, Gilles. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. --. Negotiations, 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Drucker, Peter F. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: Harper, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Freud, Sigmund. "The Ego and the Id". On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. The Pelican Freud Library, Vol 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 339-407. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant,. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Massumi, Brian. "Everywhere You Wanted to Be: Introduction to Fear." The Politics of Everyday Fear. Ed. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 3-37. Mules, Warwick. "A Remarkable Disappearing Act: Immanence and the Creation of Modern Things." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.4 (2001). 15 Nov. 2001 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0108/disappear.php>. Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1982. Sinnema, Peter W. Dynamics of the Printed Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1998. Links http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1867-C1/ http://www.media-culture.org.au/0108/Disappear.html http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch543p/help/Foucault.html http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch543p/help/Deleuze.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mules, Warwick. "That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Mules.xml >. Chicago Style Mules, Warwick, "That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Mules.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Mules, Warwick. (2001) That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Mules.xml > ([your date of access]).

Introduction In an era of upheaval and uncertainty for higher education institutions around the world, scholars, like those in many in other professions, are increasingly using social media to build communities around mutual support and professional development. These communities appear to offer opportunities for participants to exert more positive influence over the types of interactions they engage in with colleagues, in many cases being valued as more altruistic, transformational, or supportive than established academic structures (Gibson, and Gibbs; Mewburn, and Thomson; Maitzen). What has been described as ‘digital scholarship’ applies social media to “different facets of scholarly activity in a helpful and productive way” (Carrigan 5), with online scholarly communities being likened to evolutions of face-to-face practices including peer mentoring (Ferguson, and Wheat) or a “virtual staffroom” (Mewburn, and Thomson). To a large extent, these accounts of scholarly practice adapted for digital media have resonance. From writing groups (O’Dwyer, McDonough, Jefferson, Goff, and Redman-MacLaren) to conference attendance (Spilker, Silva, and Morgado) and funding (Osimo, Priego, and Vuorikari), the transformational possibilities of social media have been applied to almost every facet of existing academic practices. These practices have increasingly attracted scrutiny from higher education institutions, with social media profiles of staff both a potential asset and risk to institutions’ brands. Around the world, institutions use social media for marketing, student recruitment, student support and alumni communication (Palmer). As such, social media policies have emerged in recent years in attempts to ensure staff engage in ways that align with the interests of their employers (Solberg; Carrigan). However, engagement via social media is also still largely considered “supplementary to ‘real’ scholarly work” (Mussell 347).Paralleling this trend, guides to effectively managing an online profile as a component of professional reputation have also become increasingly common (e.g. Carrigan). While public relations and management literatures have approached reputation management in terms of how an organisation is regarded by its multiple stakeholders (Fombrun) this is increasingly being applied to individuals on social media. According to Gandini a “reputation economy” (22) has come to function for knowledge workers who seek to cultivate a reputation as a good community member through sociality in order to secure more (or better) work.The popularity of professional social media communities and scrutiny of participants raises questions about the work involved in building and participating in them. This article explores these questions through analysis of tweets from the first year of #ECRchat, a Twitter group for early career researchers (ECRs). The group was established in 2012 to provide an opportunity for ECRs (typically within five years of PhD completion) to discuss career-related issues. Since it was founded, the group has been administered through partnerships between early career scholars using a Twitter account (@ECRchat) and a blog. Tweets, the posts of 140 characters or fewer, which appear on a user’s profile and in followers’ feeds (Twitter) are organised into a ‘chat’ by participants through the use of the hashtag ‘#ECRchat’. Participants vote on chat topics and take on the role of hosting on a volunteer basis. The explicit career focus of this group provides an ideal case study to explore how work is represented in an online professionally-focused community, in order to reflect on what this might mean for the norms of knowledge work.Digital Labour The impact of Internet Communication Technologies (ICT), including social media, on the lives of workers has long been a source of both concern and hope. Mobile devices, wireless Internet and associated communications software enable increasing numbers of people to take work home. This flexibility has been welcomed as the means by which workers might more successfully access jobs and manage competing commitments (Raja, Imaizumi, Kelly, Narimatsu, and Paradi-Guilford). However, hours worked from home are often unpaid and carry with them a strong likelihood of interfering with rest, recreation and family time (Pocock and Skinner). Melissa Gregg describes this as “presence bleed” (2): the dilutions of focus from everyday activities as workers increasingly use electronic devices to ‘check in’ during non-work time. Moving beyond the limitations of this work-life balance approach, which tends to over-state divisions between employment and other everyday life practices, a growing literature seeks to address work in online environments by analysing the types of labour being practiced, rather than seeing such practices as adjunct to physical workplaces. Responding to claims that digital communication heralds a new age of greater freedom, creativity and democratic participation, this work draws attention to the reliance of such networks on unpaid labour (e.g. Hearn; Hesmondhalgh) with ratings, reviews and relationship maintenance serving business’ economic ends alongside the individual interests which motivate participants. The immaterial, affective, and often precarious labour that has been observed is “simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” (Terranova). This work builds particularly on feminist analysis of work (see McRobbie for a discussion of this), with behind the scenes moderator, convenor, and community builder roles largely female and largely unrecognised, be they activist (Gleeson), creative (Duffy) or consumer (Arcy) groups. For some, this suggests the emergence of a new ‘women’s work’ of affective immaterial labour which goes into building transformational communities (Jarrett). Yet, digital labour has not yet been foregrounded within research into higher education, where it is largely practiced in the messy intersections of employment, unpaid professional development, and leisure. Joyce Goggin argues that convergence of these spheres is a feature of digital labour. Consequently, this article seeks to add a consideration of digital labour, specifically the cultural politics of work that emerge in these spaces, to the literature on digital practices as a translation of existing academic responsibilities online. In the context of widespread concerns over academic workload and job market (Bentley, Coates, Dobson, Goedegebuure, and Meek) and the growing international engagement and impact agenda (Priem, Piwowar, and Hemminger), it raises questions about the implications of these practices. Researching Twitter Communities This article analyses tweets from the publicly available Twitter timeline, containing the hashtag #ECRchat, during scheduled chats, from 1 July 2012 to 31 July 2013 (the first year of operation). Initially, all tweets in this time period were analysed in anonymised form to determine the most commonly mentioned topics during chats. This content analysis removed the most common English language words, such as: the; it; I; and RT (which stands for retweet), which would otherwise appear as top results in almost any content analysis regardless of the community of interest. This was followed by qualitative analysis of tweets, to explore in more depth how important issues were articulated and rationalised within the group. This draws on Catherine Driscoll’s and Melissa Gregg’s idea of “sympathetic online cultural studies” which seeks to explore online communities first and foremost as communities rather than as exemplars of online communications (15-20). Here, a narrative approach was undertaken to analyse how participants curated, made sense of, and explained their own career stories (drawing on Pamphilon). Although I do not claim that participants are representative of all ECRs, or that the ideas given the most attention during chats are representative of the experiences of all participants, representations of work articulated here are suggestive of the kinds of public utterances that were considered reasonable within this open online space. Participants are identified according to the twitter handle and user name they had chosen to use for the chats being analysed. This is because the practical infeasibility of guaranteeing online anonymity (readers need only to Google the text of any tweet to associate it with a particular user, in most cases) and the importance of actively involving participants as agents in the research process, in part by identifying them as authors of their own stories, rather than informants (e.g. Butz; Evans; Svalastog and Eriksson).Representations of Work in #ECRchat The co-creation of the #ECRchat community through participant hosts and community votes on chat topics gave rise to a discussion group that was heavily focused on ‘the work’ of academia, including its importance in the lives of participants, relative appeal over other options, and negative effects on leisure time. I was clear that participants regarded participation as serving their professional interests, despite participation not being paid or formally recognised by employers. With the exception of two discussions focused on making decisions about the future of the group, #ECRchat discussions during the year of analysis focused on topics designed to help participants succeed at work such as “career progression and planning”, “different routes to postdoc funding”, and “collaboration”. At a micro-level, ‘work’ (and related terms) was the most frequently used term in #ECRchat, with its total number of uses (1372) almost double that of research (700), the next most used term. Comments during the chats reiterated this emphasis: “It’s all about the work. Be decent to people and jump through the hoops you need to, but always keep your eyes on the work” (Magennis).The depth of participants’ commitment comes through strongly in discussions comparing academic work with other options: “pretty much everyone I know with ‘real jobs’ hates their work. I feel truly lucky to say that I love mine #ECRchat” (McGettigan). This was seen in particular in the discussion about ‘careers outside academia’. Hashtags such as #altac (referring to alternative-academic careers such as university research support or learning and teaching administration roles) and #postac (referring to PhD holders working outside of universities in research or non-research roles) used both alongside the #ECRchat hashtag and separately, provide an ongoing site of these kinds of representations. While participants in #ECRchat sought to shift this perception and were critically aware that it could lead to undesirable outcomes: “PhDs and ECRs in Humanities don’t seem to consider working outside of academia – that limits their engagement with training #ECRchat” (Faculty of Humanities at the University of Manchester), such discussions frequently describe alternative academic careers as a ‘backup plan’, should academic employment not be found. Additionally, many participants suggested that their working hours were excessive, extending the professional into personal spaces and times in ways that they did not see as positive. This was often described as the only way to achieve success: “I hate to say it, but one of the best ways to improve track record is to work 70+ hours a week, every week. Forever. #ecrchat” (Dunn). One of the key examples of this dynamic was the scheduling of the chat itself. When founded in 2012, #ECRchat ran in the Australian evening and UK morning, eliding the personal/work distinction for both its coordinators and participants. While considerable discussion was concerned with scheduling the chat during times when a large number of international participants could attend, this discussion centred on waking rather than working hours. The use of scheduled tweets and shared work between convenors in different time zones (Australia and the United Kingdom) maintained an around the clock online presence, extending well beyond the ordinary working hours of any individual participant.Personal Disclosure The norms that were articulated in #ECRchat are perhaps not surprising for a group of participants seeking to establish themselves in a profession where a long-hours culture and work-life interference are common (Bentley, Coates, Dobson, Goedegebuure, and Meek). However, what is notable is that participation frequently involved the extension of the personal into the professional and in support of professional aims. In the chat’s first year, an element of personal disclosure and support for others became key to acting as a good community member. Beyond the well-established norms of white collar workers demonstrating professionalism by deploying “courtesy, helpfulness, and kindness” (Mills xvii), this community building relied on personal disclosure which to some extent collapsed personal and professional boundaries.By disclosing individual struggles, anxieties, and past experiences participants contributed to a culture of support. This largely functioned through discussions of work stress rather than leisure: “I definitely don’t have [work-life balance]. I think it’s because I don’t have a routine so work and home constantly blend into one another” (Feely). Arising from these discussions, ideas to help participants better navigate and build academic careers was one of the main ways this community support and concern was practiced: “I think I’m often more productive and less anxious if I'm working on a couple of things in parallel, too #ecrchat” (Brian).Activities such as preparing meals, caring for family, and leisure activities, became part of the discussion. “@snarkyphd Sorry, late, had to deal with toddler. Also new; currently doing casual teaching/industry work & applying for postdocs #ecrchat” (Ronald). Exclusively professional profiles were considered less engaging than the combination of personal and professional that most participants adopted: “@jeanmadams I’ve answered a few queries on ResearchGate, but agree lack of non-work opinions / personality makes them dull #ecrchat” (Tennant). However, this is not to suggest that these networks become indistinguishable from more informal, personal, or leisurely uses of social media: “@networkedres My ‘professional’ online identity is slightly more guarded than my ‘facebook’ id which is for friends and family #ECRchat” (Wheat). Instead, disclosure of certain kinds of work struggles came to function as a positive contribution to a more reflexive professionalism. In the context of work-focused discussion, #ECRchat opens important spaces for scholars to question norms they considered damaging or at least make these tacit norms explicit and receive support to manage them. Affective Labour The professional goals and focus of #ECRchat, combined with the personal support and disclosure that forms the basis for the supportive elements in this group is arguably one of its strongest and most important elements. Mark Carrigan suggests that the practices of revealing something of the struggles we experience could form the basis for a new collegiality, where common experiences which had previously not been discussed publicly are for the first time recognised as systemic, not individual challenges. However, there is work required to provide context and support for these emotional experiences which is largely invisible here, as has typically been the case in other communities. Such ‘affective labour’ “involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labour in the bodily mode … the labour is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion” (Hardt, and Negri 292). In #ECRchat, this ranges from managing the schedule and organising discussions – which involves following up offers to help, assisting people to understand the task, and then ensuring things go ahead as planned –to support offered by members of the group within discussions. This occurs in the overlaps between personal and professional representations, taking a variety of forms from everyday reassurance, affirmation, and patience: “Sorry to hear - hang in there. Hope you have a good support network. #ECRchat” (Galea) to empathy often articulated alongside the disclosure discussed earlier: “The feeling of guilt over not working sounds VERY familiar! #ecrchat” (Vredeveldt).The point here is not to suggest that this work is not sufficiently valued by participants, or that it does not parallel the kinds of work undertaken in more formal job roles, including in academia, where management, conference convening or participation in professional societies, and teaching, as just a few examples, involve degrees of affective labour. However, as a consequence of the (semi)public nature of these groups, the interactions observed here appear to represent a new inflection of professional reputation work, where, in building online professional communities, individuals peg their professional reputations to these forms of affective labour. Importantly, given the explicitly professional nature of the group, these efforts are not counted as part of the formal workload of those involved, be they employed (temporarily or more securely) inside or outside universities, or not in the paid workforce. Conclusion A growing body of literature demonstrates that online academic communities can provide opportunities for collegiality, professional development, and support: particularly among emerging scholars. These accounts demonstrate the value of digital scholarly practices across a range of academic work. However, this article’s discussion of the work undertaken to build and maintain #ECRchat in its first year suggests that these practices at the messy intersections of employment, unpaid professional development, and leisure constitute a new inflection of professional reputation and service work. This work involves publicly building a reputation as a good community member through a combination of personal disclosure and affective labour.In the context of growing emphasis on the economic, social, and other impacts of academic research and concerns over work intensification, this raises questions about possible scope for, and impact of, formal recognition of digital academic labour. While institutions’ work planning and promotion processes may provide opportunities to recognise work developing professional societies or conferences as a leadership or service to a discipline, this new digital service work remains outside the purview of such recognition and reward systems. Further research into the relationships between academic reputation and digital labour will be needed to explore the implications of this for institutions and academics alike. AcknowledgementsI would like to gratefully acknowledge the contributions and support of everyone who participated in developing and sustaining #ECRchat. Both online and offline, this paper and the community itself would not have been possible without many generous contributions of time, understanding and thoughtful discussion. In particular, I would like to thank Katherine L. Wheat, co-founder and convenor, as well as Beth Montague-Hellen, Ellie Mackin, and Motje Wolf, who have taken on convening the group in the years since my involvement. ReferencesArcy, Jacquelyn. “Emotion Work: Considering Gender in Digital Labor.” Feminist Media Studies 16.2 (2016): 365-68.Bentley, Peter, Hamish Coates, Ian Dobson, Leo Goedegebuure, and Lynn Meek. Job Satisfaction around the Academic World. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Brian, Deborah (@deborahbrian). “I think I’m often more productive and less anxious if I’m working on a couple of things in parallel, too #ecrchat” (11 April 2013, 10:25). 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“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them [...] life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (Garcia Marquez 165) Introduction The refugee experience is, at heart, one of rebirth. Just as becoming a new, distinctive being—biological birth—necessarily involves the physical separation of mother and infant, so becoming a refugee entails separation from a "mother country." This mother country may or may not be a recognised nation state; the point is that the refugee transitions from physical connectedness to separation, from insider to outsider, from endemic to alien. Like babies, refugees may have little control over the timing and conditions of their expulsion. Successful resettlement requires not one rebirth but multiple rebirths—resettlement is a lifelong process (Layton)—which in turn require hope, imagination, and energy. In rebirthing themselves over and over again, people who have fled or been forced from their homelands become both mother and child. They do not go through this rebirthing alone. A range of agencies and individuals may be there to assist, including immigration officials, settlement services, schools and teachers, employment agencies and employers, English as a Second Language (ESL) resources and instructors, health-care providers, counsellors, diasporic networks, neighbours, church groups, and other community organisations. The nature, intensity, and duration of these “midwives’” interventions—and when they occur and in what combinations—vary hugely from place to place and from person to person, but there is clear evidence that post-migration experiences have a significant impact on settlement outcomes (Fozdar and Hartley). This paper draws on qualitative research I did in 2012 in a regional town in New South Wales to illuminate some of the ways in which settlement aides ease, or impede, refugees’ rebirth as fully recognised and participating Australians. I begin by considering what it means to be resilient before tracing some of the dimensions of the resettlement process. In doing so, I draw on data from interviews and focus groups with former refugees, service providers, and other residents of the town I shall call Easthaven. First, though, a word about Easthaven. As is the case in many rural and regional parts of Australia, Easthaven’s population is strongly dominated by Anglo Celtic and Saxon ancestries: 2011 Census data show that more than 80 per cent of residents were born in Australia (compared with a national figure of 69.8 per cent) and about 90 per cent speak only English at home (76.8 per cent). Almost twice as many people identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander as the national figure of 2.5 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics). For several years Easthaven has been an official “Refugee Welcome Zone”, welcoming hundreds of refugees from diverse countries in Africa and the Middle East as well as from Myanmar. This reflects the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s drive to settle a fifth of Australia’s 13,750 humanitarian entrants a year directly in regional areas. In Easthaven’s schools—which is where I focused my research—almost all of the ESL students are from refugee backgrounds. Defining Resilience Much of the research on human resilience is grounded in psychology, with a capacity to “bounce back” from adverse experiences cited in many definitions of resilience (e.g. American Psychological Association). Bouncing back implies a relatively quick process, and a return to a state or form similar to that which existed before the encounter with adversity. Yet resilience often requires sustained effort and significant changes in identity. As Jerome Rugaruza, a former UNHCR refugee, says of his journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Australia: All the steps begin in the burning village: you run with nothing to eat, no clothes. You just go. Then you get to the refugee camp […] You have a little bread and you thank god you are safe. Then after a few years in the camp, you think about a future for your children. You arrive in Australia and then you learn a new language, you learn to drive. There are so many steps and not everyone can do it. (Milsom) Not everyone can do it, but a large majority do. Research by Graeme Hugo, for example, shows that although humanitarian settlers in Australia face substantial barriers to employment and initially have much higher unemployment rates than other immigrants, for most nationality groups this difference has disappeared by the second generation: “This is consistent with the sacrifice (or investment) of the first generation and the efforts extended to attain higher levels of education and English proficiency, thereby reducing the barriers over time.” (Hugo 35). Ingrid Poulson writes that “resilience is not just about bouncing. Bouncing […] is only a reaction. Resilience is about rising—you rise above it, you rise to the occasion, you rise to the challenge. Rising is an active choice” (47; my emphasis) I see resilience as involving mental and physical grit, coupled with creativity, aspiration and, crucially, agency. Dimensions of Resettlement To return to the story of 41-year-old Jerome Rugaruza, as related in a recent newspaper article: He [Mr Rugaruza] describes the experience of being a newly arrived refugee as being like that of a newborn baby. “You need special care; you have to learn to speak [English], eat the different food, create relationships, connections”. (Milsom) This is a key dimension of resettlement: the adult becomes like an infant again, shifting from someone who knows how things work and how to get by to someone who is likely to be, for a while, dependent on others for even the most basic things—communication, food, shelter, clothing, and social contact. The “special care” that most refugee arrivals need initially (and sometimes for a long time) often results in their being seen as deficient—in knowledge, skills, dispositions, and capacities as well as material goods (Keddie; Uptin, Wright and Harwood). As Fozdar and Hartley note: “The tendency to use a deficit model in refugee resettlement devalues people and reinforces the view of the mainstream population that refugees are a liability” (27). Yet unlike newborns, humanitarian settlers come to their new countries with rich social networks and extensive histories of experience and learning—resources that are in fact vital to their rebirth. Sisay (all names are pseudonyms), a year 11 student of Ethiopian heritage who was born in Kenya, told me with feeling: I had a life back in Africa [her emphasis]. It was good. Well, I would go back there if there’s no problems, which—is a fact. And I came here for a better life—yeah, I have a better life, there’s good health care, free school, and good environment and all that. But what’s that without friends? A fellow student, Celine, who came to Australia five years ago from Burundi via Uganda, told me in a focus group: Some teachers are really good but I think some other teachers could be a little bit more encouraging and understanding of what we’ve gone through, because [they] just look at you like “You’re year 11 now, you should know this” […] It’s really discouraging when [the teachers say] in front of the class, “Oh, you shouldn’t do this subject because you haven’t done this this this this” […] It’s like they’re on purpose to tell you “you don’t have what it takes; just give up and do something else.” As Uptin, Wright and Harwood note, “schools not only have the power to position who is included in schooling (in culture and pedagogy) but also have the power to determine whether there is room and appreciation for diversity” (126). Both Sisay and Celine were disheartened by the fact they felt some of their teachers, and many of their peers, had little interest in or understanding of their lives before they came to Australia. The teachers’ low expectations of refugee-background students (Keddie, Uptin, Wright and Harwood) contrasted with the students’ and their families’ high expectations of themselves (Brown, Miller and Mitchell; Harris and Marlowe). When I asked Sisay about her post-school ambitions, she said: “I have a good idea of my future […] write a documentary. And I’m working on it.” Celine’s response was: “I know I’m gonna do medicine, be a doctor.” A third girl, Lily, who came to Australia from Myanmar three years ago, told me she wanted to be an accountant and had studied accounting at the local TAFE last year. Joseph, a father of three who resettled from South Sudan seven years ago, stressed how important getting a job was to successful settlement: [But] you have to get a certificate first to get a job. Even the job of cleaning—when I came here I was told that somebody has to go to have training in cleaning, to use the different chemicals to clean the ground and all that. But that is just sweeping and cleaning with water—you don’t need the [higher-level] skills. Simple jobs like this, we are not able to get them. In regional Australia, employment opportunities tend to be limited (Fozdar and Hartley); the unemployment rate in Easthaven is twice the national average. Opportunities to study are also more limited than in urban centres, and would-be students are not always eligible for financial assistance to gain or upgrade qualifications. Even when people do have appropriate qualifications, work experience, and language proficiency, the colour of their skin may still mean they miss out on a job. Tilbury and Colic-Peisker have documented the various ways in which employers deflect responsibility for racial discrimination, including the “common” strategy (658) of arguing that while the employer or organisation is not prejudiced, they have to discriminate because of their clients’ needs or expectations. I heard this strategy deployed in an interview with a local businesswoman, Catriona: We were advertising for a new technician. And one of the African refugees came to us and he’d had a lot of IT experience. And this is awful, but we felt we couldn't give him the job, because we send our technicians into people's houses, and we knew that if a black African guy rocked up at someone’s house to try and fix their computer, they would not always be welcomed in all—look, it would not be something that [Easthaven] was ready for yet. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (Refugees and Employment) note that while Australia has strict anti-discrimination legislation, this legislation may be of little use to the people who, because of the way they look and sound (skin colour, dress, accent), are most likely to face prejudice and discrimination. The researchers found that perceived discrimination in the labour market affected humanitarian settlers’ sense of satisfaction with their new lives far more than, for example, racist remarks, which were generally shrugged off; the students I interviewed spoke of racism as “expected,” but “quite rare.” Most of the people Colic-Peisker and Tilbury surveyed reported finding Australians “friendly and accepting” (33). Even if there is no active discrimination on the basis of skin colour in employment, education, or housing, or overt racism in social situations, visible difference can still affect a person’s sense of belonging, as Joseph recounts: I think of myself as Australian, but my colour doesn’t [laughs] […] Unfortunately many, many Australians are expecting that Australia is a country of Europeans … There is no need for somebody to ask “Where do you come from?” and “Do you find Australia here safe?” and “Do you enjoy it?” Those kind of questions doesn’t encourage that we are together. This highlights another dimension of resettlement: the journey from feeling “at home” to feeling “foreign” to, eventually, feeling at home again in the host country (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, Refugees and Employment). In the case of visibly different settlers, however, this last stage may never be completed. Whether the questions asked of Joseph are well intentioned or not, their effect may be the same: they position him as a “forever foreigner” (Park). A further dimension of resettlement—one already touched on—is the degree to which humanitarian settlers actively manage their “rebirth,” and are allowed and encouraged to do so. A key factor will be their mastery of English, and Easthaven’s ESL teachers are thus pivotal in the resettlement process. There is little doubt that many of these teachers have gone to great lengths to help this cohort of students, not only in terms of language acquisition but also social inclusion. However, in some cases what is initially supportive can, with time, begin to undermine refugees’ maturity into independent citizens. Sharon, an ESL teacher at one of the schools, told me how she and her colleagues would give their refugee-background students lifts to social events: But then maybe three years down the track they have a car and their dad can drive, but they still won’t take them […] We arrive to pick them up and they’re not ready, or there’s five fantastic cars in the driveway, and you pick up the student and they say “My dad’s car’s much bigger and better than yours” [laughs]. So there’s an expectation that we’ll do stuff for them, but we’ve created that [my emphasis]. Other support services may have more complex interests in keeping refugee settlers dependent. The more clients an agency has, the more services it provides, and the longer clients stay on its books, the more lucrative the contract for the agency. Thus financial and employment imperatives promote competition rather than collaboration between service providers (Fozdar and Hartley; Sidhu and Taylor) and may encourage assumptions about what sorts of services different individuals and groups want and need. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (“‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”) have developed a typology of resettlement styles—“achievers,” “consumers,” “endurers,” and “victims”—but stress that a person’s style, while influenced by personality and pre-migration factors, is also shaped by the institutions and individuals they come into contact with: “The structure of settlement and welfare services may produce a victim mentality, leaving members of refugee communities inert and unable to see themselves as agents of change” (76). The prevailing narrative of “the traumatised refugee” is a key aspect of this dynamic (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”; Fozdar and Hartley; Keddie). Service providers may make assumptions about what humanitarian settlers have gone through before arriving in Australia, how they have been affected by their experiences, and what must be done to “fix” them. Norah, a long-time caseworker, told me: I think you get some [providers] who go, “How could you have gone through something like that and not suffered? There must be—you must have to talk about this stuff” […] Where some [refugees] just come with the [attitude] “We’re all born into a situation; that was my situation, but I’m here now and now my focus is this.” She cited failure to consider cultural sensitivities around mental illness and to recognise that stress and anxiety during early resettlement are normal (Tilbury) as other problems in the sector: [Newly arrived refugees] go through the “happy to be here” [phase] and now “hang on, I’ve thumped to the bottom and I’m missing my own foods and smells and cultures and experiences”. I think sometimes we’re just too quick to try and slot people into a box. One factor that appears to be vital in fostering and sustaining resilience is social connection. Norah said her clients were “very good on the mobile phone” and had links “everywhere,” including to family and friends in their countries of birth, transition countries, and other parts of Australia. A 2011 report for DIAC, Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals, found that humanitarian entrants to Australia were significantly more likely to be members of cultural and/or religious groups than other categories of immigrants (Australian Survey Research). I found many examples of efforts to build both bonding and bridging capital (Putnam) in Easthaven, and I offer two examples below. Several people told me about a dinner-dance that had been held a few weeks before one of my visits. The event was organised by an African women’s group, which had been formed—with funding assistance—several years before. The dinner-dance was advertised in the local newspaper and attracted strong interest from a broad cross-section of Easthaveners. To Debbie, a counsellor, the response signified a “real turnaround” in community relations and was a big boon to the women’s sense of belonging. Erica, a teacher, told me about a cultural exchange day she had organised between her bush school—where almost all of the children are Anglo Australian—and ESL students from one of the town schools: At the start of the day, my kids were looking at [the refugee-background students] and they were scared, they were saying to me, "I feel scared." And we shoved them all into this tiny little room […] and they had no choice but to sit practically on top of each other. And by the end of the day, they were hugging each other and braiding their hair and jumping and playing together. Like Uptin, Wright and Harwood, I found that the refugee-background students placed great importance on the social aspects of school. Sisay, the girl I introduced earlier in this paper, said: “It’s just all about friendship and someone to be there for you […] We try to be friends with them [the non-refugee students] sometimes but sometimes it just seems they don’t want it.” Conclusion A 2012 report on refugee settlement services in NSW concludes that the state “is not meeting its responsibility to humanitarian entrants as well as it could” (Audit Office of New South Wales 2); moreover, humanitarian settlers in NSW are doing less well on indicators such as housing and health than humanitarian settlers in other states (3). Evaluating the effectiveness of formal refugee-centred programs was not part of my research and is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, I have sought to reveal some of the ways in which the attitudes, assumptions, and everyday practices of service providers and members of the broader community impact on refugees' settlement experience. What I heard repeatedly in the interviews I conducted was that it was emotional and practical support (Matthews; Tilbury), and being asked as well as told (about their hopes, needs, desires), that helped Easthaven’s refugee settlers bear themselves into fulfilling new lives. References Audit Office of New South Wales. Settling Humanitarian Entrants in New South Wales—Executive Summary. May 2012. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/245/02_Humanitarian_Entrants_2012_Executive_Summary.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2011 Census QuickStats. Mar. 2013. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/0>. Australian Survey Research. Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals—Report of Findings. Apr. 2011. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/settlement-outcomes-new-arrivals.pdf>. Brown, Jill, Jenny Miller, and Jane Mitchell. “Interrupted Schooling and the Acquisition of Literacy: Experiences of Sudanese Refugees in Victorian Secondary Schools.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 29.2 (2006): 150-62. Colic-Peisker, Val, and Farida Tilbury. “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement: The Influence of Supporting Services and Refugees’ Own Resources on Resettlement Style.” International Migration 41.5 (2004): 61-91. ———. Refugees and Employment: The Effect of Visible Difference on Discrimination—Final Report. Perth: Centre for Social and Community Research, Murdoch University, 2007. Fozdar, Farida, and Lisa Hartley. “Refugee Resettlement in Australia: What We Know and Need To Know.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 4 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/search?fulltext=fozdar&submit=yes&x=0&y=0>. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. London: Penguin Books, 1989. Harris, Vandra, and Jay Marlowe. “Hard Yards and High Hopes: The Educational Challenges of African Refugee University Students in Australia.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 23.2 (2011): 186-96. Hugo, Graeme. A Significant Contribution: The Economic, Social and Civic Contributions of First and Second Generation Humanitarian Entrants—Summary of Findings. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2011. Keddie, Amanda. “Pursuing Justice for Refugee Students: Addressing Issues of Cultural (Mis)recognition.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 16.12 (2012): 1295-1310. Layton, Robyn. "Building Capacity to Ensure the Inclusion of Vulnerable Groups." Creating Our Future conference, Adelaide, 28 Jul. 2012. Milsom, Rosemarie. “From Hard Luck Life to the Lucky Country.” Sydney Morning Herald 20 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/national/from-hard-luck-life-to-the-lucky-country-20130619-2oixl.html>. Park, Gilbert C. “’Are We Real Americans?’: Cultural Production of Forever Foreigners at a Diversity Event.” Education and Urban Society 43.4 (2011): 451-67. Poulson, Ingrid. Rise. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2008. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Sidhu, Ravinder K., and Sandra Taylor. “The Trials and Tribulations of Partnerships in Refugee Settlement Services in Australia.” Journal of Education Policy 24.6 (2009): 655-72. Tilbury, Farida. “‘I Feel I Am a Bird without Wings’: Discourses of Sadness and Loss among East Africans in Western Australia.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 14.4 (2007): 433-58. ———, and Val Colic-Peisker. “Deflecting Responsibility in Employer Talk about Race Discrimination.” Discourse & Society 17.5 (2006): 651-76. Uptin, Jonnell, Jan Wright, and Valerie Harwood. “It Felt Like I Was a Black Dot on White Paper: Examining Young Former Refugees’ Experience of Entering Australian High Schools.” The Australian Educational Researcher 40.1 (2013): 125-37.

'Self-awareness' and the development of the autonomous subject (derived from Enlightenment and the Anglo-European philosophical traditions) has often been implicated in discussions of modernity. In East Asian societies where the Confucianist social order is seen as a deep-rooted social and cultural force, discussions of modernity and modernisation have often revolved around the tension between the spread of individualism and liberalism that come with modernisation and contact with the West. The preservation of traditional sociocultural values and familial and social structures that stress mutual obligations, social harmony and a certain form of "benign" paternalism have been key concerns. The popular television dramas in these societies seem to provide a public imaginary space where such tensions and conflicts are often played out in dramatic ways. They provide places were simulated or compromised solutions are proposed and explored. Popular TV romance dramas in particular can serve as a window to the ways in which the topic of the (non-) self-determining subject is explored. These dramas typically present a scenario in which strong mutual love and desire between two people come into conflict with the existing sociocultural values (e.g., familial, social constraints). In this paper, I analyse a recent popular South Korean TV romance drama: (1) Autumn in My Heart (also known as Endless Love I, Autumn for short below) and contrast it with (2) Friends, another recent popular TV romance drama jointly produced by television companies in Japan and South Korea. These cultural products are shown not only in their respective societies but also sold to television companies in other neighbouring countries; their VCD/DVDs are widely marketed and circulated in East Asian areas (e.g., Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China). 1 Autumn is about a brother (played by Song Seung-hun) and sister (played by Song Hye-kyo) who had grown up together and had developed a very close relationship in a happy middle class family until one day the family found out that the girl was actually not their own. There had been a mistake in the hospital and two baby girls were swapped. Hye-kyo was 14 when this mistake was discovered. She returned to her real mother's poor working class home (her father died from blood cancer before she was born), while the middle class family left Korea for the States with their son and newly recovered daughter as an attempt to forget about the whole incident. From then on, Hye-kyo was separated from her "brother" (Seung-hun) and started her longing for him. Ten years later, the middle class family returned to South Korea and the "brother" and "sister" met again and fell in love. Seung-hun wanted to break his prior engagement with his fiancée to marry Hye-kyo. However, family and friends still saw them as "brother" and "sister" (despite the fact that they are not related in blood) and imposed great familial and social pressure on them to end their "improper" relationship. Later, Hye-kyo discovered that she had blood cancer. She hid her illness from Seung-hun and wished him happiness with his fiancé. Seung-hun, not knowing about Hye-kyo's illness, and under a guilty conscience to make it up to his fiancée (who had attempted suicide for him), consented to leave Hye-kyo and go back to the States with his fiancé. At the last moment, he found out about Hye-kyo's illness and rushed to the hospital. Families and friends were finally moved by their love for each other and did not prevent them from spending their last days together. Hye-kyo died from her illness soon and Seung-hun, having lost all hope and interest in life, was hit by a truck. To the Western audience, such a storyline may seem implausible and perhaps impossible. For instance, how can family and friends find any legitimate reasons to prevent Seung-hun and Hye-kyo from loving each other when they are not blood relatives? Seung-hun's father mentioned once that their "improper relationship" would bring disgrace to the family. His mother did not support their union, either, as she could not bear to see the "brother-sister" relationship being transformed into a romantic, sexual relationship. She became ill, tormented by her own guilty feelings: she blamed herself for not taking Hye-kyo with her to the States ten years ago and she thought that their "love" for each other was a tragic distortion of their original brotherly and sisterly feelings due to their long separation. On the other hand, Seung-hun felt guilty for breaking his prior promise to his fiancé. Hye-kyo was also full of guilty feelings for she felt that they were hurting everybody who cared about them. Almost 90% of the time when the couple talked to each other, they were in tears and were deeply tormented by the conflict between their perceived obligations towards family and friends who loved them and their strong desire to stay together. At one point, they decided to part so that "no one would get hurt any more" (without admitting that they themselves were deeply hurt). Such self-negating actions were coupled with an unquestioning acceptance of the legitimacy of the familial and social demands on them. Is the current South Korean society very much against the development of an autonomous individual and the individual's self-determining actions? On this issue, Korean cultural studies scholar Lee Dong-hoo had the following comments: Many Korean dramas, especially daily soap operas, put values on relationships, such as family relationship and friendship. Even a success story, which emphasizes one's own will to succeed, doesn't neglect the aspect of human relationships. … The traditional Confucianist ethics or patriarchal ideology can be found in the dramas' emphasis on relationship or one's social role. And I think that keeping good relationships is one of the survival strategies in Korea. The Korean society has been maintained by the closely connected social nets. The dramas may (unconsciously) reflect this reality. Lee's remarks about the importance of Confucianism in the Korean society are evidenced in the long-term activities of the well-organised Confucianist society ("Confucian Forest"), which maintains special schools in major cities and counties, offering instruction in Confucianist ethics, rituals and practices (Wu 27). Another example of Confucianist relational ethics can be found in the recent rejection by the South Korean parliament of the nominated female prime minister; one of the reasons quoted is that her son has chosen to be an American citizen (Nan 26). Before moving on to a discussion of the ideological implications of the tragic ending in Autumn, let us first look at another recent popular TV romance drama, Friends, which was jointly produced by Japanese and South Korean television companies. Interestingly, Friends did not start with a scene in Korea or Japan but with the Victorian Harbor scene in Hong Kong, with spectacular cosmopolitan skyscrapers in the background, and a Western-style saxophonist playing Jazz music in a busy street corner. Tomoko, a tourist from Japan, was left on her own by her colleague who had travelled with her on holiday but was keen to see her boyfriend who worked in Hong Kong. Soon, Tomoko was robbed of her handbag in a busy street. In chasing the robber, she mistook Kim as the culprit. After the misunderstanding was cleared up, they became friends. Kim was a college student from South Korea and an active member of the Film society in his university. He was in Hong Kong trying to shoot his first and last movie on a shoestring budget (last because he had decided to give up film-making after this to conform to his father's wish for him to run the family business). Tomoko agreed to help Kim by acting in his movie, which was about a young woman running and searching for true love in the busy streets of a foreign place (Hong Kong). After the short stay in Hong Kong, they returned to Japan and Korea respectively and started their e-mail correspondence. Soon they fell in love. Tomoko felt that corresponding with Kim made her able to like herself again. Coming from a divorced, single-parent family and not doing very well in school, she had tried to commit suicide before. Her lowly, routine job as a sales assistant in a big department store in Tokyo also gave her little satisfaction and purpose in life. However, after starting her romance with Kim, Tomoko seemed to have regained confidence in herself and a purpose in life -- she started taking lessons in the Korean language, worked very hard and finally succeeded in becoming a tour guide for Korean trips so that she could move to South Korea. Likewise, Kim found that he could become himself again when he was with Tomoko. Tomoko encouraged him to pursue his dream of becoming a movie director. However, aggravating family pressure later made Kim wonder whether he was right in defying his father's wishes (by pursuing a film career and loving a Japanese woman) and he blamed Tomoko for his strained relationship with his father. Tomoko, dejected and heart-broken, returned to Japan. Kim, having lost Tomoko, came to his senses and returned to his low-paid job as a film production assistant. Finally he succeeded in gaining a prize for his movie and his parents came to the award ceremony indicating a softening on the part of his father, who finally came to recognise the value of, and his passion for, film work. Kim later became re-united with Tomoko. The happy ending of Friends stands in sharp contrast with the tragic ending of Autumn. The simulated ending of Friends reflects "imaginary realism", one of the newly appropriated strategies based on marketing considerations found in the recent hugely successful blockbuster movies produced in South Korea; it "enables [one] to escape the restrictions of reality without losing a sense of the real" (Lee 12). In Autumn, Hye-kyo frequently said to Seung-hun that their actions would be punished and she later remarked that her illness was a punishment for hurting other people. This tragic ending thus seems to have the ideological, didactic effect of teaching about the punishment for violating the Confucianist social order. Friends, on the other hand, seems to use the hybrid, third space created by the cosmopolitan scene and Western symbols (the Western street musician playing jazz) in Hong Kong (a former British colony which claims itself to be "the Manhattan of Asia") to fabricate a modernised, Westernised and yet still Asian background for the love story to start in. Tomoko was instrumental in inducing Kim to follow his dream, to become the person he really wanted to be. Kim's subsequent success which helped win the acceptance of his father symbolises the possibility of the maturing of the self-determining subject in the new, globalised economic order (Kim's superior in Kim's military service once encouraged him to follow his passion and contribute to the film-making industry to bring glory to the nation) and the possible gradual transition from Confucianism to a certain form of nationalist liberalism in South Korea (e.g., following one's dream and contributing to national glory simultaneously), under the influence of seemingly more Wesernised neighbouring societies (e.g., Japan, Hong Kong). Autumn and Friends seem to represent two different possible stances towards the traditional order at this historical juncture when South Korea is experiencing enormous economic success and going through modernisation and a certain degree of Westernisation that come with its participation in the global economic order. Sociocultural tensions, conflicts and resolutions are simulated and explored in the relatively safe, imaginary space of popular TV dramas, which apart from playing their economic part in a highly successful national media industry, also play an important role in engaging the transnational public (e.g., audiences in East Asian societies which share a Confucianist tradition) with sociocultural issues in an imaginary space. As in the feminist retelling and re-staging of the traditional Chinese opera Butterfly Lovers in newly formed Communist China in the 1950s to explore the self-determining subject and autonomous actions of the female protagonist (Li), these Korean TV dramas seem to provide an important public space for the explorations of a society's cultural ethos and the contested issues of modernity, Westernisation and cosmopolitanisation. They reflect the articulation of different (contradictory) cultural, economic and historical forces and their potential constitutive impact on the future sociocultural landscape of East Asian societies awaits further research. Notes For instance, the media in Hong Kong and China readily talk of the coming of the "Korean Wave" and the names of Korean TV idols such as Song Hye-kyo, Song Seung-hun and Won Bin (who co-starred in Autumn) are familiar to many Chinese young people. The final episode of Autumn aired on Asia Television (ATV) in August 2002 had attracted as high as 70% of that night's television audience in Hong Kong, a rare phenomenon that ATV hurried to boast of. References Lee, Dong-Hoo. "Relationships in Korean Dramas". E-mail communication to the author, 6 August 2002. Lee, Sooyeon. Explaining the South Korean blockbuster movies: An industrial and textual analysis. Unpublished manuscript. Korean Women's Development Institute, South Korea, 2002. Li, Siu Leung. Cross-dressing in Chinese opera. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong Press, 2001. Nan, Li Ming. "Broken dream of female prime minister in a sad South Korea [in Chinese]." Yazhou Zhoukan—The International Chinese Newsweekly, 12-18 August 2002: 26. Wu, Le Shan. "Female prime minister in South Korea's new era [in Chinese]." Yazhou Zhoukan—The International Chinese Newsweekly, 22-28 July 2002: 26-27. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Lin, Angel M. Y.. "Modernity and the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Lin.html &gt. Chicago Style Lin, Angel M. Y., "Modernity and the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Lin.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Lin, Angel M. Y.. (2002) Modernity and the Self. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Lin.html &gt ([your date of access]).

IntroductionMusicians and critics regard Australian jazz as vibrant and creative (Shand; Chessher; Rechniewski). From its tentative beginnings in the early twentieth century (Whiteoak), jazz has become a major aspect of Australia’s music and performance. Due to the large distances separating cities and towns, its development has been influenced by geographical isolation (Nikolsky; Chessher; Clare; Johnson; Stevens; McGuiness). While major cities have been the central hubs, it is increasingly acknowledged that regional centres also provide avenues for jazz performance (Curtis).This article discusses findings relating to transient musical populations shaped by geographical conditions, venue issues that are peculiar to the Northern region, and finally the challenges of cultural and parochial mindsets that North Queensland jazz musicians encounter in performance.Cairns and MackayCairns and Mackay are regional centres on the coast of Queensland, Australia. Cairns – population 156,901 in 2016 (ABS) – is a world famous tourist destination situated on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef (Thorp). Mackay – population 114,969 in 2016 (ABS) – is a lesser-known community with an economy largely underpinned by the sugar cane and coal mining industries (Rolfe et al. 138). Both communities lie North of the capital city Brisbane – Mackay in the heart of Central Queensland, and Cairns as the unofficial capital of Far North Queensland. Mackay and Cairns were selected for this study, not on representational grounds, but because they provide an opportunity to learn through case studies. Stake notes that “potential for learning is a different and sometimes superior criterion to representativeness,” adding, “that may mean taking the one most accessible or the one we can spend the most time with (451).”Musically, both regional centres have a number of venues that promote live music, however, only Cairns has a dedicated jazz club, the Cairns Jazz Club (CJC). Each has a community convention centre that brings high-calibre touring musicians to the region, including jazz musicians.Mackay is home to the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music (CQCM) a part of the Central Queensland University that has offered conservatoire-style degree programs in jazz, contemporary music and theatre for over twenty-five years. Cairns does not have any providers of tertiary jazz qualifications.MethodologySemi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-two significant individuals associated with the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns over a twelve-month period from 2015 to 2016. Twelve of the interviewees were living in Cairns at the time, and ten were living in Mackay. The selection of interviewees was influenced by personal knowledge of key individuals, historical records located at the CQCM, and from a study by (Mitchell), who identified important figures in the Cairns jazz scene. The study participants included members of professional jazz ensembles, dedicated jazz audience members and jazz educators. None of the participants who were interviewed relied solely on the performance of jazz as their main occupation. All of the musicians combined teaching duties with music-making in several genres including rock, jazz, Latin and funk, as well as work in the recording and producing of recorded music. Combining the performance of jazz and commercial musical styles is a common and often crucial part of being a musician in a regional centre due to the low demand for any one specific genre (Luckman et al. 630). The interview data that was gathered during the study’s data collection phase was analysed for themes using the grounded theory research method (Charmaz). The following sections will discuss three areas of findings relating to some of the unique North Queensland influences that have impacted the development and sustainability of the two regional jazz communities.Transient Musical PopulationsThe prospect of living in North Queensland is an alluring proposition for many people. According to the participants in this study, the combination of work and a tropical lifestyle attracts people from all over the country to Cairns and Mackay, but this influx is matched by a high population turnover. Many musicians who move into the region soon move away again. High population turnover is a characteristic of several Northern regional centres such as the city of Darwin (Luckman, Gibson and Lea 12). The high growth and high population turnover in Cairns, in particular, was one of the highest in the country between 2006 and 2011 (ABS). The study participants in both regions believed that the transient nature of the local population is detrimental to the development and sustainability of the jazz communities. One participant described the situation in Cairns this way: “The tropics sort of lure them up there, tease them with all of the beauty and nature, and then spit them out when they realise it’s not what they imagined (interviewee 1, 24 Aug. 2016).” Looking more broadly to other coastal regional areas of Australia, there is evidence of the counter-urban flow of professionals and artists seeking out a region’s “natural and cultural environment” (Gibson 339). On the far North coast of New South Wales, Gibson examined how the climate, natural surroundings and cultural charms attracted city dwellers to that region (337). Similarly, most of the participants in this study mentioned lifestyle choices such as raising a family and living in the tropics as reasons to move to Cairns or Mackay. The prospect of working in the tourism and hospitality industry was found to be another common reason for musicians to move to Cairns in particular. In contrast to some studies (Salazar; Conradson and Latham) where it was found that the middle- to upper-classes formed the majority of lifestyle migrants, the migrating musicians identified by this study were mostly low-income earners seeking a combination of music work and other types of employment outside the music industry. There have been studies that have explored and critically reviewed the theoretical frameworks behind lifestyle migration (Benson and Osbaldiston) including the examination of issues and the motivation to ‘lifestyle migrate’. What is interesting in this current study is the focus of discussion on the post-migration effects. Study participants believe that most of the musicians who move into their region leave soon afterwards because of their disillusionment with the local music industry. Despite the lure of musical jobs through the tourism and hospitality industry, local musicians in Cairns tend to believe there is less work than imagined. Pub rock duos and DJs have taken most of the performance opportunities, which makes it hard for new musicians to compete.The study also reveals that Cairns jazz musicians consider it more difficult to find and collaborate with quality newcomers. This may be attributed to the smaller jazz communities’ demand for players of specific instruments. One participant explained, “There’s another bass player that just moved here, but he only plays by ear, so when people want to play charts and new songs, he can’t do it so it's hard finding the right guys up here at times (interviewee 2, 23 Aug. 2016).” Cairns and Mackay participants agreed that the difficulty of finding and retaining quality musicians in the region impacted on the ability of certain groups to be sustainable. One participant added, “It’s such a small pool of musicians, at the moment, I've got a new project ready to go and I've got two percussionists, but I need a bass player, but there is no bass player that I'm willing to work with (interviewee 3, 24 Aug. 2016).” The same participant has been fortunate over the years, performing with a different local group whose members have permanently stayed in the Cairns region, however, forging new musical pathways and new groups seemed challenging due to the lack of musical skills in some of the potential musicians.In Mackay, the study revealed a smaller influx of new musicians to the region, and study participants experienced the same difficulties forming groups and retaining members as their Cairns counterparts. One participant, who found it difficult to run a Big Band as well as a smaller jazz ensemble because of the transient population, claimed that many local musicians were lured to metropolitan centres for university or work.Study participants in both Northern centres appeared to have developed a tolerance and adaptability for their regional challenges. While this article does not aim to suggest a solution to the issues they described, one interesting finding that emerged in both Cairns and Mackay was the musicians’ ability to minimise some of the effects of the transient population. Some musicians found that it was more manageable to sustain a band by forming smaller groups such as duos, trios and quartets. An example was observed in Mackay, where one participant’s Big Band was a standard seventeen-piece group. The loss of players was a constant source of anxiety for the performers. Changing to a smaller ensemble produced a sense of sustainability that satisfied the group. In Cairns, one participant found that if the core musicians in the group (bass, drums and vocals) were permanent local residents, they could manage to use musicians passing through the region, which had minimal impact on the running of the group. For example, the Latin band will have different horn players sit in from time to time. When those performers leave, the impact on the group is minimal because the rhythm section is comprised of long-term Cairns residents.Venue Conditions Heat UpAt the Cape York Hotel in Cairns, musicians and audience members claimed that it was uncomfortable to perform or attend Sunday afternoon jazz gigs during the Cairns summer due to the high temperatures and non air-conditioned venues. This impact of the physical environment on the service process in a venue was first modelled and coined the ‘Servicescape’ by Bitner (57). The framework, which includes physical dimensions like temperature, noise, space/function and signage, has also been further investigated in other literature (Minor et al.; Kubacki; Turley and Fugate). This model is relevant to this study because it clearly affects the musician’s ability to perform music in the Northern climate and attract audiences. One of the regular musicians at the Cape York Hotel commented: So you’re thinking, ‘Well, I’m starting to create something here, people are starting to show up’, but then you see it just dwindling away and then you get two or three weeks of hideously hot weather, and then like last Sunday, by the time I went on in the first set, my shirt was sticking to me like tissue paper… I set up a gig, a three-hour gig with my trio, and if it’s air conditioned you’re likely to get people but if it’s like the Cape York, which is not air conditioned, and you’re out in the beer garden with a tin roof over the top with big fans, it’s hideous‘. (Interviewee 4, 24 Aug. 2016)The availability of venues that offer live jazz is limited in both regions. The issue was twofold: firstly, the limited availability of a larger venue to cater for the ensembles was deemed problematic; and secondly, the venue manager needed to pay for the services of the club, which contributed to its running costs. In Cairns, the Cape York Hotel has provided the local CJC with an outdoor beer garden as a venue for their regular Sunday performances since 2015. The president of the CJC commented on the struggle for the club to find a suitable venue for their musicians and patrons. The club has had residencies in multiple venues over the last thirty years with varying success. It appears that the club has had to endure these conditions in order to provide their musicians and audiences an outlet for jazz performance. This dedication to their art form and sense of resilience appears to be a regular theme for these Northern jazz musicians.Minor et al. (7) recommended that live music organisers needed to consider offering different physical environments for different events (7). For example, a venue that caters for a swing band might include a dance floor for potential dancers or if a venue catered for a sit down jazz show, the venue might like to choose the best acoustic environment to best support the sound of the ensemble. The research showed that customers have different reasons for attending events, and in relation to the Cape York Hotel, the majority of the customers were the CJC members who simply wanted to enjoy their jazz club performances in an air conditioned environment with optimal acoustics as the priority. Although not ideal, the majority of the CJC members still attended during the summer months and endured the high temperatures due to a lack of venue suitability.Parochial MindsetsOne of the challenging issues faced by many of the participants in both regions was the perceived cultural divide between jazz aficionados and general patrons at many venues. While larger centres in Australia have enjoyed an international reputation as creative hubs for jazz such as Melbourne and Sydney (Shand), the majority of participants in this study believed that a significant portion of the general public is quite parochial in their views on various musical styles including jazz. Coined the ‘bogan factor’, one participant explained, “I call it the bogan factor. Do you think that's an academic term? It is now” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). They also commented on dominant cultural choices of residents in these regions: “It's North Queensland, it's a sport orientated, 4WD dominated place. Culturally they are the main things that people are attracted to” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). These cultural preferences appear to affect the performance opportunities for the participants in Cairns and Mackay.Waitt and Gibson explored how the Wollongong region was chosen as an area for investigation to see if city size mattered for creativity and creativity-led regeneration (1224). With the ‘Creative Class’ framework in mind (Florida), the researchers found that Wollongong’s primarily blue-collar industrial identity was a complex mixture of cultural pursuits including the arts, sport and working class ideals (Waitt and Gibson 1241). This finding is consistent with the comments of study participants from Cairns and Mackay who believed that the identities of their regions were strongly influenced by sport and industries like mining and farming. One Mackay participant added, “I think our culture, in itself, would need to change to turn more people to jazz. I can’t see that happening. That’s Australia. You’re fighting against 200 years of sport” (interviewee 6, 12 Feb. 2016). Performing in Mackay or Cairns in venues that attract various demographics can make it difficult for musicians playing jazz. A Cairns participant added, “As Ingrid James once told me, ‘It's North Queensland, you’ve got an audience of tradesman, they don't get it’. It's silly to think it's going to ever change” (interviewee 7, 26 Aug. 2016). One Mackay participant believed that the lack of appreciation for jazz in regional areas was largely due to a lack of exposure to the art form. Most people grow up listening to other styles of music in their households.Another participant made the point that regardless of the region’s cultural and leisure-time preferences, if a jazz band is playing in a football club, you must expect it to be unpopular. Many of the research participants emphasised that playing in a suitable venue is paramount for developing a consistent and attentive audience. Choosing a venue that values and promotes the style of jazz music that the musicians are performing could help to attract more jazz fans and therefore build a sustainable jazz community.Refreshingly, this study revealed that musicians in both regions showed considerable resilience in dealing with the issue of parochial mindsets, and they have implemented methods to help educate their audiences. The audience plays a significant part in the development and future of a jazz community (Becker; Martin). For the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Mackay, part of the ethos of the institution is to provide music performance and educational opportunities to the region. One of the lecturers who made a significant contribution to the design of the ensemble program had a clear vision to combine jazz and popular music styles in order to connect with a regional audience. He explained, “The popular music strand of the jazz program and what we called the commercial ensembles was very much birthed out of that concept of creating a connection with the community and making us more accessible in the shortest amount of time, which then enabled us to expose people to jazz” (interviewee 8, 20 Mar. 2016).In a similar vein, several Cairns musicians commented on how they engaged with their audiences through education. Some musicians attempted to converse with the patrons on the comparative elements of jazz and non-jazz styles, which helped to instil some appreciation in patrons with little jazz knowledge. One participant cited that although not all patrons were interested in an education at a pub, some became regular attendees and showed greater appreciation for the different jazz styles. These findings align with other studies (Radbourne and Arthurs; Kubacki; Kubacki et al.), who found that audiences tend to return to arts organizations or events more regularly if they feel connected to the experience (Kubacki et al. 409).ConclusionThe Cairns and Mackay jazz musicians who were interviewed in this study revealed some innovative approaches for sustaining their art form in North Queensland. The participants discussed creative solutions for minimising the influence of a transient musician population as well as overcoming some of the parochial mindsets in the community through education. The North Queensland summer months proved to be a struggle for musicians and audience members alike in Cairns in particular, but resilience and commitment to the music and the social network of jazz performers seemed to override this obstacle. Although this article presents just a subset of the findings from a study of the development and sustainability of the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns, it opens the way for further investigation into the unique issues faced. Deeper understanding of these issues could contribute to the ongoing development and sustainability of jazz communities in regional Australia.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. "Mackay (Statistical Area 2), Cairns (R) (Statistical Local Area), Census 2016." Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.———. "Perspectives on Regional Australia: Population Growth and Turnover in Local Government Areas (Lgas), 2006-2011." Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.Becker, H. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982.Benson, Michaela, and Nick Osbaldiston. "Toward a Critical Sociology of Lifestyle Migration: Reconceptualizing Migration and the Search for a Better Way of Life." The Sociological Review 64.3 (2016): 407-23.Bitner, Mary Jo. 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"Adapting Musicology for Commercial Outcomes." 9th International Conference on Arts and Cultural Management (AIMAC 2007), 2007.Rechniewski, Peter. The Permanent Underground: Australian Contemporary Jazz in the New Millennium. Platform Papers 16. Redfern, NSW: Currency House, 2008. Rolfe, John, et al. "Lessons from the Social and Economic Impacts of the Mining Boom in the Bowen Basin 2004-2006." Australasian Journal of Regional Studies 13.2 (2007): 134-53. Salazar, Noel B. "Migrating Imaginaries of a Better Life … until Paradise Finds You." Understanding Lifestyle Migration. Springer, 2014. 119-38. Shand, J. Jazz: The Australian Accent. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009.Stake, Robert E. "Qualitative Case Studies." The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005. 443-66. Stevens, Timothy. "The Red Onion Jazz Band at the 1963 Australian Jazz Convention." Musicology Australia 24.1 (2001): 35-61. Thorp, Justine. 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If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and homogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circumstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circumstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisement, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. 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Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.