Education, Inequality And Social Identity

Education, Inequality and Social Identity

Education, Inequality and Social Identity Edited by Lawrence Angus

The Falmer Press (A member of the Taylor & Francis Group) Washington, D.C. • London

USA The Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007 UK The Falmer Press, 4 John St, London WC1N 2ET © Selection and editorial material copyright L.Angus 1993 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publisher. First published 1993 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” A catalogue record of this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-97387-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0 75070 172 2 cased Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available on request Jacket design by Caroline Archer

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

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Introduction

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Educational Inequality and Cultural Conflict Bruce WilsonJohanna Wyn

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Re-visioning Empowerment with the Research Subject and the ‘At Risk’ Mary O’Dowd

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Women in a Male Domain: Gender and Organizational Culture in a Christian Brothers College Lawrence Angus

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Cool Guys, Swots and Wimps: The Interplay of Masculinity and Education Robert Connell

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Inside the Disadvantaged Schools Program: The Politics of Practical Policy-making Vivian WhiteKenneth Johnston

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Cultural Perspectives on Work and Schoolwork in an Australian Inner-city Boys’ High School James Walker

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Reproducing Vocationalism in Secondary Schools: Marginalization in Practical Workshops Robert Mealyea

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List of Contributors

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Index

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Series Editor’s Preface

Ethnography is often portrayed by its critics as ‘soft-edged’. Inasmuch that it is based on ‘taking’ rather than ‘making’ problems it can be seen to fail to address major social problems in favour of smaller scale personal worries. But not all ethnography is like that. This book is not like that. After all, C. Wright-Mills argued that the promise of the sociological imagination lies in the linking of personal troubles with social issues, specific milieux with structural changes. Good ethnography does not have to be short sighted. When well done it can ‘deliver the goods’, in Wright-Mills’ terms, more effectively than many other social science methodologies. This collection is concerned with inequality; poverty, social class, gender (male and female) and ethnicity. It explores identity construction, changes in social relations, life histories, and the social and cultural roles of teachers. There is also a strong reflexive theme running through the papers. Some of the major figures in Australian qualitative research are represented here and the collection as a whole provides a crucial, state of the art overview of the contribution of ethnography to our understanding of the experience and processes of inequality in education and the construction of diverse social identities. Stephen J. Ball King’s College London University of London

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This book is a collection of papers written by Australian ethnographers who are exploring issues of education and inequality in Australian society, and ways in which inequality can best be investigated and combatted. In individual chapters, authors reflect upon major studies or ongoing projects with which they are engaged. Chapters are not summaries of the larger studies or projects, but they do indicate their nature and flavour, and convey a sense of their thickness and richness. Each chapter has its own unity and argument, although major substantive, theoretical or empirical issues that have arisen from the large projects, or in the authors’ reflection upon them, are addressed. In short, authors have generally reflected upon their theoretically-informed, methodologically interesting and substantial ethnographic projects in ways which throw light upon particular aspects of education and inequality. Educational inequality has been a major focus of researchers in Australia and elsewhere for several decades. Mainly, the research has focused on the impact of poverty, social class, gender or ethnicity on the educational opportunities and outcomes of young people. In this book, class, gender and ethnicity are still regarded as crucial but the emphasis is upon lived experience, subjectivity and identity formation in the constructions of relationships which are characterized by or contribute to forms of inequality. In some chapters the experiences of young people who seem disadvantaged in Australian society are examined. Others focus on the production of attitudes and subjectivities that sustain unequal treatment. This general issue is examined particularly in relation to the construction of gender attitudes. Ways in which teachers encounter and grapple with issues of inequality, and experience the effects of inequality on themselves and their students, are also investigated in several chapters. A common theme in this last group of chapters is the question of ‘what it means to be a teacher’ in such circumstances. The first two chapters deal in different ways with the experiences and identity constructions of young people. The opening chapter by Bruce Wilson and Johanna Wyn presents a reflective overview of an ongoing project in which a number of case studies have been undertaken in a longitudinal investigation of what the authors call ‘social division’. This term is a shorthand for the interaction of class, gender and ethnic relations which lead to or sustain patterns of advantage and disadvantage. Within their relational approach, Wilson and Wyn’s particular concern is with the impact of such interaction on educational outcomes and on young people’s sense of ‘livelihood’. This latter term encompasses the young people’s attitudes towards and expectations of gaining work or careers, and their sense of dignity and worth. The term is intended to capture an important element of the complex cultural identity of young people whose attempts to achieve livelihood, it is argued, are influenced by structural and cultural inequality. This perspective is illustrated by detailed

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INTRODUCTION

case studies of two young women, the case being taken from separate studies that are linked by the common themes of social division and livelihood. Both young women, from different backgrounds, experience forms of cultural conflict, but their different experiences illustrate contrasts in the circumstances and orientations of young people, and the variable impact of complex class and gender relations on people’s lives. Mary O’Dowd also investigates social division and social formation in her chapter on young people who are defined as being ‘at risk’. She reminds us forcefully that researcher interpretations and explanations of the nature of behaviour of the participants in ethnographic inquiry are extremely problematic. In the case of the young people in her research, not only were such interpretations likely to be wrong, but also disempowering of the young people being studied—even though her intention as researcher was to empower them. Through re-visiting participants and a ‘re-visioning’ of the research, this time informed by post-modernist and feminist perspectives, O’Dowd deconstructs the way in which her own perceptions and beliefs influenced both what she saw as a researcher and how she interpreted what she had ‘seen’. Such re-visioning leads her to a more complex yet provisional reinterpretation of the relationship between researcher and researched. It also enables her to reconceptualize the notion of ‘at risk’ from a holistic perspective and to consider the relevance of the reinterpreted findings to the problematic notion of empowerment of ‘victims’ of inequality in society. The following two chapters are concerned with changes in gender relations and the construction of dominant forms of masculinity in schools. My own chapter is an account of gender inequality and the formation of gender subjectivities. In it I reflect upon and re-visit data that were collected during a critical ethnographic study over several years in a Catholic School for boys. Earlier publications from that study, including my Continuity and Change in Catholic Schooling (Falmer Press, Lewes, 1988) which is also published in Falmer’s ‘Explorations in Ethnography’ Series, have been concerned mainly with constructions of social class, religion and high-status knowledge and their part in social and cultural production and reproduction. As in O’Dowd’s chapter, but without the researcher being centred as explicitly in the inquiry, aspects of the ethnography are reinterpreted in an attempt to explain the school as a site of production of masculinities and particular gender relations. Ethnography is employed as a means of organizational analysis, and gender dynamics are regarded as part of a contested and problematic organizational culture. Part of this organizational culture, according to the argument, is a ‘gender regime’, the ‘rules’ of which are sustained and recreated through participants’ everyday actions and discourses and also through largely entrenched expectations regarding, amongst other things, the type of Catholic boy that the school should produce, the nature of discipline within it, and its hierarchical organization. These are highlighted in the chapter and located in relation to broader social and gender structures by examining responses of women teachers to the gender regime they encounter and mediate at the school. The chapter concludes with a discussion of possibilities of organizational reform which may enhance greater gender equality. In the following chapter by Robert Connell, whose work on gender and power is drawn upon in my chapter, restrospective data on the life-histories of two groups of men—one from the working class and the other from more affluent backgrounds but engaged in environmental politics— illustrate ways in which the school is a site of both the construction and differentiation of masculinities. The data are drawn from a larger study of contemporary changes in masculinity in

INTRODUCTION

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which schooling is located in large social processes. For unemployed working-class men, ‘getting into trouble’ at school was part of a process of constructing masculinity through conflict with the institutional authority of the school. For them, the school, as part of the state, represented a power they could not participate in. For other working-class boys, however, the school afforded an opportunity for them to embrace a project of mobility. As an element of this, they constructed a masculinity organized around themes of rationality and responsibility that seem to be associated with the sense of professionalism that was more familiar in the backgrounds of the relatively affluent group. Members of the group of middle-class environmentalists, however, had generally rejected the abstracted knowledge and bureaucratic authority that largely characterizes ‘professional’ versions of masculinity. Many of this group had also encountered feminist texts and feminism, but their most common reaction to it was a demobilizing guilt. As Connell sees it, such data indicate that a major opportunity for educational action to address gender inequality exists. However, there are difficulties in designing appropriate educational strategies. Broadly, the evidence suggests that the effects of streaming and failure, authority patterns, the academic curriculum and definitions of knowledge that are generally encountered in schools have a stronger effect on the construction of masculinity than formal equity programs of courses dealing with gender. This suggests to Connell that curricula need to be designed which will broaden boys’ sources of information about sexuality and gender, and that programs need to be designed that involve more than open ended problem identification. They must allow for practical accomplishments in relation to gender issues. The final three chapters address in various ways the problematic social positioning and cultural constructions of teachers in schools. In the first of these, Viv White and Ken Johnston, like Connell, employ life histories in an attempt to gain insights into the formation and development of particular identities or cultures. White and Johnston present an examination of the major program that the Commonwealth Government of Australia has funded since 1975 in its attempt to combat inequalities in education. Their focus is upon the Disadvantaged Schools Program and the experiences of key educational activists who have worked within it. They examine the complex notion of ‘educational practice’ and the problematic question of ‘what counts as good educational practice within the contested assumptions and context of the Disadvantaged Schools Program’. The life histories reported in this chapter form part of a broader project in which mainly qualitative and ethnographic studies of aspects of the program are intended to provide a source of input into policy deliberations regarding its future. The activists, who, it is clear from this chapter, are influential in making, implementing, adapting and accommodating policy at multiple levels, reflect on their successes and failures in combatting inequality and on changes in their strategic thinking over time. The authors conclude with some comments about the policy significance of their study. An intensive ethnographic study over five years in ‘Stokeham Boys’ High School’, an ethnically diverse ‘disadvantaged’ working-class school in a crowded Australian urban setting, is reported in the next chapter by James Walker. Previous publications from the study, notably Walker’s influential Louts and Legends (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988), have been concerned with both the individual histories of boys and young men who participated in the ethnography, as well as with the identification and investigation of several broadly defined ‘youth cultures’ and ways in which these may have applications to curriculum. In his chapter written for this volume, Walker examines the intercultural relations between teachers and students at year 10 level at Stokeham. Their divergent

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INTRODUCTION

cultural backgrounds and perspectives, including differences induced by the social class and occupational backgrounds of teachers, were found to influence their attitudes to and participation in schoolwork and, in turn, the expectations and aspirations of students for future working life. Walker illustrates that broad notions of ‘being a student’ and ‘being a teacher’ were problematic at Stokeham. Educational outcomes were the products of strategies developed by both teachers and students. Some strategies led to cultural convergence and all of the strategies, Walker concludes, need to be understood in terms of their possibilities for engagement and the creation of options within the complex articulations which constitute the school as a social structure. One point that has been highlighted by many commentators on the reproduction of educational disadvantage is that a separation seems to occur in schooling between theory and practice, abstract and practical knowledge, head and hand. Because of the general dominance of the competitive academic curriculum, it is argued, abstract theoretical knowledge is generally privileged in schools and yet access to it controlled in such a way that social divisions are likely to be reinforced. In the final chapter Robert Mealyea indicates that it is not only educational elitists who support a distinction between abstract and practical knowledge. Mealyea claims that teachers of practical studies (trade subjects) engage in a complex process of identity construction in which their teacher training, past trade careers and socialization into the ranks of fellow trade teachers, produce a particular educational ideology which is characterized by narrow vocationalism. This claim is supported by evidence from his ethnography of a cohort of mature aged trainee teachers undergoing transition from tradesperson to teacher in Victoria. The study was conducted at a time when the Ministry of Education had released a set of proposals aimed at reforming traditional trade teaching in secondary schools. These encouraged a student-centred pedagogy and an emphasis on the ‘how and why’ of technological studies rather than on the acquisition of trade skills through the construction of useful objects from raw or processed materials. Mealyea shows how the trainees generally rejected the intentions of the reformers and closed ranks around a traditional image of ‘what it means to be a trade teacher’. The implications for educational inequality of a pedagogy which affirms manual work yet accepts and reinforces divisions between mental and manual work are discussed. Despite the somewhat different theoretical and methodological approaches displayed in the various chapters, all provide ‘explorations’ of particular issues and approaches in the study of inequality. There seems to be agreement from all authors represented here that inequality is in large part sustained by the construction of fragmented and diverse cultural identities which afford for their members differential access to status, knowledge and power in Australian society and social institutions such as schools. However, each of the chapters is informed also by questions about the nature of change. They are accounts of changing situations and of resistance to change in specific locales and contexts. The possibility of change which might contribute to greater equality is raised, not in the sense of direct policy prescriptions or applications but in the sense of alternative strategic possibilities for action for those who are victims of inequality or who seek to combat inequality.

1 Educational Inequality and Cultural Conflict Bruce Wilson and Johanna Wyn

Educational inequality has been a major priority of researchers in Australia for more than a quarter of a century. Generally speaking, they have focused on the impact of poverty, or of social class, or of gender, or of ethnicity or race on young people’s experience of education. Only rarely has research been conceptualized in a manner which has examined the impact of the interaction between the different dimensions of social division on educational outcomes. In 1982, Connell, Ashenden, Kessler and Dowsett published Making the Difference. The theoretical framework for their analysis relied on a concept of social division as a means of understanding the interaction of class and gender relations in shaping the educational careers and achievements of students from ruling-class and working-class families. Understanding the interplay of class relations and gender relations is one of the most difficult problems in the social sciences. There are deep problems about how to pose the problem in the first place, and what a solution might even look like… Both class and gender are historical systems, riddled with tensions and contradiction, and always subject to change. Indeed it may be better to think of them as structuring processes rather than ‘systems’, that is, ways in which social life is constantly being organised (and ruptured and disorganised) through time… The joint presence of gender and class, say for a working class boy, means a relationship between processes (Connell et al., 1982:179–81). Although the authors of Making the Difference do not take it far themselves, their introduction of the concept of social division has been very significant in directing attention towards a more sophisticated analysis of the lives of young people and their experiences of schooling. Their comparison of the family circumstances and the educational experiences of young people from ruling-and working-class backgrounds has illustrated that the ‘structuring processes’ to which they refer are marked not only by material differences but also by cultural conflict. Disparities in the material resources of different families clearly have significant consequences for the nature and extent of the participation of children in school (see Wilson and Wyn, 1989). However, the patterns of educational inequality reflect also the cultural conflict that is a fundamental part of social division, shaped not only by ethnicity and race, but also by the experience of class gender relations. The cultural significance of class and gender relations was readily apparent in our research on the ways in which young people approached the task of securing their adult status. The perspectives on school, work and relationships which young people expressed required a reassessment on our part of concepts drawn from conventional economics which has typically excluded the private realms of

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social life. Rather than giving analytic priority to forms of productive labour which earn a wage, we made use of a concept of livelihood, which enabled us to engage in an analysis which encompassed a more inclusive range of practices associated with adulthood. The contemporary demands of young people are not simply for a decent income but for work, the opportunity to demonstrate competence and make a contribution; not simply for an employment or training opportunity but to have a say in how it will be established; not simply to be part of the workforce, but to meet people and to develop friendships… This reveals the complexity of the goal of livelihood and that it cannot be reduced to a single element or ‘core’. While the notion of livelihood has a material basis (the need for a decent and respectable standard of living), its significance lies much more in the quality of life, the dignity and legitimacy which achieving a livelihood allows (Wilson and Wyn, 1987:12). The means by which young people obtain a livelihood are influenced significantly by the patterns of structural and cultural inequality. Schools are intimately involved in the processes of cultural formation, and as such, become arenas in which the tensions and conflicts of the cultural dimension of social division are of central importance. The kinds of knowledges, classroom language, teaching styles and assessment strategies which are given priority reflect values, assumptions and practices which operate in the interests of students from one type of background or another. Qualitative research methodology has proved a particularly useful means of exploring the cultural tensions which permeate the experience which many working-class young people have of schools. It has provided, in our research, distinctive insights into the perspectives which students (and their parents) from different backgrounds have on their schooling and their futures, and how they interpret the relationships between home, school and work. Shaping Futures (Wilson and Wyn, 1987) drew on evidence about educational inequality and livelihood possibilities that had been gathered cumulatively from six research projects. These issues are illustrated in this chapter, however, through a consideration of two case studies, both young women, taken from two different research projects, one undertaken in 1982 and the other in 1988. Although they differed in purpose, scale, and funding source, both projects were concerned with students in the middle years of secondary education and explored the orientations of young people towards their schooling and their futures. Both projects illuminated the scope and nature of social and educational inequality and the complexity of the material and cultural forces which shape educational participation and achievement. The two projects revealed a significant contrast in the circumstances and orientations of young people in the two periods. In particular, two dimensions to the altered circumstances are of relevance. The youth labour market has changed considerably through the 1980s, marked by a collapse in the full-time employment opportunities for young people. During the 1970s, unemployment amongst young people increased significantly, rising dramatically in 1982. Although there has been some improvement since then, the jobs that do exist are largely part-time with limited relevance for long-term career development (Sweet, 1987). The types of full-time employment that are available for young people, and their selection criteria, reflect a process of industry restructuring which has placed a priority on capital-rather than labour-intensive production.

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Secondly, the economic pressures on the majority of the population are much greater now, generally speaking, than they were at the start of the decade. Although employment improved overall during the decade, poor international trade figures, inflation, high interest rates and tight fiscal restrain have meant that a sense of economic uncertainty and impending doom have dominated discussions about public policy. An important consequence of both these trends has been increasing retention into the senior years of schooling of young people who would have preferred to enter the labour market instead. During the 1980s government policy has strongly emphasized the importance of encouraging as many young people as possible to complete a full secondary education (see Wilson and Wyn, 1987; and Wilson and Wyn, 1989). The two case studies do much more than provide a useful basis for a discussion of educational inequality. They demonstrate the very real impact which class and gender relations and economic crisis can have on people’s lives. The subjects of the case studies are not exceptional. Rather, they exemplify the stories of many ‘ordinary’ young Australians who must grapple with complex social and economic forces, as they strive to establish their legitimacy as adults in one social context or another. Some of the major theoretical and methodological issues which arise from this analysis of the experiences and views of these young people are explored in the latter part of the chapter. The Research Background Textbooks on methodology are often written as though the planning and implementation of a research project is a discrete activity, with a life of its own. In practical terms, however, the opportunity to conduct a single, self-contained project on the scale that is necessary to make a substantial contribution to empirical knowledge and theoretical development depends on having a level of resources and time which is only rarely available. Given that the resources for research have been increasingly constrained in recent years, there is a greater need than ever to ensure that research work is conducted coherently, so that more general concerns, issues and principles are pursued in successive projects. Qualitative research especially is time-consuming and demanding of human resources. Our experience has demonstrated that particular theoretical and policy issues can be explored through the application of qualitative research strategies across a series of projects, each of which has had more specific scope. Hence, our ‘explorations in ethnography’ have drawn on research projects undertaken with the support of contract funding: ‘small’ projects which have taken between three and twelve months, on a limited number of sites with two or three researchers working together. In each of these projects, there was an emphasis on gathering data on the family backgrounds of young people and their attitudes to school, ideas about future employment or other activities, and on understanding how the objectives these young people have for the future might be achieved. Our interests focused on exploring the relationships between family background and experience, gender and class relations, the strategies adopted for negotiating schooling, and the hopes of the young people for their futures. Data was gathered primarily from semi-structured and unstructured interviews; observation; and documentary materials. A key question throughout the projects was how analysis of the data on cultural conflict might influence the development of appropriate policy and practical initiatives. What were the possibilities of changing the community, school and classroom processes which contributed to the production

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and maintenance of social division in Australia? The following case studies have assisted us to formulate substantial responses to these questions. Two Case Studies The first case study was compiled in a project designed to report on student and parent perspectives on schooling. The project was part of a process of curriculum review amongst six post-primary schools within a particular sub-region, on the outer fringe of a large metropolitan area. Many students were from southern European backgrounds, mostly Macedonian, Italian and Greek, with parents who worked in the factories on the nearby industrial estates or in local businesses. Some had ‘white collar’ jobs in administration or as salespeople. Much of the curriculum was still based on traditional subject areas, but there was some opportunity for students to take more initiative in shaping their own learning (see Wilson and Wyn, 1987). Angela was 15 years old, in year 10. Her father was Macedonian and her mother from Greece, but both had lived in Australia for well over twenty years. Angela had two sisters, both younger than herself. She had been to Greece twice but, despite having had wonderful times there, she would prefer to live in Australia. Angela enjoyed her school and liked the teachers: They are helpful’. Whilst her friends also liked school, many would have preferred to leave and get a job. Angela herself was planning to stay at school for a couple more years partly because of her parents’ views but also because she was not clear about what she would want to do anyway. She was not happy at the thought that some of her friends might leave school, thinking: ‘I would wonder about whether I should go on or not but then after about a week or two I would be alright’. Angela had no clear idea about the sort of job she would want for herself. She had chosen to do work experience at a local kindergarten where ‘…we had little kids painting and drawing, fixing up jigsaw puzzles with them, things like that… I really enjoyed that so I have that in mind… You have to finish school and then do a three-year course’. She also wanted to explore computer programming as she had enjoyed her early contact with computers at the school. ‘We’ve got computers at school and last year we were doing these games on it and I liked it. It was good’. When it came to the crunch, school’s value to her depended on whether it helped kids to get a job. She had not given much thought to the question of leaving school before reaching year 12, and she seemed a touch confused about how the transition from school to work might be made: ‘Kids should stay at school until they get a job… School finishes at 3.30 p.m., you can look for a job then’. Her father worked as a cleaner for the state railways and her mother as a nurse at a hospital, but she did not know much about their work. While her mother was happy for Angela to become a kindergarten teacher, her father wanted her to be ‘something higher than that’. Angela: He wants me to be a high school teacher or a lawyer or something like that. Interviewer: And why do you say higher? Angela: I don’t know, it’s just how he says it. Angela persisted in wanting to be a kindergarten teacher. Getting employment was important to her, and she and her friends did spend a lot of time talking about ‘wanting jobs ‘n’ that’.

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Angela: We talk about jobs and what we really want to do ‘n’ that and we still don’t really know. We’re still sort of muddled up. There is so much to do and you don’t know what to do. A couple of years ago I wanted to do something and then I changed to something else and you just keep on changing, you don’t know. My friends change their minds. She did not know many unemployed people, and she was confident that she would be able to get some job or other. Angela: I’d look around. I don’t know, I would live with my parents and’ just look around for any sort of job if I could get that, and get that job so I’ll have that for support, all right, and then still be looking for a kindergarten job. At this point of her life, Angela’s experience was dominated by domestic concerns. She did not go out a great deal and when she did it was usually with her (male) cousins. She and her sister did most of the housework while her grandmother did most of the cooking. With respect to her own future she was somewhat ambivalent about domestic life. While the prospect of having children appealed to her, she was less enthusiastic about being married: Interviewer: What about getting married? Angela: Yeah, s’pose so. I’ll have to be…yeah, I s’pose I’ll have to. Interviewer: Why? Don’t you think you have a choice? Angela: Oh no, you have a choice, you have a choice. When it comes up, I’ll see…you hear a lot about divorces and fights, I mean really bad fights. I’m not looking forward to it. Angela anticipated that she would not keep her job once she had children although she would perhaps look for a part-time job once the children were at school. She could not accept that a man might care for the children while she continued to be employed. Angela: I wouldn’t really like it… I don’t think that a man can really handle looking after kids and doing all the housework and the washing and all that… The force of gender expectations seemed to sharply contradict her own priority on getting employment, but after all her choice of occupation was heavily influenced by her experience of what was worthwhile and what she would be able to do. In this context, her choice to be a kindergarten teacher makes reasonable sense. It would be a job which allowed her to explore relationships with children and other women. The issues of domestic life can be left until much later (Wilson and Wyn, 1987:28). The second case study, Ana, is drawn from a project undertaken across three states. Its main focus was on the significance of the costs imposed by schools on students in Year 9; how these costs could affect the choices made by families about educational participation (see Wilson and Wyn, 1989). Similarly to Angela, Ana’s parents were from Greek backgrounds, her mother having been born in Greece itself while her father was born of Greek parents in South Australia. The family rented a house with a workshop at the rear where Ana’s father ran a fibreglass manufacturing business. Her mother worked in the central administration of TAFE in South Australia and her aunt, who also lived with them, worked for a telephone answering service. Her father had worked previously as a

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teacher, a community worker and a radio station manager, before coming to manufacturing. Unfortunately, their business was struggling from a lack of capital to finance expansion. The family’s situation reflected the complex troubles that affected an increasing number of people in the early and mid-1980s. From early on in their marriage, Ana’s parents had used their savings to purchase properties, most of which were still being paid off. Because their capital was tied up in this way, the family had raised the resources for the fibreglass manufacturing business from the Commonwealth Bank. On the advice of one of the bank’s officers, they had borrowed in Swiss francs in 1984. When the Australian dollar collapsed in the international money markets in 1985, the debt almost doubled. On top of this, interest rates rose steadily. Hence, although they had substantial assets, they were unable to realize the value of the property as the amount raised would not get anywhere near towards clearing the magnitude of their total debts, and they were unable to borrow further in order to expand the business. The issue of employment was central for Ana. Although she received a small amount of pocket money each week from her parents, she sometimes had to help pay for petrol and other necessities. Her father hoped that she would get a part-time job when she turned 15, not just for the money but because he thought that she would become more responsible. Ana herself wanted to get work in a restaurant and her father encouraged her to think carefully about what she might want to do. The family often sat down and talked about their situation, but it was usually Ana’s mother who paid the bills. The family met its obligations by living frugally. Ana’s mother sewed her own clothes; they grew all their own vegetables; they never ate out; they didn’t have a car, except for a ‘51 Prefect which they bought for $200 and which still had to be done up; visits to the grandparents north of Adelaide could only occur once each year rather than four or five times. Ana and her brother attended Foothills High School in Adelaide, even though they lived on the other side of the city. Ana had begun her secondary schooling when it was their local school and after the family moved to their present address she had wanted to continue at the school because of her friendships, even though there was a lot of travelling involved. Ana was conscious of the difference between the costs of going to a government school relative to private school fees. Apart from food, clothing and medical expenses education was regarded as a high priority. Ana liked school because she was vivacious, had lots of friends and ‘likes learning something different each day’. Her initial results in year 8 were very good but they dropped a bit in year 9. Her teachers indicated that her performance had been average more recently, but acknowledged that she was possibly not working to her potential. This, it seemed, was at least partly explained by a degree of sexual harassment, of which her father was well aware. Father: Boys began picking on her after she had done well in year 8, teasing her and she suddenly stopped putting up her hand. There was a physical confrontation which led to a loss of confidence. The school dealt with the matter and Ana’s work began to improve. Her father was not too bothered by her results but wanted her to complete year 12 and to go to university. It was ‘her decision’ but his preference was for her to have a rounded education and to get a job that she really enjoyed, not just for the money. Her friends were a bit of a mixed bunch, but it seemed likely that most of them would go on to the end of year 12.

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Ana herself hoped to study medicine and to become a pediatrician or gynaecologist, or other specialist. She expected that she would be supported by her parents although she would also get a part-time job to assist with her expenses. Her father hoped that they would be able to provide some support for her, especially if she supplemented the family income herself. He hoped that the Aussie dollar would hold up at a reasonable level; if it slipped too far he might have to be declared bankrupt which would make it very difficult to support Ana at all. He also thought that it might be useful for her to take a year off after she left school, like other students whom he had known. He admitted to being somewhat anxious about her future as ‘she seems to be very happy at the moment and I worry about what’ll happen when she gets into the real world’. Ana’s family were an atypical case. Despite being reasonably well off in terms of assets, their income for living was limited so tightly that they had to live very frugally. Ana’s parents were obviously feeling the strain of heir situation; they perceived themselves as being rather poor ad felt entrapped, and their lifestyle was structured accordingly. Bankruptcy was an option which Ana’s father was not prepared to contemplate. However, their basic attitude to life and to each other remained warm and energetic, and their commitment to education was similarly very clear. The family had to live with very little yet there was never any question that Ana should be encouraged to stay at school for as long as possible with few constraints on her subjects or activities. Ana had set herself an ambitious target, educationally and occupationally. It was, in many ways, unknown territory both for her and for other members of her family. She was optimistic, nevertheless, about her chances of achieving her goals. Analyzing Cultural Conflict and Social Division The use of a case study approach has illustrated the complexity of processes of class, gender and ethnic relations, and the ways in which these processes interweave in people’s experience. Both were Greek young women, the same age, with parents in similar circumstances; yet their cases were marked also by significant differences. In Ana’s case, she was living in a family that had significant assets, yet had very limited financial resources on which to live on a daily basis. Nevertheless, she was aiming for a professional career. Angela’s priority was on getting employment, sooner rather than later, reflecting her parents’ experiences in the labour market and her understanding of the importance of employment in obtaining a livelihood. Both have grown up in households with Greek cultural traditions which have influenced their relationships with other ‘Anglo-Australian’ students and teachers. The experience of both young women in gender relationships was marked by tension and struggle. In Ana’s case, harassment from boys confronted her with the issue of gender conflict. Angela, however, was grappling with her future as a ‘working woman’ and possibly also a wife and mother, with fairly rigid gender expectations in which breadwinning was a male responsibility and childrearing an exclusively female concern. As she noted, with some vehemence Angela:

‘Cos I don’t think that men can look after little babies screaming their heads off all day… I don’t think he could handle it. Interviewer: How come a woman can handle it and a man can’t? Angela: ‘Cos…[pause] I suppose a man would handle it but a woman, she’s always been brought up to handle a family. I mean the guy has always had a welcome home ‘n’ that.

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If it was the other way round I think a man he just wouldn’t be able to hack it; ‘cos no matter how much he loves the kids, the woman will always feel more for them. With respect to their attitude to school, and to the relationship between school and the labour market, there were differences in Angela’s and Ana’s priorities and expectations which reflected the changes in the economic and social circumstances affecting young people between 1982 and 1988. Ana’s family were struggling to manage economically in the face of interest rates that could barely have been foreseen in 1982. The major issue arising from the study from which Ana’s case is drawn was that of the significance of the costs of secondary education to a large number of families. The great majority of young people in this study felt that they would need some other financial support in addition to their parents’ contributions, in order to meet the costs of completing their secondary, let alone tertiary, education (see Wilson and Wyn, 1989). Ana wanted to stay at secondary school to complete year 12. She liked learning for its own sake, relating her secondary education to tertiary study, rather than attempting to see links between her subjects at secondary school and ‘jobs’ in the labour market. Like Angela, her priority was on getting a job that she would find rewarding and she was prepared to stay in education in order to achieve it. However, the economic constraints on Ana’s family could easily jeopardize her hopes for future study, as the costs of secondary and tertiary education continue to rise. Angela and her friends, on the other hand, were able to contemplate leaving school before the year 12, and still have reasonable prospects of finding employment. Many of her contemporaries had ambitions of achieving professional careers, but this hope was always tinged with the view that they could always leave school and get an apprenticeship or even a job in a factory. This illustrates the way in which material circumstances (and educational policy) can interact with cultural processes, shaped by class, gender and ethnicity, to perpetuate social division. Student Perspectives on Livelihood A primary objective, methodologically, in these projects, and in our other research, has been to collect sufficient data to develop a thorough understanding of the perspectives which young people themselves have had on home, school and the labour market. These projects were certainly not the first to place a priority on collecting data related to students’ perspectives on schooling. However, the persistent focus on linking family (class) background and experience and their hopes for their futures with attitudes to schooling stimulated considerable interest, at a time when policy makers and other researchers were placing great emphasis on increasing retention rates and reducing youth unemployment. The projects demonstrated that young people are not mere puppets manipulated by teachers, parents, the media or their peers, but active contributors to shaping their own destinies. In every case, it became apparent that young people made decisions about their participation in school and their entry to the labour market, based on cultural perspectives and practices drawn from the class context of their neighborhood and their parents’ own perspectives and experiences of work. The emphasis was placed on extensive interviewing primarily because we were interested in exploring the complexity of students’ experiences and their perspectives on their immediate circumstances and their futures. This type of research allows us to address the relationship between the unique qualities of individuals and the patterns that recur across social groups.

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Consistent themes did emerge in the perspectives which young people brought to bear on their experiences of school, work and on their futures, albeit not without contradictions. We suggest that the consistency and persistence of these views reflects the structured inequality that is produced through the impact of class, gender and ethnic relations in our society (Wilson and Wyn, 1987:ix). Many young people expressed priorities which reflected understandings formed on the basis of their parents’ experiences of work (often in Australian factories) and from their own limited experience of the labour force. Generally speaking, their parents’ experiences of work in the factories had been fairly negative. Despite this, and despite the exhortations of their parents, most working-class young people wanted, in the early 1980s, to find jobs as soon as possible. This pattern, reflecting the experience of class and gender division irrespective of ethnic background, seemed to be of primary importance in understanding the orientations of these young people to their futures. Even though remaining in education might have been the key which would enable them to avoid the working conditions which their parents had borne, the association between having a job and being a legitimate, adult member of society was very strong. The prospect of obtaining good credentials was not sufficient to alter the conviction of many young people that, on the basis of their information about the labour market, they should get a job as soon as they could. In these cases, the priorities emphasized by working-class cultural perspectives proved to be extremely significant. One young man spoke for many of his peers when he said: ‘Cause all you really do in your life is eat, sleep and work, that’s all life is. If you didn’t work, what would you do with your life? I mean life is just the same thing over and over. I mean if there was no work you wouldn’t exist’. These perspectives influenced a primary commitment to obtaining employment even amongst the young women. However, having ‘a job’ was not the only means by which the young women saw themselves as obtaining a legitimate livelihood. This could be accomplished also through having a family, and most young women also had a sense of themselves as becoming mothers after they had had some experience of the workplace. One young woman commented, similarly to many others: ‘When I get married, I’ll give up work and spend all of my time doing housework’. The data revealed a complex process in which the very aspects of the parents’ experiences which led them to want their children to have a ‘better life than them’ also shaped a pattern of cultural formation which encouraged the children to follow in their parents’ footsteps. Dad’s hurt his back, he comes home dirty and aching, his hair’s fallen out and he’s gone old— Mum says don’t be like your father. More often than not, it was ‘like their fathers’ that many young men wanted to be, especially when the alternative was putting up with the offerings of schools which seemed to be profoundly unsympathetic to them. This manifested itself in the constant preoccupation of young people with getting jobs, and a frustration with enduring school long enough to get good, or ‘clean’ jobs. It soon became apparent to us that ‘getting a job’ stood for a much more complex cultural transition than had been apparent at first. A young Macedonian man said: ‘Mum and Dad want me to stay at school and not end up in a factory like they have. Factory jobs aren’t much of a sight—they want us to be better off than they are’.

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The real issue for young people was how they would manage the transition to legitimate adulthood. How would they be able to obtain an adequate livelihood for themselves as adult members of society: a decent material standard of living; a sense of personal dignity; the opportunities to establish social legitimacy; and the sense that they were worthwhile members of their society. One of our interviewees put it rather bluntly: ‘If you can’t get a job you sit at home getting fat and waiting for the money [unemployment benefit] to arrive until you don’t want to work any more.’ In more recent years, the contemporary pattern of structural and technological change, specifically manifested in the collapse of the youth labour market, has put at risk the prospect that young people in our society would be able to meet the criteria of adulthood successfully. This has raised the question, for both policy and strategic purposes, of how young people are going to obtain an adequate livelihood and establish themselves as adults, if the existing means of doing so were removed from their reach? The concept of livelihood, with its focus on dignity, legitimacy and social contribution, as well as material benefits, contributed to a more thorough analysis of social division in that it encompassed the realm of unpaid work and other, more marginal, forms of labour. In other words, the concept of livelihood allowed for an examination of the relationship between the processes of social division and a diverse range of practices associated with earning a living. It provided a broad framework for exploring the ways in which young men and women anticipate their futures, overcoming the typical marginalization of all practices not normally considered to be part of the formal economy. Student Perspectives on Schooling The expectations which young people from working-class neighborhoods had about schools seemed to change dramatically during the 1980s. Whereas many working-class young people wanted to leave school as soon as possible in 1982, by 1988 they were prepared to ‘stick it out’ until either they were guaranteed a position, had achieved a credential, or simply ‘couldn’t hack it any longer’. Across both periods, however, a commitment to friendship remained a fundamentally important aspect of their underlying attitudes. Time and time again, students would make comments such as: ‘School is very good. I’ve got lots of friends’. When pushed on why they really liked it, the response would be: ‘The kids. I like the kids, you know, you get to meet them, socialize’. By way of contrast, considerable criticism was directed at the actual knowledges that school offered. One young woman asked: ‘What’s history got to do with our future anyway?’ Another said: ‘For hairdressing I guess you need maths, for giving back the change’. Not only the labour market has changed during the 1980s. Many schools have developed a range of programs and teaching strategies which attempt to provide students with scope to adopt a more cooperative and active approach to learning. These programs have often had a clearly discernible effect. A teacher noted about one student: ‘For example, one student resists the pattern in school, but has been marvellous on the Community Studies days because she is working on her interests’. In making sense of the experiences of young people at school, understanding the effect of power relations was paramount. For example, the consequence of Jane’s decision (Wilson and Wyn, 1987: 17–21) to make her friendships a priority over academic success was her early entry to the labour market and vulnerability in the competition for scarce jobs. This pattern needs to be understood in

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terms of the exercise of power; this was implemented through the perpetuation of a particular set of values and competitive procedures in school which rewarded those who conformed and penalized those who did not. Although Jane made a choice (in favour of friendship), it was one which led, at least in the short term, to further subordination. This was not even a matter of disobedience or disruption; rather, Jane was left in a marginal position because her values and practices were not rewarded in the school’s terms. The very matter of who shall, or shall not, be selected for greater things can be construed as an act of power. As this example illustrates, social division and the power relations which it implies are an abstraction from the complexity of daily life. The concept can take on precise meaning only when it is applied to specific circumstances, which help provide a sense of process as well as structure. In analyzing these case studies, a particular benefit of the concept of social division has been its inclusiveness. It established a framework for considering a number of forms of structured relationship that might be relevant to understanding any one situation, ensuring that these forms were not analyzed in isolation from each other. In our projects the more significant forms of social division were found to be class and gender division. In other situations, a focus on ethnic or racial division might be a more useful approach, as was the case in Griffin’s (1985) study of young women in the UK. Student Perspectives, Social Division and ‘Difference’ In our research, the concept of social division had provided a more complex frame-work for analyzing the contrasts that exist within and between the material and cultural circumstances of groups in Australia. It highlighted conflict as well as dependence and mutuality, and the need to examine both the relationships between groups and the perspectives on those relationships held by different individuals and groups. The dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity and race can be separated conceptually, but the way in which young people experience the effects of social division is multilayered. It is difficult to find an example of class, gender or ethnic division that does not also have resonances of the others. Without denying the attempt by other researchers to systematize and clarify feminist or class analysis, the concern in this research has been to find an explanatory expression of the everyday experience of specific groups of people. Although the relative significance of class, gender or ethnicity might change from one situation to the next, our research has indicated that their interaction in people’s experience needs to be carefully considered in the implementation of programs for change. Explaining the patterns which appeared in the comments of the students could not be accomplished in a theoretical framework which gave a priori emphasis to either class, gender or ethnic relations. The concept of social division, on the other hand, drew attention to the relations of conflict and cooperation between different groups within the society. The advantage of a relational analysis was that it drew attention to the covert exercise of power in the interaction, for example, between males and females; it emphasized also the strengths, as well as the weaknesses, of apparently disadvantaged groups; it provided a framework for recognizing the links between individual experience and collective circumstances; and it enabled consideration of both the material and the cultural dimensions of people’s lives (see Wilson and Wyn, 1987:63–5).

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Although the views, experiences and perspectives of young people were the starting point for analysis, individual experiences gained another character when linked to the broader patterns of social division. While each student had their own story, it became apparent that their views could not be understood simply in their own terms. Recognition of this ambiguity has been important in understanding the perspectives of young people and a focus on the processes of cultural formation has provided a useful framework for the analysis of these issues. For example, there was a lot of resentment expressed by young women whose parents had emigrated from southern European countries, about the extent to which they were expected to contribute to the domestic labour of the household. Their resentment was frequently verbalized in relation to the different expectations held for their brothers. One young woman complained, I have two older brothers. One can’t be bothered doing homework and the other one is already doing uni, and he does homework, but he doesn’t get ‘you have to do that [housework] as well’. I have to help my mum and do all the housework and that. That has to be done as well as the homework, and sometimes my brothers and that will say ‘you don’t do anything’. I can’t stand that. Gender, class and ethnicity were interwoven inextricably in this young woman’s experience, and what seemed like a straightforward complaint is echoed by her classmates, as they also encountered family pressure to conform to a limited vision of womanhood centred on domestic life. Their frustration was all the more poignant because of the likelihood that in their circumstances, these young women would probably need to compete with their male peers for employment. Yet their dissatisfaction with the limitations placed on them was partial. There were many aspects of femininity with which they willingly conformed. Class and gender relations involve processes which constrain people, and at the same time provide a sense of identity and belonging. This kind of complexity associated with the production of social division reflects the way in which ‘difference’ is exploited in the power relations of class and gender. In schools, for example, the choice of specific criteria for reward and promotion exacerbates ‘differences’ and contributes to the marginalizing of the interests and values of one group to the benefit of another. However, the recognition and celebration of difference is also an integral part of identity. Although the social construction of gender leads to discrimination against women, establishing and maintaining femininity is a significant and valued aspect of most women’s identities. This suggests an explanation for the resistance which many young women make to programs for change which encourage girls to be ‘more like boys’. Angela provided a classic example of the tensions involved when she said, ‘Well if, um, a man stayed at home all day and looked after them, and like, they change jobs, well, I reckon he will—he doesn’t look as a man. He’d look more like a woman. Across all ethnic groups represented in these projects, gender difference has been important to the young people and to their plans for their futures. The meaning attributed to femininity and masculinity for both the young men and the young women was at times explained in terms of their ethnicity (‘we’re Greek, you see’). However, the problems raised by gender difference were faced by young people regardless of ethnicity. Although ethnic cultural traditions gave a particular emphasis to their views, their solutions were couched in much the same terms as young people from other

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groups. For example, the young women were interested in seeking work that would enhance their femininity while young men sought occupations that would confirm their masculinity. Within class relations, a similar pattern of inclusion and exclusion has developed around the cultural ‘differences’ associated with ‘mental’ versus ‘manual’ or formality versus informality (Connell et al, 1982:195; Dwyer et al, 1984:57). The choice of classroom pedagogy and the arrangements for assessment of students’ work give priority typically to literary and abstract forms of learning, thus favouring students from certain types of cultural backgrounds at the expense of others. Case Studies and Cultural Conflict Case studies have been a central feature of the methodology of these projects for several quite specific reasons, some of which relate directly to the ethnographic tradition. In the first place, case studies are most appropriate for collecting data which encompasses the complexities and the cultural dimensions of social and structural relationships. Secondly, focused, semi-structured and unstructured interviewing with parents, teachers, students and others, observation and documentary analysis can all contribute to data collection. Thirdly, a case study approach can be used to accommodate individuals, families, schools and communities, depending on the focus of inquiry. A sample of case studies can be stratified to take account of particular theoretical or empirical issues. Fourthly, the number of case studies can be reduced or expanded depending on the resources and time available. Fifthly, a case study methodology allows for systematic analysis across several projects, where the specific circumstances and dynamics uncovered in any one case must of necessity be explored both in their own terms and in relation to their context. The use of case studies also implies the use of a particular type of logic. The use of the ‘logic of case-studies’ as an analytical and reporting device has been discussed by Silverman: In a case-study the analyst selects cases only because he [sic] believes they exhibit some general theoretical principle. His account’s claim to validity depends entirely on demonstrating that the features he portrays in the case are representative not of a population but of this general principle (Silverman, 1985:113). Particular cases often portray important elements of the themes which can be identified across all the participants in a particular project. As Silverman comments, it is only possible to use the insights gained from this type of research to extrapolate to like situations ‘by logical inference based on the demonstrated power of our theoretical model’ (1985:114). The methodology employed in many of the projects has been innovative in response to external constraints, and in its reflexiveness, involving researchers and the researched in a process of constraints, and in its reflexiveness, involving researchers and the researched in a process of critique and assessment of what has been achieved. In each of the projects, there has been an emphasis on providing useful information and opportunities for reflection and action for the people in the situations being researched. At each site, the research methodology was negotiated with the adult participants, and increasingly, those who were the ‘subject’ of the research have also participated in devising and carrying out the research. This involvement by those being researched has meant that a

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wide range of research techniques has been employed, with the aim of producing knowledge relevant to the participants. For example, in one project, teachers have been asked to keep a diary of their thoughts about their classes, as a means of personal reflection about pedagogy. A variation on this has been to record thoughts on to tape, which can then be transcribed. This type of recording of teachers’ understandings about their work has been analyzed in the context of observation of their classes by a researcher, and interviewing of students who participated in the classes. In two studies, a longitudinal method has been used, recording the reflections young people have about their experiences of school and work over a period of time (in one study, up to three years). Increasingly, the methodology has involved the use of workshops of teachers and other researchers, to reflect on the data gathered at a certain point, and to facilitate decision-making about further directions for research and reporting. Conclusion Our ‘explorations in ethnography’ have provided the means for generating considerable understanding of how the cultural conflict which many young people experience in the arena of schooling can contribute to educational inequality. Many students can articulate a quite profound critique of their schools and their relevance for their futures. This often comes as a surprise to many teachers and policy makers who have assumed that young people would see schooling as being in their ‘best interests’. The difference in the views of students and teachers (and parents) can help considerably in illuminating the nature of educational inequality because of the attention which it draws to the cultural dimension of social division. Since 1972, with the establishment of the Australian Schools Commission, Australian governments have maintained a significant policy commitment to the objective of reducing educational inequality: all children should be able, at least, to start the ‘race of life’ from the same line. Whilst a dramatic improvement has occurred in the proportion of young people who complete their secondary education throughout Australia, there continue to be significant differences in educational outcomes for children from different backgrounds (see Williams, 1988). The patterns of inequality remain, despite the expenditure of considerable funds and a great deal of energy. Yet the reality has been that programs for change have focused for too long on addressing the distribution of material resources and have been guided by an ideology of compensatory education which has understood the poor performance by children from different group in terms of ‘deficit’ theory. The evidence gathered in our research, however, has demonstrated that young people from all social backgrounds come to school with complex perspectives that are grounded in the particular experiences and cultural life of their parents, themselves and others in their neighbourhoods. Their response to schooling is in itself a complex matter, reflecting an intricate process of negotiation between the values and practices accepted within the institution of the school and the understandings and practices which young people are developing in ‘another life’ (see Connell et al, 1982). The variety of situations and views which we have encountered amongst the participants in our projects has heightened our awareness of the ways in which social life is constantly being organized, disrupted and shaped by the intersecting processes of class, gender and race relations and ethnicity.

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The use of qualitative research methods has provided a valuable means for capturing the implications of the process of social division for individuals and groups at particular points of time. Analytically, the link between individual experience and social context has been conceptualized through a framework which is especially sensitive to process and interrelationships. We have drawn attention here to the relational nature of social division, encompassing class, gender and race, and have indicated the value of the concept of livelihood as a strategy for comprehending the various means by which young people see themselves as securing their legitimacy as adult members of their community. An important aspect of our use of qualitative research has been to take the views of young people seriously. The cultural dimension of social division is central in shaping the processes and outcomes of schooling. The broader recognition of the complex nature of this process in the development of school structures and curriculum could contribute significantly to addressing the conflicts and contradictions felt by many students. The ultimate test of this aproach would be the social and educational outcomes for young people: Do the programmes help to ensure that young people will be assured of a livelihood in a context which helps to challenge the existing structure of social division?… The priority that young people themselves place on establishing their legitimacy as adult members of the society implies that the ultimate responsibility for fashioning a livelihood must rest with them, both as individuals and as members of a particular community (Wilson and Wyn, 1987:131). References BETTER LIFE THAN THEM (1983) (videotape), Melbourne, Transition Education Advisory Committee/ Vocational Orientation Centre. CONNELL, R.W., ASHENDEN, D., KESSLER, S., and DOWSETT, G. (1982) Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. DWYER, P.J., WILSON, B., and WOOCK, R.R. (1984) Confronting School and Work: Youth and Class Cultures in Australia, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. GRIFFIN, C. (1985) Typical Girls? Young Women from School to the Job Market, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. SILVERMAN, D. (1985) Qualitative Methodology and Sociology, UK, Gower. SWEET, R. (1987) The Youth Labour Market: a Twenty Year Perspective, Canberra, Curriculum Development Centre. WILLIAMS, P.N. (1988) Research on Poverty and Education: Australian Descriptive Research 1979–87, with a commentary and policy implications by R.W.CONNELL and V.WHITE. Report 1 of the Poverty, Education and the DSP Project, Macquarie University, Sydney. WILSON, B., and WYN, J. (1987) Shaping Futures: Youth Action for Livelihood, Sydney, Allen and Unwin. WILSON, B., and WYN, J. (1989) Educational Costs Borne by Year 9 Secondary Students, Report to the National Youth Affairs Research Scheme, Hobart, National Clearing-house for Youth Studies.

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2 Re-visioning Empowerment with the Research Subject and the ‘At Risk’ Mary O’Dowd

Overview This chapter is in three parts. In the first section I discuss the findings of ethnographic research about an alternative lifestyle involving young people at risk. In part two I discuss my follow-up research and draw conclusions about empowering those regarded as at risk from a social and psychological perspective. In part three I describe a theoretical framework that relies substantially on systems theory of the second generation (Rittel, 1982). It is a reflexive analysis of the research described in parts one and two. The philosophical perspective which underpins the theoretical framework is consistent with the emerging post-positivist tradition that uses deconstruction ‘…to distance us from and make us skeptical about beliefs concerning truth, knowledge, power, the self and language…’ (Flax, 1987:624). I attempt to deconstruct the way in which my own perceptions and beliefs influenced and shaped what I saw as a researcher. I apply de Beauvoir’s (1949) construct of ‘otherness’ to indicate how I had constructed the at risk. I then re-vision my research by applying ideas from systems and feminist theory to develop conclusions about empowering the at risk involving: (1) Constructs are a way of seeing and not seeing (I apply this to a worker cooperative and argue there is no one or neutral reality. I indicate how the researcher’s experience and background influence how and what is seen and constructed as reality). (2) The implications of the patriachial researcher/worker viewing the subject as an ‘other’. (3) The relevance of membership, acceptance and community on a social and psychological level to the at risk. Finally I discuss the concept of ‘at risk’ from a holistic perspective and consider the relevance of the findings to empowerment in society. Definition of terms Slavin et al. (1989:4–5) describe the at risk as, …certain category of students. The meaning of this term is never very precise, and varies considerably in practice. One possible definition is that students who are at risk are those

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who, on the basis of several risk factors, are unlikely to graduate high school. Among these risk factors would be low achievement, retention in grade, behaviour problems, poor attendance, low socio economic status and attendance at schools with large numbers of poor students. All of these factors are closely associated with dropping out of school. In this chapter I use the term at risk to describe young people from the above background. I look at these young people after they have left school and become further ‘at risk’ in our society as they form a part of a new underclass (another loosely defined term): …the term underclass is used loosely and broadly…[it includes]… Unemployed, underemployed, out of the labour force and/or engaged in illegal activities… Recently the term underclass has been extended by some to include the homeless, de-institutionalised mentally ill (Miller, 1989:225). My ethnographic research on the at risk focused on a worker cooperative used by young people who had dropped out of school. Part 1: The Worker Cooperative, ‘The Shop’ My interest in alternative economic and social systems led me to make my first contact with The Shop which I heard was a workers’ cooperative. The Shop was founded by people with an idealistic and Christian humanitarian philosophy. The ideals and humanitarian concepts, including cooperation, accorded with my own views so I was sympathetic to its aims. In my ethnographic research I collected the data, and described and interpreted the reality of a worker cooperative using the standard criteria of substantiating data received from, for example, Becker (1961); Glaser and Strauss (1968); Rist (1977); Ball and Kemmis (1982); Vidich (1955); Schwartz and Schwartz (1955); and Miller (1952). The research was much as Becker (1961:17–32) described it, as one who follows those he studies through their daily round of life, seeing what they do, with whom and under what circumstances and querying them about the meaning of their action. My purpose for doing this was to build up a body of field notes and interviews that captured patterns of collective action. In this I was aware of the dangers of becoming too involved with any particular group one is observing. Miller (1952) reported on the dangers of over involvement from personal experience in his study of union leaders: ‘…[S]ome penetrating lines of inquiry had to be dropped…for fear of opening severe conflict areas. Once established, shifting “rapport” to a lower level would induce distance and distrust’ (p. 98). I was engaged in overt participant observation research at the co-op; the members agreed to my research taking place. The participants referred to the co-op, typically, as ‘The Shop’, as the cooperative was a shop that packaged and sold nuts, dried fruit and chocolate nuts. These products were normally sold on ‘nut rounds’ in the city and suburbs by The Shop’s members who took the goods into offices. The members shared the profits. I became a member of the co-op and was a nut seller. I had initially intended to study the social context of, and reasons for, the abundance of graffiti at The Shop: to see who wrote, what they wrote and why. But as Becker (1961) noted the initial

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research project can change as some more interesting themes emerge. It became clear that the graffiti were a manifestation and a covert indicator of the feelings, tensions, conflicts between sub-groups within The Shop, and it became the focus of the research. This meant a much more interesting study developed of people in an ‘alternative reality’. (The term has been used by a variety of writers such as Rigby (1974), Cock (1979), Black (1984) and Metcalfe (1986) to describe communities outside the mainstream economic system that provide social and economic alternatives.) There were several key individuals involved in establishing and developing The Shop. Mary, a Christian, founded the co-op in 1980. About the same time she established a house where young people who had been out of home1 could stay. Peter, Nik and other young people from the house and their friends formed the initial core of those who dropped in. Joseph and Carl were anarchists who got involved in 1981. Both anarchists were politically active during the Vietnam moratorium in the 1970s, and were jailed. John was another core member. He was from England and later became an illegal immigrant when he over-stayed his visa because of his involvement with The Shop. Mary’s idea was to assist young unemployed to earn an income and to provide a place where they could go and be accepted and obtain emotional support. When asked if her motives were economic she replied, ‘Good God no. The idea was to combine energy and money. Christian money with unemployed energy’. The Shop developed a drop-in function for a variety of people. Difference in an Alternative Reality The varied backgrounds of the people involved made The Shop an incredibly interesting and dynamic place. There were between twenty and thirty people actively involved at any one time and another twenty to fifty people who had some contact. These included sub-groups who identified themselves as anarchists, Christians, travellers, Nyoongahs2 and street kids (who were a part of a larger group of young people who were out of home), ‘ex’ (de-institutionalized) psychiatric patients, homosexuals and people with disabilities. I focused my analysis on the young people out of home and the anarchists and Christians. The people at The Shop perceived themselves and The Shop as different. Carl, an anarchist, saw the co-op as: ‘Arthurian—a small group of people set in a struggle against the times’. Others did not see its political and economic difference as primary, but stressed their collective social nonconformity. Joseph, who was an ex-bomber, said: ‘We’re the most amazing collection of social outcasts working together on one project that you’ll probably ever see’. No one described the group as law breakers but this was a theme that emerged covertly in some descriptions. Peter spoke about those he lived with, most of whom were involved in The Shop, as: ‘… illegal immigrants, barbiturate addicts, all sorts, prostitutes, drug addicts, gays: nearly all got involved at The Shop’. Some members just saw themselves as lone individual outsiders from the dominant system. For example, Dusty stated; ‘I don’t put a label on myself but I guess I’m a bit of a social outcast’.

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Table 1 Individuals’ view of the social world

Source: Abridged table from Rigby (1974:50).

Nik indicated her own sense of difference and the internal differences between the Christians in The Shop and the young people. She described how Jo, a Christian, had ‘…never experienced drug addicts, alcoholics—people like us’. Other people involved described themselves as: ‘alternative’, ‘non-conformist’, ‘outcasts by necessity or choice’. The Shop, therefore, was viewed by the members as a ‘different’ alternative place. (An unobtrusive indicator of the different operating values accepted in The Shop was the acceptance and endorsement of graffiti which was almost everywhere on the walls, table and doors). As a cooperative it was an attempt to establish a viable social and economic alternative to the mainstream economic system, to establish an alternative lifestyle which was different to the hierarchical, competitive, mainstream capitalist system. It was a place where people perceived they had greater control over their working lives and were encouraged to be actively involved in decision making. Motivation Rigby (1974) analyzed the motivations of people attempting to establish alternative lifestyles. He used the terms ‘alienated’ and ‘estranged’ in assessing the reaction of the people to mainstream society—the capitalist system. Rigby employed Marx’s concept of the alienated man as an individual who fails to recognize his actions and the results of his actions as his own, and who believes in the existence of impersonal, determinate forces that shape and control individual and social life (1974:49). Rigby suggested that the alienated individual is not necessarily a psychologically estranged social being. This is because, while ‘alienated’ usually describes a person who is disillusioned with mainstream society and feels separate from it, ‘alienated’ also describes those who select an alternative lifestyle. That is, the term describes those who consciously reject the lifestyle offered by the corporate state and deliberately engage in activities which involve a different lifestyle—a deliberately chosen alternative. While Rigby’s alienated person is dissatisfied with his own life he is not aware of this feeling within himself and is not therefore ready to do anything about it. I consider two of Rigby’s categories: those alienated and estranged, and those unalienated but utopian (Table 1), closely parallel the two major sub-groups that I identified at The Shop. Consequently, I used Rigby’s theoretical framework to explain these sub-groups I identified at The Shop: those individuals whom I considered alienated by mainstream society because they did not consider it purposeful (whom I termed ‘opt outs’); and those alienated from mainstream society because they had no access to society (whom I termed ‘dropped outs’). This latter group consisted mainly of young people who used The Shop, the great majority of whom were at risk. Rigby’s Type 2 alienated and estranged’ had characteristics of the ‘dropped outs’ and Type 3 unalienated and

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estranged’ had characteristics of the ‘opt outs’ at The Shop. The young people who used The Shop, the dropped outs, typically had left school early, were ongoing truants or refused to attend school and consequently had a limited education. They usually had poor literacy and numeracy skills. They were not overtly concerned about social or political issues. They lacked social skills typical in mainstream society. For example, when they spoke they often used swear words in situations where it was not socially acceptable; and much of their drug use was also public as they would walk around drunk or stoned. The ‘dropped out’ young people at The Shop were typically out of home because they had been kicked out, or had fled home due to conflict or abuse and were consequently further at risk (see Burdekin, 1989). Many were now young offenders. They had not rejected the dominant society, but lacked access to it and acceptance by it. Typically there was no process for them to gain the skills necessary to join mainstream society and so they were barred from it. They were dissatisfied with their situation but did not consider or have any clear ideas or perception of their power to bring about change. Rigby’s type 3 include those individuals who perceive a gap between how society appears to be and how they feel society ought to be: ‘Among their number one can locate the radical activists of society… They seek to create a new social order’ (p. 53). These correspond to the opt outs. For example, Mary established The ‘Shop to create an accepting and caring place for the unemployed. She perceived it as needed particularly because it did not exist in the mainstream system. Joseph, an anarchist, perceived The Shop as an ideal venue in which to develop an alternative to the capitalist system to which he was opposed. Carl was also an anarchist and considered The Shop as important as an alternative option to the mainstream and he supported it as a nut seller and volunteer worker. These individuals deliberately opted out and were consciously trying to create something new and better. While educated and eloquent enough to cope in the capitalist system, they had made a conscious choice not, as far as possible, to be a part of the mainstream system. The ‘opt outs’ were typically tertiary educated and of an older age group (23 plus). This group included the anarchists, the Christians and some of the travellers. They had a choice about whether to be in or out of the dominant economic system because of their education and skills. I recognize Rigby’s categories as ‘types’ and consider it is possible to analyze the motivation of individuals at The Shop in terms of these types. However, my research indicated the dynamic character of humans as there was a process where some people moved or were moving from the dropped out to the opt out group. For example, Peter fled home at 14 because of abuse, and left school at the same time. Working with Joseph at The Shop he had learnt sufficient skills and confidence to gain access to the mainstream and after The Shop obtained an office job. Although the distinction about different motivations for people joining alternative realities has been made (Cock, 1979; Black, 1984; and Metcalfe, 1986), the emphasis about the social causes for these motivations has not to my knowledge been made. Group Cohesion The varied backgrounds of The Shop members gave them a significant commonality. This was their perceived difference to the norm in mainstream society. One of the major and most obvious things about The Shop was how it became a place to which people who were not in mainstream society were attracted and where they felt at home. It became their place where they socialized and worked

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together. Selling, packing and labelling the goods gave all the members a sense of belonging and contributing. All the members could attend meetings and have a say in how things were run. Such participation was one of a number of factors which bonded the people as a group and gave them a sense of mutual dependence, personal support and trust. Cohesion was also promoted due to the fact that most of them broke the law in one way or another and this was accepted. For example the smoking of marijuana was an established norm for almost all the members and in certain subgroups, such as the young people out of home, it was almost expected. It was an activity that people shared, and enjoyed, together. One of the anarchists was an ex-heroin addict and had used most drugs. He was therefore looked up to by some of the younger people who were establishing a connection and identity with the ‘street kids’ and out of home group for whom drug use was an important aspect of their sub-group’s membership and their identity. Peter started to use drugs at this time as did many other young people involved at The Shop. Drug taking was accepted, acceptable and a sign of belonging. Another member, Singer, wrote to me his reflections on drug taking: In terms of socialization [at The Shop] the use of drugs barriers… A parallel could be made with the Red Indian century America. The [Shop] had a sense of community indulgence in marijuana could well be described as a handshake’ for new arrivals.

did aid in breaking down social ‘peace pipe’ ritual of nineteenthfrom the outset. The communal ‘welcome’ mat, or a ‘surrogate

Somewhat less eloquently, Tony, when visiting The Shop stoned, indicated the acceptance of people who used drugs: ‘When you’re stoned there’s nothing better than visiting here’. Peter and Nik confirmed the availability of marijuana when they told me in separate conversations, ‘You could always score at The Shop’. Graffiting was another cohesive device. The anarchists would go out putting up posters and graffiting political and environmental slogans on walls around the city. (When one of their members was jailed even the outside wall of the jail was daubed in a risky sortie.) Occasionally ‘prestigious’ objects and symbols of established values such as the War Memorial were daubed with anti-war messages. The young people wrote their graffiti on trains and in other public places. Some times the young people would join the anarchists on their excursions as this was exciting and there were stories of graffiting while stoned. Graffiti writing was also accepted in The Shop and both major sub-groups engaged in this. Graffiti writing was accepted as a legitimate, although sometimes illegal, activity that the anarchists and the young people got up to. In fact many of the activities that held the group together were illegal and the acceptance of antiauthoritarian activities at The Shop united the members. This was linked to a deeply held dislike of the police who were perceived as tools of a repressive state system. The young people and anarchists saw the police as a harsh and sometimes brutal group who could beat them up with immunity and were instrumental in the taking away of their liberty. The Shop members, united in their view of the police, had a great sense of mutual protection and loyalty. For example when the police called at The Shop, time was played for so the illegal immigrant could escape over the back fence, or drugs could be stashed, or suspect graffitists escape. Young people who had stolen cars or who had warrants out for their arrest were similarly protected. There was a perceived and practised duty in

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mutual protection. The anti-authoritarian behaviour and consequent law breaking gave the members of The Shop a shared identity. As a food supplier, The Shop was also subject to frequent visits by the health inspector of the local council. He frequently gave the members tasks to be done under threat of closure. This also united the members in their animosity to the authority and in ‘busy-bees’ where they worked together to get things done before the health inspector returned. While these factors united the members there were some tensions. This is understandable in that the members were a disparate group of people. At times the differences resulted in conflict. Group Conflict The graffiti in The Shop, while on one level a cohesive device, were also a latent indicator of conflict (O’Dowd, 1986), in this case between the two major sub-groups at The Shop, the opt outs and the dropped outs. However, as Simmel (1955:17–18) notes, ‘A certain amount of discord, inner divergence and outer controversy, is organically tied up with the very elements that ultimately hold the group together…’. So while Nik described one of the Christians as: ‘Some fucking crusading Christian She was such a sleazy back-stabbing arsehole. A fucking pain in the arse. She was from some woop-woop town. She never experienced drug addicts, alcoholics—people like us’, the statement highlights the sense of difference but is also cohesive in that it established her ‘sameness’ to her significant others, her sub-group in The Shop. Interestingly, some of the very things that united the members became a source of conflict when they went beyond what was considered an acceptable limit, which was when the action interfered in the running of The Shop. For example while drug taking was cohesive it became a source of tension as The Shop slid more into debt because it became necessary that people work harder. In this situation the differences in patterns of drug taking amongst the members became apparent. The opt outs took drugs to a much more limited extent than the dropped outs, and drug taking was seen by them as a recreation secondary to their work. The dropped out would typically get drunk, stoned (on marijuana) or take pills (legally prescribed or purchased illegally on the black market) whenever the opportunity arose. This resulted in a level of unreliability; for example, sometimes The Shop was opened late, or people would not turn up for nut rounds, or not turn up to do work when they were depended on. As nut sellers, I and others experienced the annoyance and frustration of turning up to The Shop to do a round only to find it closed because someone had had a hard night. Another significant tension in The Shop arose whenever money was stolen from the till. As there was almost no customer trading in The Shop, outsiders could not be blamed so a regular user and/ or his friend was therefore responsible. Inevitably, after weeks of suspicion, the thefts would stop when a particular person, almost always a friend of a dropped out, left. While the thefts went on there was a great deal of unease because of the suspicion caused and no one would accept that their friends were to blame. Simon and Dave were members of the dropped out group who had limited access to mainstream society. They were regular visitors to The Shop and worked there on occasions. Simon told me he saw people ripping off money but said he didn’t say anything as it wasn’t his responsibility. Dave told me the people who ripped The Shop were friends of the others who came. He said the stolen money was usually used to buy alcohol or marijuana which they and their friends shared. The young people in practice apparently had no desire to reprimand their

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friends as they benefited indirectly through sharing in the alcohol or marijuana which was a more immediate priority than The Shop’s profits. These persistent thefts were an increasing source of tension and conflict at The Shop when sales began to decline. The two main sub-groups involved in The Shop were, then, united by their difference to the outside, mainstream society as the major threat to The Shop’s survival was from outsiders (such as the health department) and this provided an internal cohesion. However, this was not sufficient to unite them in their alternative reality. There was not a unity in purpose in their motivations for being members. They did not all share a commitment to The Shop’s primary role as a political/business enterprise and an alternative reality. The tensions and conflict between those who used The Shop primarily to meet their friends and those for whom it was a social alternative came more to the fore when The Shop as an entity began to sink into serious debt. The increasing debt was a consequence of several factors. Firstly there was a decrease in customer demand as the exotic nuts and dried fruits that The Shop sold started to become widely available in supermarkets. Secondly, other outlets were taking on the marketing style of The Shop and also selling things in offices, Finally, the business skills of those dropped outs now in charge of ordering were more limited and this resulted in good selling lines not being available so sales slumped even further. As the debt grew worse conflict increased. People aligned themselves much more rigidly with their friendship group: opt outs and dropped outs. The difference between the opt and dropped outs came dramatically to the fore. The Shop became a centre of conflict. Dropping in no longer became pleasant; so there were fewer and fewer people to pack and label the goods and so there were fewer items for the sellers to sell. The cooperative became harder work and eventually failed. Analysis of the Cooperative’s Failure The decision makers in the co-op, those with power, were the opt outs. They had not seen that the aims of the dropped outs were not the same as theirs. The opt outs had a vision, belief and commitment in an alternative lifestyle that provided them with greater control and autonomy than the dominant society provided. They had assumed that because people were not in the dominant economic system they did not want to be of the system. This was not the case. Most of the young people wanted the benefits of the capitalist system: good cars and clothes. Although most of the young people liked The Shop because it was an accepting environment, they had no overt vision of a new social order nor did they acquire this while there. So they were not committed to working towards a ‘better’ society. There were therefore very different reasons why people were involved. My analysis of the cooperative led me to conclude that it failed because of the financial drain on The Shop by those who had no choice about access to society, in particular the young people who were out of home. For an alternative reality to work I concluded that there needed to be much more work on educating the members in the philosophy and practice of cooperatives. The young people were not interested in cooperatives because they did not know enough of the principles. I concluded that those at risk would not automatically be interested in alternative realities because they were educated informally, through advertising and the consumer orientated materialistic ideology of the current society, in the benefits of the capitalist system and had not been educated in practice in the alternative. For the at risk to gain access to the mainstream greater points of access needed to be created.

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Part 2: The Shop’s Former Members Revisited Five years later, in 1990, I recommenced research into the at risk. As a part of this I returned to reinterview The Shop’s ex-members. I was particularly interested in the perspective of the dropped out about the good and ‘empowering’ aspects of the cooperative as well as their criticisms of it, so that I could develop a theory of empowerment of young people at risk and make use of their reflections and conclusions. I was attempting to work within an empowering research methodology (Lather, 1988) and to avoid research that ‘is frequently conducted in a rape model: the researchers take, hit and run’ (Reinhartz, 1979:95). I attempted to involve the subjects and feed back to them what the data was indicating. I hoped the research thus would be more empowering and more ethical. Feminists have attempted to develop alternative research styles that consider an ethical dimension (for example see Bowles and DuelliKlein, 1983), but it is a difficult issue. Stanley and Wise (1983: 166) note how attempting empathy can result in ‘“fictitious sympathy” [which] differs from “real sympathy” and is defective because it isn’t based upon sharing the same important emotions; the only way to share emotions is to share experiences’. I considered and attempted to practise reciprocity, a sharing of information, in the research process. 1990: Conclusions from Research about Empowerment of the At Risk My initial data was collected between 1985 and 1987 when the cooperative closed due to debt. Many of the young people from The Shop were unemployed when I returned in 1990, but most had found rented accommodation, one was living in a squat and another was homeless. Many were now members of an underclass of un-and under-employed. In my interviews in 1990 I asked the young people what they thought would be appropriate support for those who found themselves in the situation they had been in. Their responses reflected their experiences. All the young people thought there needed to be another The Shop or ‘safe place’ to go where there was similar emotional and social support. It had to be a place where they were accepted and felt they belonged. However many of the young people felt there was a need to encourage people to access employment and relevant training. They saw this as an unmet need at The Shop. Others reflected that in ‘another shop’ people needed to see the applicability of what they were doing to the work force. Nik stated that they needed to be able to say, ‘I was a shop assistant, a storeperson…’, to ground the experience they had gained. While recreation was also seen as a need, the young people did not see it as a replacement for what they wanted, work. Nik argued, ‘You can’t tell an employer you’ve got a certificate in abseiling, he doesn’t care’. This strongly indicates that it is not enough simply to occupy young people’s time; they want to be linked to something that is meaningful to them in terms of employment opportunities in the mainstream. Many young people stated that they considered The Shop experience was positive. They identified the lack of pressure, the lack of structure and the acceptance that they received at The Shop as an important, and major part of its attraction. However, because it was so accepting, they noted that it was easy and acceptable to be unmotivated and to do nothing. The Shop’s opt outs had not motivated the young people on an ongoing basis and this was suggested as necessary and important. The ‘time out’ provided by drugs was seen as positive and necessary at times when the young people had found it hard to cope because life appeared so desolate and painful. The personal histories of these young people were typically painful and damaging. Dusty suggested that his past

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affected his ‘nuts and bolts’. Unlike most of the others, Dusty had received a lot of trained counselling since The Shop days and he regarded this counselling as vital in his coming to terms with his personal experiences. However, many of the young people recognized the informal counselling that they had received at The Shop from the opt outs as important because it had enabled them to make sense of their history and to see how that past was impacting on their present behaviour. The concept of ‘healing’ (that is the young people gaining an understanding of the impact of their past on their behaviour and coming to terms with that past, so it did not control their lives) appears relevant to empowerment. Tim, Simon and Peter said they had received a lot of informal counselling from Joseph and they identified this as important. For example, Peter shared with Joseph a traumatic experience that had been instrumental in his leaving home. He had got significant emotional and social support and informal counselling. Nik reflected that she had talked a lot to Mary about her past, and since The Shop had spent a lot of time alone which she had found valuable in helping her to reflect on her past and look to the future. It is interesting that most of the young people who had received informal counselling said they would never have gone to professional agencies. They had obtained advice because the people were their friends. I looked at some of the young people who had been at risk and who were now working. Peter had joined the Public Service after the co-op and could therefore be seen as a success because he had accessed mainstream society and had, as socially defined, a good job. This appeared linked to both the counselling and the skills and knowledge he had acquired through working with Joseph. Tim, who had been linked to store work while at The Shop, had obtained employment. He also had a close relationship with Joseph and got important support from him and Mary. However, both these young men had mothers who were professional nurses and therefore successful and ‘appropriate’ role models from the mainstream system. For example they owned their own homes. Perhaps, more significantly, their mothers were described positively by these young men. A positive relationship with a caring adult was identified by Werner (1989) as one of the factors identified in children from at risk backgrounds who were ‘resilient’ (they were no longer at risk). In this research a positive relationship with an adult caregiver as a child appeared to assist young people in being able to develop trust relationships in their adult life. Consequently, the early socialization, and the values and norms the young men were exposed to were much more akin to mainstream society than many of the other young people who were mainly from broken families where the parenting had been erratic. These young people remained unemployed after the close of The Shop. They did not have such close relationships with the opt outs at The Shop. It appeared that because they lacked close relationships with people whom they could trust, and whose values they could identify with, they found it much harder to integrate, or to see value in attempting to join the mainstream. The young people who were poorly educated, from lower socio-economic backgrounds and abusive families were also fairly inarticulate in terms of the idiom of the dominant society and did not have the skills or knowledge to market what they had done at The Shop to potential employers. Yet the more ‘traditionally articulate’ young people who knew, and cared about, how and when not to swear, and more readily learned how to market their experiences at The Shop had a more mainstream economic upbringing. It appears while they had rejected their parents (and/or been rejected by them) because of abuse or neglect, they had absorbed the mainstream (material) value system of their parents. In addition, their earlier socialization with appropriate parenting, appeared

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to have provided them with greater ability to form trust relationships at The Shop and thus through this to be in a position to acquire the skills to access the mainstream system. It appears that Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1977) idea of cultural capital could be combined with an idea of ‘psychological’ capital, and that this could explain why certain young people, who were seemingly equally disadvantaged by being out of home, accessed, or were empowered to access, the mainstream system. These young people had, in childhood, experienced mainstream values (not necessarily middle-class norms) and possibly conceptualized or internalized or perceived the social world differently to the others, because they saw the mainstream as important and accessible. Young people without this background were members of an underclass of long term unemployed, who had fairly transient accommodation and a continuing criminal record for petty offences. They still lacked access. I concluded that a strategy of empowerment with the at risk required firstly a place where they felt safe, accepted and a sense of belonging (this implies some sense of ownership so that they feel their friends are welcome). The study indicated that young people required social and emotional support, and counselling. The young people felt the counselling should take place in the context of ‘natural’ relationships (not worker-client), where the young people knew, accepted and trusted those they talked to. The young people wanted the power to choose if they wanted to talk about their problems. Consequently informal counselling, in a non-structured context, was the form the young people considered appropriate and necessary. The young people felt that the passing on of information, skills and training should take place in a supportive environment where they were encouraged and motivated and where they could see clear links to the mainstream system. The place should not be highly pressured and it was important that there should be provision for ‘time out’. In the context of the young peoples’ backgrounds of abuse and rejection these requirements could be easily understood as providing for needs and opportunities that they had missed out on. It appeared that young people who had experienced very little trust and love needed greater opportunities in which to develop positive relationships, as they needed more time and understanding and/or skilled intervention to acquire the ‘psychological’ capital which was necessary to develop such relationships. The young people brought up in families or environments where their significant caregivers were members of an underclass appeared more at risk of remaining outside the mainstream system and this appeared to be associated with their early socialization (social class experiences). If, in addition, the young people came from a background where they did not have positive relationships/appropriate parenting with a caring adult, their ‘at riskness’ increased because they did not have the same level of skills as other young people in developing positive relationships which assist people in gaining access to the mainstream system. So while Schwendinger et al. (1976) noted that middle-class, but marginalized, young people had more ‘absorption mechanisms’, such as access to counselling, in this study it appears that access is not enough for young people from backgrounds where they had not been socialized with mainstream values in their immediate environment. Such young people may require more intensive work to empower them in the practice, as well as the knowledge, that access to the mainstream is possible. So access to ‘aborption mechanisms’, such as counselling, is not enough and an empowerment process needs to recognize not only structural issues of access, but process issues which embrace a recognition of the interplay between social and psychological issues.

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While I was researching empowerment in 1990 I spent a lot of time with the young people. The methodology meant there was much more of an exchange of views than in my earlier research with them. It was in this exchange with its non-directive style of interviewing that I became dissatisfied with my earlier data interpretation and conclusions (outlined above) that did not appear to address all the issues. Part 3: Reflexivity—Research Re-visioned In the remainder of this chapter I attempt to locate the research, and myself the researcher, in a theoretical framework. I endeavour to show how my description of the cooperative and its members was not a neutral reality but was a compilation of factors that shaped my seeing: the constructs, ideas and experience that I brought to the research experience. I reflect on the data and my analysis. My research perspective in part three is influenced by systems theory of the second generation (Rittel, 1982), and post-positivist philosophy (which embraces postmodernism and poststructuralism). I also use feminist theory in this tradition. I draw conclusions about the implications of the findings to empowerment. Reflexive Research 1990 After I had written up the findings I began to reflect on my earlier analysis of the data in part one and the data collected in 1990 more carefully. I looked at what the young people told me in addition to what I had wanted to learn, I was no longer satisfied with my original data interpretation. I felt I had failed to describe the reality of the young people at risk, most of whom were now members of an underclass. I used a reflexive methodology which means ‘…in simple terms, to…probe beyond the level of “straightforward” interpretation…’ (Woolgar, 1988:16). It involves looking again: revisioning and deconstructing the text and the author, to consider alternative interpretations of the ethnographic record. Reflexive research raises issues where ‘… the observer, the agent of representation, has become again part of the picture’ (Woolgar, 1988:16). I began to see how my earlier interpretation was a product of my social constructs—what I could see and how I saw it—a factor I had not considered in 1986/7. I began to consider that certain feminist ideas about patriarchal power were relevant to the position I had taken as a researcher and that these ideas were relevant to researchers in general: male or female. I developed the idea that as a researcher I had operated in a framework of positivism, certainty and absolutes which is a part of the patriarchal tradition of hegemony, hierarchy and dominance. In this tradition the researcher names: what is normal, what is true, what exists. I reflected on how I came to see the subjects of my research as an underclass of at risk people that I oppressed as a researcher. My re-visioning was very much influenced by new ‘knowledge’ including a post-positivist and systems perspective on the world, but was interconnected with the experience that I had obtained with at risk young people in the intervening years. I will briefly outline this perspective and then relate it to my research.

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A Post-positivist and Systems Perspective Postmodern epistemology is ‘…questioning the basis of truths…’ (Mascia-Lees et al., 1989:15) and assumes that reality is interpreted through the constructs that the observer brings to any situation. These constructs are shaped by the class, culture and experience of the researcher. The written texts are thus seen as inseparable from how the author views the world: a world where there is no certainty: Postmodern discourses are all ‘deconstructive’ in that they seek to distance us from and make us skeptical about beliefs concerning truth, knowledge, power, the self, and language that are often taken for granted within and serve as legitimation for contemporary western culture (Flax, 1987:624). In this tradition ethnographic research is considered to reflect not ‘the’ account of reality but the author’s description of ‘a’ reality which the writer describes—we describe things the way they are and the way they are becomes the way we describe it (von Foerster: 1986). So a text is no longer seen as impartial but as a perception of what is true. The postmodern epistemological view is common in some systems theory and has antecedents in feminist theory: …what appear to be new and exciting insights to these postmodernist anthropologists—that culture is composed of seriously contested codes of meaning, that language and politics are inseparable, and that constructing the ‘other’ entails relations of domination—are insights that have received repeated and rich exploration in feminist theory for the past forty years (MasciaLees et al, 1989:11). Systems theory of the second generation is very different from that of the first generation with its conservative application by writers such as Talcott Parsons and as criticized in Lilienfeld (1982/88: 166–72). The later systems theory is used as a way to attempt to look at the interconnections between disciplines and, indeed, all forms of life. It can be used as a way of viewing the world and/ or the connections between various parts within the whole (Capra, 1982). It has been used by deep ecologists such as Naess (1989) to look at the interrelatedness of all life. Von Bertalanffy (1975:149) refers to ‘Aristotle’s “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” as a definition of the basic system problem that is still valid’. Briefly, systems theory construes the world from a dialectical perspective with all the organisms, including humans, and the entire ecosystem interacting and interconnected in a web of complex relationships. The ontological perspective of systems theorists such as Maturana and Varela (1987) is common to post-positivism and contends that there is no objective reality and that a reality, as described, is a construction of the observer: ‘We do not presuppose an objective world independent of us as observers…’ (p. 241). So knowledge is seen, not as an objective fact, but as a reflection of the perceptions and understandings that the observer brings to the situation which may or may not be true. Consequently we can never know something is a fact and true; we can only believe it to be so. This connects with ideas in post-positivist philosophy. Wittgenstein (1972:2e) states: ‘From its seeming to me—or to everyone—to be so, it doesn’t follow that it is so’. Therefore what was once construed as a ‘certainty’ becomes a possible or contingent certainty because it has arisen out of a

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particular framework of perceptions and beliefs. In short, ‘The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference’ (Wittgenstein, 1972:12e). So that what we can ‘see’ and perceive is a factor of the frameworks (recognized or unrecognized) that we bring to the situation. Berger (1974:8) notes: The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today. The implications of this perspective in philosophy and systems theory is that we cannot know anything with absolute certainty and therefore all knowledge claims must be treated with caution: The knowledge of knowledge compels. It compels us to adopt an attitude of permanent vigilance against the temptation of certainty. It compels us to recognise that certainty is not proof of truth. It compels us to realise that the world everyone sees is not the world but a world which we bring forth with others (Maturana and Varela, 1987:245). Neither systems theory nor this chapter sets out to answer philosophical questions, to investigate philosophical debates, or the traditions that underlie them, but acknowledges this philosophy as a base for looking at the world, and a basis for revisioning the text. Using this perspective the observer has the capacity to ‘see again’, to reconstruct, the same ‘reality’ when they recognize and reflect on how their framework shaped their perceptions: We do not see what we do not see, and what we do not see does not exist. Only when some interaction dislodges us—such as being suddenly relocated to a different cultural environment —and we reflect upon it, do we bring forth new constellations of relation that we explain by saying that we were not aware of them, or that we took them for granted (Maturana and Varela, 1987:242). Feminist theorists have used such ideas to deconstruct and reconstruct ‘woman’. For example Rich suggest the need for women to re-vision their past in order to understand how they have been shaped by it: Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction… Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self knowledge…is more than a search for identity: it is a part of our refusal of the self destructiveness of a male dominated3 society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been until now a male prerogative (Rich, 1979:35). Applying such a perspective involves seeing ourselves as drenched in assumptions and constructs which arise out of our social experience and affect the perceptions through which our knowledge

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arises and alters. Deconstructing these assumptions helps us in our understanding because there are no neutral interpretations but they arise from a belief. ‘The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief (Wittgenstein, 1972:23e). We need to be aware of our framework which is based on beliefs and assumptions because without this awareness we cannot doubt. It is from this process of reflection or ‘…what Habermas calls the “self-reflection”, or “reflexivity” of human agents…’ (Giddens, 1985:18), that we acquire the ability to see how perceptions of certainty arise. The process of questioning the constructs with which we ‘saw’ develops into deconstruction, where ‘reality’ can be, not only questioned, but reconstructed. Thus instead of a reality, ‘realities’ may emerge. Feminist theorists have used deconstruction to consider how society and patriarchy constructed ‘woman’ as other to man. The discussion of the female as “other” was the starting point of contemporary feminist theory’ (Mascia-Lees et al., 1989:11). I attempt to reconstruct The Shop and how I saw the at risk as an ‘other’ to myself. Reconstructing The Shop’s Realities I began to deconstruct the reality of the co-op, and the subjects that I had constructed, and to reconstruct another reality. Neither of the realities was wrong or right. I realized that two very important factors shaped my initial analysis: (1) how I framed/constructed whom I was interpreting and (2) how I framed/constructed what I was interpreting. I will firstly look at whom I saw using de Beauvoir’s (1949/81) idea of ‘other’. Patriarchal Thinking, the ‘Other’ and the Researcher I use reflexivity here in the context of an analysis of the idea of ‘otherness’ because I think it is a valuable concept to use in social analysis with reference to the traditional perception of the researcher and scientist as objective and impartial observers of reality. I use this construct of ‘otherness’ and ‘other’ to argue that the tradition of patriarchy operates in the research process under an illusion of objectivity and that this can be oppressive. De Beauvoir writes, ‘Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself (1981: 17). In her analysis of the subjugated role of women she argues that woman is defined in relation to man and therefore ‘man’ is perceived as neutral. Consequently, by the very process of definition, woman is other, and inferior, as man is construed as the norm. …it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there was an absolute human type, the masculine (p. 15). De Beauvoir argues that there is a social assumption that man’s thinking is inherently superior to a woman’s. It was this biological gender based assumption that man’s thinking was superior that de Beauvoir challenged. De Beauvoir’s argument was that a women’s assumed inferiority rested in her

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position as ‘other to’ man, the norm. De Beauvoir described a mode of thinking which was dominant, and oppressive to women, that was a part of a male patriarchial perspective. She took one conceptual and profound step: she has identified a paradigm that describes constructs of superiority in male thinking and used it to reinterpret women’s reality. With the constructs underlying male thinking exposed they are then open to question. I find the notion of patriarchy very important and a useful way of thinking about types of thinking (metathinking). Therefore I use the idea of patriarchal thinking (exclusive of a gender concept) in my analysis. I will illustrate the importance of distinguishing patriarchal from male by using de Beauvoir’s reply to a man who assumed his male thinking as superior. She replied,’ “I think thus because it is true,” thereby removing my subjective self from the argument’ (p. 15). She appealed to truth as a neutral arbitrator. In doing this de Beauvoir did two things. She assumed a position of inferiority because she did not claim female thinking (female) to be as valid, or the same, as man’s. Secondly, she has not removed the subjective self, as she states, but failed to recognize the subjectiveness of her own truth. What de Beauvoir did is interesting. She placed her thinking on a higher level to man’s, terming her words as truth. But by stating her thinking was true, she adopted the man’s paradigm of dominance and patriarchal thinking by assuming not only superiority but truth. That patriarchal thinking and behaviour is not the prerogative of the male gender is suggested in Kohler Reissman (1987), Tronto (1987) and Derrida (1987) who in commenting on structures as a part of male institutions spoke of ‘the masculine directors of the university—masculine, whether women or not…’ (p. 191). Fox Keller notes that feminists are examining patriarchal bias ‘on ever deeper levels of social structure, even of language and thought’ (Fox Keller in Harding, 1987:236). De Beauvoir’s response to hegemony was (p. 15) an appeal to truth and in this instance she became a part of the ‘male paradigm’ of certainty, hegemony and supposed objectivity. Patriarchy is not an uncommon mode of thinking. The perception of men as superior, as de Beauvoir points out, was vested in the supposed neutrality of maleness. But this position is in fact one of assumed superiority as it enables the ‘neutral’ man to assume the position of being able ‘impartially’ to comment on, to evaluate and to judge the other—in this case woman. The research and scientific traditions that consider the researcher’s data collection and analysis as an objective description of reality are, I would argue, a part of the patriarchal paradigm. The notion of a researcher as objective observer comes from this tradition of patriarchy. The researcher’s findings are seen to constitute neutral facts and knowledge; like de Beauvoir, the researcher describes reality that way ‘because it is true’. The subjects in research may become the other and the researcher’s interpretations can be the products of their own hegemony. De Beauvoir states, ‘if…we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?’ (1981:15). Similarly, if we as researchers admit that we and subjects exist, then we must, I would argue, ask: What is the researcher? What is the subject? How is the researcher interpreting the world? What is the relationship between the two? The researcher must attempt to be aware of how her framework, which has a philosophical base, affects what she sees. As Wittengenstein states, ‘Working in philosophy…is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things’ (1980:16e).

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The Other My initial data analysis ‘discovered’ that the people whom I termed the dropped outs were instrumental in the failure of a worker cooperative. At the end of the first research period, in 1987, I had explored and understood why this alternative reality ‘failed’. I had understood that those who had been dropped out of society had been a drain. They had behaviours that had to be altered—they needed education in the principles of cooperation. I saw them as ‘others’. I knew that they acted and behaved differently to me. I saw them as different. I saw them as oppressed. I saw them in Buber’s terms as in as I-It relationship, and not an I-Thou (Buber, 1970). I had seen more of their flaws than their potential. I had seen the subjects as other to myself and I had described their reality from my position: my hegemony, my constructs. My perceived research object was of a cooperative, an alternative reality, that was providing something positive for people who lacked access to society, the dropped outs. I had not seen the anarchists or the Christians or most of the travellers as different to myself. I shared their constructs about the capitalist world. I too was looking for an alternative and it ‘made sense’ to open the alternative to more disadvantaged others who would, as victims of the dominant hegemony, be thought of as viewing the dominant system in the same way. I had been careful not to form closer relationships with the opt outs than with the dropped outs as I realized they would be the group I would have more empathy with. However, while I had considered how my cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977) would influence whom I would form relationships with, I had not considered how my thinking, my constructs, would cause me to see a particular reality and to favour some ideas, interpretations and values over others. I had not understood how my life and experience had tied me to the opt out group so even without directly establishing closer relationships with them, in terms of ideals and world view I was closer to them. I was something of an opt out. I understood their cause. I was sympathetic to their motivations. I had not understood the dropped outs beyond that categorization, because my intellectual and social cultural capital and constructs did not see that their reality was valid. I did not know their reality, nor how they viewed the world. I saw them as different to me but I did not assume the need to view their ‘reality’, as for me there was only one reality, the one I saw. In retrospect I saw that, as I was interested in the cooperative as a ‘new’ order, my constructs and judgments about those who were not acting as I perceived members of the new order should behave were influenced and constructed by this perception. The dropped outs for me were the drug taking other. I was not therefore a neutral observer but a person operating within The Shop’s dominant hegemony. 1990: De-constructing the ‘Other’ After re-meeting and re-interviewing the former co-op members, I considered that I had made a leap that somehow denied the humanity of these at risk young people. It was inadequate to consider the dropped outs as people who were a drain on The Shop, they were something beyond an oppressed minority that I labelled. I had viewed them through a construct as oppressed, as other to myself and the opt outs. I now believe I had not the skills or the experience to relate to and understand the importance of observing and listening to the reality of the young at risk people in The Shop. In 1990 I believe I managed this better and I consider this was a result of experiences that enabled me to ‘see’. As stated, in the intervening years I had worked two years in a situation where I was for most of the time a lone worker running a youth centre targeting the at risk. Drug use and heavy drinking

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by these young people was not uncommon and neither was violence. In this environment the rules were formed and enforced cooperatively, within the constraints of the law, and were balanced in terms of their norms. I had to learn these norms. I also learnt a lot about their backgrounds not as abstract life histories but as painful psychological injuries that they shared as our relationship developed. I got to know the young people in an environment where their norms and needs were important and where I was dependent on them in situations of violence and conflict. I was exposed to their vulnerability when they related traumatic life histories that they found confusing and painful. I learned that they expressed their pain in suicide, self mutilation, drug taking, and anger. I learnt a lot more about drug taking. I also learned to appreciate the young people for their happiness, zest, energy, sense of humour, their challenges and cooperation. It was at times traumatic but also very enjoyable. In this period I saw patterns between the young people’s background experiences and their socially unacceptable ways. Their actions became ‘normal’, understandable reactions, in the context of their backgrounds. When I came back to re-interview the at risk from The Shop they were much less ‘other to’ me. I had an understanding of how they thought and why they behaved in the ways they did. In addition we now had a shared history that we looked back on together. Nik said to me, ‘You were part of the place’. I will now look at how my construct of what I saw framed my seeing. Reconstructing The Shop In this section I look at how I framed/constructed what I was interpreting and then go on to reconstruct another reality in The Shop. I concluded in 1987 that the cooperative was failing and ultimately failed because it was being used by a sub-group of members who were more a drain on, than an input into, this alternative reality and that therefore ‘alternative realities’ were not an appropriate option for the at risk. These conclusions were, in retrospect, accurate for that situation, but I had not been aware of how my analysis was limited by the context or system in which I had seen, or had not seen, the at risk. I interpreted a reality, the cooperative. I had not recognized that those at risk had no power to name a reality suitable to their needs, but their use of the ‘co-op’ defined their needs and its function for them. They did not name it in words but they ‘named’ it differently in their practice. The construction of The Shop as a cooperative was not a neutral way of perceiving and interpreting reality. It led me to look at not simply the at risk, but to look at them in the context of and ‘as members of that particular reality. I drew conclusions about them in the context of a political and social situation which they had not constructed. The reality in which they operated was not neutral, but was a defined entity, like society, in which they had little chance of gaining power. I had analyzed The Shop through particular constructs, that of a worker cooperative and alternative reality. These reflected my interests and influenced what I saw. When the people all spoke of The Shop as a worker cooperative, I had assumed this as the reality. I had constructed my analysis of The Shop on how it was presented to me, its real or manifest function. That function was described by those who had established The Shop. They were eloquent and interested in The Shop (their construction). The others, the dropped out, described it in the same terms: a cooperative. I researched the coop and those involved in it with reference to that reality. However,

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those who named The Shop, and its role and functions, were those in power, the anarchists and Christians, the opt outs. They described the reality they had constructed. In the capacity of the right to name, power existed on a very fundamental non-overt and non-manifest level. The power of the name ‘cooperative’ was crucial in how I initially analyzed The Shop. For the at risk The Shop was firstly a place where they could drop in, be accepted and have a cup of coffee. It happened to be a worker cooperative, and thus they called it by what it had been named, but they had not done the naming. The way the at risk used The Shop was not as it was named. They defined its reality by their practice. They defined it in a different way. When I contacted Ted, a young Nyoongah man, in 1990, he said, ‘Yeh, I remember [The Shop] and The Den’. I was surprised by this association. The Den was the name of an inner city drop-in centre that provided a place for people to go, pool, free tea and coffee. Although many of the young people and one adult from The Shop were involved in both ventures, they seemed like very different places to me. However, both places had essentially the same function from the young people’s point of view, somewhere to drop in, where they and their friends were accepted. The at risk got involved in The Shop as it was relevant and accessible to them. The cooperative aspect was not the main function for the young people. Cooperation was good but not why they went there. This came up again and again in the conversations in 1990 before I heard it as relevant. I had accepted the dominant group’s view (who were the dominant hegemony in this case) without even considering that there could have been another reality which existed because of other needs and also because of opportunity. I then reflected on one aspect of the ‘others’ behaviour, the drug taking of the dropped outs. I applied a systems analysis in considering how the part (the drug taking) was related to the whole (the life and lifestyle of these people). There were different realities operating and thus different expectations and outcomes for those involved which were to some extent in conflict. Thus conflict amongst The Shop’s participants was inevitable. In retrospect it would be valuable for the researcher, me, to attempt to recognize how she, I, construct(s) reality, and to investigate how others use a supposed reality, to see how they construct it. It is not enough to see how a place is named, because naming is a prerogative of those in power. It is important to deconstruct how reality is named and how actions reflect an unspoken name, or un-naming. It is therefore important not to assume the reality. So while The Shop on one level was named a worker cooperative, this was not the construct that shaped how people used and treated it, nor was it a consistent perception. The worker cooperative I saw reflected what I was interested in and it limited not only what I saw but how I saw it. The conclusions were not only arrived at by looking at the cooperative but also in the way I perceived and constructed the at risk. I will now attempt to use a systems perspective to see the interconnectedness of participants’ drug taking and their lifestyle and human needs. A Systems Perspective on Drug Use In 1990, when I reinterviewed the members of The Shop, one of my initial interests was whether those who had been using drugs frequently were still doing so, and secondly whether they were now employed. I had not been aware of a more holistic perspective, but saw factors such as drug taking in isolation from the system in which it took place.

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Frequently when I re-interviewed the young people from The Shop a joint was rolled or a bong lit during the interview. Often the interviews took place in the context of a meal as they came for lunch or dinner to where I was staying. The interviews were informal and the data collection strung out until they decided to leave, sometimes six or more hours later. So they were pretty casual and, while I had certain questions, the sessions were not really designed around the questions as I was trying to get some holistic understanding of their lives. A theme emerged in the 1990 interviews that The Shop was important as a place to earn or steal money for drugs. It began to emerge that in many cases the need for drugs was linked to some trauma the young person had experienced. Again and again the theme kept emerging about the great sensation, the anaesthetizing effect of drugs and pills. For Tim, The Shop was ‘somewhere to go and pass the time… The only time I went out selling was when I wanted drugs’. The desire for drugs was linked to the need for a pain killer, a way out. For Nik, ‘It’s great. To be so drug fucked you just don’t care: pilled out. It’s great feeling, just great… I loved being out of it. It was pleasure. You don’t think. I used to like not having to think. It wasn’t a drama. If you let yourself think it was a drama’. Dusty considered that The Shop helped him earn money for drugs and that the drugs helped him cope with his private pain. He explained, ‘It took me a long time to admit I was sexually abused by my uncle. If you don’t admit it…it affects your nuts and bolts—your brain’. Tim had been ‘glue sniffing at 13’ and smoking ‘pot at 14’. He explained his motivation as: ‘I can’t say why…but I feel relaxed… I was always getting blown out… You feel nothing…a great anaesthetic Another theme in these young persons’ lives was the lack of alternative things to do and places to go. The lack of other things to do was closely associated with the need for a place to meet and talk to other people. They frequently mentioned that The Shop was a ‘safe’ place, which is interesting and perhaps links with their precarious accommodation and family histories of abuse and conflict. As several of the dropped outs put it: ‘Basically I had nothing to do. I kept going back’ (Singer). ‘We loved that place’ (Ted). ‘Somewhere to hang out, safe…have fun…there? because I didn’t have anywhere else to go… To meet and talk about life, the universe and everything’ (Simon). The young people kept telling me how they liked drugs. However, it was a significant period of time before I absorbed/heard the ‘drugs are great’ hypothesis because it was an ‘unacceptable’ hypothesis—unacceptable in that I did not consider this a finding as it was not a ‘solution’ but an endorsement of what I had seen as a ‘problem’. I was now in the concluding stage of my research and I was searching for solutions to tie the data on the co-op together in terms of findings on empowerment. This was the research agenda I had set. It took me ages before I absorbed their views about drugs and initially I only joked about ‘my new hypothesis’ that drug taking was really good. Yet what I was getting was an insight into their social perception of their drug taking reality—which I had not done previously. It was now 1990. These dropped outs were older, and could articulate their experiences as they had reflected on them. I could listen more effectively to hear ‘new’ information. They were less strange others and I was less of an other to them because of our shared past. They were more understandable because of my ‘new’ knowledge of the at risks’ reality that I had learned in the youth centre where I had known closely and sometimes intimately young people from the same backgrounds. At the youth centre I had the cynical reflection at times that drug taking was more my problem than the young people’s. They were apparently enjoying themselves. I was the one troubled by it. Now I was actually exploring

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what drugs (illegal) meant to them as distinct from what they meant to me as a member of mainstream society. Neither reality is wrong; both are valid perceptions. However, to see their reality is very important in terms of actions about my owned belief about ‘excessive’ drug use being destructive of people’s potential and of society’s norms. Nik linked the need for drugs to a response to life’s ‘drama’ which was a source of pain. This is a similar response to the medical model where one of the reasons for prescribing drugs is to alleviate pain.4 Now if drug taking is a response to pain, and the source of the pain is in these young people’s lives, then it must be seen as the source of their initial drug taking. Drug taking could be construed as a normal response when needs are not being met and where that deprivation of needs means that life is too difficult to cope with on a daily basis when not drugged or ‘straight’. The young people’s view of the necessary amount to be prescribed was different to that of doctors. In this context drug taking is an understandable response and a ‘normal’ response given the life experience of the young people. In my initial observations of the young people from The Shop my social constructs about the functions of The Shop influenced the way I looked at drug taking. I accepted the needs of The Shop’s survival over that of the young people’s needs without even being aware that this was a factor of the way I was viewing the reality. I did not know that the young people’s perception of reality was important, or even valid. Even when I re-interviewed them it took a lot of time and reflection for me to ‘hear’ that drugs were used as a great pain killer, and to understand this as valid. I did not see drugs as fulfilling a need, so having a positive function for those using; nor did I develop a hypothesis about the need for free drugs for individuals who were typically from abused backgrounds. Rather, I considered their responses as ‘problems’ and not as valid perceptions to be included in any holistic ‘solution’. The young people’s contentment and need for drugs was construed by me as a sign of their malaise and their ‘difference’. While I saw that drug taking was a norm, I again dichotomized, seeing it as normal for ‘them’ and only relevant as such. I did not consider their drug taking as affirmative action and indicative of their taking some control, but as negative and as inaction. When I reflected on my data I began to see how drug taking for the young people was at first a pleasant experience because it fulfilled immediate needs, but also was a part of a sub-culture where acceptance came if one used drugs. Latterly I began to see the lifestyle that developed around drug taking. I began to see that it was part of a social scene, providing for previously unmet human needs. So in addition to killing pain, or making it duller, drug taking also had other social consequences. It provided excitement because it was illegal. There was drama with police raids and arrests. These raids and arrests created victims who got caught and were the unfortunate targets of a hated ‘other’ to the young people, the police. There was sympathy and empathy for those caught/oppressed. There were heroes who escaped, who had somehow foiled the ‘evil oppressors’, the police. It was a shared tragedy when someone overdosed. Drug taking was a cohesive action that linked the users as a group. There were group traditions in common attitudes and values. For example the police were typically considered as corrupt. There were many stories of their framing people and stealing drugs for their own use. In addition there were legends that grew up as a part of this scene. There were lively and amusing oral stories and histories, which were often embellished in the telling, and from which the orators got kudos. For instance Bouncer talked with great vividness (a story I had heard him recount before) about the time he shared a house with some university students one of whom was a

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friend of his. He said Rob (his friend) had come around to the house with some of his mates from university. He had told them that there was a heroin addict in the house. Rob then went to Bouncer and asked him if he’d shoot up so they could watch. So I said, ‘Oh all right’. So with them all watching I stuck the needle in, gave it a bit of a squirt with blood—just for drama. All these faces hanging around the bedroom door watching. Rob impressing his mates! Another old story that I often heard was one by Joseph. He asked, ‘Have you heard about the friend of mine who got eaten by a polar bear in Perth?’ Almost everyone had but Joseph would always repeat it. It was a true story and amusing and sad for its lunacy. A couple of friends of Joseph’s dropped some acid5 and went tripping in the Perth zoo. One climbed into the polar bear enclave and was mauled to death. Joseph always told it like it was a big joke and everyone usually laughed or groaned at his sense of fun. The death was down played. There was Simon’s story of being busted by the police: a part fact, part fancy tale. In the telling the events all happen in the one day. In practice the arrival of the police came several days later because Simon had a warrant out for him. The story goes: Simon’s house had been robbed and his friend Bouncer lost some things. Simon phoned the police to report the theft. He took a shower while waiting for the police to come. Meantime, some friends called round and while waiting for him they lit up a joint. Simon walks out of the shower just as the police come in while his friends are passing around the joint. So Simon’s friends get busted for dope smoking. The police then search the house, find a marijuana plant, and arrest Simon. Sometimes the stories had morals and lessons for life. For example Simon’s story ends with a court appearance and an $800 fine and the obvious lesson is to stay away from the police. Bouncer’s indicates his friend’s acquaintances’ ‘otherness’ and thereby reinforces minority group solidarity. Joseph’s story suggests the foolish behaviour of one user and by implication their greater sense: they were still alive. Another part of this lifestyle is the need to obtain money to buy drugs. This required ‘necessary’ crime (to provide money for supply). All these aspects added drama to lives where paying the rent and bills were difficulties, where outside recreation was often too expensive, where owning a car was an exception and where there was little hope of work that would bring any status and self esteem. In addition most of those involved had memories of a childhood and adolescence where there was ongoing trauma that resulted in unresolved psychological pain that was good to forget. If we acknowledge a bit of excitement as a human need, particularly given the high energy levels of young people, then the drug and crime culture has a very important latent function, for young people, of providing a more absorbing and interesting lifestyle. One typical/normal consequence of purchasing drugs, which is difficult on unemployment benefits because of the costs, is dealing. For example, Tim (although not unemployed in 1990) tried to fix up some contacts for marijuana deals with some other people who were present when I interviewed him. Typically these young people only deal marijuana and pills, but at times some of the older ones were dealing harder drugs, although this was small scale and to finance their own use. There is a strange irony in some of their logic. Simon said he only deals ‘…to pay off my fines’. It is as ironical as it is absurd and dangerous.

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Drug taking can therefore be understood from a systems perspective not as an isolated ‘problem’ but as a part of a whole lifestyle. It was not an unusual response to psychological pain and lack of access to mainstream society. The outcomes of the young people’s using drugs to cope with and to avoid psychological pain included participation in a lifestyle which led some to addiction and, more typically, to crime. These dealers, the young people who got involved in drugs and who came to The Shop, are not rich, nor are they obviously evil or bad as society constructs and stigmatizes them. They, because of their backgrounds (class, economic factors, psychological and then social abuse), become involved in a process, a system that leads in a certain direction: to crimes like dealing and robbery and thus to the legal system and its inexorable mechanisms. Simon had been through an alcohol program but was still in the same social circle and drinking when I met him in 1990. A young woman from The Shop was going through a drug and alcohol program when I contacted her. She said she didn’t want to meet any of The Shop people because ‘I used to socialize with drugs. I don’t want to mix with them [The Shop people] any more. They are still users’. She had been in the social circle of the at risk young people for five years, but hopes to avoid them when she leaves the program so she does not get re-involved in drugs. If we consider social contact a need, one wonders how easy it will be for this young woman to avoid her ‘old’ friends. While we can admire her determination to straighten her life out, it is important to recognize that drug use is a part of a drug use lifestyle which meets other human needs. These include a social network of contacts and friends with common values and expectations. Treating drug taking as a substance abuse which needs only the removal of the addiction, e.g. through a detoxification program, ignores that drug taking is also a lifestyle which meets many psychosocial needs: like a group belonging, providing a sense of place, social acceptance, excitement and pleasure. The psychosocial needs have to be replaced with something meaningful or life could become bloody miserable. A Systems Perspective on the Cooperative Despite all the talk of involvement in The Shop there was really only a limited capacity for people to be involved full time if they did not want to go on nut rounds. Joseph did most of the tasks, and trained Peter. There was not the time, the provision for training, or capacity to have many full time active members on the business side. The work of packing and labelling was labour intensive. The Shop was providing young people with somewhere to go and things to do. It was ‘doing good’ for the at risk. Yet The Shop served other functions that also linked the two groups: the opt outs and the dropped outs. The Shop gave the anarchists and Christians meaning in their lives and a position in the wider community as people engaged in productive and non-exploitative work that assisted groups at risk: the young unemployed, the ex-psychiatric patients, those with disabilities. Those involved were featured on the radio, in the local newspaper and were invited to give talks to community groups. Politicians visited. Joseph stated how it was the first opportunity he had to live out his ideals. The opt outs also needed the at risk young people precisely because they were at risk from the dominant society. They were needed not as powerful or socially equal people but as people at risk because this demonstrated The Shop’s social difference. The at risk were evidence and a visual manifestation of the Christians’ and anarchists’ very criticisms of the dominant society. The young people’s ‘at riskness’ was a social construction. It

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reflected the way the dominant society reacted to and treated people with limited social and emotional resources, providing them with no/few opportunities and so turning them into outcasts. So the young people’s presence showed The Shop’s difference to mainstream capitalism: it accepted the unaccepted. The young at risk’s presence gave The Shop and the workers a lot of kudos in the wider community.6 The fact that the young people lacked the opportunity to take power at The Shop was not a deliberate subjugation but it was a latent consequence of the structure of The Shop. Nik, one of the at risk, was obtaining skills and a position of influence in The Shop. She was in the process of gaining the skills to enter the mainstream. She tried to assume power, and to get rid of Joseph who stood between her and control of The Shop. This was not welcomed by the others in power: the Christians, the anarchists and, although unacknowledged because of my position, by myself. There was a lot of controversy. It could be viewed that Nik had become empowered beyond the level that was acceptable. She had tried to take power. This was contrary to cooperative principles, but it was also contrary to the power status quo in which there were powerless and powerful people. There was no room for the at risk to redefine a reality for their needs. A systems analysis of The Shop could look at The Shop as an organism of interdependent parts where the hierarchy was embedded and not ranked. There was a mutual dependency and a struggle for power. The Christians and anarchists wanted to help the oppressed, the needy, as their willingness to help showed their difference to the unjust/oppressive ruling order. The at risk needed and wanted the social and economic support of The Shop. There were therefore functions that the at risk were performing that made them intrinsic to the purpose of the place, and they could not therefore simply be constructed as a drain. They were implicated in multiple ways in the functioning of the whole.7 It was not recognized by the opt outs that they too needed the at risk for their own social and emotional needs to be met. For all of us, ‘We ourselves want to be needed, we do not only have needs, we are also strongly motivated by neededness’ (Andras Angyal, quoted in Meyeroff, 1971:24). Escaping ‘At Risk’ through the Politics of Deconstruction In this section I will firstly consider who the at risk are and then what ‘at risk’ implies. I consider and use deconstruction as a process exposing the politics implicit in a theory or way of looking because it involves re-looking, a form of critical appraisal and a re-examination of what is taken for granted or ‘obvious’.8 Werner (1971, 1989), Nichol (1985) and Anthony and Cohler (1987) have investigated research on the factors which enabled young people to escape from an at risk background. These writers employ a particular psychological framework. On one level this has a positive function as it serves to recognize, and work for, the alleviation of the qualities and conditions that make up ‘at riskness’. On another level, in the very act of defining a group as at risk they are created into an ‘other’ from a supposedly neutral norm (de Beauvoir, 1949/81) and the implication is that the norm is somehow healthier. Such a framework is therefore not neutral, but a way of looking at, and constructing, a reality. Each psychological framework has, therefore, a social, philosophical and political position which has implications for the dominant hegemony, as, in this case, it constructs a group of people as ‘different to’, and not as barred from, the mainstream society.

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Consequently, for the at risk to cease being at risk there needs to be change: perceptual as well as structural. For Werner (1989) the criteria of being no longer at risk included having a good job and perhaps obtaining further education. Peter from The Shop is therefore no longer at risk: he has a good job. However, he stated he used more marijuana than before. He also said his peers at work were heavy users. But Peter has acquired a legal and respectable livelihood. Peter ceases to be at risk now because he works at something society endorses. However, Peter said he was not happy in his work and described his marijuana use as an escape. So the drug is still functioning as a pain killer. However, this ceases to be relevant as such because Peter fits in to what society constructs as appropriate. Nik has not escaped being at risk in Werner’s terms. She is still dependent on welfare, has no qualifications and is soon to be a single mother. However, she is happy in her lesbian relationship. She no longer drinks heavily or smokes much. She considers herself as successful because she organized and succeeded in artificially inseminating herself and was going to give birth to a child in a couple of months. She will give birth to a baby that will, if her financial situation does not change, be at risk. The way at risk is constructed, by Werner, is largely in economic and educational terms. Economic and educational success are directly equated with being healthy and not at risk. While accepting that poverty is a factor in being at risk, I argue that there are other possibly equally important facets beyond the economic and educational dimensions. These may include spiritual, emotional and social well-being which are hard to measure when not pathological. Nik appeared and spoke as being more content than Peter. The Public Service, Peter’s workplace, appeared to be causal in Peter’s increased illegal drug use. He spoke about how boring it was and how this resulted in his increased drug use. The Public Service appears to be a high risk environment, but it is not perceived as such and not defined as such. It is a ‘respectable’ and legitimate way of earning money in the dominant hegemony. Such environments are less accessible to researchers, and pathologies, problems and crime within them are less public. The more socially powerful people are the less likely they are to be visible as at risk—such as in the middle classes (see Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1976; Nye, 1958). Emotional disorders amongst such people are only relevant if they become obvious pathologies. Being economically at risk is a consequence of being dependent on welfare. Being in receipt of pensions is not viewed as positive. Apart from the influence of the work ethic, this is largely because the likelihood of retaining a good quality of life on the dole or on a pension is minimal. The dole, welfare payments, are below the poverty line. The interplay between poverty and being at risk is clear in the literature (for example, Rutter and Madge, 1977; Liffman, 1978; and Duncan, 1984). The poverty line could therefore be constructed as a stress line, and being at risk a consequence of the social acceptance of poverty as a stress. Accepting that some people should not be in receipt of an adequate income indicates a social perception of the worth of these individuals. It suggests an acceptance of placing people at risk from poverty. It suggests that those who are not working are valued less than workers and suggests a social acceptance that such people should be under stress. It indicates an acceptance that the potential of these people and their children should be stunted because it accepts that they should suffer greater stress and the consequence that they are less likely to attain their potential. The social structure of welfare payments creates people at risk. Such an interpretation would indicate that being risk is a product of how society values a particular group of people; whereas the particular psychological framework of Werner (1989), Nichol (1985) and

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Anthony and Cohler (1987) suggests that being at risk is a product of the individual’s response, their resilience. Similarly, the factors which define ‘resilience’ are not neutral. The at risk are therefore a social construction that stems from a political perspective. There are underlying assumptions about how people in society should behave which ignore, to a large extent, opportunity. (For example, the work ethic implies that people should hold paid employment; it does not acknowledge that people who may want to work are unable to do so). The at risk are defined, and so constructed, as those who do not value education and drop out of school, who do not fit in to a work environment and who are economically unproductive. This construction does not automatically draw attention to structural questions about access and the emphasis tends to be on intervention (with an ‘other’) and not reform of a system. The construction reinforces the status quo in society. The label ‘at risk’ is attributed to particular individuals within society and not to the structure of society. Another way of describing this reality is a systems approach which looks at society as a whole and determines that if parts of the whole are not ‘well’ then the whole is not well, or is at risk. Fisher (1990:38) notes how a ‘systemic approach allows environmental dislocation to be dissolved by restructuring the way the “problem” is perceived’. In another construction societal values such as the desirability of being wealthier than others can be seen, not as health, but causal in creating a society at risk. The problems and issues of poverty, in this construction, cease to lie with the poor, and the wealthy can be seen as responsible for placing society at risk through their overconsumption. From such a perception the role of psychologists and social workers could be redefined so the focus would cease to be on the poor. They would investigate why the wealthy feel it necessary to over-consume. Counsellors could be brought in to ‘clients’ who have too much housing, too many material goods and who use too much energy. Each unnecessary or frivolous item of clothing, every duplication of machine and car would be a cause for professional concern, intervention and report writing. Budget counselling could be offered to help individuals recognize what their priorities should be. The pathologically well-off could be treated along with their symptoms of gross disregard for the resources of the world, and their lack of responsibility to the earth. Sociologists could point out structural causes which lead to the problems and issues around wealth. The more punitive might consider the necessity of a legal response and possible jail sentences for those who continue to place the society at risk. In conclusion, I would argue that deconstruction is political and can be used to look at and question the definition of those at risk and terms such as oppression in our society. While I acknowledge that both society and oppression can also be deconstructed such actions are also political. ‘Problems’ are constructions that reflect positions of power and contingent legitimacy. Deconstruction does not have to lead to nihilism and can lead to further political and social insights about power/patriarchy and dominance. While a systems analysis is another way of seeing and deconstructing boundaries, it also leads to a philosophical postion which has broad social and political implications.

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Conclusions Process This study indicated that empowering young people at risk is possible. However, it requires political and social action. Young people need support in order to gain the skills to get and retain work, training or education. So there need to be more programs not only offering support and special training, but also where the young people’s needs for a place to which they can belong are met, and the relationships between those involved are critical. There need to be additional incentives to encourage young people to attend—especially if they are from lower socio-economic, underclass and/ or abused backgrounds. Some at risk are more disadvantaged than others and will need additional support. Socializing with friends and hanging out is a low risk pursuit for young people at risk. They are familiar with it. It will not cause them to lose their self respect or dignity. But searching for work or attending a program carries risks of psychological and social rejection and no short term benefits. To choose such a course in this context is not motivating but threatening. Courses are comparable to school where the at risk have already failed. I argue for the need for incentives because these (young) people require choice to be empowered. What they choose, because of social constructs of what is worthwhile, may be in part determined by our materialist society. However, at least they would have the option of access, an option which most people appear to take advantage of. Political Implications We observe the world through our constructs, so what we see is not certainty but an aspect of reality which we organize. In my reflexive research I considered myself as an actor in how I was constructing the observations I made. I deconstructed some of the constructs I brought to my initial research data by considering how my own background and later experiences influenced what I saw and could see. My ‘new’ experiences in the intervening years enabled me partially to step outside myself and see my own constructs. Gadamer’s concept of bildung (education, self-formation) is that ‘we become different people, that we “remake” ourselves as we read more, talk more, and write more’ (Rorty, on Gadamer, 1979:359). Gadamer’s bildung applied to the researcher, suggests the possibility of looking back on data to see it anew and to reconstruct a reality, as I have done. This indicates the importance of considering the researcher as an actor who shapes what they can see and indicates how the researcher is a subjective recorder of events, influenced by their experiences and knowledge. (This has been shown by, for example, Kohler Riessman (1987) who considers the impact of the researcher’s class, race and gender, and by Friedrich (1986) who considers how his background experiences influenced his research interests). The way we see, our constructs, are then political and thus deconstruction is, I would argue, a political process. However, the politics of postpositivist philosophy, when it is applied, is not clear, outside of feminist theory: ‘Unlike postmodernism, feminist theory is an intellectual system that knows its politics…’ (Masica-Lees et al, 1989:7–8). So feminist theory has a clear political concern,‘…directed toward securing recognition that the feminine is as crucial an element of the human as the masculine and thus a politics skeptical and critical of traditional “universal truths’” (Mascia-Lees et al, 1989:8).

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However, outside of feminism, Wickham (1990) sees the political possibilities of postmodernism as meaning that ‘concepts like democracy, humanitarianism, class, freedom and culture have to be accessed both in terms of general theoretical debates and in terms [of] the different ways they’re understood and used, or not used, in other particular political sites’ (Wickham, 1990:130). This implies ontology has to be considered not as an abstract debate but for the political implications of such meanings. My study indicated that the construction of terms like at risk are ways of seeing which are inextricably linked to power relations within society. These relations may go unrecognized and unchallenged, but the lack of recognition means underlying assumptions may go unchallenged and unquestioned. In my role of researcher I showed how I considered a group as other to myself. So the dominant hegemony extends far beyond a powerful group but into the very way that we see and do not see. So even those who may consider themselves as advocates for the disadvantaged may be repressive (operating in a patriarchal paradigm of dominance) by placing in the role of victims those on whose behalf they advocate. This realization has profound implication for the construction of any socially just notion of empowerment. Welfare, good intentions and attempts to normalize the ‘at risk’ may in fact further disempower them. Feminist theory’s politics may help to develop a politics for disadvantaged others in our community. I had constructed the at risk as deviant others with problems, and not as humans responding normally to different levels of rejection and abuse. My research suggested that deconstruction can expose covert power relations and consequent political implications, or political sites embedded in our ways of seeing. In the next section I deconstruct ‘at risk’ and draw conclusions about politics and empowerment (as empowerment is a political view of truth) and suggest that researchers should own their frameworks, assumptions and experience in order to make apparent that they describe their constructed reality from a political site and not from a position of ‘truth’. ‘Place’: Acceptance, Belonging (membership) and Relationship In my research experience some at risk young people, who had suffered psychological abuse, were empowered in particular ways that contributed to the resolution of their psychological abuse. This appeared to be associated with their having a place to which they could belong. At The Shop they found acceptance, membership of a community (and a consequent sense of belonging) and positive relationships. (These findings are similar to Wehlage et al. (1989) who looked at schools that were successful with the at risk.) In this context counselling occurred, not through formal therapy, but through relationships with people they knew and trusted. These features, combined with the passing on of skills and knowledge, seem important for the at risk to develop ‘resilience’ as indicated by their accessing the mainstream system. For example when John came into contact with and joined the cooperative, he was depressed and suicidal. He considered that at The Shop he came into an environment that was accepting and to which he felt he belonged. In The Shop he was exposed to new ideas and an alternative lifestyle. He was given insights and understandings about how to aim for something outside of the system but he also learnt an acceptable, for him, point of access into the system: education. When I contacted him in my follow-up research he was in England (he had been deported from Australia as an illegal immigrant) and was completing his undergraduate degree and planning to go on to a Master’s. He linked his experiences at The Shop as instrumental in his development as a person. He wrote that at The Shop

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I was introduced to a diverse range of ideas, values, and people, that were previously missing. Basically it began a period of…personal growth. On the same level I think it also began a process that is still at work today, that being the gradual realization of my own potential and the responsibility I have for my own actions. ‘Place’: Social and Psychological Apart from structural access to the mainstream, the at risks’ background experiences appeared to be very significant in terms of their succeeding or failing to be empowered to join the mainstream. The difficulty of young people, who had inappropriate parenting, in developing trust relationships appeared to be a significant issue. John, like the other young people who moved on from the at risk category, had a stable and positive relationship with an adult for an extended period of time as a child. Such a relationship appeared to have provided a base for the at risk to be able to build on the trust they had experienced and to develop new relationships in the supportive environment of The Shop. The capacity to trust appeared to be associated with their going on to gain skills, where there were limited opportunities, and so accessing mainstream society. A second issue that advantaged those young people who had got out of at risk environments was experience with mainstream norms including stable accommodation, and a parent in regular employment. The young people from an underclass background where their parents had been employed spasmodically appeared to have greater difficulty in accessing the mainstream perhaps because their experience had exposed them to knowledge of, but not experience in, the benefits of the mainstream system. Human Needs: A Systems Perspective When I applied a systems analysis to drug use my study indicated that belonging to a community was very important in meeting emotional and social needs. Consequently, young people who have been abused and rejected need access to a community that meets their social and emotional needs without stifling their potential. Money, access and esteem are linked in our society. Most of the young people in this study either had no official income or were on the dole which is well below the poverty line and the severe poverty line. In initially giving these payments the rationale was that they be able to sustain people between jobs. Unemployment benefit was supposed to be a safety net. We now live in a period of sustained and continuing unemployment which is hitting certain groups, like the young and the unskilled, much harder than others. Unemployment benefit was never set up with the purpose of sustaining the social or emotional needs of people in the context of a society which encourages people to consume and affords status to those with significant material goods. People have basic needs for self esteem. These young people were typically rejected or abused in their families, they had few material possessions and lacked access to traditional employment to develop their self esteem in ways society deems acceptable. Without this access and with low self esteem they reacted by drinking, drug taking, crime, self abuse and the like. They became members of a sub culture where their social and emotional needs were met not only by the drugs but by the whole street and drug culture. The drug community provided them with a place to belong which mainstream society had not done. In this context their actions were comprehensible consequences of

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unmet human needs and an understandable response to particular social and psychological circumstances. Relationship, Interconnectedness, Empowerment and Love I have identified the need for a community to belong to a social and psychological place that is safe and where people can experience accepting and positive relationships. The study indicated that the quality of the relationship is very important in terms of the worker or the researcher understanding those termed at risk. Part of the relationship is connecting with the ‘others’ to see how and why we see them in a particular way. I, with a different knowledge base and experiences, had seen the at risk as separate others to myself and their actions as inappropriate response. Through my reflection I attempted to show how my constructs and experience were preventing me from understanding that group, and causing me to continue to structure them as ‘other’ to me. (I have discussed the political consequences above.) Mathews (1989) states, ‘Our psychological identity and epistemic stance are to a certain extent socially and culturally constructed’ (p. 5). Mathews argues that the new metaphysic of interconnectedness calls for a new relationship between knower and known which I consider is a relevant concept in empowerment. The at risk are defined in terms of an opposite, a group who are assumed to be not at risk. Using a perspective of interconnectedness this binary opposition could not take place as an individual’s or a group’s at riskiness cannot be separated from the ‘at riskness’ of our society—as the part belongs to and is not separate from the whole. Empowerment is then a part of a micro process of seeing the connectedness of self and ‘other’ and a macro process of seeing the relationship of the sub-group to the society and the world. If a recognition of our interconnectedness existed on a micro and macro level, and became an underlying assumption behind how we acted, there would be a limited need for psychologists, social welfare workers and environmentalists as these professions arise out of our alienation from each other and our earth. Their role indicates our failure to see and act in terms of our relatedness and interdependence with each other and with the environment (a perspective that links in with deep ecology (Naess, 1986 and 1989)). I therefore concluded that a part of an empowerment process is a way of seeing, or trying to see, ourselves as connected to each other and the earth. We are only theoretically non-‘at risk’ when we are bound up in a system that damages others and the earth. Such a way of seeing is implicit in having the capacity for development and love, the capacity to empower and be empowered. Maturana and Varela state: …we can expand our cognitive domain. This arises through a novel experience brought forth through reasoning, through encounter with a stranger, or, more directly, through the expression of a biological congruence that lets us see the other person and open up for him room for existence beside us. This is the act of love… Anything that undermines the acceptance of others, from competency to the possession of truth and on to ideological certainty, undermines the social process because it undermines the biological process that generates it (1987:246–7). Such a relationship involves seeing/perceiving the subject not as other to and negative, but as a part of the social self. In this perception, space is created for the other as we see ourselves in them and

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they in us: I in thou. Buber (1970) states we can see a person as an ‘other’, as an object, an ‘it’, or alternatively as a ‘thou’, that is a part of our social and personal self. In seeing a person as ‘thou’, the empowerer is also empowered: ‘Only as the other is truly thou for me, do I truly become I for myself Cain on Marcel (1963:36). This does not dismiss difference, but perceives difference as a place for the development of both: in a I-thou relationship. So the process of empowerment is a part of the act of love. As Fromm states (1959:32): ‘Love is one aspect of what I have called the productive orientation: the active and creative relatedness of man to his fellow man, to himself and to nature’. Maturana and Varela (1987:248) consider this part of our very ontology. We have delved into the social dynamics which points up a basic ontological feature of our human condition that is no longer a mere assumption, that is, we have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps us bring it forth. Ultimately empowerment is about the finding of ourselves in the other, and in this, the other ceases to be other to ourselves. Consequently, we are empowered with others: we cannot ‘empower the at risk’ without acknowledging that the process is contingent on us being less powerful, less judgmental. We are all at risk and we create at riskness by taking away from others a way to fulfil human needs, by our over-consumption of material things and by our power over, instead of with, others. Our societal values and dominant constructs see power and wealth as desirable. A consumer view of ‘others’ links to society’s values and norms which are bound up with consumerism, and ongoing development being perceived only in terms of ‘growth’—which assumes infinite resources. The values in this process, I argued, foster the actual production of a group that can be defined as at risk. In such a process we create at riskness, exploit people and limit their potential. Fromm states: ‘Only when man ceases to be a consumer item for his stronger “fellow” man can our cannibalistic, prehistoric period end and our truly human history begin’ (1986:144). Deconstructing the term ‘at risk’ reveals that the values and ideology of growth and overconsumption actually place all of society and the earth at risk. Consequently, we are all at risk and not just a socially constructed group in society. This indicates changes have to take place on a macro level; otherwise, empowering the group termed at risk, the most vulnerable to the social norm of consumerism, will be an ongoing process, with the group, so defined, ever increasing as our resources become ever depleted and our relationships ever more alienated. In such a society people would lose the capacity to see the self in the other, and difference would be constructed as unacceptable. Final remarks The results of my research experience did not lead me to a set of skills and processes or a particular methodology about how to empower (which I had believed was the issue when I commenced this research). It led me to consider the primary basis of empowerment (as distinct from the giving of power). It is more than people seeing the hands of those in need as human hands (Freire, 1968:29); it is to work with people, to connect, to understand, but more importantly to see and feel ourself in the other, so that the otherness disappears, not in a necessarily mystical sense, but through a

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pragmatic attempt to understand how we objectify and why we cannot relate to ‘them’. Relationship, acceptance, belonging and place are key to empowerment. But social and structural processes need to embrace psychological and philosophical aspects to arrive at a way of constantly re-visioning the consequences of one’s framework and assumptions about the ‘subject’ (person, group or world). To empower is to see the self not in isolation from, but connected to, and in, others. To be involved in empowerment is not to see the self as a giver, but as involved in an experience of reciprocity. It is not to develop sameness but to understand the human reasons behind our difference while respecting human needs. It is working towards seeing the self, through deconstruction and construction of realities, attempting to be neutral, while acknowledging the impossibility of such a reality, and, importantly, owning beliefs/‘knowledge’ as perceptions which should be open to reappraisal. Empowerment is relevant on a micro and macro level: the two are interconnected and implicit to individuals and society as achieving of potential for development. We as a society cannot ignore all the costs, social, personal and economic, of the creation and neglect and disempowerment of any group like the at risk. All people are deserving of a life that accesses their potential and fulfils their needs. Demanding action on behalf of and with these people is not charity but connected to our very development as a healthy society and world. Notes 1 I use ‘out of home’ as a preferred term (as used in Kennedy et al. (1987)) instead of ‘homeless’. It encompasses the idea that a home is a safe place where physical and psychological needs are met. Thus a person who is in a violent living situation where they are not safe, is psychologically without a home. The concept of ‘out of home’ therefore embraces a wide, and what I consider to be a useful, range of living circumstances that cover the situations of the young people in my research:

• A person in a living situation where they are exposed to danger. • A person who does not have reasonable security (a squat could be this, or a person who is forced to move from place to place because their care is only offered on a temporary basis); such a person may also be periodically on the streets. • A person who has nowhere to live. 2 Nyoongah = a generic term for Aboriginal people from the south west of western Australia. 3 ’male dominated’: I consider patriarchy is a power domination and a mode of thinking which while gender typical is not gender specific. It is a powerful socialization force which is much more directed at males (gender) and therefore much more typical, but is not exclusively male (gender). The structure of all major institutions is hierarchical and competitive. For women to “succeed” in a patriarchal society some behave and think like patriarchs. As Mathews (1989) states ‘…feminine gender development is susceptible to pathologies…’. 6). 4 Many of the drugs the young people used were in fact legally prescribed: serepax, valium and rohypnol. The dealers who sold the drugs illegally on the streets were other young people who claimed to have got their supply by visiting a variety of doctors and telling the ‘appropriate story’—depression, inability to sleep and the like—to get hold of these drugs. 5 ‘acid’ = L.S.D. 6 In social welfare, workers are similarly provided with meaning, purpose and income but the meaning is contingent on having/serving the oppressed.

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7 This has implications for social services and social welfare, as when a whole bureaucracy and welfare employment system is built around the poor/oppressed, it is contrary to the needs of the system that the input, the at risk, disappear. The ‘advocates for the poor’ are therefore advocates for their own needs. Both are mutually dependent. 8 Deconstruction does not lead automatically to nihilism. It is a process which produces new constructs or ways of seeing that give rise to consequent reflections. Deconstruction gives reconstructions which are not necessarily negating what has gone before but possibly refining such observations of reality.

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TRONTO, J. (1987) ‘Beyond gender difference to a theory of caring’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12, 4, pp. 644–63. VIDICH, A. (1955) ‘Participant Observation and the Interpretation of Data’, American Journal of Sociology, 60, pp. 354–60. VON BERTALANFFY, L. (1975) Perspectives on General Systems Theory, New York, George Braziller. VON FOERSTER, H. (1986) Seeing With The Third Eye A Day and a Night With Heinz Von Foerster, Videorecording of Lectures in June. WEBB, E.J. CAMPBELL, D.T., SCHWARTZ, R.D., and SECHREST, L. (1966) Unobtrusive Measures: Non Reactive Research in the Social Sciences, Charaz, Rand McNally. WEHLAGE, G., RUTTER, R., SMITH, G., LESKO, N., and FERNANDEZ, R. (1989) Reducing The Risk: schools as communities of support, London, The Falmer Press. WERNER, E. (1989) ‘High-Risk Children in Young Adulthood: a longitudinal study from birth to 32 Years’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 59, 1, January. WERNER, E., BIERMAN, J.M., and FRENCH, F.E. (1971) The Children of Kauai, University of Hawaii Press. WHYTE, W.F. (1956) Street Corner Society, The University of Chicago Press. WICKHAM, G. (1990) ‘The politial possibilities of postmodernism’, Economy and Society, 19, 1, February. WILBER, K. (1983) Eye To Eye: the quest for the new paradigm, New York, Anchor Books. WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1972) On Certainty, Ed. G.E.ANSCOMBE and G.H.VON WRIGHT, New York, Harper and Rowe. WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1980) Culture and Capital, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. WOOLGAR, S. (1988) in WOOLGAR, S. (Ed.) Knowledge and Reflexivity, London, Sage Publications, pp. 14– 34.

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3 Women in a Male Domain: Gender and Organizational Culture in a Christian Brothers College Lawrence Angus

In this chapter gender inequality in schooling is examined through a case study of aspects of the construction of masculine subjectivity in a boys’ school, and of the encounter of women teachers with its gender regime. The women are shown to be in an inequitable position in relation to their male colleagues in a variety of ways. In preparing the chapter I have revisited data collected during an ethnographic study that I conducted over several years as a participant observer in Christian Brothers College (CBC) in the provincial Australian city of Newburyport,1 in the early to mid 1980s.2 The study was published as Continuity and Change in Catholic Schooling: An Ethnography of a Christian Brothers College in Australian Society (Angus, 1988). Although identified early in the research as an important theme (Bates, 1986), gender was treated in that book as a general feature of organizational life at CBC but not as a central issue. While the organizing theme for the book was social and cultural production and reproduction, this amounted in effect to an analysis of the part played by the school in the production of suitable young men for a differentiated labour market. Tensions created in the school by religious changes, a changing population of teachers, curricular pressures and changes in the local political economy were illuminated. In particular, constructions of class, hegemony and high-status knowledge were examined in an attempt to explore the relationship between the school and particular status groups. Through an emphasis on agency and structure, school dynamics were located within larger social movements and within a broad social and economic context. In retrospect, gender—as a fundamental aspect of the culture of CBC as an organization, of Catholicism and of Christian Brothers’ traditions, and also as an element of cultural production and contestation at CBC—could well have served as the central organizing theme through which various aspects of CBC might have been interpreted. The particular purpose of this chapter is not to speculate about how the book might have been different had the central focus been upon gender. Rather, my intention here is to examine gender as an aspect of background rules and hegemonic culture as they are mediated within the institutional context of Christian Brothers College (CBC), Newburyport. I have argued elsewhere that a critical ethnographic approach (Anderson, 1989) is appropriate for such a project (Angus, 1987). I recognize, however, that my approach in this chapter is somewhat problematic. For one thing, there is a gap of several years now since the data that I shall employ in the chapter were collected. Moreover, I shall be using the data to elaborate upon a theme, the significance of which, while it was not excluded from my original analysis, was not fully appreciated at the commencement of the project. The foreshadowed problem concerned structures and processes of continuity and change— but these were seen by and large as structures and processes of class and religion. While this focus

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broadened as I began to explore the social dynamics of the school and its community, it is only since withdrawing from the site that I have attempted to probe more fully the complexities of gender structuring and subjectivity, and their implications for organizational and social change. Nonetheless, I would argue that the relationship between theory and any set of data is never static. We analyze data as we collect it, as we write it up, and as we continue to reflect upon and work through various explanations of it. During all this time our thinking is also influenced by alternative theories and theoretical developments. My own position at CBC during the extensive period of research, as participant-observer and ethnographer, was also problematic. I had been teaching at the school for two years before formally collecting any data, I had myself been taught at a Christian Brothers secondary school in another city fifteen years earlier, I had been raised in a Catholic family on a farm. While at the time of the study, and now, I maintained an intense interest in modern Catholicism as a social and political phenomenon, I was not and am not ‘religious’. This background has no doubt influenced my own gender attitudes in ways that are partly unclear and inaccessible to me. Although I have consciously modified gender attitudes that pervaded the rural, sporting, clerical and masculinist environments of my childhood and early adult years, gender biases undoubtedly run deeply, as was indicated in my case by the occlusion of gender analysis as a central theme in my initial ethnography of CBC. While CBC, as a single-sex school for boys, is of general interest as a site of production of forms of masculinity which contribute to broad gender inequality, the particular emphasis of this paper is on the encounter of women teachers with the school and its prevailing maleness. Like other schools, and other organizations, CBC is a cultural site in which broad social expectations and relationships (such as gender relationships) are sustained and developed while also mediated and refracted so that they are given a particular quality in their specific context. CBC is of particular interest for this purpose because, until fairly recent times, it had been virtually an all-male institution, and the very fact of its single-sex nature highlights the significance of gender in the organization of CBC. In this chapter I attempt to do three things. Firstly, I advance an argument for the importance of the consideration of gender dynamics as part of organizational culture, and of the relationship of this to social structure and the formation of subjectivity. Secondly, I focus on the gender regime of CBC, especially as it is highlighted by the encounter of women teachers with the daily life of the school. This is illustrated by reference to versions of masculinity that are prevalent at CBC, the symbol of the Virgin Mary, the place and nature of discipline in the school, and its hierarchical form of administration. Finally, I examine the responses of women to their encounter with CBC in terms of possibilities for organizational reform. Gender Dynamics in Society and Organizations The issue of gender has largely escaped attention in the literature on educational administration and school organization until very recently (see Blackmore, 1989; Sampson, 1987). Indeed, Shakeshaft (1986), in a comprehensive synthesis of research in the field, concluded that most of the literature available does not grapple with issues of gender construction. The research is characterized by quantitative studies of occupants of administrative positions, or analyses of the characteristics of women who hold such positions. Treatment of gender politics, according to Shakeshaft (1986), is, even in this limited literature, usually confined to the identification of particular barriers to access to

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administrative positions that are faced by women. In research in education more generally, however, since the mid-1970s gender has emerged as a prominent issue (Spender and Sarah, 1980; Whyte, 1985; Yates, 1986). Perhaps the major strand in much of this research has been the investigation of differential treatment of girls and boys in schools and the identification of practices that discriminate against girls. Although the emphasis in the literature still remains on pupils and the problem of access of girls to traditionally male dominated areas of the curriculum (Carpenter, 1985; Ives, 1984; Kelly, 1981, 1985; Leder, 1980), increasingly attention is being given to the construction of masculinity and femininity in schools through hegemonic school practices that are manifest in, especially, the sexual division of labour in teaching (Apple, 1986; Sampson, 1987; Yates, 1983). Recent biographical (Connell, 1985) and historical (Apple, 1986) work has also attempted to uncover the implications of gender and gender politics in the construction of teachers’ work and school organization. The institutional context of CBC, with the presence of women becoming strongly apparent only relatively recently, provides an interesting site for the examination of gender dynamics at work in a particular school. While no claim is being made for the general representativeness of CBC as an organizational culture incorporating universal gender attitudes, the ‘maleness’ of CBC as an institution may not necessarily lead to an especially exaggerated situation of female subordination compared with the pattern of power relations between the sexes that prevails in society more broadly. To put the matter simply and bluntly: There is an ordering of versions of femininity and masculinity at the level of the whole society, in some ways analogous to the patterns of face-to-face relationship within institutions… Their interrelationship is centred on a single structural fact, the global dominance of men over women (Connell, 1987:183). The argument is that organizational cultures, including that of CBC, reflect at least in part structural features of society at large. Institutions are created within, and exist in relationship with, that society. This implies, in regard to relationships between men and women and what is perceived to be their appropriate roles, that society, despite its diversity, is characterized by a ‘gender order’ (Matthews, 1984; Connell, 1987) which is socially and historically constituted. Its ongoing constitution is always problematic and provisional, however, and occurs largely as a result of differential power relationships, cultural expectations and access to resources between the sexes. The effect of these is that particular patterns of relationships between the sexes are largely regarded as normal. Such patterns, however, must be actively constructed through the responses of women and men to the complex practices and tensions which characterize their lives. Thus, while avoiding a narrowly structuralist perspective, it is possible to argue that, through a dialectical relationship between agency and structure, specific institutions like schools will also have their own gender order or ‘gender code’ (MacDonald, 1980). Connell (1987:98; see also Kessler et al, 1985) provides a useful distinction in terminology here. In describing the nature of sexual politics, he uses the term ‘gender order’ to refer broadly to ‘the structural inventory of an entire society’. The term ‘gender regime’ is then used to refer more specifically to ‘the structural inventory of a particular institution’. While there is a good deal of institutional and cultural autonomy associated with gender regimes that might be identified at the

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micro level of organizations, gender attitudes at the institutional level will, in this view, intersect with and mediate prevailing social attitudes and expectations. Connell’s distinction is therefore helpful because it points to a linkage, but not a reductionist or determinist relationship, between broad social structural issues and issues of participants’ social action in everyday life. It recognizes that the constitution of organizational forms by organizational actors must occur within an existing social structure that both constrains and enables their interaction at the micro level. Notions like gender order and gender regime can be difficult for us to grasp however, because as Connell (1987:139) explains: In common sense understanding gender is a property of individual people. When biological determinism is abandoned, gender is still seen in terms of socially produced individual character. It is a considerable leap to think of gender as being also a property of collectivities, institutions and historical processes. We can be assisted in this leap by the realization that many concepts in prevailing western discourse are effectively gendered, at least in cultural terms. Feminists have argued convincingly, for instance, that political power is gendered and influenced by notions of masculinity (Farganis, 1986). Similar claims have been made about notions of militarism and patriotism (Harstock, 1983). Keller (1983) argues that positivist science is male gendered in its cultural attributes and fundamental presuppositions, while Gilligan (1982) claims to identify a female epistemology which incorporates an ‘ethic of care’ and emphasizes notions of understanding and connectedness between persons. Perhaps the notion of gendered cultural concepts is most clearly apparent in the discourse of business and administration where assumptions of impersonality, male aggressiveness, hierarchical leadership and analytical rationality prevail (Ferguson, 1984). The significance of gender in cultural dynamics can also be appreciated by regarding sex as a category which clearly structures the identity and perceptions of people and how they are regarded or valued within organizations and by society (Farganis, 1986:4). For feminists, of crucial importance here in relation to sexual politics is de Beauvoir’s notion that all of society is explicitly gendered with women being relegated to the status of the ‘second sex’: She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute— she is the Other (de Beauvoir, 1960:20). While it is possible to talk about a general male dominance of the whole society in this way, it is well to remember that the hegemonic form of masculinity ‘is always constructed in relation to various subordinated masculinities as well as in relation to women’ (Connell, 1987:183). There are two important and often overlooked points here. One is that the representation of gender as a male/ female duality implies that all men are in an equally dominant position when, although men in general benefit from prevailing gender relationships, many men, particularly gay men but also others, find the dominant male form oppressive. The second point is that, regardless of some men existing within a dominant masculinity that they may not entirely wish to share, it is against this

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dominant form of masculinity that various forms of subordinated femininity are defined. As Connell (1987:183) summarizes these: One form is defined around compliance to this subordination and is oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men. I will call this ‘emphasized femininity’. Others are defined centrally by strategies of resistance or forms of non-compliance. Others again are defined by complex strategic combinations of compliance, resistance and cooperation. Thus it seems clear that gender relationships are far from uniform, and the particular character of male/ female interactions can only be understood in particular instances in particular institutions and contexts. Such context specific relationships, however, build into and are influenced by the complex network of gender relations of society as a whole. Within that broad pattern there will be many irregularities and tensions which compound but do not negate the prevailing gender order in which, although no single view holds unchallenged at any time, there is ‘likely to be a kind of “fit” between hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity’ (Connell, 1987:185). This fit does not rely on the force of men for its imposition—although force, sexual harassment and violence are often apparent, especially at the level of domestic relationships and, as I shall discuss later, violence has an impact on women both at CBC and more generally. Rather than from coercive imposition, masculine ascendancy is more secure because it follows primarily from the assertion of dominant cultural patterns that are continuously being deconstructed and reconstructed, in which being considered masculine or feminine is a major component of one’s subjectivity and social identity. In particular institutions, or in particular interactions with others, there may be more or less pressure on people to fit in accordance with particular gender expectations. Therefore it is significant that ideologies of domesticity and femininity, which make up the prevailing notions of womanhood within the gender order, extend beyond the sphere of home and family. They also play a large part in the construction of social rules about appropriate types of work that are available to women in the labour force. Such notions, however, are fragmented and often contested so that they never fit together to construct a single framework of gender prescriptions. Gender and Organizational Culture In the past decade or so, organizational analysis and organizational theory have addressed the notion of organizational culture as a major theme of investigation (Ouchi, 1981; Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Smircich, 1983; Angus, 1988, 1989; Bates, 1987; Meek, 1988). In the emergence of a strong body of literature on organizational culture, however, gender has remained at best a marginal theme (Hearn and Parkin, 1983; Mills, 1988). In particular, the marginalization of women in the literature on administration and organization renders the notion of gender largely irrelevant to the analysis. Administration and organization are represented as being appropriately gender neutral when, in most cases, they are in fact seen as being unproblematically male. This is despite increasing attention being given during the past two decades to gender as a central feature of virtually all aspects of social and cultural dynamics in everyday life (Barrett, 1980; Connell, 1987; Eisenstein, 1984). The exclusion of gender, or more particularly of the experience of women, from an academic sub-

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discipline like organizational analysis perhaps should be no surprise when feminist writers have argued that ‘the women’s voice’ (Gilligan, 1982:1) has also remained largely unnoticed in most other academic fields. In her influential work on the gender blindness of psychological theory, for instance, Gilligan (1982:1) strove to expose ‘the recurrent problems in interpreting women’s development and to connect these problems to the repeated exclusion of women from the critical theory building studies of psychological research’. This general academic neglect of course does not excuse the occlusion of gender issues from organizational analysis for, as Mills (1988:351) correctly points out: Given that so much time is expended in defining and refining sexual differences and their consequences, it is remarkable that [such difference] is ignored when it comes to organizational analysis. Very few studies have sought to analyze the relationship of gender to organizational behaviour… The ignoring and marginalization of gender, although not limited to any particular approach within organizational analysis, is inexcusable in the face of growing concern with the experiential aspects of organizations, particularly in regard to the current interest in organizational culture. A handful of analyses which have begun to relate gender to organizational culture have recently appeared in the literature on organizational studies (Riley, 1983; Smircich, 1983; Mills, 1988; Hyde, 1989). One problem emerging from the current interest in culture in organizational analysis, however, is that incompatible notions of culture are employed by different theorists. The predominant perspective in the literature on business and educational administration sees organizational culture as an aspect of institutions that may be manipulated by management in order to enhance organizational commitment and efficiency. That is, the organization and its leadership are seen as generators of particular cultural attributes that are associated with corporate solidarity and a sense of mission or corporate vision (Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Ouchi, 1981). Such a cultural emphasis reflects a view of organizations that is hardly less static and systematic than was assumed in the functionalist organizational sociology that dominated organizational analysis in the 1950s and 1960s (Swingewood, 1975; Meek, 1988). While it must be conceded that vigorous defences of functionalist organizational theory have recently been mounted (Donaldson, 1985), and radical critiques of functionalism (e.g. Benson, 1977; Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980; Morgan, 1980) have not widely penetrated the mainstream literature on the study of organizations (Aldrich, 1988), there are good arguments that the functionalist perspective in general, but particularly in relation to the notion of organizational culture, is extremely limiting. I am unable to elaborate those arguments here (see Bates, 1987; Meek, 1988), but of particular significance for the analysis in this chapter is that such a perspective on organizational culture allows virtually no concern for culture as a shifting and contested notion that is continually being constructed and reconstructed, and which must be subjectively understood. Instead, emphasis is upon managerial concerns with the manipulation of and intervention in organizational culture to shape it in ways that are conducive to the realization of organizational goals. Not only is there a lack of appreciation of the importance and complexity of cultural politics, but also there is a takenfor-granted assumption that organizational culture will reflect unproblematically norms and goals which are internalized to form stable, integrated organizational structures.

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A somewhat different and more helpful approach to organizational culture sees organizations as manifestations of cultural forms (Smircich, 1983) or rules (Clegg, 1981) and also as sites of cultural contestation (Benson, 1977; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980). In other words, in institutions such as schools, rather than a uniform concept of organizational culture simply being imposed from above, or bequeathed from the past, contest occurs over the construction and assertion of cultural forms. Teachers and students, as active and knowing agents, have the capacity to influence organizational culture and structure, while also simultaneously adapting to some extent to strongly institutionalized cultural expectations, both within the institution itself and in society more broadly. In organizations, as in other spheres of social life, cultural forms may become hegemonic when understandings are so strongly entrenched that they become internalized as guides for appropriate action. But organizational culture does not simply bear down upon individuals in an institution so that a monolithic sense of organization is unproblematically sustained. Organizational culture, as part of the social world, must be continuously constituted. It is therefore always imperfectly reconstructed amongst contested discourses and subjectivities. Institutions like schools should therefore be seen as cultural sites (Willis, 1977; Giroux, 1984) in which entrenched expectations and hegemonic understandings act as background rules which influence the action of organizational participants (Clegg, 1981; Giddens, 1976, 1984). And while a particular organizational culture many be associated with specific institutions, these institutions are also influenced by, and partly mediate, broader social structures and societal cultures. That is, if Clegg is correct, organizations, like broader social structures, must be constantly constituted through rules which ‘are not necessarily formally defined by members of the organisation, although they may be’ (Clegg, 1981: 545). These ‘rules’ refer to general understandings of appropriate action by which ‘one can formulate the structure underlying the apparent surface of organisational life’ (Clegg, 1981:545). Such rules have a strong existence in the form of institutionalized expectations. They may not be hard and fast rules and may be mediated in organizations in different ways in different situations involving different people. According to Giddens (1976:121), rules in this way amount to structures which are ‘both constituted by human agency and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution’. Giddens emphasizes both the dynamic relationship between structure and agency and the important point that structures do not merely constrain but also enable meaningful choices that may lead to action. Rules, then, largely in the form of institutionalized expectations and values, influence the nature and quality of individual and group participation in organizational life in complex and variable ways. A gender regime in a particular organization could be seen as an illustration of such influence. In examining any set of rules, structures, authority relations or gender regime, however, it is important that, as Clegg (1988:11) reminds us, we keep in mind that ‘organizations are arenas of struggle and loci of calculations in which social relations of and in production are worked out with a degree of indeterminacy’. In the remainder of the chapter, with this caution in mind, the influence and mediation of socially and historically constituted rules in relation to gender and gender subjectivity within the organizational arena of Christian Brothers College, Newburyport, are examined.

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CBC: School for Catholic Boys Established in 1930, CBC has developed many of its own traditions but is also steeped in the traditions of the Irish Christian Brothers and of Roman Catholicism. More than any other religious order, the Congregation of Christian Brothers has dominated the secondary education of Catholic boys in Australia during the past century. Indeed, despite the many orders of religious brothers in Australia, to many Catholics the word ‘Brothers’ refers simply to the Christian Brothers.3 Many fathers, uncles, elder brothers, cousins and grandfathers of current CBC pupils attended CBC or other Brothers’ schools. At the local level, prolonged family involvement with CBC is evident in the Old Boys’ Association and the Christian Brothers Collegians’ Football Club, one of the strongest in the Newburyport and District Football Association, and which field teams at all junior and senior levels of the competition. Support for the Old Boys’ Association is strong, but it is the Football Club through which many former pupils retain links with their old school and schoolmates as supporters, members, players and fathers of members. So significant is the sports emphasis in the life of the school that an often-heard joke is, ‘CBC teaches only one religion— football’. The joke works equally well for those who support the sports emphasis as for those who mock it; being delivered with perhaps a knowing look and a wink in the first case, and an ironic shrug in the latter. The football club, like many similar clubs around Australia, is both a place (clubrooms and a football ground) and a collection of people. Women and girls may be supporters of the club and even associate members, but the business of the club is decidedly masculine. Within the club, many CBC students are encouraged and educated in the ways of an Australian male sports culture. For particular boys, a version of masculinity, which combines physical strength, skill and competitiveness with a capacity to consume large amounts of liquor and sexually dominate females, is reinforced by the informal ethos of such clubs. In this version, women are regarded largely as objects and as necessarily subservient. Elements of this male image are, of course, frowned upon within the official ethos of the school. Perhaps for this reason, the macho image was particularly appealing to students who were resistant to school in general or to teachers within it. Elsewhere, in reporting my early research on disaffected year 11 pupils at CBC (Angus, 1982, 1984), I have discussed elements of the perceptions of schooling of a group of ‘macho’, ‘unacceptable’ students who referred to themselves as the ‘sweathogs’. Many of the school’s outstanding footballers came from this group. Despite a measure of football glory, they believed they were the ‘rejects’ of the school, and differentiated themselves from more ‘acceptable’ pupils who, they said, usually studied maths and science and were ‘smarter’ than they: Interviewer: Jack: Interviewer: Group:

What do you mean, ‘smarter’? They work harder. Is there a difference between you and those kids? …work harder. …we’re dumber (laughter). …they get high marks. …they’re all sucks (laughter).

In a subsequent discussion the distinction was elaborated: Michaeh:

They’re prepared to work all the time and don’t go out.

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Bill:

They don’t have fun in school like us. They’re always serious—always talk about school. Interviewer: Aren’t there any exceptions? Terry: Oh yea, like Richard (nicknamed ‘Errol Flynn’). That’s because he’s good at sport and, you know, he’s kind of social. Baz: You should see the women he gets onto! Terry: There’s not many others. Only a couple who are good at sport are all right. Ken: Most of the others are all different though. Not like us. We’re sort of more radically minded. We do all sorts of things you know. They don’t want to get on the wrong side of teachers, like. They won’t have fun in class. Baz: They’re not social. Like, I reckon everyone in this group here, all right, goes to a party just about every Saturday night. They don’t do nothing. The ‘sweathogs’ distanced themselves from school-related activity which they saw as childish. They believed that their experiences of the ‘real’ world gave them superiority over their ‘smarter’, schooloriented colleagues. Most drank regularly at a particular pub where they often got drunk. The possiblity of getting picked up by the police for under-age drinking added extra excitement. Terry boasted about his recent experiences at King’s Cross; Bill’s reputation had been enhanced since he started going out with a girl two years older than he. Compared to such ‘real’ life achievements they found school dull and trite. While disapproving strongly of the hard drinking and womanizing that is part of the macho image, the Brothers and their associates have been strong supporters of all forms of sporting competition. Successes were publicly recognized at CBC and formed a large part of the agenda for school assemblies. The reputation of members of Christian Brothers schools as fierce sporting competitors is matched by the traditionally combative nature of the Brothers’ social, economic and academic objectives. This point is well expressed by Brother Cas Manion (1977:vii) in his editorial to the hundredth issue of the Christian Brothers’ journal, Studies, in which he reflects upon the Brothers’ schools of the 1930s: The objective of the school was to hand on the Faith intact and ready to fight; to raise the working class boy to a level of prestige in Public Service or Profession; and to attain high levels of examination success in open competition. Also another objective, only slightly lower in estimation than the first, was the ability to challenge the domination of better endowed schools in any field, scholastic or sporting. This sense of competitiveness was directed mainly at Protestant foes who, especially during the interwar years, were regarded, not without reason, as oppressors of Irish-Australian working-class Catholics. Within the schools, too, competition was seen as important in character building and essential to academic success. The competitive ethos was matched somewhat ambivalently with a notion of Catholic solidarity that the Brothers had intended to create by educating working-class boys for placement in middle-class careers. This was considered as important work for the Church in, as one of the younger Brothers at CBC put it, ‘establishing a Catholic community that could

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stand on its own feet in all sorts of areas of society’ to the point where ‘these days, now, you have got people with Catholic backgrounds as leaders in all these groups’. Such male leaders were regarded as the successful products of Brothers’ schools, and afforded current pupils an alternative masculine image to that of the resistant, macho male. Within this approved version of masculinity, boys were encouraged to be ‘responsible young men’. Typical examples of these were the boys who were elected by their peers to be captains of the school. In each of the years of my association with CBC, a boy of considerable sporting ability, who was also academically successful and regarded as being of sound moral character, was elected. As far as I am aware, and I was in a good position to know, the election was never rigged and the principal never felt it necessary to employ his power of veto to overrule the students’ choice. The principal and other senior teachers in the school did usually impress upon the boys the importance of electing an appropriate person to such a significant position. Such cautions were hardly necessary, however, as even boys who were regarded as resistant usually took the election seriously and seemed to have had a very clear notion of the type of boy that was required. While responsible young men might succumb to the temptations of the flesh just as resistant pupils like the ‘sweathogs’ did (and their excesses and indiscretions would be widely reported amongst pupils precisely because they were ‘responsible young men), they were expected to comply with the goals of the school. That was largely what ‘responsibility’ (and the associated term, ‘maturity’) effectively meant at CBC. In this respect, the line between being a ‘responsible young man’ and being a ‘suck’ (an insulting term for a compliant student) was hazy and fudged. It had to do largely with a sense of cool detachment that separated responsible young men who had, in a sense, proved themselves, from the ‘sucks’ who were overly conformist and tried too hard to please. There were other versions of masculinity available to boys at CBC but these two, resistant ‘macho’ and ‘responsible young man’, seemed to me to be dominant. The greatest insult a pupil could deliver to another was to doubt his masculinity by referring to him as a ‘poofter’ or as a ‘girl’. In the pupil hierarchy boys who were physically weak or shy were likely to be regarded as ‘girls’. At all year levels there was continual joking about ‘poofters’, both inside and outside classrooms, by male teachers as well as boys. In such ways some boys were identified as ‘not real boys’ (Spender, 1982) and became the butt of numerous jokes and innuendoes. A few of these, much like the ‘three friends’ in Walker’s (1988) study, were able to gain some respect by meeting such taunts head-on and employing their flair and artistic talents in outlets such as school drama productions. Two boys who managed to do this in the early 1980s left school to become successful and entrepreneurial hairdressers in Newburyport. Most boys so labelled, however, adopted more passive strategies and generally tried to get by without drawing attention to themselves. Such students, unlike the responsible young men, were not regarded as potential Catholic leaders in the community. In Newburyport there is certainly a network of Catholic male ‘leaders’ and businessmen with strong links to CBC. The careers teacher, Bruce Smith, himself born in Newburyport and an old boy of the school, soon discovered that many school leavers got jobs because of old boys: ‘[Many old boys] are 38 or 40, just rising to the top of their jobs as executives; others are in their 50s now…so they just look after the old school tie’. The network reaches strongly into Newburyport’s banking and retail industries and more generally throughout the business community and the public life of the city. One prominent father, who during the period of the study became Newburyport’s mayor, expressed the kind of loyalty to the Brothers that is expected of old boys. He claimed, ‘One thing

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that I have always been proud of, and always will be proud of, is that I received a Christian Brothers’ education—and there’s no better education available’. He was thankful to the Brothers for ‘making me what I am today’. As a teacher explained, ‘Our parents have good contacts…very good contacts some of them’. Of course the parents being referred to here were fathers and the school used them to its advantage. For instance, the principal, Brother Carter, was shadowed as part of the research as he made use of the network when dealing with banks, insurance companies and building contractors to negotiate management of a substantial debt and make arrangements for renovating part of the school. Mothers were not called on in this way. Their contribution was usually in the form of rostered duties in the school canteen and contributions to fund raising activities like the annual ‘fashion parade’, which usually was attended by over two hundred mothers. The sense of competitiveness and aggression, that is so strongly associated by Brother Manion with the Brothers’ educational mission, sits rather uneasily with the emphasis at CBC and other Brothers’ schools upon devotion to the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Family. Devotion to Mary has played a major part in the faith of Catholics for centuries (Laeuchli, 1972) and has been especially prominent in Irish Catholicism. Although this tradition of Marian devotion has declined substantially since the Second Vatican Council, a statue of Mary Immaculate stood on an elevated altar in each classroom at CBC and served as the predominant female image in the school. To my mind these statues in some ways had a stronger ‘presence’ in the school than the marginalized women teachers who were present in life. Most Brothers and many lay teachers began each lesson with a ‘Hail Mary’ when students as a general rule faced towards the statues and bowed their heads. During the month of October, a time of special devotion to Mary in the Catholic Church, there was an emphasis on recitation of the Rosary and other prayers in supplication to or in honour of the Mother of God. At such times it was common for some classroom altars, especially in junior grades, to be decorated with more extravagent furbishments than the usual plastic flowers. It was also not unusual for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, March 25, to be a day on which boys in various classes received instruction about sex, manners and appropriate relationships with girls, and the mysteries of female biology. One devout and well-meaning woman, whose husband, brothers-inlaw, nephews and several sons have attended CBC, has conducted such sessions on a number of occasions. I did not witness these, but I have reproduced here an account of one session that was provided by a male teacher, Bob Murphy, who referred to the incident as ‘Brigid Fitzpatrick’s sex talk’: There was an audible hush as Brigid stepped up to the podium. Here was Everymum about to deliver the goods—with the nihil obstat and imprimatur of God, Mary, Saint Joseph and CBC. She was respectably groomed in a prim and proper Country Roadish way. To the boys she was Gospel; to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of biology, she was humbug. ‘Now boys, there’s no reason to be uncomfortable about the subject. I have raised three boys so I have a good idea of what you know about girls. You know, girls are special creatures with special needs and special times. You may notice that women—even your mums—act differently at different times. During these times you must be especially careful not to upset them, because they’re feeling a bit under the weather. It’s natural and part of God’s plan. Just as you’ve changed, so have your mother and older sisters at different times in their life.’

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A quick glance around the room showed thirty-five quizzical stares. When would she get to the good part? ‘…and so, boys, remember to be open and honest with your parents, and show special care for your sisters and your mother. They are all special people who deserve your special care. Are there any questions?’ Not a hand went up, but it was the first sex talk that I’d ever heard which posed more questions than it answered. To a fifteen year old it must have been utterly baffling. To be fair to Mrs Fitzpatrick, I must emphasize that this is an individualistic account of such sessions. Others might have provided a different interpretation, although I doubt that there would be much disagreement about her general content and message. Brigid Fitzpatrick, along with a coterie of others, served as a generalized and unthreatening model of mature femininity in the life of the school—something like a fleshly and somewhat older-looking version of the plaster statues. She had a friendly but understated relationship with the school, had borne sons for the Church, was a devoted church-goer, took a leading role in organizing the duties of other mothers at the school (canteen service, fund-raising), invited the Brothers into her home, was welcome at the Brothers’ House, and appeared always calm, well-groomed and maternal. She could be described, in Sumner’s (1975) terms, as one of God’s police. I do not wish to belabour the significance of Mary, both virgin and mother, in the symbolic life of CBC. Even this brief sketch, however, indicates the type of cultural features that are associated with womanhood in the traditions of the school and in Catholicism. The symbol of Mary was pervasive yet unremarkable within the daily life of the school. Largely because it was unremarkable, indeed virtually redundant, Mary seemed to bond particular female stereotypes into a meaningful image of woman. That is, the symbol did more than stand for a particular idealized woman; it subtly constituted and communicated a powerful cultural notion of appropriate womanhood. I do not wish to suggest that the symbol of Mary exclusively defined ‘woman’ for CBC participants; such symbols give us the capacity to make meaning but that capacity is always ‘mediated by the idiosyncratic experience of the individual’ (Cohen, 1985:14). The ethnography shows that traditions were being challenged in various ways at CBC as alternative conceptions of woman were being constituted in practice. The challenge was being prompted largely by the increasing presence of women teachers in the school. Moreover, enough has been said to establish that the values associated with Mary in some ways were broadly consistent with images of hegemonic masculinity which pervaded CBC—traditional Roman Catholicism, compliant femininity, patriarchal family. These were emphasized as part of the ‘real’ world that boys would encounter. In other ways, however, Mary offers something of a counterpoint to this sense of the ‘real’ world. Holy Mary, virgin and mother, whose whole life was spent in obedience to God, was venerated in terms of a remote idealism. Of course, such an image has traditionally fitted well in an institution that, until recently, was virtually entirely run by men who were remote from women and had vowed to abstain from sex. The Catholic hierarchy has for centuries been based on the belief that chastity and celibacy are associated with a special ‘calling’ from God. Also within Catholicism, the view of Mary as the ‘new Eve’ has been associated with the fundamental belief that her son was crucified in order to redeem all of us from what was essentially Eve’s original sin (Laeuchli, 1972; Malone, 1989). In the statues Mary is gentle, untouched and above the world as

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she accepts her fate with humility and quiet resignation. She indeed represents the ‘other’ in relation to the earthly, physical and competitive world of the football club and school. The combination of these rather rarified sites of male learning and masculinity construction had the effect, I believe, of reinforcing the sort of traditional masculine attitudes that are outlined by Arnot (1984): The traditional masculine values of taking as much pain as possible without giving in, being able to ‘hold’ alcohol, to show no feelings, to be competitive, is hardly likely to fit in with equal participation in parenthood, with valuing women and respecting an equality of the sexes… Boys learn to eschew the domestic and repress the emotional side of life…[T]hey have to try to achieve manhood through the dual process of distancing women and femininity from themselves and maintaining the hierarchy and social superiority of masculinity by devaluing the female world. In circumstances such as those that prevailed at CBC, boys were given little opportunity for socialization into roles other than those associated with dominant masculinity. One reformist male official in a Catholic Education Office said of schools like CBC: We are not even ready to address the question of boys’ schools and how they prepare young adolescents to become the next generation’s lovers and husbands and fathers. How do you develop [men] who will in fact be able to be generative and intimate? That is sort of beyond us. Entrenched gender-bound attitudes could therefore inhibit young men in the development of their full human, as opposed to masculine, potential. As Askew and Ross (1988:13) conclude about such a situation, ‘This is very important because it often results not only in damage to the boys themselves, but can be even more destructive to the people they interact with and their relationship with the environment’. The emphasis on the gentle and motherly Virgin at CBC can be contrasted also with the tradition of discipline at the school that has led to an institutionalized concern for order, obedience and control. Discipline and Authority The Christian Brothers in Australia have a well-earned reputation for maintaining strict discipline in their schools (Morris, 1945; Radic, 1972; Blair, 1976). Former pupils often recall the familiar leather strap that was used to enforce a rigid code of classroom behaviour and to punish both recalcitrance and poor scholarship. Instances of classroom dread and summary justice can seem funny in retrospect even if terrifying at the time, as illustrated by a prominent Australian ‘product’ of the Brothers: Say Christianity to the Asian and he’ll think of Western imperialism; say it to the old [Christian Brothers] boy and he’ll recall May altars, three Hail Marys and the baptism of leather. For ten years we lived in constant threat of it… The meaning of Extreme Unction. The gerund, the dative case, simultaneous equations. ‘You don’t know, boy? Hold out your hand

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and take it like a man’. One day, even God rebelled. When the foolhardy Gunson ventured —‘but surely, sir, a mixed marriage isn’t always evil?’ Brother Conroy blackened, stamped his foot hard, the floor trembled, and the picture of the handsome Christ above the blackboard fell down on his head (Oakley, 1967:14). Discipline and physical punishment were associated with manliness and ‘character’, and miscreants could regain esteem and respect in the eyes of the Brothers by accepting punishment in the right spirit—‘by taking it like a man’. The blatant use of corporal punishment as a matter of course has declined markedly, however, during the past twenty years or so, at least at CBC, according to a teacher who was once a pupil there: In the years I was here as a student, there were a lot more Brothers here and the discipline was a lot harder than it is now. There was corporal punishment …just done very easily and without a second thought. I think a lot of parents knew that and actually expected that to happen if anything went wrong with their son. They expected the Brothers to belt them and put them straight. Another old boy sketched some details of classroom life in the late 1960s. He recalled that part of parental expectations, then and now, was that the Brothers would not only ‘straighten them out’ but also ‘toughen them up’: When I was here I remember being scared stiff—at times petrified. You wouldn’t move… Sometimes you would be too scared to ask questions—for example, you get four maths sums wrong and, bang, you are up for four straps. The once-familiar volley of leather was rarely heard at CBC by the mid-1980s, however. CBC participants generally explained the demise, but by no means the eradication, of corporal punishment in the school as being due to the decline in the number and proportion of Brothers on the teaching staff. Since the late 1960s, when almost all teachers at most Brothers’ schools were Brothers, their presence at CBC had declined to a mere 20 per cent of the total teaching staff by the mid-1980s. The remainder were lay teachers and, increasingly in the years of my research at CBC, a minority of women were appointed. Although the nature of discipline and punishment had changed considerably during the previous two decades, a concern with controlling student behaviour was still a feature of everyday life at the school. A senior Brother, for instance, had definite views about what the place of discipline should be: There are certain traditions that we have had. We have traditionally been regarded at our school as being authoritarian. Personally, I wouldn’t regard that criticism as much too worry about. I would be a little disappointed if some people did not regard our school system as authoritarian, because in my mind that would mean a lack of discipline.

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Other Brothers, particularly older ones, agreed with such sentiments and felt that the imposition and maintenance of a strict regime of discipline was an important part of the Brothers’ mission. The connection was explained by Brother Gordon: Interviewer: You seem to think that a high standard of discipline is an essential starting point. Brother Gordon: Yes, for a Catholic school. I truly believe that no person can be a Catholic unless he has got self-discipline. Interviewer: Could you elaborate a little on that? Brother Gordon: I am convinced [that]…one of the reasons why there is a fall off in faith, particularly amongst youth, is that they have not got sufficient discipline to be Catholics. You wouldn’t expect them to understand about discipline because their whole lives have been so easy…They have never had to exercise real self-discipline, to face up to the self-discipline of Christian life. While not all shared such a Pauline view of the necessity of Christian discipline, many teachers, religious and lay, believed that the strict discipline that was still associated with CBC had enhanced the reputation of the school. One teacher, for instance, whose association with the Christian Brothers and with Newburyport spanned over forty years, claimed that: Catholic people would send their boys to CBC because they are hoping for a good Catholic education. That is one thing. Then the second part that attracts people to CBC is, ‘I will send them to the Brothers and they will straighten them out’. While all teachers were expected to play their part in maintaining discipline, Bob Murphy, one of the school’s most highly regarded lay teachers, explained that the pressure on Brothers to conform to an authoritarian image was stronger than that on lay teachers because ‘the Brothers are perceived differently by the boys just because of the fact that they are a Brother’. The mould had been set by generations of Brothers and was, in general, maintained by the group at CBC. Indeed, teachers strongly agreed that parents shared an expectation that they would ‘straighten out’ any waywardness amongst their pupils. Not all of the Brothers, however, were happy about conforming to an authoritarian stereotype. Brother Ernest, for example, was critical of his confreres whom, he argued, had relied on engendering fear in pupils as a means of gaining and sustaining discipline. He maintained that the legacy of that style of teaching made it virtually impossible for him as a Brother to develop a ‘relationship of trust’ with pupils because so many older Brothers had ‘so successfully put forward the brutal image’ that pupils ‘don’t take [him] seriously’ when he tried to elicit their trust and cooperation. Brother Ernest’s position of passive opposition to entrenched expectations is very significant because it suggests very clearly that the masculine ethos of CBC was in no way uniform or uncontradictory. There was a problematic mix of ‘masculinities’ that were not simply structurally or organizationally determined. This point is illustrated also by the position of CBCs notorious ‘Brother Bash’. This Brother did not shirk from the role of authority figure but used physical education periods in an attempt, unsuccessful as it turned out, to balance his authoritarian image: I know I am criticized for teaching PE [but] that is the only way that I can meet every kid every week in that area… That is the thing. Even if I forget their names I can talk to them, like in the

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gym or in the swimming pool, because other times I have got to go in as the strong authority figure. The principal, Brother Carter, unlike Brother Ernest, had no doubts about the central place of discipline in the school: ‘In all my years of experience I have never seen a class working well that was not disciplined… A teacher is not suitable if he has not got discipline’. In such pronouncements, and in interviews, Brother Carter habitually referred to teachers as ‘men’. The statement above was made at a staff meeting and was accompanied by a reference to ‘a weakness in some classes’— meaning, of course, a weakness in some teachers. Such pronouncements were general enough to make most teachers feel somewhat uneasy. The emphasis on discipline seemed to lead some of them, particularly inexperienced lay teachers, to try to imitate the teaching style that was associated with the Brothers. Les Cameron, an experienced lay teacher, felt that such imitation was rarely successful: The trouble is that some teachers feel that extraordinary pressure to control their classes. And so we find that young teachers, particularly, are trying to impose a degree of control or this regimentation which is really beyond them. They might be trying to conduct the class the way that Brother So-and-so, who has been a teacher for many years and…has the children sitting up straight in rows—trying to run the class the way a teacher like that would. It is not their style and personality, and for some teachers this may exacerbate the problem rather than solve it. Some teachers were nervous because of the perceived pressure to control pupils. Yet some felt that student discipline had to change to cater for the changing needs of students. According to Heather Verdun: Traditions are there on one hand, and the expectation of discipline but, on the other hand, a lot of teachers realize that those demands aren’t realistic—that today, especially, you have to be able to communicate with the kids. And I think children’s expectations are different—they expect their teachers to be human and they want to be able to talk to them. There was no doubt in my mind that Brother Carter’s declared expectation that classes be quiet and orderly, along with a general expectation that was part of what was expected in a Christian Brothers school, deterred many teachers from adopting more liberal teacher-pupil relations. The principal set the tone of discipline and watchful control each school morning as he patrolled the school grounds before classes began. In the evenings he was almost always again on duty at the school gate seeing that pupils left the school grounds in an orderly manner. His attention to checking that correct school uniform was worn earned him the nickname of ‘mother’, a term which was not intended to flatter. Such constant vigilance by Brother Carter was cited as evidence by one teacher to support her conclusion that an institutionalized attitude towards pupils existed at CBC which smacked of McGregor’s (1960) theory ‘X’: The school is based more on—if you do the right thing you are okay; do the wrong thing and you get a punishment… The basis of this school is on the negative rather than the positive’.

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It is perhaps significant that, of the teachers who favoured more ‘positive’ authority relationships, many (but not all) were women. As I have emphasized however, for much of its history CBC was an all-male institution—the Brothers taught the boys. Lay teachers were increasingly employed from the late 1960s and, while most of these had been men, a small number of women had also been appointed, especially to the primary and junior secondary areas. Bob Murphy dispassionately summed up the status hierarchy of this mix of teachers at CBC: I think that when a Brother goes into a classroom on day one, they would have an added advantage over a [lay] male who goes into the classroom on day one who would have an advantage over a female who goes in on day one in an all boys’ setting. That is just what I have found here. A young woman teacher, from her perspective, put the situation more directly and urgently: ‘Most of the teachers have been males…but just now there seems to be this influx of females and [the boys] seem to be revolting against it’. Other women teaching in the secondary school agreed with the view that, as one calmly expressed it, They are finding it hard to accept us’. The response of male teachers to the perceived ‘discipline problems’ of their female colleagues was variable. One was rather sceptical about the existence of any general resistance towards women teachers: I never found that. I mean I have never noticed that. There have been odd instances of boys who have resented having a female teacher. This is the sort of thing that you hear from the female teachers not from the boys them-selves…that they seem to virtually object to the fact that they are being told what to do by a woman. I think that has got a lot to do with the home environment more than anything else, or how the father behaves, or even just a general view that people have of women perhaps. Some men attempted to assist their female colleagues by sharing ideas and strategies; others were only remotely sympathetic. Some were critical of the increased presence of women because, they claimed, classes too often had to be ‘settled down’ after lessons with women teachers who had inadequate classroom control. Only a few saw the treatment of women at CBC as fitting into broader social patterns of gender subjectivity. Robert Darling, for instance, perceived that… Women at CBC suffer somewhat from an unfortunate attitude which I believe exists in the minds of many of the boys and puts them at a disadvantage because they are women. This in turn suggests something about…the formation of those attitudes, or the reinforcement of those attitudes, by staff and perhaps by the Brothers themselves, or maybe by parental attitudes. Evidence from Robert’s classroom indicated that patriarchal attitudes were deeply held: Recently I gave the class the task of arguing why the male should be the head of the family… A lot of them took the line that…the notion of being head was one of issuing instructions or

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directions and…women are insufficiently capable of exerting their authority… Therefore the tasks they perform at home are the ones they are best suited to. The issue of authority was significant at CBC and the masculine undercurrent of pupil discipline was a feature that caused concern for a number of women. Heather Verdun, for instance, the first woman to teach an HSC subject at CBC, explained why she had to devise methods of classroom control that differed from the norm: Last year myself and Lynda were the first lady teachers that they had in the senior school—so that was a bit of a cultural shock for them… I suppose they find my style a lot different from the men—I don’t try and intimidate them physically or anything whereas some of the men might have. They might not say it but I guess it is always there—the blokes are bigger than they are and they could thump them. But, you know, I had to sort of rely on other things to get them to do what I wanted. Heather recognized the underlying hint of physically violent repercussions for miscreants that remained at CBC despite the relatively infrequent use of the strap and other versions of corporal punishment. But displays of physical violence did sometimes occur and were sufficient to keep alive the possibility that was ‘always there’, that pupils might get ‘thumped’. When such displays were performed in public with the rituals of theatre, the impact upon all pupils was maximized. At an assembly of years 7 and 8 students in the gymnasium, for instance, a number of boys who had committed various offences were lined up and strapped by Brother Stirling. Feelings amongst teachers about the strappings were mixed. According to one, a man: ‘It was great. The kids were all shitting themselves. Stirling was saying, “So-and-so, you did such-and-such three weeks ago. Come out here!” Bang, bang. All of them were wondering if they were going to be next’ Most disapproval came from the group of women who taught years 7 and 8. However, their disapproval was not so much of the strapping itself as of being asked to leave the scence of public humiliation before the strapping could proceed. All of them were furious at being singled out in a way which emphasized the stereotypical division of male toughness and physicality and female delicateness and sensibility. The incident also indicated women’s lack of belonging in the male domain of the school, and marked them out as not real teachers. Although adding to Brother Stirling’s theatre, the exclusion of female teachers reinforced the notion that women are weak. One woman complained, ‘I’ve seen pigs slaughtered so I am hardly going to get upset seeing a few boys get the strap’. Although the obvious competence and versatility in difficult circumstances of women like Heather Verdun and others made a mockery of stereotypical images of ineffectual femininity, women teachers remained on the fringe of a predominantly male culture. This culture was characterized, perhaps more than anything else, by the emphasis on forms of discipline. Several women believed that the latent violence that remained submerged for much, even most, of the time ‘undermines our authority and our discipline’. The use of corporal punishment, although infrequent, was the steel that reinforced the cement of the school’s gender regime. That sort of discipline was seen as effective yet was effectively denied to women. As one young woman put it:

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I wouldn’t be able to discipline in that way because they wouldn’t take me realistically that way anyway. Supposedly, the authority is meant to be there but, you know, I sort of don’t have it in the way that a male teacher would have it. Several points need to be made about the undertone of violence that was associated with discipline and authority at CBC. The first is that it was associated with male teachers, and with long-standing masculine traditions and expectations that women teachers would have difficulty sharing in even if they wanted to. Secondly, although during the period of study few men used obvious, physical violence at the school, the relationship of all male teachers with their pupils was influenced by it. This was usually to their advantage, in that classroom control became less problematic. However, some teachers, like Brother Ernest, felt that they suffered from expectations about discipline that impeded the development of greater intimacy between teacher and students. All women teachers, however, were adversely affected by the presence of violence in the immediate context of CBC. The possibility of violence as a back-up to teacher authority, even if it was distant and sporadic, marginalized women while reinforcing hegemonic masculinity. Thirdly, such possibility helped to reinforce among CBC participants, particularly students, the acceptance of the view that certain forms of violence are a legitimate and natural part of the adult world. Although instances of violence at CBC may be regarded as random, isolated phenomena associated with idiosyncratic individuals such as ‘Brother Bash’, I have attempted to illustrate that, as some women teachers had recognized, it was part of the fabric of the school—of its gender regime. This has parallels with the level of society more broadly. As Walby (1989:224) explains, ‘Men use violence as a form of power over women. Not all men actively need to use this potential power for it to have an impact on most women’. In an essentially male institution like CBC, life could be hard for females—a point made by a male teacher who, like myself in thinking about my own secondary schooling, wondered about the effect that the masculine culture of CBC may have had on him as a former pupil: As far as the women go it is hard to be objective because I think I have been conditioned because of my previous experience here at CBC… The Brothers here were always fairly strict and you couldn’t get away with much—but with the women you seem to be able to get away with a lot more. I think it is good that we do have more women here because I think it helps with the maturing process of the kids. Being around just boys and not having female teachers—as we did then—may have given us a warped type of view towards women and how you should treat them and all the rest of it. I think it is good that there are women on the staff now but, gee, it’s a rough road to have to come in on. Another former pupil, now also a teacher at CBC, described the situation this way: One of the biggest changes that I have noticed [about CBC] is the number of women on the staff and that has only been really in the last few years… I think the boys really need—I know I did—they need some sort of relationship with someone of the opposite sex, whether it was a teacher or whether it was, you know, anybody. I think we have got a lot of examples in year 11 and 12 where for the first time boys are coming up face-to-face with a female teacher. They

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don’t know how to cope. There are different points of view and whatever, but I think that in the lower forms there should be a few female staff, but unfortunately we are at the moment a bit down in female staff at the lower area and they are finding trouble and the boys …react a little bit to the female as being a bit of an easy option. Maria Campagna, who was having a particularly rough time, was a young first year teacher. I witnessed a number of incidents where she was subjected to emotional and sexual harrassment by members of her year 8 classes. In discussions that I conducted with groups of students, they often depicted her as almost childlike. One class group, during a discussion about curriculum, discipline and evaluation, claimed that ‘we shape the teacher’ and that they could make her cry whenever they wanted to. They often set out to do this. In concluding the conversation, a number of boys suggested in paternalistic tones that ‘she’ll probably be all right next year’. They expected her to improve as a teacher because her experiences with them would teach her about ways to control a class. For her part, Maria was not seeking excuses. Her appraisal of her situation was as follows: Being first year out adds to the problem. You know, I am sure that if I had been in my forties and came here they might have accepted me more readily. Well, if I had have been a male I would have probably had it a little bit easier—but I am not saying that it is just because I am a female that I am having, you know, that they are not listening or whatever, because it happens to everyone. But the male has just that little more authority. Maria had been employed partly as a teacher of Italian and had been surprised to find that there were few boys of Italian origin in her classes: Interviewer: Is there any way that you can use parents with Italian? Maria Campagna: Well, there aren’t many [Italian parents]. I was thinking of that. I was hoping there would be, but I would say there are only about two boys in each class of Italian parents… At Loreto Hall [nearby Catholic girls’ school] there is a fairly large population of Italians and other ethnic cultures. Interviewer: What do you think happens to the boys? Maria Campagna: I thought most of them would be here but they are not. The simple answer to the mystery of what happened to the Italian boys is that they were restricted from entry to CBC because of a zoning requirement. The majority of Italian and other immigrant families lived in the less affluent Northern suburbs of Newburyport and were zoned to another Catholic secondary school, Vianney College, in that area. Thus Maria was unable to make use of any cultural affinity she may have had with a group of Italian background. Far from believing that her performance as a teacher was likely to improve as a result of her experiences with boys at CBC, Maria feared that the reverse was happening: Maria Campagna: I think Bernadette may have had the same type of thing. Maybe she doesn’t say it as much but I think she’s depressed because of the fact that she can’t, you know, perhaps put her ideas into use. And with Christine, too, the girl that takes religion with me…

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Interviewer:

So that in fact you find yourself being pushed towards a much more authoritarian… Maria Campagna: Yes, I do and I don’t really like it because I can’t see the learning going on as well as it would be in another situation. I mean, I am there and most of the time I am lecturing or, I mean, I can hardly smile in the classroom because, if I do, that is the note that ‘oh fine, you know, we can have fun’. Maria provided an example of a situation that I had not witnessed but which illustrated some of her difficulties: The other day we were doing drama…and one boy got up and he imitated me so well it was incredible and I thought, ‘Now, what am I going to do in this situation?’ I mean, he was just like, ‘I am just tired of you’ and all this, and he said something about ‘I don’t want to teach you little brats’. I mean, I don’t say that but he sort of put that in. And I usually put a line up on the board and I sort of put ‘Br O’Hara’ on that and boys [whose names are put on the board] are going to be referred to him. He [the pupil] sort of walked up to the blackboard and he looks at everyone and he glares and looks—and I try and avoid putting names up on the blackboard and so I walk to the blackboard and fix the line up—and he was doing this and I thought, ‘Is this what I look like in the classroom?’ And I sort of laughed there and sort of accepted it and I thought, ‘Oh well’, and they went wild and they were just laughing and they went hysterical and I had to sort of put my foot down and say, ‘Right! You have had your fun’. One of Maria’s colleagues was less reluctant than her to fall back on the traditional authority of the Brothers: If I find one person is really rude or something like that, I take him to Brother Stirling—that puts the fear of God into them—or I bring them up to Brother Carter… It makes them better, but it is not really my authority. It is not me that is doing it. Certainly, pupils are aware that teachers cannot win by sending miscreants to the principal. As a student pointed out in referring to yet another woman teacher: If the teacher is a bit slack you do what you like. Like, one teacher is a bit slack with us. She’s got a soft voice and she can’t really tell us off. Brother Carter came in and said to send anyone who mucks around to him. But she doesn’t send anyone over because then they’d think she was a weak teacher. Although women like Heather Verdun were challenging the gender regime that was a major element of the organizational culture of CBC, attitudes like these made their task difficult. The general emphasis on control and discipline, and especially the actual or implied use of physical punishment, even if tacit and not officially endorsed, undermined the status of women.

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A Brothers’ School The gender regime of CBC had a number of identifiable features that contributed to its organizational culture. Many of these features had become institutionalized as part of what I have called elsewhere (Angus, 1988) ‘the Brothers’ school paradigm’. The concept of an organization as a paradigm is taken from Brown (1978:373–4): By paradigm we refer to those sets of assumptions, usually implicit, about what sorts of things make up the world, how they act, how they hang together, and how they may be known… [The] tacit intersubjective property of paradigms constitutes in effect the ‘agreement’ between members that enables the orderly production of role enactment. That is, the structuring of organizational interaction requires members to rely upon shared but largely tacit background knowledge that is embodied in an organizational paradigm. Roles as well as the definition of ‘problems’, ‘responsible opinion’, ‘leadership’, and so on, are afforded by the dominant model. I would now regard the notion of paradigm as somewhat too limiting in its lack of a strong sense of the possibilities of alternative (or counter-paradigmatic) actions on the part of organizational members, or of ways in which organizational structures are continually produced and reconstructed through the situated practices of organizational members. Nonetheless, the term is useful in highlighting the point that a number of characteristics of CBC were clearly recognized by teachers, Brothers and lay, as expected and established elements. Amongst these was the expectation that Brothers would be