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This paper collects together quotations and extracts from 19th and 20th century thinkers who were little-known for being supporters of workplace democracy.

To study sexual deals, the Italian ethnologist Paola Tabet introduced an original frame of analysis, the “economico‐sexual exchanges” frame, which she conceives as a continuum, from marriage to prostitution. The purpose of this paper is to know if we have to accept the idea of a sexual social contract as a holistic way of understanding, like Carole Pateman, or whether we have to admit the heterogeneity of sexual transactions.

According to the social function of the contract presented by Yvon Pesqueux, this paper will try to seize the contractual forms of sexual transactions, developing at the same time in the logic of the psychological contract, in particular to approach more finely the notion of consent, a notion at the heart of the debates concerning economic sexuality and which cannot be reduced to the expression of personal freedom. Pateman's work is also too fundamental to be ignored and so the author summarizes the main ideas.

It can be said that the social reality of sexual transactions exists between two opposite contractual and anti‐contractual ideologies, between a gender idealistic point of view and a management realistic one. Individuals, men and women, are more or less free to sell or buy sexual services. If freedom exists, contracts can be spoken about; if not, a contractual point of view appears only as a justification for the strong.

The paper presents a sexual/gender point of view in the contractual theories.

This study examines Pateman's “spillover thesis” that democratic participation in the workplace will “spill over” into political participation. It applies a latent class analysis (LCA) to identify patterns of political behavior and uses workplace participation and political efficacy as predicting variables of political behavior patterns.

This study analyzed the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) data. This study applied a LCA to identify distinct patterns in people's political behaviors and did a multinomial regression analysis to predict the patterns with workplace participation and political efficacy.

The study found partial support for the spillover thesis. Among three distinct political behavior patterns, two active patterns were associated with political efficacy. However, the mediation from workplace participation to political participation through political efficacy was not supported. Respondents involved in workplace units that collectively make work-related decisions were more likely to be active in political behaviors, but only one set of political activities. Higher political efficacy was found to lead to more active overall political participation of both patterns.

Unlike the previous studies of democratic spillover, which treated political behaviors either as independent types of behaviors or as a summative index of such binary coded variables, this study addressed such shortcomings of the previous studies by providing a more complex picture of political behavior patterns and their relationship with workplace participation. Future research can build on this unique methodological endeavor to explore a holistic picture of how workplace practices can influence politics and democracy through individual workers.

“All things are in a constant state of change”, said Heraclitus of Ephesus. The waters if a river are for ever changing yet the river endures. Every particle of matter is in continual movement. All death is birth in a new form, all birth the death of the previous form. The seasons come and go. The myth of our own John Barleycorn, buried in the ground, yet resurrected in the Spring, has close parallels with the fertility rites of Greece and the Near East such as those of Hyacinthas, Hylas, Adonis and Dionysus, of Osiris the Egyptian deity, and Mondamin the Red Indian maize‐god. Indeed, the ritual and myth of Attis, born of a virgin, killed and resurrected on the third day, undoubtedly had a strong influence on Christianity.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

Charitable Choice Policy, the heart of President Bush’s Faith‐Based Initiative, is the direct government funding of religious organizations for the purpose of carrying out government programs. The Bush presidential administration has called for the application of Charitable Choice Policy to all kinds of social services. Advocates for child‐abuse victims contend that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy would further dismantle essential social services provided to abused children. Others have argued Charitable Choice Policy is unconstitutional because it crosses the boundary separating church and state. Rather than drastically altering the US social‐policy landscape, this paper demonstrates that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy already is in place for childabuse services across many of the fifty states. One reason this phenomenon is ignored is due to the reliance on the public‐private dichotomy for studying social policies and services. This paper contends that relying on the public‐private dichotomy leads researchers to overlook important configurations of actors and institutions that provide services to abused children. It offers an alternate framework to the public‐private dichotomy useful for the analysis of social policy in general and, in particular, Charitable Choice Policy affecting services to abused children. Employing a new methodological approach, fuzzy‐sets analysis, demonstrates the degree to which social services for abused children match ideal types. It suggests relationships between religious organizations and governments are essential to the provision of services to abused children in the United States. Given the direction in which the Bush Charitable Choice Policy will push social‐policy programs, scholars should ask whether abused children will be placed in circumstances that other social groups will not and why.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a systemic view of democracy can provide insights into the myriad ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic affects democracies worldwide. This enables the authors to offer practical suggestions for strengthening democracy through meaningful participation in the spaces where deficits are most apparent.

The authors use the systems approach that has emerged from the deliberative and participatory democracy literature in recent years to map out the impacts of COVID-19. In this paper, the authors set out this approach as an agenda for future, more comprehensive research.

The authors’ preliminary overview suggests that democratic spaces are reconfigured during COVID-19, with participatory spaces shrinking, overlapping and invading each other. Based on the systemic overview, the authors suggest participatory interventions to address particular points of weakness such as accountability.

Taking a systemic approach to analysing COVID-19’s impacts on democracy enables the authors to understand the pressure points where democratic values and participation are under strain and where citizens’ participation is essential not only for strengthening democracy but also addressing the public health challenge of COVID-19.

Recent developments in media technology have led some within the communications policy field to question traditional approaches to localism and its continued viability as a meaningful policy principle. In response to this potential turning point, this paper explores the underlying rationales for localism and examines the principle’s relevance in an era when media technologies are less restrained by geographic barriers. In terms of its underlying rationales, it is clear that the principle need not be entirely abandoned. The traditional “spatial” conceptualizations and applications of the localism principle still have relevance. If it can be expanded to account for alternative definitions of community, the principle will remain an important principle for communications policymakers and policy analysts.

New South Wales (NSW) was the first state in Australia to introduce a legislative requirement to undertake affirmative action for members of particular target groups in order to achieve equality of opportunity in employment. This requirement was introduced in 1980 as an amendment to the NSW Anti‐ Discrimination Act 1977. Referred to as Part IXa, the amendment required all public service departments and statutory authorities to produce an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Management Plan, setting out strategies by which EEO could be achieved for target group members, and to report annually to the Director of Equal Opportunity in Public Employment (DEOPE) on progress made towards this goal.

In this article we focus on two women, Catherine Francis (1836‐1916) and Dorothy Dolling (1897‐ 1967), whose lives traversed England, New Zealand and South Australia. At the beginning of this period the British Empire was expanding and New Zealand and South Australia had much in common. They were white settler societies, that is ‘forms of colonial society which had displaced indigenous peoples from their land’. We have organised the article chronologically so the first section commences with Catherine’s birth in England and early life in South Australia, where she mostly inhabited the world of the young ladies school, a transnational phenomenon. The next section investigates her career in New Zealand from 1878 where she led the Mount Cook Infant’s School in Wellington and became one of the colony’s first renowned women principals. We turn to Dorothy Dolling in the third section, describing her childhood and work as a university student and tutor in New Zealand and England. The final section of our article focuses on the ways in which both women have been represented in the national memories of Australia and New Zealand. In so doing, we show that understandings about nationhood are also transnational, and that writing about Francis and Dolling reflects the shifting relationships between the three countries in the twentieth century.