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Book part
Publication date: 16 August 2021

Lorraine Rumson

The historical study of sexuality during the Victorian period has been influenced heavily by the development of sexology as a scientific field. The impetus of sexology to…

Abstract

The historical study of sexuality during the Victorian period has been influenced heavily by the development of sexology as a scientific field. The impetus of sexology to delineate and categorize “types” of sexuality and sexual behavior has situated the late nineteenth century as a starting point for studies of contemporary concepts of sexual “abnormality.” However, research into this subject, while drawing on both legal and medical discourses, has overwhelmingly ignored the value of porn in reconstructing the dynamics of Victorian sexuality. Accordingly, this chapter integrates legal, medical, and pornographic discourses of the late nineteenth century to develop a more thorough examination of Victorian sexual experiences that fell outside the limits of prescribed legal and medical “normalcy.”

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Kink and Everyday Life
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83982-919-2

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Book part
Publication date: 29 March 2022

Elisabete Mendes Silva

The developments that occurred as a result of the Industrial Revolution and during the British Empire hastened commerce and transformed Britain's social and cultural status quo…

Abstract

The developments that occurred as a result of the Industrial Revolution and during the British Empire hastened commerce and transformed Britain's social and cultural status quo. By the eighteenth century, there was already in London a vast number of retail shops that would inaugurate an urban world of commerce and consumerism. Magnificent and wide-ranging stores served householders with commodities that mesmerized consumers, giving way to new trends in the commercial and social fabric of London. Therefore, going shopping during the Victorian Age became mandatory for the well-off, especially for the emergent moneyed middle class. Harrods department store opened in 1864, adding new elements to the retail industry by providing a single space with various commodities. In 1909, Selfridges would transform the concept of urban commerce by imposing a more cosmopolitan outlook in the commercial arena. We shall draw attention to these two department stores, Harrods and Selfridges, analyzing how they were perceived when they first opened to the public and the effects they had on Victorian society. We shall then discuss how these department stores rendered space for social inclusion and exclusion and gender under the spell of the Victorian ethos, national conservatism, and imperialism and how they transformed social, cultural, and power dynamics. Lastly, this chapter provides insight into the social history of the late Victorian period and the early decades of the twentieth century.

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Re-Imagining Spaces and Places
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-737-4

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Book part
Publication date: 20 October 2011

Jenny Morris and Ray Kinnear

Purpose — This chapter considers how transport policy and planning has been developing in Victoria in tandem with the research program described elsewhere in this book…

Abstract

Purpose — This chapter considers how transport policy and planning has been developing in Victoria in tandem with the research program described elsewhere in this book. Developments in policy and planning are discussed with particular regard to transport disadvantage and social inclusion.

Methodology — The chapter commences by providing a policy and planning context in terms of the geography and demography of travel needs, the relevant jurisdictional responsibilities in Australia and the policy history. It then describes the evolution of transport policy in the past decade and outlines the way in which the findings of this research are being incorporated into the development of programs and projects to support social inclusion. Additionally, some key policy challenges are outlined, at least some of which may provide fruitful areas for undertaking further research to support the development of future policies and programs.

Findings — The results show that applied research can be a highly successful endeavour, particularly when policy and planning perspectives are integrated into the development of the research design and strong collaboration is an ongoing feature of the research program.

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New Perspectives and Methods in Transport and Social Exclusion Research
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78-052200-5

Book part
Publication date: 24 September 2015

Brian Simpson

The purpose of this paper is to explore the narratives that construct the practice and regulation of ‘sexting’, the sending of sexualised images via text message, when engaged in…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the narratives that construct the practice and regulation of ‘sexting’, the sending of sexualised images via text message, when engaged in by young people. The aim of this discussion is to better understand the extent to which those narratives recognise young people’s agency in relation to their sexuality and the role that new media plays in enabling youth to explore their sexual identity.

Methodology

The methodology employed is that of discourse analysis. This approach is used to deconstruct the dominant narrative of sexting contained in the literature, a narrative that constructs it as a problem to be contained and controlled, either through the application of the criminal law or through education and guidance approaches. This paper then investigates an emerging counter narrative that gives greater emphasis to the autonomy rights of youth. A case study involving a Parliamentary Inquiry in one Australian State into sexting is also employed to further this analysis.

Findings

This paper concludes that the dominant narrative remains the strongest influence in the shaping of law and the practice of sexting, but that young people may be better served by the counter narrative that recognises their agency in ways that may empower and grant them more control over their bodies.

Originality/Value

The paper thus provides an alternative approach to developing new law and policy with respect to the regulation of sexting by youth that should be of value to lawmakers and child and youth advocates.

Details

Technology and Youth: Growing Up in a Digital World
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78560-265-8

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Book part
Publication date: 30 May 2017

Joseph Drew

Australia notably was one of the few developed nations to avoid a technical recession subsequent to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). However, the fact that the nation escaped a…

Abstract

Australia notably was one of the few developed nations to avoid a technical recession subsequent to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). However, the fact that the nation escaped a technical recession doesn’t mean that citizens and local governments were not subject to some of the measures associated with post-GFC austerity. In particular, intergovernmental grants – an important source of revenue for Australian local governments – were frozen by the federal government seeking to mitigate large deficits over the forward estimates. This chapter compares and contrasts the budgetary outcomes for the local governments of Australia’s two most populous states – New South Wales and Victoria. We find that the disparate regulatory controls in the two municipal jurisdictions were strongly associated with the budgetary outcomes of the individual municipalities: In particular, we present evidence which suggests that taxation limitations and lax investment guidelines in New South Wales can be associated with relatively inferior budgetary positions and higher budgetary volatility. By way of contrast, Victorian councils had the flexibility to vary rates of taxation to the changing conditions and largely avoided investment losses associated with the financial failure of Lehman Brothers. In New South Wales the regulatory response to deteriorating municipal budgets (subsequent to the GFC) has been to execute a radical programme of forced amalgamations. Somewhat ironically, the Victorian state government has recently imposed taxation limitations on its municipalities. In summary, this chapter demonstrates the saliency of regulatory constraints on municipal resilience, in the context of post-GFC economic challenges.

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Governmental Financial Resilience
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-262-6

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Book part
Publication date: 12 November 2018

Bernice Davies, Anona Armstrong and Maree Fitzpatrick

In 2013, the National Mutual Acceptance (NMA) of single ethical review was introduced into the Australian public health sector to address the timeliness of multisite clinical…

Abstract

In 2013, the National Mutual Acceptance (NMA) of single ethical review was introduced into the Australian public health sector to address the timeliness of multisite clinical trials. A clinical trial is usually designed to test the effects of an experimental therapeutic product. While all research involving humans must comply with ethical guidelines, clinical trials testing products in Australia are also subject to stringent regulatory controls making the need to meet trial milestones critically import. Commercial clinical trials offer participating research sites substantial financial and clinical advantages. Concerns that bureaucratic processes have impeded commercial investment have influenced countries, including Australia, to introduce single ethical review, where one ethics review is accepted at multiple sites participating in the same research project. Although a central tenet of the NMA is the standardization of the behaviors and procedures of research review, concerns of inconsistency remain. This raises the question of whether the NMA does lead public healthcare agencies to adopt similar research governance practices.

A questionnaire survey was undertaken to explore the current experiences (n = 149) of the NMA in Victorian public health agencies, and 21 semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore expectations of the future of the NMA. The findings indicated that, while there was conformity to many of the process requirements of the NMA, a persistent focus on the needs of each individual healthcare agency rather than on complying with the national system weakened pressure on agencies to adopt standardization.

The NMA has the capacity to be a powerful tool in delivering quality clinical trial outcomes, maximize research resources and create dependable performance metrics if consistent policies and governance are followed.

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Applied Ethics in the Fractured State
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-600-6

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Book part
Publication date: 30 June 2004

Carol A.B Warren

The medical suppression of female sexuality in Victorian society has long been the subject of historical and cultural scholarship, with documentation not only of textual threats…

Abstract

The medical suppression of female sexuality in Victorian society has long been the subject of historical and cultural scholarship, with documentation not only of textual threats by religious and medical “experts,” but also of surgical assaults on female reproductive systems (Longo, 1979, 1986; Scull & Favreau, 1986; Sheehan, 1997). Less well known is the apparent obverse: the use of medical techniques to stimulate the female genitalia as a means of treating hysteria and other mental disorders (Maines, 1999; Schleiner, 1995). In this paper, I trace the cultural history (mainly Anglo-American) of the psychiatric enhancement, as well as repression, of female sexual pleasure, through various genital treatments, including the surgical and the electrical.1 I then make the case that these “opposite” treatments are, in the context of Victorian society, two sides of the same coin of the patriarchal, medical control of female sexuality.2

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Gendered Perspectives on Reproduction and Sexuality
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-088-3

Book part
Publication date: 4 April 2017

David L. Blaney

Duncan Bell’s project to restore late-Victorian and Edwardian debates on federative empire or a Greater Britain to international theory emphasizes the “political language” of…

Abstract

Duncan Bell’s project to restore late-Victorian and Edwardian debates on federative empire or a Greater Britain to international theory emphasizes the “political language” of civilization, race, and character available to fin-de-siècle thinkers on empire. In the process, Bell leaves out the contribution to these debates made by a key figure in the newly emerging discipline of economics: Alfred Marshall. Most recent writings on 19th-century empire similarly ignore the work of late-Victorian economists, as do recent efforts to map the terrain of international theory more broadly. Marshall’s writings on federative empire are not referenced by the advocates of Greater Britain that Bell carefully documents, but it is clear that Marshall followed those debates closely. And though he imagined his contribution as distinctly economic, his work unfolded in a similar language of civilization, race, and character, informed particularly by social evolutionary thought. In conclusion, I stress the dangerous temptation to sort the relevance of thinkers according to contemporary disciplinary boundaries so that more recent economists and the components of earlier political economic work that might be classed as economics are sifted out of our narratives of political thought. Instead, I see the debates on empire that Bell explores as unfolding in a language that, since the 17th and 18th centuries, has engaged issues of commerce and trade, social change, moral virtue, and the nature of political rule: political economy.

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International Origins of Social and Political Theory
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-267-1

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Book part
Publication date: 15 June 2022

Zahirul Hoque and Thiru Thiagarajah

Accountability in the public sector has generally been discussed in light of public sector auditing and performance measurement. Performance audit or ‘value for money’ audit…

Abstract

Accountability in the public sector has generally been discussed in light of public sector auditing and performance measurement. Performance audit or ‘value for money’ audit practice has been implemented at various government levels for assessing three key areas of performance – economy, efficiency and effectiveness. This practice has been significantly influenced by recent reforms in the public sector globally. Local governments or city councils play a significant role in providing community services at grass-root levels. How different actors are involved in auditing practices at the local level has attracted recent research interest world-wide. This chapter contributes to the global public sector accounting literature by presenting a critical overview of the development of local government auditing in Australia. It focusses on the role of the local government regulations and various stakeholders in audit scope, methodologies and practices with an illustration from the state of Victoria in Australia. The evidence presented will contribute to understanding international audit practices in local governments across the globe.

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Auditing Practices in Local Governments: An International Comparison
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-085-7

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