In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

The Wretched of the Earth

The End of History and the Last Man

One dimensional man

The Limits to Capital

Contents: What ruling class? The history of the Australian and New Zealand ruling classes What do the Australian and New Zealand ruling classes look like today? Australian networks of power The New Zealand interlocks of power Think tanks, corporate collectivity and the reproduction of ruling ideas Gender and the ruling classes Back to the future Bibliography Index.

Capitalist Networks and Social Power in Australia and New Zealand

Is there a job-quality problem in mining? Is part of this problem that mining employees are working involuntary long hours? If so, how extensive is this problem? What is the impact, if any, of involuntary long hours in mining on family life? And how much control do mining employees have over their working-time arrangements? What are the possible policy responses? We address these questions through analysis of data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Work and Life Index survey, a survey of employees in Queensland, and qualitative interviews with 135 people associated with the Queensland mining industry. We find evidence of substantial involuntary long hours in mining, closely related to 24-hour operations and 12-hour shifts, with adverse implications for the work—life balance, which is made worse where employees lack input into the design of rosters. The findings suggest that, in order to promote ‘good jobs’ in the mining industry, there is both a need to revisit protections for employ...

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‘You Get Really Old, Really Quick’: Involuntary Long Hours in the Mining Industry

Existing literature examining business relationships in China suggests that China has a business culture that is based on strong family networks or cultural ties secured in guanxi connections, which are underpinned by strong Confucian ethics. We agree that Chinese business may have cultural attributes that are distinctly national (that international businesses and their expatriates ignore at their peril), but we also question the continued significance of these historical cultural concepts in a globalizing world. We query whether a system of networks arising from existing state-owned enterprises that has been consolidated during 50 years of communism can still be applicable on the considerably larger scale of multinational corporate business on which Chinese capitalism in the 21st century operates. Interview data collected from Australian expatriates in Shanghai in November 2001 is used to assess the relevance of guanxi. Our findings suggest that the necessity for expatriates to establish guanxi is determined by company size and the individual expatriate's length of service in China.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.abm.9200019.pdf

Australian Expatriates' Experiences in Working Behind the Bamboo Curtain: An Examination of Guanxi in Post-Communist China

How do interlocks effect the integration of the Australian capitalist class? Here it is argued that the sociological study of interlocks (that is, the links created by a director who is on board of more than one company or organization) reveals some but not all dimensions of corporate power. The study of directional interlocks (using only board members from primary organizational positions) reveals the following traceries of power: first, a map showing inter-firm power links; second, these links also indicate the direction of the flow of corporate information; third, the links indicate which sector (e.g. productive, financial or service) is at the political centre of business relations. In the Australian big business case studies (1992 and 1998) chosen to illustrate the centrality of interlocks it is shown that industrial companies dominate the formation of top corporate social links. It is hypothesized that the most heavily interlocked director is a ruling class leader who acts to ingratiate the capitalist class with the state, but interlocking directorates also act to integrate the ruling class as a whole and to keep the class positioned advantageously in regard to its global objectives. Triangulation of the interlock material with both interviews and company ownership data shows some support for this. The most significant finding is the observance of two levels of power; the first is political and is reflected in the clusters of industrial interlocking company directorates, and the second is economic, in which the ubiquity of finance capital gives it dominance and control over the former.

Interlocking Directorates: What do they tell about Corporate Power in Australia?

This paper presents results from a comparative study of company directors of the top 250 Australian companies. The paper analyses the concentration of directorship holding in Australia and New Zealand in 1991 and compares this with other Australian, New Zealand, British, Canadian and American studies. The paper argues that while the density of interorganisational interlocks in Australia is quite normal by international standards, such comparisons are substantially affected by the relatively small number of board positions characteristic of Australian companies. When we allow for this external parameter by considering the concentration of directorship holding by persons, there is evidence of a significant concentration of available positions in the hands of relatively few persons in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The paper suggests that the organisation of business power in Australia reflects a continuing tension between principles of regulation derived from the larger economies of Britain and the Unit...

Georgina Murray

Papers

Capitalist Networks and Social Power in Australia and New Zealand

‘You Get Really Old, Really Quick’: Involuntary Long Hours in the Mining Industry

Australian Expatriates' Experiences in Working Behind the Bamboo Curtain: An Examination of Guanxi in Post-Communist China

Interlocking Directorates: What do they tell about Corporate Power in Australia?

Business power in Australia: The concentration of company directorship holding among the top 250 corporates