Journal of Sociology

Analyses of the influence of psychology and the growth of counselling during the 20th century commonly point to the deleterious effects of a cultural shift from reticence and self-reliance to emotional expressiveness and help-seeking. Indeed, the ascendancy of therapeutic culture has been widely interpreted as fostering cultural decline and enabling new forms of social control. Drawing on less pessimistic assessments of cultural change and recent directions in social theory, this article argues for greater recognition of the ambivalent legacy of the therapeutic turn. Through a reinterpretation of the consequences of the diminution of traditional authority, the weakening of the division between public and private life, and the rise of the confessional, the article challenges dominant readings of decline and control. In doing so, it draws attention to how psychological knowledge and therapeutic understandings of the self have given legitimacy to, and furnished a language with which to articulate, experiences of suffering formerly confined to private life. In advancing a less pessimistic interpretation of cultural change, it considers two historic moments in Australia: the advent of telephone counselling in the 1960s and the Royal Commission on Human Relationships in the 1970s.

Utilizing a Geertzian cultural systems approach, Australian newspaper reporting of the 2002 Bali bombing is analysed to explore the dynamics of collective memory during crisis. With Australian footballers among the casualties in the terrorist attack, the traditional heroic figure of the Australian sportsman was widely used as a symbolic frame through which journalists, politicians and social commentators rationalized national suffering. The resulting promotion of an insular Australian nationalism inflamed public hostility towards Indonesia about the treatment of Australia's dead and injured. A counter-narrative of the attack emerged, however, with Australian tourists in Bali being mythologically aligned with First World War Anzac soldiers. In keying the bombing into the cultural logics of contemporary global travel and post-Fordist consumption, this collective memory provided a `model for' the emergence of a more cosmopolitan nationalism that legitimized a return to everyday activities and allowed for the development of closer diplomatic ties with Indonesia.

The role of niche media in discursively constructing and deconstructing powerful ideas is often underestimated. Using the 2004 `Redfern riots' as a case study, this article investigates how ideological elements of the riots were framed by the Koori Mail, a fortnightly niche Indigenous publication, compared to the more mainstream Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph. The research is conducted through a frame analysis of 155 media texts from these three newspapers. In comparing the niche and mainstream media, the contribution of the niche media to the contested nature of debate within the mediated public sphere is evident. By keeping the riots within a socio-political frame, the Koori Mail actively reframed dominant ideological constructions of racial identity and were able to construct a more nuanced and politicized critique of the riots than that offered by the two mainstream papers.

Be they highwaymen, bandits or bushrangers, outlaws are mythical figures celebrated across a variety of cultures. Australians' knowledge of colonial outlaws is examined by asking a national sample of adults if they could name four `bushrangers'. A large majority identified Ned Kelly and a substantial proportion Ben Hall, although less than a quarter could name four bushrangers and one in five were unable to name any bushrangers at all. Australian-born, middle-class, middle-aged, politically informed people who live in Queensland or NSW were the most knowledgeable, with the educational achievement findings suggesting that bushrangers occupy the realm of `middle-brow' taste. Ned Kelly is confirmed as Australia's best-known colonial figure and folk hero. Immortalized in Sidney Nolan's paintings and mythologized in various cultural milieux, Kelly has transcended bushranging to symbolize a romantic and rebellious aspect of Australian identity.

The field of cosmopolitanism research, for several years the topic of a mostly theoretical elaboration, is presently on the cusp of an empirical moment where research questions are specified and answered. The dimension of this shift that is of interest to us here concerns the impact of cosmopolitanism on the individual. While qualitative research is starting to gather momentum, a systematic quantitative research agenda remains less developed. We propose the association between cosmopolitan outlook and cosmopolitan practice as a useful starting point for such work. Here we report and reflect upon some initial findings on the nature and direction of this relationship as it exists among the general population in Australia.

Contemporary writing on cosmopolitanism has asserted the need for a new sociological toolkit to deal with an emergent post-national social order. At the heart of this agenda is a misunderstanding about the role of the nation-state, which has led to some rather unhelpful theorizations. The state is assumed to be a dead hand in the development of post-national sentiments or an increasingly irrelevant social structure. We argue that the superseding of the nation-state is not necessary for the development of cosmopolitan sentiments of solidarity. In addition to classical sociology, it is work surrounding the concepts of cosmopolitan democracy and constitutional patriotism and the public sphere that can assist us in theorizing cosmopolitanism. What distinguishes this tradition is the utilization of social science concepts such as democracy, state, public sphere and law in an attempt to ground the idea of cosmopolitanism within the context of existing social structures.

This article provides a series of critical reflections on the development of sociological studies in relation to popular music and the development of a cultural sociology of popular music. The piece begins by mapping the origins of popular music as a focus for academic study and the indebtedness of this body of work to Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies-style cultural studies analyses of popular music audiences and their reception of popular music texts. This is followed by a review of sociological work on popular music and the emergence of what could be termed a proto-cultural sociological approach. The final section of the article considers the cultural turn, its impact on cultural approaches to sociology and the significance of this for the development of a cultural sociology of popular music.