Introduction

This chapter is animated by questions arising from core ideas in Elias's thinking, which are explored in relation to research concerned with South Africa over a 200-year period. First, does Elias's analysis of the civilising process, forged in the crucible of European histories and societies in France, Germany, Italy and Britain, ‘travel’ to other parts of the world and specifically South Africa, or is a racialising process more apparent there, and if it is, then what is the relationship between racialising and civilising processes? Second, does figuration, another central component of Elias's sociology, play a significant part in the South African trajectory of change, and if so in what ways? And third, what is the relationship between figuration and the civilising or racialising process in South Africa, and can this be helpfully understood by exploring its established and outsider group dynamics?

These questions are considered by reference to a research project on ‘Whites Writing Whiteness’ (WWW) spanning the period from the 1770s to the 1970s. This is a qualitative longitudinal investigation of how South Africa's distinctive apartheid racial order came into being, exerted power, was contested, then eventually replaced by a democratically elected government. It explores this by analysing the complex relationship between the materiality of the racial order and the representational ‘world’ as inscribed in letterwriting, over this lengthy period (Stanley 2017; see also Stanley 2020, 2018, 2016, 2015, 2013). The work of Elias provides the ideal framework for WWW research, which draws on his thought-provoking interrogation of long-term processes of change and encompasses state formation as intermeshed with sociogenetic everyday social practices.

WWW has constructed a large longitudinal dataset of historical materials, formed by collections of letters and related everyday documents of life written by South African white people, with many archive collections spanning three or more generations of contributors (Stanley 2015). Analytical attention has been on the changing representational practices in which some people and groups were ‘Othered’ in race terms in these epistolary writings. In investigating this, Elias's thinking about figuration, established and outsiders, pronouns and relationality among other ideas have been drawn on, as well as the civilising process and whether it is an appropriate framework for thinking about this data or whether other processes connected with racialising have been more impactful in South Africa.

Historical imagination and sociological imagination are inseparable: whenever we imagine a society, we are figuring something that has a lifespan reaching far beyond any individual’s existence, both into the past and into the future. The point has long been made in classical sociology: we find it in Émile Durkheim's old argument for understanding society as a sui generis being, not reducible to any sum of individuals, supervening on their relations and extending in time, effectively immortal compared with any human life-span (Durkheim 2014). However, the essentially philosophical insight that a society – any society – always has a historical dimension, does not solve the basic problem of sociology: how can the historicity of the social be accommodated within the framework of empirical science? It is all very well to say that sociological imagination must include history, but how should a sociologist practising the imagination proceed to stay true to the call of history? Specifically, how can she solve the tension between the philosophical concept of history as an (for all practical purposes) infinite process and the limitations of her research methods and techniques? Our research practice, whatever we do, can only address fragments, bits and pieces, it cannot grasp the whole, the continuum, without framing it in some limitative way.

Norbert Elias's theory not only endorses the point about the inherent historicity of the social as self-evident but one that is frequently reduced to a meaningless declaration. It also offers guidance for a corresponding research practice which combines theory and historical evidence. The task of historical sociology has been defined as making ‘theoretical sense of the past’ (Steinmetz 2007). Eliasian sociology carries out this task to perfection. Most importantly, it avoids one trap of thinking about history and society which I would call selective historicity. Let me begin this chapter with a brief discussion of this phenomenon as an introduction to an overview of historical–sociological matter in Elias's work, beginning with On the Process of Civilisation in its historical context, followed by mapping historical–sociological interests in his minor writings. I will conclude with a discussion of Elias's theory as a way to cope with human engagement in mythologised historical imaginaries, including both the happy and the unhappy images of the past, pointing out the benefits of combining historical and sociological imagination with an appropriate quantum of detachment.

This chapter is dedicated to Nehemiah Thomas Faleolo

Introduction

Pacific peoples, or Pasifika, in the Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter Aotearoa) context, have remained transient and mobile since their arrival and settlement over the last 60 years. Although at times constrained by migration policies, their collectives have continued to expand further abroad through Aotearoa to Australia. This chapter will focus on the trans-Tasman mobilities of Pasifika, providing a broad understanding of the politics of mobility and migration that influence their movements in and through Aotearoa. The discussion will consider the pre–Covid-19 trans-Tasman mobilities that have maintained important sociocultural interconnections across multi-sited familial collectives. These connections have been reimagined and transformed by Pasifika groups in response to Covid-19-related regulations. The challenges of social distancing and travel restrictions can be contrasted against an increased sociocultural connection occurring online between multi-sited and intergenerational groups.

Positioning this research

This chapter presents a de-colonised standpoint on Pasifika mobilities informed by trans-Tasman Pasifika narratives and observations that started with a well-being focused study of Samoan and Tongan migrant groups (2015–2019), and continued with observations of Pasifika moving to and through Australia (2020–2021), which is part of another larger study.

My research acknowledges the realities of Pasifika migration, as shared with me by Pasifika and re-presented by me as a Pasifika; they are important constructs of our perspectives and lived experiences. These realities and related notions can be better understood within Pasifika frames of thought and belief systems that are fundamental to specific Pacific groups. As my research focus was with Samoan and Tongan peoples,this discussion draws upon their cultural frameworks of anga faka-Tonga (the Tongan way of being) and faa Samoa (the Samoan way of being). Both these Pacific understandings provide sets of values, beliefs and codes of practice that are lived out in the Pacific homelands as well as in diaspora contexts. Both frameworks are based on a shared perception that relationships, particularly that of familial connections, are at the core of their way of life (Faleolo 2012, 8; Lilomaiava-Doktor 2009, 7–8; Taumoefolau 2013, 140–14).

In my communications with the Pasifika communities, families and individuals as part of my research, I have embraced a culturally responsive approach. The method/methodology of talanoa and vā has been used both offline (face to face) and online to respond to the current Covid-19 restrictions on social interaction and travel.

A Feminist Jurisprudence

Feminist Jurisprudence, more commonly known as feminism, originated in 1978 and comprises a competing and, at times, contradicting collection of social theories, political movements and moral philosophies. Feminism is attributed mainly to women's experiences, particularly with respect to women's social, political and economic inequalities. Advocates of feminist jurisprudence were unable to concur on the most effective way of achieving the end goal of equality for women. Traditionally, advocates promoted either liberalism, based on the concept of ‘sameness’, or culturalism, based on the concept of ‘differences’. While both liberal and cultural feminism have valid grounds, the main argument of this monograph is based on reconstructive feminism because it promotes gender equality by recognising that women as parents have dual familial and societal roles and makes necessary adjustments to empower women in their venture to succeed in both. In addition, reconstructive feminism considers changes in women's roles as mothers through the lenses of shared responsibility with fathers, therefore, parents’ entitlements have to be considered as a whole in any future policy development.

1 Liberal Feminism

Liberal feminism—among other varieties of feminism—provides the strongest authority and foundation for other feminist theories. By definition, liberal feminism is a ‘feminist theory that believes gender inequality is created by lowering access for women and girls to civil rights and allocation of social resources such as education and employment’. The main principle is that individuals should have the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and that no one should bar those rights. The roots of liberal feminism were acquired from the liberal political philosophy in the enlightenment period, and the movement focuses on autonomy, universal rights, equal citizenship, and democracy. Liberal feminists are essentially concerned with deconstructing structural obstructions, including discriminatory laws, which keep women in oppressive gender roles and hinder them from actively participating in the workplace and society.

Liberal feminism can be classified into two categories, namely assimilationist and androgynous. The assimilationist paragon assumes that all people have equal status and should consequently be treated according to the same rules and principles. In addition to forcing women to abide by the rules created by men, the assimilationist ideal ignores the core elements of women's identities by declaring men's behaviour and lifestyle as the standard.

This chapter is a continuation of the discussion initiated in Chapter seven, which focused largely on the post-1989 and post-1992 years. The primary focus of this chapter is the second half of the 1990s, although it must be recognised that Chinese society in the 1990s was driven by at least two strong conflicting socio-political forces represented by the post-1989 crackdown and the post-1992 economic liberalisation and their constant tension. This situation could well be envisaged as being overseen by a person holding both the carrot and the stick, in a manner similar to what is known as Deng Xiaoping's ‘two-hands approach’ (liangshou zhua). The aim was, on the one hand, to encourage people to actively engage in more economic activities, while on the other hand tightly controlling ‘all kinds of ideological and cultural pollutants from abroad’ (Kim 2006, 279). There were two boundary lines between what was expected and what was not tolerated. Such socio-political conditions also shaped people's behaviours, making people more individualistic and utilitarian. The natural human tendency to seek advantage and avoid disadvantage not only propelled more people to make new efforts to reposition themselves but also altered the patterns and characteristics of their social repositioning.

Of course, as noted previously, it is critical to remember that the 1989 Tiananmen protest had almost no direct impact on China's rural population, although it has been praised by many activists for promoting democracy in the country. In the post-1989 years, rural residents were still a significant cohort, forming over 74 per cent of the total population (see Figure 1.2). It was at almost the same time that China's rural industrialisation entered its second stage, offering tens, if not hundreds, of millions of rural citizens employment in TVEs. This not only effectively transferred rural surplus labour from the agricultural sector to industrial and service sectors, but also popularised Deng's idea of ‘letting some people get rich first’ among peasants. The success of rural industrialisation also inspired the state to utilise what it had learned from the early steps of the rural industrialisation in the restructuring of less efficient SOEs, putting new owners and managers of enterprises in a more advantaged position while making many urban workers jobless.

There is an intellectual tradition that downplays the importance of the biography. It recognises the biography as an accumulation of anecdotal episodes. However, from a sociological point, thinking evolves within a context. A human mind is a thinking machine that processes everything of which it becomes aware. The key to understanding the intellectual progress is not the conception of an individual that ‘thinks’, but as a junction where influences condense into new thoughts.

This distinction is particularly important when it comes to a sociologist. Scientific knowledge that explores people's coexistence cannot be obtained without observations shaped by previous experience. As a chemist works in a laboratory, the social scientist works in a society. Sociologists’ experiences as social beings are shaped by the culture in which they grow up. Over the process of becoming older, they have interacted with countless people in this society. Whenever sociologists reflect upon what they have read, they do this in the presence of past experiences with groups that they have encountered and with which they have want to relate to. All their past experiences are processed, analysed and form the background of their new ideas. So, if we speak about the sociologist Norbert Elias, we should at least have a glimpse of the people who helped shape his research questions and guided him towards new sociological thinking.

Breslau

The life of Norbert Elias began in 1897 in Germany's easternmost metropolis of Breslau. He grew up in a well-off, but not fabulously wealthy, Jewish family. Elias remained the only child of his parents, who were keen for his social advancement and thus put their son under pressure. This family's environment contained numerous academics: the young Edith Stein, philosopher and Catholic saint, was one of his childhood playmates, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer was the brother of a married uncle, the graphic artist Eugen Spiro was part of the extended kinship. So Elias grew up in an academically inclined family that encouraged his studies. Even before he started school, he had completed a preparatory course with one of the schoolteachers. His childhood home and environment encouraged him as a boy to aim at becoming a professor.

I Introduction

A Background

All member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including Australia, guarantee some form of paid parental leave to new parents. These policies differ substantially in the duration of leave provided, amount of benefits, job protection and eligibility. This monograph critically examines paid parental leave in Australia compared with the global framework and the position within select similar OECD member countries. The substantial disparity in parental leave policies between Australia and these OECD member countries raises questions about the effect of Australian policies on gender inequality in the workforce, women's workforce participation and child and parental health. The support of new parents is particularly important in Australia as a country facing the problem of the aging population.

A recent survey in Australia reported that three out of four women returning from work following parental leave spend at least four months at home with their child. Parental leave policies serve as a mechanism for providing new parents, especially women, a leave of absence from work. These leave policies aid new parents in preparing for childbirth, recovering from childbirth and adapting to caring for their child. The goal of these policies is to assist parents to balance competing financial and family responsibilities without having to resign one or the other. Professor Brough and her team established in a seminal qualitative research interviewing 81 parents in Australia and New Zealand that current employment transition is perceived as ‘premature and as having adverse personal consequences (e.g., personal health, child attachment and breast-feeding) and organisational consequences (e.g., diminished job commitment and increased turnover intentions).’ Additional research demonstrated synergy in perceived organisational support and ‘dynamic processes of self-efficacy to regulate work and life in facilitating work–family enrichment’. Which means that working parents who are allowed sufficient time for parenting can also be happy and productive employees.

This monograph recognises that parental leave is available to a number of carers; however, the Australian Bureau of Statistics identified that ‘95% of all primary carers leave is taken by mothers.’ For this reason, the focus of this monograph is on mothers. As a rule, the adoptive parents have the same entitlements as biological parents, therefore the discussion of parental leave entitlements will progress without making a distinction between adoptive and biological parents.

Introduction

As global displacement increases, understandings of refugee citizenship rights and belonging have become particularly salient. In June 2021, the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, reported that the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes due to armed conflict, warfare and political persecution had reached 84.2 mil-lion – the highest figure ever recorded. While 48 million individuals were ‘internally displaced’, within their country of residence, 36 million had left their country and crossed international borders, where they wait in cities or refugee camps until they deem it safe to return home or they are forcibly repatriated (UNHCR 2021). Those who cannot return home may decide to seek asylum (protection from the state) in the country to which they first fled, or to apply for refugee status through the UNHCR (1996) in the hope that they might be resettled in a third country that is signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. However, only 107,800 asylum seekers and refugees were resettled in 2019 (Solf and Rehberg 2021). This number dropped to 34,400 in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic, and by mid-2021, the United Nations had documented 26.6 million refugees in need of assistance, placing pressure on governments across the world to accept more refugees and offer more durable resettlement solutions (UNHCR 2021).

As one of the signatories to the Convention, Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, New Zealand) resettles refugees through an annual refugee quota. This quota has recently been increased due to the growing humanitarian crisis and significant activist pressure, such as the Double the Quota campaign (Stephens 2018a). A refresh of the 2013 New Zealand Refugee Resettlement Strategy is also underway (Bonnet 2021). The Strategy was originally implemented by the government, local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and refugee background communities, with the vision that

This vision is further supported by five practical outcomes related to self-sufficiency, social participation, health and well-being, education and safe housing.

Introduction

Norbert Elias was steeped not only in developments in biology, psychology, philosophy, history and, of course, sociology, but he was also deeply immersed in literature, art, architecture, sport and leisure culture more generally (Steuerwald 2018). Problems of art that first intrigued Elias in his twenties formed an abiding concern throughout his long lifetime. In some ways, the Breslau of Elias's youth was a rather unpromising environment for sustaining a habitus oriented towards art. Until the 1920s, Breslau had been something of a cultural backwater with ‘few contemporary artists of note and no real artistic milieu, with few galleries, exhibition spaces, arts cafes, or salons’ (Barnstone 2016, 111). Even so, Elias cultivated an aesthetic disposition. As a student at Breslau he learned from the ethno-nationalist art historian (and later Nazi) Wilhelm Pinder (1878–1947) of the significance of inter-generational shifts in artistic taste and from August Grisebach (1881–1950), a specialist in Renaissance and nineteenth-century architecture, how an artwork like the Ghent altarpiece was a product of the emergent Flemish bourgeoisie (Jitschin, chapter one, this volume). In a precocious essay of 1921 Elias (2006a) explored the relationship between the sensual experience of art and the scientific understanding of nature. A few years later he began to work for an abandoned Habilitation thesis supervised by Alfred Weber on the historical sociology of painting and the natural sciences (Elias 2006d), a theme that would resurface in 1987 with his Involvement and Detachment (Elias 2007, 37–63). In the 1930s, Elias was personally acquainted with critical theorists Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno and became a close confidante of Karl Mannheim around the time that Mannheim (1956) was developing his model of the democratisation of culture. Within Mannheim's research group, Elias influenced Mannheim's doctoral student Gisele Freund's pioneering research on the sociology of photography, Nina Rubinstein's thesis on the aristocratic émigrés of 1789, Margarete Freudenthal's study of women and structural changes in the urban bourgeois family household, while Jitschin (Chapter 1 this volume) suggests that his approach to aristocratic romanticism was, at least in part, indebted to Natalie Halperin's doctoral thesis on eighteenth-century German women writers (Kettler et al. 2008).

In recent years, the decade of the 1980s in China has attracted research interest among researchers old and new. Like all nostalgic views of the past, which often reflect present discontents and apprehensions about existing social conditions, this new interest among some Chinese seems to be based on a comparison of the current decade to the first decade of reform – especially the differences in official discourses, if not ideological tendencies, policy re-alignments and socio-political climates. Several cultural critics have even called for a ‘return to the 80s’ (Hong and Cheng 2009). Although such discussions have mostly taken place within the fields of literary and cultural studies, the notion of returning to the 1980s has various connotations and denotations, making the topic more socio-political than literary.

A number of researchers have explored why the 1980s, in particular, has become the focus of nostalgia. In the words of Zhang and Zhang (2011), in an early analysis of the topic, this nostalgia is a condensed representation of the sentiments of many critics and writers. They argue there are three types of publications that can be regarded as part of the push for a return to the 1980s. Besides the pure academic literature, such as various journal articles and textbooks, there is a sizeable body of memoirs, biographies, autobiographies and other records that are historical or semi-historical rather than purely literary works; and, finally, there are numerous literary depictions of the 1980s, generally portraying it as a decade full of passion, ideals and changes. Reflecting these depictions, the phrase ‘emotional memory’ has been used to explain the attraction to the 1980s.

Under the influence of some earlier publications, as well as the unquantifiable oral histories of 1980s in China, new cohorts of writers produced a large number of inspirational works for China's huge book market. New titles about the 1980s are often associated with optimistic, positive and inspirational narratives or depictions, invoking the era's supposed opportunities for new careers, entrepreneurship, becoming rich, living an exciting life – even becoming a straight-A student, as many are assumed to have been in the 1980s.

The social consequence of the change to the central leadership in certain authoritarian systems is, to a great extent, similar to that of regime change. Both could lead to the abrogation of power and privileges of some people and the creation of new opportunities for others. As pointed out in Chapter four, a number of political obstacles were swiftly removed in response to the demands made by hundreds of thousands of people in the 1976 Tiananmen Incident. Apart from a small group of radical leftists, including the Gang of Four, who were politically dumped or punished, the vast majority of people were happy to see a time for changes both in their personal life and in society more generally. The latter was clearly seen in rural villages, where the rigid rule of organising rural production was relaxed, with the politically incorrect activities of selling and buying surplus agricultural produces. In the cities, as analysed in Chapter four, many people's attention was drawn to the renewed university entrance system, which not only provided young people with a chance to study at university, but also relaxed some related restrictions.

These new social dynamics slowly transformed the rest of the late 1970s and early 1980s into a situation where more people from different backgrounds or political persuasions were allowed to try to position, or reposition, themselves in their anticipated places in society, but also to conduct it in their own ways and capabilities. Such new massive-scale social repositionings, in turn, transformed the conditions of social actions and performances of individuals, and the dynamics of their social positionings as well. The latter was characterised by an increasing number of highly motivated citizens and their attempts for the advantages under the Dengist leadership.

This chapter analyses to these changes and people's new repositioning efforts in the early years of China's post-Mao reform and opening up, which started in 1978. To help readers understand the social conditions of people's repositioning, a few more general changes need to be taken into consideration. Within the first few years, numerous Chinese had opted to throw themselves in the new, open and competitive societal environment generated by many new measures before reforms run into their first momentous trouble in the mid-1980s, which was a small but meaningful turning point in our examination.

The nature and extent of the problems faced by temporary migrant workers in Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, Aotearoa) workplaces were first realised in 2010 by social justice activists – themselves migrants – and the fast-food workers union Unite. This realisation led to the formation of a dedicated organisation, the Indian Workers Association, in October 2012. Within weeks it became obvious that temporary migrants from most countries were victims of exploitation and other workplace issues. Accordingly, the name of the newly formed organisation was changed to Migrant Workers Association.

By 2017, the Migrant Workers Association had successfully resolved many employment disputes. The Association also started to raise awareness about work rights and immigration matters through a weekly radio show, which led a campaign to overturn unfair deportations of several international students. Taking stock of the width, breadth and depth of the issues that migrants faced, and drawing inspiration from the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, the Migrant Lives Matter campaign was launched in October 2017 at the Auckland Unitarian Church. Among other things, the purpose of this campaign was to remind the newly formed Labour Coalition Government to deliver on its promise to bring back the international students recently deported. Following a successful campaign, the students were returned to Aotearoa in 2018 and 2019.

While the world admires Aotearoa for its kindness, inclusiveness and compassion following the Christchurch mosque terror attacks and in handling the Covid-19 pandemic, activists in Aotearoa have made continuous efforts to shine a light on the plight of migrant workers who are holding temporary work visas. Traditionally, trade unions and workers associations have been at the forefront of raising a voice against migrant exploitation and bringing the issue to the political arena as well as societal platforms. More recently, many newly formed migrant groups and employer associations have also joined the struggle.

The exploitation of temporary migrant workers was rife before the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, but the last few months have shown us an endless number of sham redundancies, wage-subsidy thefts and much more dished out by exploiting employers. The Government made some minor provisions, often quite late in the piece, to provide temporary relief; for example, automatic visa extensions for some visa categories and some relaxation of conditions for employer-supported visas. While these changes are welcome, they are only window dressing and do not address the root cause of migrant exploitation.