The Tramp

NO PLACE FOR A WOMAN The Australian author Barbara Baynton had her first short story published under the title â€Å"The Tramp† in 1896 in the Christmas edition of the Bulletin. Founded in Sydney in 1880, the Bulletin was instrumental in developing the idea of Australian nationalism. It was originally a popular commercial weekly rather than a literary magazine but in the 1890s, with the literary critic A. G. Stephens as its editor, it was to become â€Å"something like a national literary club for a new generation of writers† (Carter 263).Stephens published work by many young Australian writers, including the short story writer Henry Lawson and the poet â€Å"Banjo† Paterson and in 1901 he celebrated Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career as the first Australian novel. 2 †¦ Stephens deemed her â€Å"too outspoken for an Australian audience† (Schaffer 154). She was unable to find a publisher in Sydney willing to print her stories as a collection a nd it was not until 1902 that six of her stories were published in London by Duckworth’s Greenback Library under the title Bush Studies. It was, on the whole, reviewed favorably.She subsequently published a novel, Human Toll, in 1907 and an expanded collection of stories in 1917. Yet, although individual stories were regularly included in anthologies of Australian literature, by the time of her death in 1929 she was better known as an antique collector and her collected stories were not reprinted until 1980. 3 Until the advent of feminist criticism in the 1980s, Baynton remained a largely forgotten figure, dismissed as a typical female writer who did not know how to control her emotions and who was unable to put her â€Å"natural talent† to good use.As late as 1983 Lucy Frost could talk of â€Å"her unusually low level of critical awareness† (65) and claim that she â€Å"relies †¦ on instinct †¦ In order to write well she needs to write honestly out o f intuitive understanding. †¦ As art it makes for failure† (65). For a long time reading the implicit in Baynton’s stories consisted in identifying the autobiographical elements and attempting to piece together her true life. She notoriously claimed, even to her own children, to be the daughter not of an Irish carpenter but of a Bengal Lancer and in later life tried to conceal he hardship of her childhood and early married life. The stories were read as â€Å"true† accounts of what it was like for a poor woman to live in the bush at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper argues that far from being a natural writer whose â€Å"talent does not extend to symbolism† (Frost 64), Baynton is a sophisticated writer who uses obliqueness simply because this was the only form of criticism open to a woman writer in Australia at this time. The apparent inability of readers to engage with the implicit in her stories stems from an unwillingness to accept her vision of life in the bush. In order to understand Baynton's technique and why earlier readers consistently failed to interpret it correctly, it is important to replace her stories in the context of the literary world in which she was working for, as Brown and Yule state, when it comes to reading the implicit: â€Å"Discourse is interpreted in the light of past experience of similar discourse by analogy with previous similar texts† (65). In 1901, the year of federation and the height of Australian nationalistic fervor, A. G.Stephens wrote: What country can offer to writers better material than Australia? We are not yet snug in cities and hamlets, molded by routine, regimented to a pattern. Every man who roams the Australian wilderness is a potential knight of Romance; every man who grapples with the Australian desert for a livelihood might sing a Homeric chant of history, or listen, baffled and beaten, to an Aeschylean dirge of defeat. The marvels of the adventurous are our d aily common-places.The drama of the conflict between Man and Destiny is played here in a scenic setting whose novelty is full of vital suggestion for the literary artist. (Ackland, 77) 5 Women are conspicuously absent in this description of Australian life as they are in the work of Henry Lawson whose stories have come to be seen as the ‘perfect’ example of nationalistic writing. In the titles of his stories women, if they exist at all, are seen as appendages of men: â€Å"The Drover’s Wife,† â€Å"The Selector’s Daughter. They are defined at best by their physical characteristics: â€Å"That Pretty Girl in the Army,† but more often than not are specifically excluded: â€Å"No Place for a Woman† or reduced to silence: â€Å"She Wouldn’t Speak. † In the texts themselves the narrators are either anonymous or male and male mate-ship is valued above marriage. In Lawson's most well-known stories the bush is a destructive forc e against which man must wage a constant battle. The landscape, perhaps predictably, is depicted in feminine terms either as a cruel mother who threatens to destroy her son or as a dangerous virgin who leads man into deadly temptation.Men survive by rallying together and are always ready to help a â€Å"mate† in distress. Women are left at home and are shown to be contented with their role as homemaker: â€Å"All days are much the same to her †¦ But this bush-woman is used to the loneliness of it †¦ She is glad when her husband returns, but she does not gush or make a fuss about it. She gets him something good to eat, and tidies up the children† (Lawson 6). Baynton's stories challenge this vision of life in the bush in a number of ways: the majority of her protagonists are female; the real danger comes not from the bush but from the men who inhabit it. From the very beginning, Baynton’s stories were subject to a form of male censorship since Stephens h eavily edited them in an attempt to render the implicit conventional and thereby make the stories conform to his vision of Australian life. Few manuscripts have survived but the changes made to two stories have been well documented. In 1984 Elizabeth Webby published an article comparing the published version of â€Å"Squeaker’s Mate† with a typescript/manuscript held in the Mitchell Library.She noted that in the published version the structure has been tightened and some ambiguity removed by replacing many of the pronouns by nouns. More importantly, the ending has been changed and, since endings play such a crucial role in the understanding of a short story, this has important repercussions on the whole text: The new, more conventionally moralistic ending demanded a more actively brutal Squeaker and a more passive, suffering Mary. So traditional male/female characteristics were superimposed on Baynton’s original characters, characters designed to question such s exual stereotypes.As well, the main emphasis was shifted from its ostensible object Squeaker’s mate, to her attacker and defender; instead of a study of a reversal of sex, we have a tale of true or false mateship. (459) 7 Despite these changes the text's conformity to the traditional Australian story of mate-ship which the Bulletin readers had come to expect remains superficial. The title itself is an ironic parody of Lawson's story titles. The woman is defined by her relationship to the man but the roles are reversed. The man has become the effeminate â€Å"Squeaker,† the woman the masculine â€Å"mate. As in Lawson's stories the male character's words are reported in passages of direct speech and the reader has access to his thoughts while the woman's words are reported only indirectly: â€Å"†¦ waiting for her to be up and about again. That would be soon, she told her complaining mate† (16). However, and this is an important difference with Lawson's sto ries, in Baynton's work the text deliberately draws attention to what is not said. For example when Squeaker leaves her without food and drink for two days: â€Å"Of them [the sheep] and the dog only she spoke when he returned† (16), or again: â€Å"No word of complaint passed her lips† (18).By the end of the story the woman has stopped speaking altogether and the reader is deliberately denied all access to her thoughts and feelings: â€Å"What the sick woman thought was not definite for she kept silent always† (20). The main character is thus marginalised both in the title and in the story itself. The story is constructed around her absence and it is precisely what is not said which draws attention to the hardships of the woman's life. 8 A similar technique is used in â€Å"Billy Skywonkie. The protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout the story, is not even mentioned until the fourth paragraph where she is described as â€Å"the listening woman passengerâ €  (46). She is thus from the start designated as external to the action. Although there is a lot of dialogue in direct speech in the story, the protagonist’s own words are always reported indirectly. The reader is never allowed direct access to her thoughts but must infer what is going on in her mind from expressions like â€Å"in nervous fear† (47) or â€Å"with the fascination of horror† (53).Despite the awfulness of the male characters, the decentering of the protagonist makes it possible for readers unwilling to accept Baynton’s views on life in the bush to accept the explicitly stated opinions of the male characters and to dismiss the woman as an unwelcome outsider. 9 The most significant changes to the original stories, and those about which Baynton apparently felt most strongly since she removed them from the text of Bush Studies, concern the story now known as â€Å"The Chosen Vessel. † This story, as many critics have remarked, is a ve rsion of â€Å"The Drover's Wife† in which the â€Å"gallows-faced swagman† (Lawson 6) does not leave.Lawson's text states repeatedly that the wife is â€Å"used to† the loneliness of her life, suggesting even that it is easier for her than for him: â€Å"They are used to being apart, or at least she is† (4). Baynton's character, on the other hand, dislikes being alone and the story shows the extreme vulnerability of women, not at the hands of Nature, but at the hands of men. 10 Baynton originally submitted the story under the title â€Å"When the Curlew Cried† but Stephens changed this to â€Å"The Tramp. † Once again his editorial changes deflect the reader’s attention away from the female character.By implicitly making the man rather than the woman the central figure, the rape and murder are reduced to one ‘episode’ in the tramp’s life. Kay Schaffer underlines (156) that this attempt to remove the woman from the story is also to be found in the work of the critic A. A. Phillips. For many years he was the only person to have written on Baynton and his article contains the preposterous sentence that her major theme is â€Å"the image of a lonely bush hut besieged by a terrifying figure who is also a terrified figure† (150).As Schaffer rightly points out, it is difficult to understand how any reader can possibly consider that the man who is contemplating rape and murder is a â€Å"terrified figure. † 11 As was then the convention, both the rape and murder are implicit: She knew that he was offering terms if she ceased to struggle and cry for help, though louder and louder did she cry for it, but it was only when the man’s hand gripped her throat that the cry of â€Å"Murder† came from her lips. And when she ceased, the startled curlews took up the awful sound, and flew wailing â€Å"Murder! Murder! over the horseman’s head (85). 12 Stephen’s delibera te suppression of two passages, however, means the reader can infer a very different meaning to events than that intended by Baynton. The Bulletin version omits the scene in which Peter Henessey explains how he mistakenly thought the figure of the woman shouting for help was a vision of the Virgin Mary. The only possible reading in this version is that the horseman was riding too fast and simply did not hear her calls: â€Å"She called to him in Christ’s Name, in her babe’s name †¦ But the distance grew greater and greater between them† (85).Baynton’s original version leads to a very different interpretation: ‘Mary! Mother of Christ! ’ He repeated the invocation half unconsciously, when suddenly to him, out of the stillness, came Christ’s Name – called loudly in despairing accents †¦ Gliding across a ghostly patch of pipe-clay, he saw a white-robed figure with a babe clasped to her bosom. †¦ The moonlight on the g leaming clay was a ‘heavenly light’ to him, and he knew the white figure not for flesh and blood, but for the Virgin and Child of his mother’s prayers.Then, good Catholic that once more he was, he put spurs to his horse’s sides and galloped madly away (86-7). 13 By clarifying what is going on in the horseman’s mind, Baynton is implying that patriarchal society as a whole is guilty. This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the woman does not exist as a person in her own right in the eyes of any of the male characters. Her husband denies her sexual identity: â€Å"Needn’t flatter yerself †¦ nobody ‘ud want ter run away with yew† (82); the swagman sees her as a sexual object, Peter Henessey as a religious one.Taken individually there is nothing original in these visions of woman but their accumulation is surprising and ought to lead the reader to consider what place is left for a woman as a person. 14 Stephen's second omission is a paragraph near the beginning of the story where the reader is told: â€Å"She was not afraid of horsemen, but swagmen† (81). This sentence is perhaps one of the best examples of the way the implicit works in Baynton's stories. The presupposition, at the time widely accepted, is that horsemen and swagmen are different.Explicitly asserting the contrary would have been immediately challenged and Baynton never takes this risk. Only with the story's denouement does the reader become aware that the presupposition is false, that both horsemen and swagmen are to be feared. 15 The other technique frequently used by Baynton is that of metaphor and metonymy. According to Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni: â€Å"le trope n'est qu'un cas particulier du fonctionnement de l'implicite. †¦ Tout trope est une deviance et se caracterise par un mecanisme de substitution – mais substitution de quoi a quoi, et deviance de quoi par rapport a quoi† (94;109).Readers of Bus h Studies have all too often identified only the substitution, not the deviance. 16 In her detailed analysis of â€Å"The Chosen Vessel† Kay Schaffer examines the significance of the last paragraph of the story in which the swagman tries to wash the sheep’s blood from his dog’s mouth and throat. She is particularly interested in the last sentence â€Å"But the dog also was guilty† (88). Most readers have seen this as a simple, almost superfluous statement, whose only aim is to underline the parallel between man and dog: the man killed a woman, the dog a sheep.Schaffer on the other hand sees here a reference to the first paragraph: â€Å"but the woman’s husband was angry and called her – the noun was cur† (Baynton 81). She analyses the metonymic association of woman and dog and argues that the woman’s dog-like loyalty to a husband who abuses her is open to criticism since as a human being she is capable of making decisions for h erself. According to Schaffer's reading: â€Å"Her massive acceptance of the situation makes her an accomplice in her fate† (165). 17Most readers do identify the woman’s metaphoric association with the cow as a symbol of the maternal instinct but Schaffer again goes one step further and argues that since the woman is afraid of the cow she is consequently afraid of the maternal in herself but in participating, albeit reluctantly, in control of the cow, her husband’s property, she also participates in maintaining patriarchal society and therefore: â€Å"Although never made explicit in the text, by metonymic links and metaphoric referents, the woman paradoxically is what she fears.She embodies ‘the maternal’ in the symbolic order. She belongs to the same economy which brings about her murder† (165). 18 The baby is rescued by a boundary rider, but this does not mean that motherhood emerges as a positive force in the story. Baynton’s title â€Å"The Chosen Vessel† implies that the abstract concept of the maternal can exist only at the cost of the woman by denying the mother the right to exist as a person: The Virgin Mary exists only to provide God with his Son, a wife is there to ensure the transmission of power and property from father to son.At the end of Baynton’s story even this reverenced position is denied women: â€Å"Once more the face of the Madonna and Child looked down on [Peter] †¦ ‘My Lord and my God! ’ was the exaltation ‘And hast Thou chosen me? ’ Ultimately Schaffer argues: If one reads through the contradictions, woman is not guilty at all – she is wholly absent. She takes no part in the actions of the story except to represent male desire as either Virgin or whore †¦ She has been named, captured, controlled, appropriated, violated, raped and murdered, and then reverenced through the signifying practices of the text.And these contradictory prac tices through which the ‘woman' is dispersed in the text are possible by her very absence from the symbolic order except by reference to her phallic repossession by Man. (168) 19 In a similar way Baynton's use of sheep as a metonym for women and passive suffering is often remarked upon but is seen as little more than a cliche.This view is justified by referring to â€Å"Squeaker’s Mate† where the woman is powerless to stop Squeaker selling her sheep, many of which she considers as pets, to the butcher and to â€Å"Billy Skywonkie† which ends with an apparently stereotypical image prefiguring the â€Å"meaningless sacrifice† (Krimmer and Lawson xxii) of the woman in â€Å"The Chosen Vessel†: â€Å"She noticed that the sheep lay passive, with its head back till its neck curved in a bow, and that the glitter of the knife was reflected in its eye† (Baynton 60).Hergenhan does go slightly further by arguing that this is also an example of Ba ynton’s denial of the redemptive power of the sacrificial animal (216) but when the collection as a whole is considered, and the different references are read in parallel, the metonym turns out to be far more ambiguous. 20 In â€Å"Scrammy ‘And† the knife is clearly not a dangerous instrument: â€Å"The only weapon that the old fellow had was the useless butcher’s knife† (41, my italics). Even more significantly in this story the reflection of the moonlight in the sheep’s eyes is sufficient to temporarily discourageScrammy: â€Å"The way those thousand eyes reflected the rising moon was disconcerting. The whole of the night seemed pregnant with eyes† (38). Far from being â€Å"innocent† creatures the sheep are associated with convicts: â€Å"The moonlight’s undulating white scales across their shorn backs brought out the fresh tar brand 8, setting him thinking of the links of that convict gang chain long ago† (42). Nor are sheep seen to be entirely passive: â€Å"She was wiser now, though sheep are slow to learn† (44). 21 In this respect the symbolism of the ewe and the poddy lamb is particularly interesting.The old man claims that this is the third lamb that he has had to poddy. He accuses the ewe of not being â€Å"nat’ral† (34), and having a â€Å"blarsted imperdence† (30). The narrator, on the other hand, describes her as â€Å"the unashamed silent mother† (30). What is being challenged is not her motherhood but her apparent lack of maternal instinct. Once the shepherd is dead, the ewe is capable of teaching her lamb to drink suggesting that it is in fact the man who prevents the maternal from developing. This would seem to be confirmed by the repeated remark that men insist on cows and calves being penned separately.Thus apparently hackneyed images are in fact used in a deviant way so as to undermine traditional bush values. 22 In much the same way, Bay nton’s cliches also deviate from expected usage. For example in â€Å"Scrammy ‘And† the old shepherd sums up his view of women as: â€Å"They can’t never do anythin’ right, an’ orlways, continerally they gets a man inter trouble (30). † By inverting the roles of men and women in the expression â€Å"getting into trouble† the text suggests that values in the Bush are radically different to elsewhere. Something which is confirmed in â€Å"Billy Skywonkie† where the narrator reflects: â€Å"She felt she had lost her mental balance.Little matters became distorted and the greater shrivelled† (55). 23 Similarly the apparently stereotypical descriptions of the landscape in fact undermine the Bulletin vision of Australia. In â€Å"Billy Skywonkie† the countryside is described as â€Å"barren shelterless plains† (47). Were the description to stop here it could be interpreted as a typical male image of the land as dangerous female but the text continues; the land is barren because of â€Å"the tireless greedy sun† (47). In the traditional dichotomy man/woman; active/passive the sun is always masculine and like the sun the men in Bush Studies are shown to be greedy.Although never explicitly stated, this seems to suggest that it is not the land itself which is hostile but the activities of men which make it so. Schaffer sees a confirmation of this (152) in the fact that it is the Konk’s nose which for the protagonist â€Å"blotted the landscape and dwarfed all perspective† (Baynton 50). In Baynton’s work women are associated with the land because both are victims of men. 24 The least understood story in the collection is undoubtedly â€Å"Bush Church†: Krimmer and Lawson talk of its â€Å"grim meaninglessness† (xxii) and Phillips complains that it is â€Å"almost without plot† (155).It is perhaps not surprising that this story should be the m ost complex in its use of language. Of all the stories in the collection â€Å"Bush Church† is the one which contains the most direct speech, written in an unfamiliar colloquial Australian English. These passages deliberately flout what Grice describes as the maxims of relevance and manner – they seem neither to advance the plot nor to add to the reader's understanding of the characters. 25 Most readers are thrown by this failure to respect conversational maxims and the co-operative principal. Consequently they pay insufficient attention to individual sentences.Moreover, the sentences are structured in such a way as to make it difficult for the reader to question their ‘truth’ or even to locate their subversive nature. As Jean Jacques Weber points out, the natural tendency is to challenge what the sentence asserts rather than what it presupposes (164). This is clearly illustrated by the opening sentence: â€Å"The hospitality of the bush never extends to the loan of a good horse to an inexperienced rider† (61). Readers may object that they know of occasions when a good horse was loaned to an inexperienced rider but few realise that the assertion in fact negates the presupposition.Baynton is not talking here about the loan of a horse but is challenging one of the fundamental myths of life in the bush – that there is such a thing as bush hospitality. 26 Once again a comparison with Lawson is illuminating. Lawson's anonymous narrator says of the Drover's wife: â€Å"She seems contented with her lot† (6). In â€Å"Bush Church† this becomes: â€Å"But for all this Liz thought she was fairly happy† (70). Although semantically their meaning is similar, pragmatically they could not be more different.It is not the anonymous narrator but Liz who is uncertain of her feelings and feels it necessary to qualify â€Å"happy† by â€Å"fairly. † More importantly the presupposition, â€Å"but for all t his,† deliberately leaves unsaid the extreme poverty and the beatings to which Liz is subject. 27 Susan Sheridan, talking of Baynton’s novel Human Toll, says: â€Å"the assumption that it is autobiographical deflects attention from the novel’s textuality as if the assertion that it was all ‘true’ and that writing was a necessary catharsis could account for its strangely wrought prose and obscure dynamics of desire† (67).The same is true of her short stories. By persisting in reading her as a â€Å"realist† writer many readers fail to notice her sophisticated use of language. Perhaps because none of the stories has a narrator to guide the reader in their interpretation or because the reader has little or no direct access to the protagonist’s thoughts, or because of the flouting of conversational maxims and the co-operative principal, sentences are taken at face value and all too often little attempt is made to decode the irony or to question what on the surface appears to be statements of fact.Hergenhan queries the success of a strategy of such extreme obliqueness: â€Å"It is difficult to understand why Baynton did not make it clearer as the ellipsis is carried so far that the clues have eluded most readers† (217), but it should be remembered that, given the circumstances in which she was trying to publish, direct criticism was never an option for Baynton. What is essential in decoding Baynton’s work is to accept that it is not about women but about the absence of women who are shown to be victims both of men in the bush and of language. The Tramp NO PLACE FOR A WOMAN The Australian author Barbara Baynton had her first short story published under the title â€Å"The Tramp† in 1896 in the Christmas edition of the Bulletin. Founded in Sydney in 1880, the Bulletin was instrumental in developing the idea of Australian nationalism. It was originally a popular commercial weekly rather than a literary magazine but in the 1890s, with the literary critic A. G. Stephens as its editor, it was to become â€Å"something like a national literary club for a new generation of writers† (Carter 263).Stephens published work by many young Australian writers, including the short story writer Henry Lawson and the poet â€Å"Banjo† Paterson and in 1901 he celebrated Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career as the first Australian novel. 2 †¦ Stephens deemed her â€Å"too outspoken for an Australian audience† (Schaffer 154). She was unable to find a publisher in Sydney willing to print her stories as a collection a nd it was not until 1902 that six of her stories were published in London by Duckworth’s Greenback Library under the title Bush Studies. It was, on the whole, reviewed favorably.She subsequently published a novel, Human Toll, in 1907 and an expanded collection of stories in 1917. Yet, although individual stories were regularly included in anthologies of Australian literature, by the time of her death in 1929 she was better known as an antique collector and her collected stories were not reprinted until 1980. 3 Until the advent of feminist criticism in the 1980s, Baynton remained a largely forgotten figure, dismissed as a typical female writer who did not know how to control her emotions and who was unable to put her â€Å"natural talent† to good use.As late as 1983 Lucy Frost could talk of â€Å"her unusually low level of critical awareness† (65) and claim that she â€Å"relies †¦ on instinct †¦ In order to write well she needs to write honestly out o f intuitive understanding. †¦ As art it makes for failure† (65). For a long time reading the implicit in Baynton’s stories consisted in identifying the autobiographical elements and attempting to piece together her true life. She notoriously claimed, even to her own children, to be the daughter not of an Irish carpenter but of a Bengal Lancer and in later life tried to conceal he hardship of her childhood and early married life. The stories were read as â€Å"true† accounts of what it was like for a poor woman to live in the bush at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper argues that far from being a natural writer whose â€Å"talent does not extend to symbolism† (Frost 64), Baynton is a sophisticated writer who uses obliqueness simply because this was the only form of criticism open to a woman writer in Australia at this time. The apparent inability of readers to engage with the implicit in her stories stems from an unwillingness to accept her vision of life in the bush. In order to understand Baynton's technique and why earlier readers consistently failed to interpret it correctly, it is important to replace her stories in the context of the literary world in which she was working for, as Brown and Yule state, when it comes to reading the implicit: â€Å"Discourse is interpreted in the light of past experience of similar discourse by analogy with previous similar texts† (65). In 1901, the year of federation and the height of Australian nationalistic fervor, A. G.Stephens wrote: What country can offer to writers better material than Australia? We are not yet snug in cities and hamlets, molded by routine, regimented to a pattern. Every man who roams the Australian wilderness is a potential knight of Romance; every man who grapples with the Australian desert for a livelihood might sing a Homeric chant of history, or listen, baffled and beaten, to an Aeschylean dirge of defeat. The marvels of the adventurous are our d aily common-places.The drama of the conflict between Man and Destiny is played here in a scenic setting whose novelty is full of vital suggestion for the literary artist. (Ackland, 77) 5 Women are conspicuously absent in this description of Australian life as they are in the work of Henry Lawson whose stories have come to be seen as the ‘perfect’ example of nationalistic writing. In the titles of his stories women, if they exist at all, are seen as appendages of men: â€Å"The Drover’s Wife,† â€Å"The Selector’s Daughter. They are defined at best by their physical characteristics: â€Å"That Pretty Girl in the Army,† but more often than not are specifically excluded: â€Å"No Place for a Woman† or reduced to silence: â€Å"She Wouldn’t Speak. † In the texts themselves the narrators are either anonymous or male and male mate-ship is valued above marriage. In Lawson's most well-known stories the bush is a destructive forc e against which man must wage a constant battle. The landscape, perhaps predictably, is depicted in feminine terms either as a cruel mother who threatens to destroy her son or as a dangerous virgin who leads man into deadly temptation.Men survive by rallying together and are always ready to help a â€Å"mate† in distress. Women are left at home and are shown to be contented with their role as homemaker: â€Å"All days are much the same to her †¦ But this bush-woman is used to the loneliness of it †¦ She is glad when her husband returns, but she does not gush or make a fuss about it. She gets him something good to eat, and tidies up the children† (Lawson 6). Baynton's stories challenge this vision of life in the bush in a number of ways: the majority of her protagonists are female; the real danger comes not from the bush but from the men who inhabit it. From the very beginning, Baynton’s stories were subject to a form of male censorship since Stephens h eavily edited them in an attempt to render the implicit conventional and thereby make the stories conform to his vision of Australian life. Few manuscripts have survived but the changes made to two stories have been well documented. In 1984 Elizabeth Webby published an article comparing the published version of â€Å"Squeaker’s Mate† with a typescript/manuscript held in the Mitchell Library.She noted that in the published version the structure has been tightened and some ambiguity removed by replacing many of the pronouns by nouns. More importantly, the ending has been changed and, since endings play such a crucial role in the understanding of a short story, this has important repercussions on the whole text: The new, more conventionally moralistic ending demanded a more actively brutal Squeaker and a more passive, suffering Mary. So traditional male/female characteristics were superimposed on Baynton’s original characters, characters designed to question such s exual stereotypes.As well, the main emphasis was shifted from its ostensible object Squeaker’s mate, to her attacker and defender; instead of a study of a reversal of sex, we have a tale of true or false mateship. (459) 7 Despite these changes the text's conformity to the traditional Australian story of mate-ship which the Bulletin readers had come to expect remains superficial. The title itself is an ironic parody of Lawson's story titles. The woman is defined by her relationship to the man but the roles are reversed. The man has become the effeminate â€Å"Squeaker,† the woman the masculine â€Å"mate. As in Lawson's stories the male character's words are reported in passages of direct speech and the reader has access to his thoughts while the woman's words are reported only indirectly: â€Å"†¦ waiting for her to be up and about again. That would be soon, she told her complaining mate† (16). However, and this is an important difference with Lawson's sto ries, in Baynton's work the text deliberately draws attention to what is not said. For example when Squeaker leaves her without food and drink for two days: â€Å"Of them [the sheep] and the dog only she spoke when he returned† (16), or again: â€Å"No word of complaint passed her lips† (18).By the end of the story the woman has stopped speaking altogether and the reader is deliberately denied all access to her thoughts and feelings: â€Å"What the sick woman thought was not definite for she kept silent always† (20). The main character is thus marginalised both in the title and in the story itself. The story is constructed around her absence and it is precisely what is not said which draws attention to the hardships of the woman's life. 8 A similar technique is used in â€Å"Billy Skywonkie. The protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout the story, is not even mentioned until the fourth paragraph where she is described as â€Å"the listening woman passengerâ €  (46). She is thus from the start designated as external to the action. Although there is a lot of dialogue in direct speech in the story, the protagonist’s own words are always reported indirectly. The reader is never allowed direct access to her thoughts but must infer what is going on in her mind from expressions like â€Å"in nervous fear† (47) or â€Å"with the fascination of horror† (53).Despite the awfulness of the male characters, the decentering of the protagonist makes it possible for readers unwilling to accept Baynton’s views on life in the bush to accept the explicitly stated opinions of the male characters and to dismiss the woman as an unwelcome outsider. 9 The most significant changes to the original stories, and those about which Baynton apparently felt most strongly since she removed them from the text of Bush Studies, concern the story now known as â€Å"The Chosen Vessel. † This story, as many critics have remarked, is a ve rsion of â€Å"The Drover's Wife† in which the â€Å"gallows-faced swagman† (Lawson 6) does not leave.Lawson's text states repeatedly that the wife is â€Å"used to† the loneliness of her life, suggesting even that it is easier for her than for him: â€Å"They are used to being apart, or at least she is† (4). Baynton's character, on the other hand, dislikes being alone and the story shows the extreme vulnerability of women, not at the hands of Nature, but at the hands of men. 10 Baynton originally submitted the story under the title â€Å"When the Curlew Cried† but Stephens changed this to â€Å"The Tramp. † Once again his editorial changes deflect the reader’s attention away from the female character.By implicitly making the man rather than the woman the central figure, the rape and murder are reduced to one ‘episode’ in the tramp’s life. Kay Schaffer underlines (156) that this attempt to remove the woman from the story is also to be found in the work of the critic A. A. Phillips. For many years he was the only person to have written on Baynton and his article contains the preposterous sentence that her major theme is â€Å"the image of a lonely bush hut besieged by a terrifying figure who is also a terrified figure† (150).As Schaffer rightly points out, it is difficult to understand how any reader can possibly consider that the man who is contemplating rape and murder is a â€Å"terrified figure. † 11 As was then the convention, both the rape and murder are implicit: She knew that he was offering terms if she ceased to struggle and cry for help, though louder and louder did she cry for it, but it was only when the man’s hand gripped her throat that the cry of â€Å"Murder† came from her lips. And when she ceased, the startled curlews took up the awful sound, and flew wailing â€Å"Murder! Murder! over the horseman’s head (85). 12 Stephen’s delibera te suppression of two passages, however, means the reader can infer a very different meaning to events than that intended by Baynton. The Bulletin version omits the scene in which Peter Henessey explains how he mistakenly thought the figure of the woman shouting for help was a vision of the Virgin Mary. The only possible reading in this version is that the horseman was riding too fast and simply did not hear her calls: â€Å"She called to him in Christ’s Name, in her babe’s name †¦ But the distance grew greater and greater between them† (85).Baynton’s original version leads to a very different interpretation: ‘Mary! Mother of Christ! ’ He repeated the invocation half unconsciously, when suddenly to him, out of the stillness, came Christ’s Name – called loudly in despairing accents †¦ Gliding across a ghostly patch of pipe-clay, he saw a white-robed figure with a babe clasped to her bosom. †¦ The moonlight on the g leaming clay was a ‘heavenly light’ to him, and he knew the white figure not for flesh and blood, but for the Virgin and Child of his mother’s prayers.Then, good Catholic that once more he was, he put spurs to his horse’s sides and galloped madly away (86-7). 13 By clarifying what is going on in the horseman’s mind, Baynton is implying that patriarchal society as a whole is guilty. This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the woman does not exist as a person in her own right in the eyes of any of the male characters. Her husband denies her sexual identity: â€Å"Needn’t flatter yerself †¦ nobody ‘ud want ter run away with yew† (82); the swagman sees her as a sexual object, Peter Henessey as a religious one.Taken individually there is nothing original in these visions of woman but their accumulation is surprising and ought to lead the reader to consider what place is left for a woman as a person. 14 Stephen's second omission is a paragraph near the beginning of the story where the reader is told: â€Å"She was not afraid of horsemen, but swagmen† (81). This sentence is perhaps one of the best examples of the way the implicit works in Baynton's stories. The presupposition, at the time widely accepted, is that horsemen and swagmen are different.Explicitly asserting the contrary would have been immediately challenged and Baynton never takes this risk. Only with the story's denouement does the reader become aware that the presupposition is false, that both horsemen and swagmen are to be feared. 15 The other technique frequently used by Baynton is that of metaphor and metonymy. According to Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni: â€Å"le trope n'est qu'un cas particulier du fonctionnement de l'implicite. †¦ Tout trope est une deviance et se caracterise par un mecanisme de substitution – mais substitution de quoi a quoi, et deviance de quoi par rapport a quoi† (94;109).Readers of Bus h Studies have all too often identified only the substitution, not the deviance. 16 In her detailed analysis of â€Å"The Chosen Vessel† Kay Schaffer examines the significance of the last paragraph of the story in which the swagman tries to wash the sheep’s blood from his dog’s mouth and throat. She is particularly interested in the last sentence â€Å"But the dog also was guilty† (88). Most readers have seen this as a simple, almost superfluous statement, whose only aim is to underline the parallel between man and dog: the man killed a woman, the dog a sheep.Schaffer on the other hand sees here a reference to the first paragraph: â€Å"but the woman’s husband was angry and called her – the noun was cur† (Baynton 81). She analyses the metonymic association of woman and dog and argues that the woman’s dog-like loyalty to a husband who abuses her is open to criticism since as a human being she is capable of making decisions for h erself. According to Schaffer's reading: â€Å"Her massive acceptance of the situation makes her an accomplice in her fate† (165). 17Most readers do identify the woman’s metaphoric association with the cow as a symbol of the maternal instinct but Schaffer again goes one step further and argues that since the woman is afraid of the cow she is consequently afraid of the maternal in herself but in participating, albeit reluctantly, in control of the cow, her husband’s property, she also participates in maintaining patriarchal society and therefore: â€Å"Although never made explicit in the text, by metonymic links and metaphoric referents, the woman paradoxically is what she fears.She embodies ‘the maternal’ in the symbolic order. She belongs to the same economy which brings about her murder† (165). 18 The baby is rescued by a boundary rider, but this does not mean that motherhood emerges as a positive force in the story. Baynton’s title â€Å"The Chosen Vessel† implies that the abstract concept of the maternal can exist only at the cost of the woman by denying the mother the right to exist as a person: The Virgin Mary exists only to provide God with his Son, a wife is there to ensure the transmission of power and property from father to son.At the end of Baynton’s story even this reverenced position is denied women: â€Å"Once more the face of the Madonna and Child looked down on [Peter] †¦ ‘My Lord and my God! ’ was the exaltation ‘And hast Thou chosen me? ’ Ultimately Schaffer argues: If one reads through the contradictions, woman is not guilty at all – she is wholly absent. She takes no part in the actions of the story except to represent male desire as either Virgin or whore †¦ She has been named, captured, controlled, appropriated, violated, raped and murdered, and then reverenced through the signifying practices of the text.And these contradictory prac tices through which the ‘woman' is dispersed in the text are possible by her very absence from the symbolic order except by reference to her phallic repossession by Man. (168) 19 In a similar way Baynton's use of sheep as a metonym for women and passive suffering is often remarked upon but is seen as little more than a cliche.This view is justified by referring to â€Å"Squeaker’s Mate† where the woman is powerless to stop Squeaker selling her sheep, many of which she considers as pets, to the butcher and to â€Å"Billy Skywonkie† which ends with an apparently stereotypical image prefiguring the â€Å"meaningless sacrifice† (Krimmer and Lawson xxii) of the woman in â€Å"The Chosen Vessel†: â€Å"She noticed that the sheep lay passive, with its head back till its neck curved in a bow, and that the glitter of the knife was reflected in its eye† (Baynton 60).Hergenhan does go slightly further by arguing that this is also an example of Ba ynton’s denial of the redemptive power of the sacrificial animal (216) but when the collection as a whole is considered, and the different references are read in parallel, the metonym turns out to be far more ambiguous. 20 In â€Å"Scrammy ‘And† the knife is clearly not a dangerous instrument: â€Å"The only weapon that the old fellow had was the useless butcher’s knife† (41, my italics). Even more significantly in this story the reflection of the moonlight in the sheep’s eyes is sufficient to temporarily discourageScrammy: â€Å"The way those thousand eyes reflected the rising moon was disconcerting. The whole of the night seemed pregnant with eyes† (38). Far from being â€Å"innocent† creatures the sheep are associated with convicts: â€Å"The moonlight’s undulating white scales across their shorn backs brought out the fresh tar brand 8, setting him thinking of the links of that convict gang chain long ago† (42). Nor are sheep seen to be entirely passive: â€Å"She was wiser now, though sheep are slow to learn† (44). 21 In this respect the symbolism of the ewe and the poddy lamb is particularly interesting.The old man claims that this is the third lamb that he has had to poddy. He accuses the ewe of not being â€Å"nat’ral† (34), and having a â€Å"blarsted imperdence† (30). The narrator, on the other hand, describes her as â€Å"the unashamed silent mother† (30). What is being challenged is not her motherhood but her apparent lack of maternal instinct. Once the shepherd is dead, the ewe is capable of teaching her lamb to drink suggesting that it is in fact the man who prevents the maternal from developing. This would seem to be confirmed by the repeated remark that men insist on cows and calves being penned separately.Thus apparently hackneyed images are in fact used in a deviant way so as to undermine traditional bush values. 22 In much the same way, Bay nton’s cliches also deviate from expected usage. For example in â€Å"Scrammy ‘And† the old shepherd sums up his view of women as: â€Å"They can’t never do anythin’ right, an’ orlways, continerally they gets a man inter trouble (30). † By inverting the roles of men and women in the expression â€Å"getting into trouble† the text suggests that values in the Bush are radically different to elsewhere. Something which is confirmed in â€Å"Billy Skywonkie† where the narrator reflects: â€Å"She felt she had lost her mental balance.Little matters became distorted and the greater shrivelled† (55). 23 Similarly the apparently stereotypical descriptions of the landscape in fact undermine the Bulletin vision of Australia. In â€Å"Billy Skywonkie† the countryside is described as â€Å"barren shelterless plains† (47). Were the description to stop here it could be interpreted as a typical male image of the land as dangerous female but the text continues; the land is barren because of â€Å"the tireless greedy sun† (47). In the traditional dichotomy man/woman; active/passive the sun is always masculine and like the sun the men in Bush Studies are shown to be greedy.Although never explicitly stated, this seems to suggest that it is not the land itself which is hostile but the activities of men which make it so. Schaffer sees a confirmation of this (152) in the fact that it is the Konk’s nose which for the protagonist â€Å"blotted the landscape and dwarfed all perspective† (Baynton 50). In Baynton’s work women are associated with the land because both are victims of men. 24 The least understood story in the collection is undoubtedly â€Å"Bush Church†: Krimmer and Lawson talk of its â€Å"grim meaninglessness† (xxii) and Phillips complains that it is â€Å"almost without plot† (155).It is perhaps not surprising that this story should be the m ost complex in its use of language. Of all the stories in the collection â€Å"Bush Church† is the one which contains the most direct speech, written in an unfamiliar colloquial Australian English. These passages deliberately flout what Grice describes as the maxims of relevance and manner – they seem neither to advance the plot nor to add to the reader's understanding of the characters. 25 Most readers are thrown by this failure to respect conversational maxims and the co-operative principal. Consequently they pay insufficient attention to individual sentences.Moreover, the sentences are structured in such a way as to make it difficult for the reader to question their ‘truth’ or even to locate their subversive nature. As Jean Jacques Weber points out, the natural tendency is to challenge what the sentence asserts rather than what it presupposes (164). This is clearly illustrated by the opening sentence: â€Å"The hospitality of the bush never extends to the loan of a good horse to an inexperienced rider† (61). Readers may object that they know of occasions when a good horse was loaned to an inexperienced rider but few realise that the assertion in fact negates the presupposition.Baynton is not talking here about the loan of a horse but is challenging one of the fundamental myths of life in the bush – that there is such a thing as bush hospitality. 26 Once again a comparison with Lawson is illuminating. Lawson's anonymous narrator says of the Drover's wife: â€Å"She seems contented with her lot† (6). In â€Å"Bush Church† this becomes: â€Å"But for all this Liz thought she was fairly happy† (70). Although semantically their meaning is similar, pragmatically they could not be more different.It is not the anonymous narrator but Liz who is uncertain of her feelings and feels it necessary to qualify â€Å"happy† by â€Å"fairly. † More importantly the presupposition, â€Å"but for all t his,† deliberately leaves unsaid the extreme poverty and the beatings to which Liz is subject. 27 Susan Sheridan, talking of Baynton’s novel Human Toll, says: â€Å"the assumption that it is autobiographical deflects attention from the novel’s textuality as if the assertion that it was all ‘true’ and that writing was a necessary catharsis could account for its strangely wrought prose and obscure dynamics of desire† (67).The same is true of her short stories. By persisting in reading her as a â€Å"realist† writer many readers fail to notice her sophisticated use of language. Perhaps because none of the stories has a narrator to guide the reader in their interpretation or because the reader has little or no direct access to the protagonist’s thoughts, or because of the flouting of conversational maxims and the co-operative principal, sentences are taken at face value and all too often little attempt is made to decode the irony or to question what on the surface appears to be statements of fact.Hergenhan queries the success of a strategy of such extreme obliqueness: â€Å"It is difficult to understand why Baynton did not make it clearer as the ellipsis is carried so far that the clues have eluded most readers† (217), but it should be remembered that, given the circumstances in which she was trying to publish, direct criticism was never an option for Baynton. What is essential in decoding Baynton’s work is to accept that it is not about women but about the absence of women who are shown to be victims both of men in the bush and of language.

Noonan’s point of view for the Anti-abortion Essay

Noonan’s is an extreme anti-abortionist. He believed that once conceived, the being was recognized as human because he/she had human’s potential. The criterion for humanity, thus, was simple and all embracing: if you are conceived by human parents, you are human. He believes in four pro-choice criteria for human being. The first criterion is viability. Viability is the point in time in which a fetus lived attached to its mother determines the fate. Notion of viability is that fetus is depended on its mother in order to live, and if this dependence is taken through abortion, then it is actually a right of life taken from a living human being. The second view is experience. Experience as defined through Noonan is, † A being who has had experience, has lived and suffered, who posses memories, is more human than one who has not†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Here he points out the stage of fetus when it can be responsive to touch and can feel the environment around him/her. He compares this stage of fetus to of an adult who has aphasia has lost his or her memories- his or her â€Å"experience†: Noonan asks rhetorically if this means the humanity of the adult has been erased. In this argument Noonan is implying that if there is an absences of experiences during fetus stage of human life, we can not deprive the fetus of his/her right to life. The third case is sentiment. Sentiment in this case means that if the fetus dies, it won’t receive the same grief as for a living child because it hasn’t been named or had personality. Noonan views this while contrasting different races among human kind. He portrays his feelings that if one human being is of different skin color or of different sex, we won’t say that his/her life lost is not grief able. Why isn’t then a fetus is given the same human respect he/she deserved. The last of these criteria’s is social visibility. They argument says that the fetus hasn’t been socially perceived as human: it cannot communicate like humans. Noonan’s views for this argument is as follows. He says that humanity does not depend on social recognition, although the failure to recognize this fact has led it to destruction of lives. These are the Noonan’s point of view towards the abortion.

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Procurement Methods - Assignment Example In this project, the construction procurement techniques that will be talked about are the novated design and build methods, accelerated traditional methods and the construction management approach. Construction administration is as procurement course in which the works are built by various different foremen. These builders are contracted to the customer yet overseen by a development supervisor. The construction supervisor goes about as a specialist for the customer, controlling and facilitating the working contracts. The development administrator is by and large selected ahead of schedule in the outline change so their experience can be utilized to enhance the fabricate capacity and bundling of suggestions as they build. This can empower some exchange foremen to be delegated sooner than others, possibly shortening the time taken to finish the responsibility assigned. Then again, there will be the value instability until the configuration is finished and all agreement has been let. Accelerated traditional method is a system where a builder is selected prior in the arrangement of design on the premise of fractional data, either by transaction or in competition. Arrangement, from the premise of the starting, incomplete data, happens once the last outline data gets to be accessible. Development begins when the outline is created to the last stage (Bennett, 1990). Whilst this permits an early begin on location, it additionally involves less conviction about expense. In Accelerated traditional method, some outline covers development. It is accomplished by letting a different, advance works contract. For instance, by permitting foundations (site leeway, heaping and establishments) to continue to construct once arranging consent has been gotten keeping in mind the design for whatever remains of the building is finished, and by tendering over the ground development independently. This lessens the aggregate

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Ernest Hemingway - Essay Example In other words, the life and art of Hemingway are interwoven in numerous ways, and his biography contributes heavily to the understanding his works. Thus, his major works such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are useful in establishing that a great deal of his fiction was influenced by his life and that his art, in turn, transformed his life to a considerable extent. The interrelation between the life and art of Hemingway is clearly reflected in his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). Here, one finds a young American narrating the story, and he is the only character in the work who maintains the standards of conduct. As Edmund Wilson establishes, the character fails to attract the love of a woman due to his incapacity to dominate and direct the lady. The author tenses up the membrane of his style in order to communicate the pulsations of these trepidations. Wilson is of all praise for the artistic style of the writer who invests the arid sunlight and the green summer landscapes with a vindictive quality which has never been found in the literature before. In the novel, one finds the romantic spirit of the writer at its best and his literary style clearly reflects the link to his life experience. â€Å"This Hemingway of the middle twenties ... expressed the romantic disillusion and set the favorite pose for the period. It was the moment of gallantr y in heartbreak, grim and nonchalant banter, and heroic dissipation.† (Wilson) Therefore, it is indubitable that the writer skillfully commingled his life with his art which ultimately won him international reputation. There have been ever so many illustrations of the life-aspects in the writings of Hemingway and the critics have often been in praise of the ability of the writer to reflect his life in his art astutely. Every character in his novels reflects one or the other characteristic of the novelist’s life. The proficiency of the writer as an outdoor sportsman, his career spell as a war

Economic Environment of China Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4250 words

Economic Environment of China - Essay Example This issue is one of the most sought after topics for the researchers because in the recent years a lot of flexibility has been allowed in the economic system of China. There are several sectors where the private players are being allowed to exist in the market. The stringent restrictions on the property rights of the country have also been relaxed. The paper also analyses the economic systems that the other developed and developing countries have adopted. The comparison of the economic systems provides an insight into the various pros and cons of the set ups that are existent across the world. The fundamental premise for the contention is that the economic structure and the systems of a particular economy are a major determinant of the growth and prosperity of the economy. The world has witnessed the set up of different kinds of economic systems over different eras. There are various countries that have adopted different theories and have tried to implement them into their economies . The economic set up that China, Russia or Poland have followed the socialist structure while that of the US or German Economy have adopted the capitalist set up. In this paper comparison of China has been done with the other countries that work on a different economic model. A variety of economic systems around the world can be observed. In the Capitalist economic system which is alternatively called the market economy, the forces of demand and supply are allowed to operate. The prices and quantities to be sold are determined in the free market and there is no restriction put by the government on the determination of the prices that are sold in the market. Thus the profit or surplus that is earned by the owners of the means of production remains on their hands and the employees or the workers are eligible for salaries or wages (Gardner 27). The economic structure of the United States is of the capitalist type because this ideology has been applied in the economic system of the Uni ted States. In an alternative system that is the Socialist structure of the economy, the entire ownership of the means of the production lies with the government of the country. In this kind of a socialist system the surplus that is derived out of the production of goods and services after the payment of the wages are equitably distributed among the people that constitute the residents of the entire nation. Even the disabled people who directly cannot contribute to the production get an equal share of the surplus as the wage earners are entitled to. The main proponents of the theory of socialism were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They believed in the theory of class struggle and the theory of surplus value. A third kind of economic system that has the quality of both the capitalist structure and the socialist structure is the mixed economy. In this kind of an economic structure, the public and the private sector institutions coexist (Conklin 37). The government of such mixed econo mies does not interfere into the activities of the private sector directly but they do have certain restrictions imposed on them in the form of legal and constitutional regulations. The economy of India is an example of mixed economy where there is the coexistence of the private and the government players in the markets. Literature review The

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English - Evaluation on a restaurant - Essay Example The thesis statement for this paper is, ‘to evaluate the pros and cons of the Ocean Prime, three criteria will be used: food choices must include a wide range of seafood with high nutritional value, the service staff must be efficient and well mannered, and the total cost must not exceed $20 per person’. The first criterion used to evaluate the restaurant was that food must include a wide range of highly nutritional seafood dishes for seafood lovers.   I believe that the restaurant does very well in this regard. We ate Crab Wedge with Maytag Blue Cheese and Shellfish Cobb Salad and really liked them. Both dishes had good nutritional value as they contained high percentages of potassium, protein, and omega-3s. Some strengths of the restaurant in this regard include variety of signature salads, chicken and fish sandwiches, cocktails. However, a couple of weaknesses that we observed regarding this criterion included a little amount of extra vinegar in the Crab Wedge dish and unavailability of some main seafood dishes listed on the menu book. The second criterion used to evaluate the restaurant was that service staff should be well mannered and efficient.   I believe that the restaurant did not meet this criterion to full extent. The reason is that there were just 4 to 5 waiters for 12 to 14 tables. Each waiter was serving more than two groups of visitors at a time which made it difficult for them to serve each visitor properly. However, they were all well mannered and dealt with visitors very courteously. Therefore, the strength of the restaurant in this regard was its well-behaved service staff, whereas the weakness was its shortage of service staff to serve a large number of visitors. The second criterion used to evaluate the restaurant was that the total cost must not exceed $20 per person. The restaurant’s rates were economical as compared to most of the other seafood

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Bergquists four cultures - Essay Example Delaune and Ladner (2006) in their book on Fundamentals of Nursing defined culture as â€Å"knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, habits, customs, languages, symbols, rituals, ceremonies, and practices that are unique to a particular group of people† (p. 388). Simple folks ordinarily know culture as a way of life. Aretz (2007), in his article Managing Change in Health Professions Education -Experiences from the Trenches explored two definitions of culture as: â€Å"â€Å"the deeply embedded patterns of organizational behavior and the shared values, assumptions, beliefs, or ideologies that members have about their organizations or its work† (Petersen and Spencer) and culture is â€Å"Obedience to the Unenforceable†; â€Å"It is a realm in which not law, not caprice, but virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment, †¦ hold sway. In a word, it †¦ covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.† (John Fletcher Moulton) (p. 22). In an academic research written by William H. Bergquist, an international consultant and professor in the fields of organizational psychology and management, he identified four cultures in higher education which are interrelated and have profound effects to an organization, to wit: collegial, managerial, developmental and negotiating. Walter (2007) distinguished between collegial and developmental as: â€Å"the collegial culture is one in which individuals find meaning primarily through their discplines and through the original research that helps to further knowledge in that discipline. The developmental culture, by contrast, is one in which individuals find meaning primarily through their participation in teaching, learning, and professional development activities† (pp. 11-12) Collegial culture emphasize the value of scholarship, governance, rationality and decision making as opposed to personal and professional growth as the focus of developmental

Compare and contrast Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 9

Compare and contrast - Essay Example d moving through various places during a life, so their understanding of the â€Å"home† were formed without a long belonging to one village or a town. Both of them agree that nowadays it is not something uncommon to change places of living, especially in America. Sanders even considers that the mobility is the particular national characteristic of Americans, whose â€Å"Promised Land has always been over the next ridge or at the end of the trail, never under [their] feet† (173). Ford, explaining his numerous relocations, asserts that he is â€Å"just an ordinary fish aswim in a confluence of swirling currents† (183). Yet, both of them admit that in spite of all inner and outer voices urging people to seek new territories for life, in spite of the famous American slogan â€Å"Stand still – and you die†, the â€Å"staying put" by Sanders (173) or "to feel enfolding" by Ford (183) is of a great importance for them. For Sanders the key valuable meaning of home is the taking root in a place, in a specific physical location, rather than in ideas or in memory, as it is suggested by Salman Rushdie regarding to explaining of the migrant sensibility. Sanders argues that the most of the abuses, which has happened in the history of America, were caused by actions of â€Å"people who root themselves in ideas rather than places â€Å"(Sanders 173). And, on the contrary, when people become inhabitants, local residents instead of migrants, they are more committed to the place, they want and like to learn and care for their places, to â€Å"pay enough heed and respect to where we are† (Sanders 174). Sanders gives a bright example of such commitment to the place, describing the Millers family, who underwent three tornado, which heavily destroyed the family’s house, but each time after the tornado, the Millers stayed on the same place and rebuilt their house anew. Sanders supposes such behavio ur, â€Å"staying put† (172), can serve as an evidence of a third human instinct, as a response onto

Jollibee Essay Example for Free

Jollibee Essay Tony Tan Caktiong’s Jollibee has been one of the most admired, most copied, most innovative and most professionally-run company here in the Philippines. It has been the number one fastfood chain overtaking giants such as Mc Donalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken or KFC. How did a local jolly red bee knocked down a multinational red-haired clown named Ronald? Let’s see another inspiring story of the founder of one of my ideal businesses. With its success, a Jollibee franchise has now a tag price of P25+ Million (US$ 500,000+). Wow! Tony Tan Caktiong’s Life and his Jollibee company is another rags to riches story of an entrepreneur that truly inspires everyone. Tony was the third of seven siblings born to poor parents who migrated from the Fujian province in China to look for a better life here in the Philippines. Tony to return back to Manila and pursue his course Chemical Engineering at the University of Santo Tomas (UST). In 1975, Tony and his colleagues went on a visit to a Magnolia Ice Cream plant located in Quezon City and learned that it was offering franchise when he saw a poster for it. By the month of May, with his family savings, he took P350,000 to grab the franchise opportunity and opened two Magnolia ice cream parlors named Cubao Ice Cream House. They all worked hands-on but as the business propels, they noticed they could not do it all so they started to set up an organization hired store managers, and trained people. Tony started with just two ice cream. Then after two years, he offered chicken and hamburger sandwiches, because customers were telling them they didn’t want to be eating ice cream all the time. They prepared the food in the back kitchen, and soon noticed that people were lining up more for hamburgers than for ice cream. Then in 1978, when they already had six ice cream parlors, they asked themselves: â€Å"Why don’t we change into a hamburger house?† That was also the time they decided to incorporate and realized they needed a brand name. They were looking for a symbol that would represent the group, and because Tony was very impressed with Disneyland characters, they decided on a bee. The bee is a busy creature that produces honey – one of life’s sweetest things. They thought it would be a very good symbol to represent everybody. They decided they would all be very busy and happy at the same time, because if they were busy but not happy, it would not be worth it. That’s why they put the word jolly and just changed the â€Å"y† into â€Å"i† to form a brand name JOLLIBEE. â€Å"It wasn’t long before we heard that the multinationals were coming in – including McDonald’s. Friends started asking us if we were going to get a McDonald’s franchise but I remember saying, if you franchise, you can’t grow outside the Philippines†, says Tony.

Animal Testing Essay Example for Free

Animal Testing Essay Living in the twenty-ï ¬ rst century society is beginning to raise questions about the importance and relevance of issues that could very easily alter our way of living. Animal testing is one of these issues; the use of non-human animals in experiments. When an opinion regarding whether or not animal testing is ethical is mentioned in conversation or our news, citizens generally begin to question its morality. In debates, the issues on animal testing should be divided into two sub-categories: what is necessary for survival, and what is moral. If animals do feel a little pain, can you imagine how they feel? They are forced to do something that they do not want to do just because they cant actually say ‘no’. Yet, scientists, the well educated people, believe that we should keep it, so should we really get rid of it? Animals used: Many different species of animals are used in research. In 2003, the majority of procedures used mice and rats. Other mammals accounted for around 3% of the total, including 11,000 pigs, 5000 dogs and 3000 primates (for example, monkeys and marmosets). Laboratory mice are used more often in research every year than any other animal species. Mice, and other rodents such as rats and hamsters, make up over 90% of the animals used in biomedical research. In addition to having bodies that work similar to humans and other animals, rodents are small in size, easy to handle, relatively inexpensive to buy and keep, and produce many offspring in a short period of time. However, rodents may not always be the best animal to use in certain experiments. In these cases, dogs, cats, rabbits, sheep, ï ¬ sh, birds, reptiles and amphibians, or other kinds of animals may be used. All of these animals together make up less than 10% of the animals used in research. Methods of testing the drug: 1.Exposure Testing Some animals are tested by exposure testing. Animals like rats, dogs, cats, monkeys and birds are exposed to things that people would normally be exposed to. Exposure includes inhaling cigarette smoke or being in a place where furniture polish is sprayed. Exposure to microwaves, UV lights, the sun and extremes in temperature are also ways animals are tested. The results found include diseases that show up because of exposure to elements, learning disabilities that might occur (based on maze and behavior tests after exposure) and pregnancy complications that go along with exposure. These tests are usually used to make conclusions about what a humans reaction would be to the speciï ¬ c substances or conditions that the animals were exposed to. Conclusions might be that products are safe for humans based on exposure to animals or that products and elements are not safe based on what happened to the animals. 2.Skin Testing Some products, like cosmetics, are tested on animals by skin testing. In this method of testing, animals have products applied to their skin. This is done especially with pigs. The products, like cosmetics and other skin care products, are introduced to the animals skin, and the results are recorded. Most of this testing is done by cosmetic companies themselves, who are looking for any adverse reactions the products might have. Reactions they are looking for include breakouts, skin irritations, sicknesses or allergies that crop up with exposure. Research companies might be paid by cosmetic companies to test the products of competitor companies to make sure that the products they are selling will perform better. Cosmetic companies and skin care companies are also looking to test how well their products work Skin testing on an animal http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/tags/skin against the claims they have made for their own +corrosion/default.aspx products. 3.Injection Testing Many animals are tested with injection testing. For drug testing, this might mean injecting an animal with a drug to see what the side effects of the drug might be. Allergy medications, acne medications, seizure medications and disease medications are tested on health animals to test for side effects like sicknesses, birth defects or behavior problems. Other animals are tested by ï ¬ rst being injected with a disease or a sickness, and then injected with a course of drugs to see which drug might beneï ¬ t it the most. Diseases include AIDS, Cancer, Parkinsons Diabetes and Epilepsy. The beneï ¬ ts they are looking for include a reduction in symptoms, a cure for the disease, or a way to slow down the diseases progress. Injection testing usually measures the effects of the substance that is being injected on the animals, in order to see what results those things might have Ingected animal testing for people. http://urchinmovement.com/ 2011/08/11/the-rise-of-the-planetof-the-apes-animal-testing-goesmainstream/ 2 Nayla Khalifa AlKhalifa 4.Creation Testing Some animals are created in order to be tested, or their creation itself is the test. Scientists play with the genetic makeup of animals and attempt to create new animals. They also perform experiments on animals in utero, such as inject them with drugs, expose them to chemicals and change their genetic makeup to see if these experiments can be accomplished successfully and then to see if those results can be repeated for humans. Animals are cloned in labs to see if the cloning process works and what drugs, processes and genetic manipulations affect cloning in what way. Cloned animals are then studied to determine the effects of cloning on a general population. 5.Behavior Testing Some animals are tested in a way that is unobtrusive. Behavior tests are not usually meant to test a product or cosmetic or drug. They are tests that look at the lives of the animals and their behaviors. Some tests might include testing the speed at which mice can run various mazes or testing an animals ability to recognize colors or symbols. These tests might include exposing animals to loud sounds like music or yelling or to stressful situations including loud sounds, ï ¬â€šashing lights or strange smells or vibrations. Researchers then watch their behavior and make conclusions about what might happen to people in the same situation. Behavior tests also include studying the way a dog thinks by having him respond to commands and stimuli or testing the way another animal reacts when praised or yelled at. These behavioral tests give more information about how animals think and how their brains work, and also provide insights into why humans might have some of the same behaviors or issues as animals. What are the alternatives? There is a huge range of non- animal research techniques that, as well as being a more humane approach to science, can also be cheaper, quicker and more effective. These include: ââ€" Cell cultures Almost every type of human cell can be grown in culture and this has been key to understanding cancers, sepsis, kidney disease and HIV/AIDS. Cells grown in test tubes are routinely used in chemical safety testing, vaccine production, medicines development and to diagnose disease. ââ€" Chemical methods Analytical techniques used by chemists can be used to detect toxins in products, such as the LCMS method to replace the use of mice who are injected to detect toxins in shellï ¬ sh. ââ€" Tissue and organ culture Tissues from humans donated after surgery or even death can be used to investigate diseases and also test whether drugs might be safe and effective, before they are used on humans. ââ€" Computer models Programs run on computers can be used to predict whether a chemical is going to be harmful based on its similarity to other chemicals, or to even simulate body processes such as heart rate. ââ€" Human Volunteers Studies of humans can often be the best way to replace animals. We can now see inside peoples’ brains using imaging machines or test microscopic amounts of new drugs harmlessly on volunteers, as well as conduct large scale studies of populations to help see what might cause disease (epidemiology). Scientists are moving away from using animals but it is a slow process and they need more support. My opinion on animal testing is that we still need it but we should try to minimize the amount of animals being used and the pain the may experience even when pain relievers and anesthetics are used. We should use alternatives as much as we need to. We should not completely ban animal testing until we have a full replacement for it that works just as well or even better. Scientist are actually just trying to save someones life, I think many people in this world would see that as a selï ¬â€šess act. Personally I would rather an animal die than a cancer patient. They also test on animals as some of them are very much like humans, that means if an animal has a positive reaction towards a drug we are one step closer to curing a disease and we would all rather an animal die during research than a human. Animals are mostly used to develop medicines for the sick and have they have actually helped ï ¬ nd different treatments for cancer, strokes, and may other diseases that many people die from each year. Anyone that thinks that they are against animal testing is basically telling some cancer patients that they would rather them die then some rats. I would never ban animal testing. I ï ¬ nd that the people who protest against animal testing are an insult to the poor people that are ï ¬ ghting for their lives lying in a hospital bed some where with one chance of getting their life back by taking a drug that may have been tested on animals. It makes me feel really uncomfortable knowing that healthy people want something which will drastically decrease the standard of living of others. A complete ban on animal testing will have very serious negative effects on medical research. I believe that developing better, more effective and safer drugs is more important than sparing a few rats. Either way, if we continue animal testing ( which we are now ) too many animals are getting hurt, money is being spent, and products are still being tested, but if we ban animal testing we only have alternatives that work with only certain parts of an animals body. So, if we do either one we will still have issues.

The Eurozone Crisis and EU Fiscal Governance Reform

The Eurozone Crisis and EU Fiscal Governance Reform   Framing the Eurozone Crisis: A Case of Limited Ambition Abstract The eurozone crisis provided a new opportunity for obtaining supranational fiscal integration within the European single currency area. This study applies a framing analysis to the crisis discourse that emerged from within the European Union’s (EU) intergovernmental forums involved in fiscal policy coordination. As well as linking policy frames to two different integration scenarios for the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the broader influence of macroeconomic ideology is also emphasised. It is found that the response to the intensification of the crisis in Europe was to employ framing devices supporting intergovernmental fiscal discipline. While there were emergent supranational discourses over the longer term, these were reflective of a limited reform ambition. A key constraining factor here were the sovereignty concerns and issues of moral hazard circulating amongst member states, which together have ensured that a supranational fiscal policy is unlikely to be obtained i n Europe.   Introduction This article considers the response from within the intergovernmental forums to the eurozone crisis and the future prospects for fiscal supranationalism in Europe more broadly. When political scientists have turned their attention to the politics of the crisis, it has often figured as a case study to support the grand theoretical claims made by the ‘new intergovernmentalism’ (Bickerton et al. 2015; 2015a). This approach has tried to theorize a new paradox in European integration in the post-Maastricht era: ‘Member States pursue more integration but stubbornly resist further supranationalism’ (Puetter 2012, 168). Certain institutional dynamics associated with the new intergovernmentalism can be found to be at work within EMU where, particularly since the onset of the crisis, there have been marked increases in intergovernmental policy coordination within the European Council and ECOFIN Council structures (Hodson 2011; Puetter 2012). However, the approach is still at an early stage of development and deep empirical analysis of the political deliberations and policy environment within these settings are still lacking. Further criticisms have been made. In particular, Schimmelfennig (2015, 724) points out that, ‘They do not distinguish intergovernmentalism and supranationalism by the integration outcomes (either substantive or in terms of the level or scope of integration)’. Thus, claims of an ‘integration paradox’ taking place within EMU specifically or across the wider EU remain uncertain. This article focuses on the issue of EU fiscal governance reform following the intensification of eurozone crisis. The potential role of ideas as engines of policy change within EMU is a prospect taken seriously here (Dyson 2000). With this in mind, the  discursive institutionalist  theoretical framework proposed by Schmidt is employed (Schmidt 2008, 2010). This approach is well suited to considering the role of ideas and discourse interactions in bringing about change in an EU institutional context (see Schmidt 2015). It is applied through a framing analysis of the reform discussions that emerged from within the key intergovernmental forums involved in guiding the crisis response (Goffman 1974). This article identifies the dominant policy frames (‘problems’ and ‘solutions’) organising the reform debate, and links them to two alternative reform paths for EU fiscal governance: intergovernmental and supranational. In doing so, this article clarifies far more precisely the different political and economic policy options for reforming EMU governance, as well as previously underdetermined concepts such as ‘fiscal union’ and ‘political union’. As well as linking individual policy frames to different integration scenarios, the important role of macroeconomic ideology in guiding framing preferences is also emphasised. Theoretical and Methodological Framework It could be assumed that the eurozone crisis would confirm neofunctionalist  beliefs concerning the dynamics of the European integration  process: the weaknesses revealed in the asymmetric single currency area create strong pressures for a functional ‘spillover’ of supranational competencies to the European level (Rosamond 2005). However, when political scientists have turned their attention to the crisis, it has often been directed at the intensified intergovernmental policy coordination that has taken place within the European Council and ECOFIN Council (Hodson 2011; Puetter 2012; Bickerton et al. 2015; 2015a). While broader new intergovernmentalist claims of an ‘integration paradox’ in Europe involving integration without supranationalism remain undetermined (see Schimmelfennig 2015), these findings do suggest that deep supranational integration may not be obtained in EMU. Moreover, it has previously been found that a supranational reform agenda was not internalised by the Commission[1]. Together these findings are important as the long-term sustainability of the single currency area without significant steps being taken towards a more deeply integrated fiscal union has been questioned (De Grauwe 2013). Through a framing analysis this article will seek to explore if the crisis response from within the intergovernmental institutions was to push for supranationalism within EU fiscal governance, or alternatively, a retaining of intergovernmental control at the EU level. And, if the later course prevails, it will seek to offer a more complete theoretical explanation of why member states continue to resist supranationalism, even in the face of significant centralisation pressures. A deeper understanding of the political determinants of the EMU policy environment will also help facilitate a more complete explanation of why a supranational reform agenda was found not to have been internalised within DG ECFIN. The overarching theoretical framework informing this analysis is discursive institutionalism (Schmidt 2008; 2010). Of particular relevance here is the distinction made by discursive institutionalism between ‘coordinative discourse’—which takes place internally within the EU policy making setting—and ‘communicative discourse’—which take place externally between EU policy actors and the general public (Schmidt 2005). This study integrates discursive institutionalism alongside a frame analysis. Framing has been criticised for its lack of consistency in application of theory and method, with many different variants being operationalised without adequate clarification (Cacciatore et al. 2016). Framing has also been found to share common processes with agenda-setting and priming, although framing offers a more ‘encompassing conceptual approach’ (Aday 2006, 768). Here, a sociological approach to framing is adopted, which can be traced back to the work of Goffman (1974). A frame is understood as a ‘schemata of interpretation’, which can shape actors’ perceptions of reality and, in turn, influence political behaviour (Goffman 1974, 21). Inspired by Goffman’s approach, Benford and Snow (2000) make an important distinction between ‘prognostic’ and ‘diagnostic’ framing: the construction of particular  problem representations and possible solutions. This is valuable for facilitating a deeper understanding of the diagnosis of the causes of the eurozone crisis arrived at, as well as an exploration of the interlinking reforms suggested to solve or at least deal with the problems posed by the eurozone crisis.   Ideas within frames can be understood as occurring at different levels of generalisation: specific policy ideas related to problem and solutions (e.g. strengthened rules-based surveillance versus debt mutualisation); normative ideas which attach value to political action (e.g. fiscal discipline versus fiscal solidarity); and finally these can be connected to programmatic ideas related to broader policy paradigms and ideologies (Schmidt 2005; 2008). As a means to locate the key framing ideas that are likely to figure in the institutional discourse on the eurozone crisis, a wider review of the reform literature on EU fiscal governance will be completed (see the section below, ‘Literature Review’). Table (1) helps to link the different problem and solution policy frames that will be uncovered as part of this discussion to two different integration scenarios for EMU: intergovernmental and supranational. As well as showing how ideas relate to different policy measures (proble ms and solutions) and normative arguments, the wider role of macroeconomic ideology in guiding framing preferences for EMU reform is also highlighted here. Following a framing analysis, the dominant frames uncovered will also be explored in relation to the wider interplay between ideas and institutions within EMU[2].   Two guiding macroeconomic ideologies are important for understanding developments in European monetary integration: neoliberalism and Keynesianism. Neoliberalism is a highly contested term, although from an ideological standpoint it favours market based solutions and methods over  government  intervention (Holden 2011). In contrast, perhaps the most important insight of Keynesianism is the recognition of the need for  demand management by the state both in economic downturns and  booms (Skidelsky 1992, 572-624). Keynesian theory, therefore, demands a far more active role for the state in managing the economy through fiscal policy. Neoliberal ideas have been found to have become deeply embedded within the EMU policy framework, including the prevalence of ‘sound money’ and ‘sound finance’ ideas imparting fiscal discipline (Dyson 2002). There is no prior reason why neoliberalism should be associated with intergovernmentalism and Keynesianism with supranationalism. However, when applied to events taking place during the eurozone crisis, a Keynesianism philosophy demands a level of centralised fiscal solidarity amongst member states, which would imply edging towards a more supranational model of fiscal integration. On the contrary, building on, rather than replacing, the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) arrangements for fiscal discipline would preserve the intergovernmental logic of EMU governance, and is more aligned with neoliberal preferences. The focus here is on the framing activities that took place within the European Council and ECOFIN Council (shadowed by the informal ‘eurogroup’), althoughthese frames will also be located in the context of the wider crisis discussions taking place within the EU Commission and ECB settings. The analysis distinguishes between two distinct phases of the eurozone crisis: a crisis ‘escalation’ and crisis ‘normalisation’ phase. The crisis escalation phase can be traced back to the intensification of the global financial crisis in the summer of 2007. With attention focused on the frailties of the American financial system, the eurozone economy at first assumed a ‘safe-haven’ status for many commentators (Wyplosz 2009)—although there was some prescient warnings as to the multiple risks the downturn could pose to the institutions of the European single currency area (Feldstein 2008). In early 2010, following significant upwards revisions in the budget deficit figures for Greece,   there was a sudden erosion in market confidence in the Eurozone leading tolong-term government bond yield spreads increasing dramatically for the periphery member states (Checherita et al. 2010). With the risk of sovereign default  and uncontrollable  contagion  effects at its most serious, the President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, swiftly put together a case for the supremacy of a European Council led Task Force in guiding a ‘fast-track’ process for EMU reform.    By the fall of 2012, market reactions towards the eurozone had normalised significantly. Key here was the ECB fulfilling its function as a lender of last resort (De Grauwe 2016, 126-141), which was aided by Mario Draghi’s  statement at the end of July 2012 that ‘[w]ithin our mandate, the ECB is ready to  do whatever it takes  to preserve the euro’. In response to the calming in market conditions, the attention of European leaders switched to the measures required to stabilise EMU over the longer term. Laying the foundations for these reform discussions were two strategic documents: the December 2012 report, prepared at the request of the European Council by President Van Rompuy, jointly with the Presidents of the European Commission, the ECB, and the Eurogroup, entitled Towards a Genuine Economic and Monetary Union and the Commission’s own A Blueprint for a Deep and Genuine Economic and Monetary Union: Launching a European Debate, published in November 2012. Building on the previous documents, in June 2015, the President of the Commission, in close cooperation with the Presidents of the Council, the ECB, the Eurogroup and the European Parliament, presented the so-called ‘Five Presidents’ Report’ entitled Completing Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union. Official documents and speeches throughout these deliberation phases will be supplemented by a series of semi-structured interviews that were conducted with senior EU officials located within the European Council, ECOFIN Council and DG ECFIN during the most important phases of the crisis. It is important to differentiate between the full internalisation of discourse within institutions and discourse that is deployed in rhetoric as a strategic political device (Hay 2006). Interview data is then useful for forming a comparison between communicative discourses to the general public and the internal coordinative discourses of policy construction taking place among policy actors (Schmidt 2008). Literature Review The escalation of the Eurozone crisis in 2010 fixed attention on the design failures of the eurozone and the practicalities of having a monetary union without the accompanying integration of the fiscal side (De Grauwe 2013). Since 2010, most of the reform proposals suggested to complete the architecture of EMU have centred on the prospect of implementing two neo-Keynesian fiscal solidarity mechanisms: 1) centralised fiscal capacity (or federal budget) for stabilisation purposes; 2) and the introduction of debt mutualisation schemes. A Policy Contribution for Bruegel details the four main options for developing a fiscal capacity for the eurozone with stabilisation functions: 1) unemployment insurance; 2) payments related to deviations of output from potential; 3) the narrowing of large spreads; 4) and discretionary spending (Wolf 2012). Suggestions for debt mutualisation include the so called European Safe Bonds (Euro-nomics group 2011) and Redemption bonds (Bofinger et al. 2011). In view of the salient features of fiscal policy, it is understood as imperative that progress towards a more supranational fiscal union is accompanied by deeper political integration to guarantee the democratic legitimacy of EMU governance (Schmidt, 2015). Despite calls being made for EMU to be completed through a process of supranational fiscal integration, there is an altogether different integration route that would maintain the intergovernmental logic of fiscal arrangements in Europe. Neoliberal monetarist principles are pervasive here, with discussions of fiscal solidarity being disregarded in favour of a limited fiscal discipline agenda (von Hagen et al. 2009; 2011). The main concern under this integration scenario is with heightened budgetary surveillance and enforcement mechanisms, which could be secured under the preventative and corrective arms of the pre-existing SGP framework. The fundamentally decentralised character of EU fiscal governance would also be preserved. In the literature, support for such a limited reform agenda is often supported by a belief that the eurozone crisis was primarily the result of excessive  fiscal profligacy  in the periphery member states (Sinn 2010). Of course, the distinct lack of political integration envisioned here would mean that channels of democratic legitimacy would remain largely indirect via member state governments. Through this discussion of the literature, two reform scenarios for EMU have been identified: intergovernmental and supranational. These two models can be understood as being supported by a selection of different policy  frames,  implying different definitions of what the  problem is and different ideas of what the suitable policy solutions  may be (see Table 1). First, the intergovernmental reform scenario is guided by a simplistic fiscal profligacy diagnosis of the eurozone crisis. Such an interpretation of the crisis strongly implies neoliberal policy solutions in the form of strengthened rules-based fiscal discipline. Framing the crisis in these more limited terms may also be both politically and intellectually attractive. This is because these frames do not demand challenging integration steps being taken towards a deeper level of fiscal and political union. Alternatively, the more far reaching supranational reform scenario is informed by a broader interpretation of the crisis problem as a problem of regional imbalances. In turn, possible solutions are understood as going far beyond neoliberal fiscal discipline in the direction of the implementation of neo-Keynesian solidarity measures, including debt mutualisation and an enlarged EU budget. The need to ensure the democratic legitimacy for decisions taken at the Union level is also problematized under this integration scenario, leading to demands for the simultaneous development of a flanking political union. Table 1: Framing the Eurozone Crisis Building on [name deleted for peer review] Framing the Eurozone Crisis   Crisis Escalation Phase Following the intensification of the global financial crisis in July 2007, the eurozone was at first considered by some to be a ‘safe haven’ (Wyplosz 2009). With the full implications of the deepening global financial crisis for the eurozone not yet apparent, the crisis problem was initially framed by European leaders as one created externally by the financial excesses built-up within the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economies. As one DG ECFIN official observed, ‘Governments believed the crisis to have originated primarily in poor regulatory practices in New York and Londonand Europe was being pulled into the crisis through the global financial system’ (Secretariat Official in DG ECFIN 2 2013). A similar sentiment was also reflected in more communicative discourse as European leaders attempted to externalise the crisis. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, was uncompromising in asserting before the German Bundestag that ‘excessively cheap money in the US was a driver of today’s crises’ (Financial Times 2008). Moreover, French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, proclaimed in similar terms that ‘the crisis was a product of the Anglo-Saxon model’ (Financial Times 2009). Despite European leaders framing the 2008 financial collapse as an almost exclusively ‘Anglo-Saxon’ phenomenon with epicentres in New York and London, European leaders, led by Nicolas Sarkozy as the then acting president of the Council, did push for a strong coordinated European response alongside the G20 and American economies (Hodson 2011). In this early period, the framing of solutions to the crisis in Europe, overlapping with the international response and IMF recommendations, was guided heavily by Keynesian principles as leaders sought to avert financial contagion and recessionary spillovers into the real economy through coordinated fiscal expansion. In Europe, this translated into an attempt to combine both national and EU resources to ‘support demand’ and ‘cushion economies from the worst effects of the financial meltdown’ (Secretariat Official in DG ECFIN 1 2013). In November 2008, after an extraordinary summit of the euro area Heads of Government led by Nicolas  Sarkozy, the Commission proposed a Keynesian ‘European Economic Recovery plan’ (ECRP), which championed a substantial coordinated fiscal stimulus: ‘The Commission is proposing that, as a matter of urgency, Member States and the EU agree to an immediate budgetary impulse amounting to â‚ ¬ 200 billion (1.5% of GDP)’(Commission 2008). Importantly though, a key principal underpinning the plan was that any budgetary stimulus should be ‘timely, targeted, and temporary’—and that ‘Member States should commit to reverse the budgetary deterioration and return to the aims set out in the [SGP’s] medium term objectives’ (Commission 2008, 6-7).   As Joaquà ­n Almunia,  Vice President  of the European Commission, commented at the time: ‘we have red lines,  we cannot  put an excessive  burden  on  the next generation’ (Commission 2008a, 6). Similarly, the conclusions of the ECOFIN Council continued to support the long-term application of the SGP: ‘we remain fully committed to sound and sustainable public finances. The Stability and Growth Pact provides adequate flexibility to deal with these exceptional situations’ (Council 2009). Thus, while European leaders led by Nicolas  Sarkozy, along with the broader international community, embraced more Keynesian orientated fiscal stimulus in order to counter the expected downward trend in demand presented by the intensification of the global financial crisis, the long-term European commitment to the neoliberal rules-based SGP framework remained relatively stable during this early crisis period.   In the Spring of 2010 Greek public debt was downgraded by the main credit rating agencies to junk status and a growing spread in yields emerged in Eurozone sovereign bonds (Checherita et al. 2010). Recalling these events later, President Van Rompuy noted that this sudden loss of confidence in the Eurozone provoked by Greece was a ‘real shock’ for which ‘we were not prepared’ (Council 2014). As one official in DG ECFIN remarked: ‘It was now internal: a crisis of the Eurozone’ (Secretariat Official in DG ECFIN 2 2013). As the crisis intensified within the eurozone it was reframed by European leaders as a problem of fiscal profligacy amongst the periphery member states. On 11 February 2010, in a short emergency statement issued by Heads of State, they remarked that ‘all euro members must conduct sound national policies in accordance with the agreed rules’ (Council 2010). The discussion was also centred on Greece, with the Greek government being told ‘to implement all these measures in a rigorous and determined manner to effectively reduce the budgetary deficit by 4% in 2010’ (Council 2010). From a reading of the coordinative discourse, it was now Germany that was seen to be providing ideational leadership for framing the crisis in behavioural terms on Greek fiscal profligacy. As the largest eurozone country of course Germany’s voice was perhaps louder than the rest. I think it is fair to say that there was a perception in Germany that the troubles in the sovereign debt market had been caused by excessive government spending by certain periphery member states. (Council Directorate for Economic Policy Official 2013). The Commission also concurred with these views. In fact, the EU executive took the unprecedented step of issuing a series of strict recommendations to ensure that the budget deficit of Greece was brought below 3% of GDP by 2012 (Commission 2010a). Joaquà ­n Almunia,  Vice President  of the European Commission, commented that ‘this is the first time we have established such an intense and quasi-permanent system of monitoring’ (Commission 2010a). In response to the escalating crisis in the eurozone, President Van Rompuy argued the case in March 2010 for the pre-eminence of a European Council led Task Force in driving reform negotiations on EMU governance. The framing of policy solutions within the framework of the Task Force setting was guided more by a neoliberal ideology towards the imposition of strengthened intergovernmental fiscal discipline. In the first statement issued by the Task Force on the 25 March 2010, the shift in policy responses by European leaders was already firmly established: ‘the current situation demonstrates the need to strengthen and complement the existing framework to ensure fiscal sustainability in the euro zone’ (European Council 2010b). Moreover, the final conclusions of the March 2010 European Council summit further instructed the Task Force ‘to identify the measures needed  to  reach  the  objective  of an improved crisis resolution framework and  better budgetary disciplineexploring all options to reinforce the existing legal framework’ (European Council 2010a). Again, in the coordinative discourse, officials drew attention to the renewed ideational leadership played by Germany in framing policy solutions for the crisis: You have to understand that for Germany in particular the idea of having enforceable rules and sanctions to maintain budgetary discipline is central to their vision of how EMU should operate. And during the crisis it was Germany that pressed the hardest for heighted budgetary surveillance (Member of the Cabinet for the European Council President, 2014). A separate official commented on what they perceived as the inevitably of Germany’s leading role in setting the reform priorities within the task force: ‘But of course Germany takes a leading role here in view of its economic size. So Germany automatically was seen to take on a leading role, whether it wanted it or not ‘(Council Directorate for Economic Policy Official 2013). In contrast, French President, Nicolas Sarkozy led continued pleas for more fiscal solidarity: ‘The euro is our currency. It implies solidarity. There can be no doubt on the expression of this solidarity’ (BBC 2010). However, while it has been observed that ‘France under the stewardship of Sarkozy also had a role to play here’, it has been noted that he, in effect, was ‘forced to concede too many of Germany’s demands during the crisis deliberations’ (Council Directorate for Economic Policy Official 2013). Thus, while Nicolas Sarkozy played an important role in leading a more Keynesian international response at the onset of the global financial crisis, as the crisis intensified within the eurozone the French President was forced to abandon solutions involving fiscal solidarity in favour of Germany’s more limited fiscal discipline objectives.    These framing priorities were reflected in the Final Report of the Task Force released to the public in October 2010. The main pillar of the suggested reforms was geared towards ‘greater fiscal discipline through a stronger stability and growth pact’ (European Council 2010, 3-4).   As part of its ongoing institutional dialogue with the Task Force, the ECB also offered its public support for legislative measures supporting a more rigorous  Ã¢â‚¬Ëœquasi-automatic’ implementation of the SGP rules (ECB 2010). Three key objectives were embedded in the Final Report of the Task Force: ‘the need for a greater focus on debt and fiscal sustainability’, ‘to reinforce compliance’ and ‘to ensure that national fiscal frameworks reflect the EUs fiscal rules’ (European Council 2010, 1-12). In remarks following the final meeting of the Task Force, President Van Rompuy documented that the ‘task forces commitment to a stronger Pact was high from the beginning to the end’ (European Council 2010c). Converging with the framing   activities of the Task Force, in September 2010 the Commission proposed the so-called ‘six-pack’ of legislative proposals centred on the concept of ‘prudent fiscal policy-making’ (Commission 2010, 1). These ‘fast-tracked’ proposals sought to strengthen the impact and effectiveness of the preventative arm of the SGP by giving it ‘teeth’ (EU Commission 2010, 4-5). These early framing activities led by deliberations within the Task Force also helped set the subsequent policy agenda in the form of a legislative ‘two-pack’ (proposed in November 2011) and intergovernmental ‘fiscal compact’ (agreed 8-9 December 2011). Building on the legislative six-pack, both measures were limited to strengthening intergovernmental fiscal discipline under the SGP, through strengthened budgetary surveillance and reinforced compliance (see Commission 2012). Crisis Normalisation Phase From the summer of 2012 to the winter of 2013 there was a gradual reduction in the eurozone periphery bond yield spreads. Key here was the ECB fulfilling its function as a lender of last resort (De Grauwe 2013; 2016). With the ECB able to temporarily normalise market reactions within the eurozone, it offered the prospect that European leaders may seek to reframe the crisis as demanding more supranational solutions. This assumption appeared to be confirmed when President Herman Van Rompuy, following a European Council summit at the end of June 2012, first mentioned the prospect of laying down a ‘longer-term vision’ for strengthening EMU (European Council 2012c). Following prior negotiations in the European Council, President Van Rompuy, jointly with the Presidents of the European Commission, the ECB, and the Eurogroup, presented in December 2012 a report entitled Towards a Genuine Economic and Monetary Union. However, despite the possibility of a critical juncture event, the framing of policy solutions within the report continued to prioritise the strengthening of intergovernmental fiscal discipline over the short-term. The near term priority is to complete and implement the new steps for stronger economic governanceThe other elements related to strengthening fiscal governance in the euro area (‘Two-Pack’), which are still in the legislative process, should be finalised urgently and be implemented thoroughly (European Council 2012, 8). These reform priorities were also reflected in the coordinative discourse: ‘The priority has remained the implementation of the measures contained in the ‘‘six-pack’’ and ‘‘two-pack’’ proposals’ (Council Directorate for Economic Policy Official 2013). And again, Germany’s ideational leadership in framing policy solutions was observed to be pivotal here: ‘There is an understanding amongst member states that budget discipline has to be ensured before more financial support can be offered. This is also a German insistence’ (Council Directorate for Economic Policy Official, 2013). Moreover, while the ECB internally called for a ‘quantum leap’ in integration within EMU, this was strictly interpreted in terms of ‘further strengthening the budgetary discipline of the euro area Member States’ (ECB 2012:8). When discussing the reform solutions for implementation over the long-term (five years and more), there was a shift in the discourse of the Towards a Genuine Economic and Monetary Union report towards the language of supranationalism. However, these framing devices were only reflective of a limited reform ambition. For example, the report mentions the possibility of gradually developing a ‘fiscal capacity’, which could help ‘cushion the impact of country-specific shocks’ and ‘prevent contagion across the euro area’ (European Council 2012, 9). Yet the precise form that any fiscal capacity should take within the euro area was left vague, with the report acknowledging that ‘the exact conditions and thresholds for the activation of transfers would need to be studied carefully’ (European Council 2012, 11). Moreover, it was also emphasised that the development of a fiscal capacity within the eurozone should ‘not lead to  permanent transfers  between countries’ and that this process should occur ‘without resorting to the mutualisation of sovereign debt’ (European Council 2012, 10-12). Tellingly, within the subsequent Conclusions of the December 2012 European Council, any mention of a fiscal capacity or shock absorption function for EMU was omitted, along with plans for debt-mutualisation (European Council   2012a). In the coordinative discourse, officials were able to account for the limited ambition shown in framing supranational solutions to the eurozone crisis by pointing towards a mixture of sovereignty concerns and issues of moral hazard amongst member states. For example, one official highlighted the constraining influence of these national interest ideas on integration within EMU: A degree of debt mutualisation or financial risk sharing could, in theory, help lower borrowing costs amongst the periphery member states and help ward off pressure from the financial markets but it effectively means the transfer of sovereignty, at least to some extent. That is the biggest obstacle: that is what it is all about. In the end it comes down to sovereignty and money (Council Directorate for Economic Policy Official 2013). Similar ideas were raised by one official who, when asked to comment on the probability of securing supranational fiscal integration, answered candidly: ‘I think it is not very probable because of state sovereignty concerns’ (Advisor to the Cabinet of the European Council President 2014). The official argued that this is because a ‘fiscal union with tax powers going to the European Union level would be completely turning upside down the way the Union is currently running’ (Advisor to the Cabinet of the European Council President 2014). A separate official also drew attention to the importance of ‘concerns of moral hazard’, predominantly amongst the ‘core member states who want to be able to influence the periphery member states’ debt situation’ (Member of the Cabinet for the European Council President 2014). There were also discussions in the Towards a Genuine Economic and Monetary Union report concerning the development of a flanking ‘political union’ aspect, although again the supranational framing of the discourse was lacking in ambition.   In order to underpin the ‘democratic legitimacy and accountability’ of decision making the report called for the ‘the involvement of the European Parliament as regards accountability for decisions taken at the European level’, while at the same time ‘maintaining the pivotal role of national parliaments, as appropriate’ (European Council 2012, 16-17). The promise to maintain a ‘pivotal’ role for national parliaments, even in the event of a vertical transfer of powers to the European level, would appear to stem from an observation made in the report that ‘decisions on national budgets are at the heart of Member States parliamentary democracies’ (European Council 2012, 16). The report, then, explicitly divorced itself from supranational political solutions. In the coordinative discourse, sovereignty concerns were again raised as major hurdle to political integration: ‘People have different interests and different concepts of what a political union would be and as to what sovereign powers should be transferred’—adding that ‘we are not even discussing this’ (Council Directorate for Economic Policy Official 2013). In November 2012 the Commission published its own Communication outlining A blueprint for a deep and genuine economic and monetary union: Launching a European Debate. Converging with the Van Rompuy report, the immediate framing of policy solutions was restricted to fiscal discipline objectives: ‘immediate priority should be given to the full deployment of the new economic governance tools brought by the ‘‘six-pack’’ as well as rapid adoption of current Commission proposals such as the ‘‘two-pack’’ (Commission 2012, 12). Once again, like the Van Rompuy report, the blueprint did cautiously embed more supranational frames when addressing the long-term reform agenda for EMU (five years and more). This is in keeping with the EU Commission’s pledge that ‘steps towards more responsibility and economic discipline should be combined with more solidarity and financial support’ (EU Commission 2012, 11). Accordingly, the framing of solutions shifted to demand more in the way of fiscal solidarity, with tentative ideas for a ‘fiscal capacity’ (or ‘federal budget’) and even ‘debt mutualisation’ schemes being   aired as possibilities ‘to support member states in the absorption of economic shocks’ (Commission 2012, 25-26). However, these solidarity mechanisms were envisioned as being implemented strictly after the new arrangements for fiscal discipline have been fully implemented. Also, the procedural details and legal basis for the solidarity mechanisms was left vague, with proposal covering options from ‘contractual arrangements’ to an ‘insurance’ type system. As one official commented: ‘I think there needs to be some ingredients of fiscal union. It’s not entirely clear which ones and to what extent; there are different views and these are tricky questions’ (Senior Fiscal Policy Advisor in DG ECFIN 2013). Moreover, the blueprint also shied away from committing itself to any process of supranational political integration, with the EU Commission arguing that the ‘the Lisbon Treaty has perfected the EUs unique model of supranational democracy’ (Commission 2012, 35).   In June 2015, the President of the Commission, in close cooperation with the Presidents of the Council, the ECB, the Eurogroup and the European Parliament, presented the so-called ‘Five Presidents’ Report’ entitled Completing Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union. It is notable that in the updated report the framing of policy solutions for fiscal integration was even less ambitious than it had been in earlier institutional reports drafted during earlier periods of the crisis. Apart from repeating the need to improve compliance with the new rules contained in the ‘six-pack’, ‘two-pack’ and Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, there were no institutional innovations suggested for implementation over the short-term. Instead, intergovernmental fiscal discipline was again framed as the priority solution—with repeated references made to ‘responsible budgetary policies’ (Commission 2015, 14). The report also warned that ‘every Member State must stick to the rules, or the credibility of this framework is at risk’ (Commission 2015, 14-15).   In terms of the framing of solutions over the longer-term (five years or more), previous references to a ‘fiscal capacity’ and limited forms of debt mutualisation were completely omitted. Instead, the Five Presidents tentatively floated the idea of a ‘euro area-wide fiscal stabilisation function’ (Commission 2015, 14-15). Postponed strictly for ‘in the longer term’, the development of such a   function is envisioned as the culmination of a process of ‘convergence’ and ‘further pooling’ of decision-making on national budgets (Commission 2015, 14-155).   The report also cautioned that ‘it should not lead to permanent transfers between countries’ and that efforts should be made to ‘guarantee it is consistent with the existing EU fiscal framework’ (Commission 2015, 15). Tellingly the report was also explicit that ‘the exact design of such euro area stabilisers requires more in-depth work’ (Commission 2015, 14). As part of the Commission Presidents’ 2015 ‘State of the Union’ address, he argued for ‘a more effective and democratic system of economic and fiscal surveillance’ (Commission 2015a). However, there was again a noticeable lack of progress on political union. While the report affirmed ‘a key role for the European Parliament and national Parliaments’, practical steps to ensure the democratic legitimacy of decision making were limited to proposals to consolidate the external representation of the euro and the integration intergovernmental solutions (i.e. Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance) within the EU legal framework (Commission 2015, 17-18). Framing in Context The dominant framing activities uncovered need to be understood in the context of the wider EMU policy environment. One of the key foundations of EMU was the ideational consensus reached in Europe on neoliberal economic principles in the 1980’s (McNamara 1998). However, while there developed a relative consensus that monetary policy would function in accordance with neoliberal principles, very little thought was given during the deliberations at Maastricht on the 1992 Treaty on European Union (TEU) as to the possibility of accompanying these integration steps with progress towards a supranational fiscal union. As Verdun commented:   ‘Fiscal policy harmonisation was just simply one step too far; there was no support for a transfer of sovereignty over these matters to the European level’ (Verdun 1998, 122). From an early stage, therefore, political necessity dictated that fiscal policy would remain firmly in the intergovernmental realm. Yet from the perspective of underpinning EMU with an institutional framework that is in keeping with neoliberal ideas of ‘sound money’ and ‘sound finance’ (Dyson 2002), European economic and monetary integration was not completed at Maastricht. It was against this backdrop that the then German Minister for finance, Theo Waigel, advanced a proposal for a rules-based ‘Stability Pact for Europe’ in 1996. In summary, owning to the political constraints preventing fiscal supranationalism, coupled with the importation of neoliberal ideas, intergovernmental fiscal discipline became institutionalised at heart of EMU early on. Since its formation, the course of EU fiscal governance reform has been characterised by a strong ‘path-dependency’ (Pierson 1996). In fact, in view of the path-dependent constraints of the political environment, on top of the prevailing neoliberal ideational consensus, the rules-based framework for EU fiscal governance was never seriously challenged by European leaders throughout the first ten years of the single currency area (see Heipertz and Verdun 2011. While the onset of the eurozone crisis had the potential to represent a ‘critical juncture’ in the path for EMU integration (Bulmer 1994), the revival of concerns amongst member states over sovereignty and moral hazard have continued to render the intergovernmental structure of EMU a political necessity. However, although the minimal structure of EMU remains a manifestation of different conceptions of national interest, the prevailing neoliberal ideology has simultaneously continued to condition perceptions as to the efficacy of the SGP rules-based framework for fiscal discipline. Thus, while French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in tandem with the international community, was seen to be influential in leading a brief resurgence of more Keynesian oriented demand stimulus during the early stages of the crisis, European leaders defended the continued application of the SGP as the overarching framework for EU fiscal governance. The dramatic shift in early 2010 from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ external excesses to the internal vulnerabilities within the eurozone only exaggerated the path-dependent effect of competing national interests amongst member states while reinforcing the reversion to neoliberal solutions.   First, policy makers were responding with a degree of shock and panic to a crisis of potentially ‘existential proportions’ (as termed by a Member of the Cabinet for the European Council President, 2014). Operating in this environment of crisis, diagnosing the crisis in behavioural terms as resulting from fiscal profligacy and offering intergovernmental reform solutions limited to strengthening the SGP would have been both intellectually and politically attractive. Not only were these policy frames fully in line with the neoliberal logic of ‘sound  money  and finance’ enshrined since Maastricht (Dyson 2002), but they could also be implemented via secondary legislation under the current legal basis provided by the SGP framework. Moreover, buttressed by its economic weight and its considerable structural power within the EMU set-up, Germany was also increasingly in a strong position to provide ideational leadership in framing neoliberal solutions to the crisis. This can be contrasted with France who, as the crisis progressed, was forced to abandon more Keynesian solutions in favour of Germany’s more limited fiscal discipline objectives. Conclusion The intensification of the crisis within the eurozone brought with it a marked intensification of intergovernmental policy coordination within EMU. As the crisis progressed, the response by European leaders was to adopt problem and solution frames supporting intergovernmental fiscal discipline. Importantly, these frames were intellectually attractive as they were fully consistent with the neoliberal foundations underpinning EMU governance. Also, these frames were politically simple to express as they could be implemented in full under the pre-existing SGP legal framework. While there was a partial shift in the discourse towards supranationalism following the normalisation of the crisis, these discourses were always reflective of a limited reform ambition. In this context, a supranational framing of the crisis was found to be limited by constraining ideas of national interest concerning state sovereignty and issues moral hazard. Germany was also able to draw on its economic weight and bargaining power to provide ideational leadership, further directing the reform agenda towards intergovernmental fiscal discipline. In relation to the wider literature, these findings are broadly consistent with ‘new intergovernmentalist’ claims that supranationalism is unlikely to be obtained in the post Maastricht integration phase. This study though has helped develop a deeper political understanding of the current integration impasse in EU fiscal governance, and of the ideational and institutional path-dependencies working to limit the scope for far reaching reform. This analysis has also contributed to existing critical analysis on European integration by emphasising the central importance of neoliberal ideology in guiding framing preferences. Finally, one major consequence of these findings is that the imbalance between monetary and fiscal integration within the EMU framework will likely remain. However, further investigation will be needed to assess the long-term sustainability of running a single currency area with a decentralised system of fiscal policy. 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