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To report on research that examines the impact of the adoption of nationally‐recognised training by enterprises in Australia.

The project involved a mix of methodologies including focus groups, employer survey and case studies.

The research found that there had been a higher than expected adoption of nationally‐recognised training by Australian enterprises in recent years and that enterprises were using training packages to support other human resource management activities apart from training.

The case studies were confined to four industry areas of hospitality, manufacturing, arts/media and call centres.

This paper fills a significant gap in the research literature on the use that enterprises make of nationally‐recognised training.

The ways in which the brain, as mapped by bioscience, has become popularly understood as the locus and determinant of the self is a topic of increasing importance within medical sociology. Nikolas Rose has influentially chronicled the emergence of a “neurochemical self,” determined by brain chemistry and thus fluid, malleable, and open to improvement via increasingly fine-tuned psychopharmacology. This chapter argues for the contemporaneous emergence of a neurostructural self, intrinsic to the growing neurodiversity movement. Drawing on trends in contemporary neuroscience and biological psychiatry, this model of “brainhood” conceptualizes the brain-as-self as a material system: governed by physical laws, and thus both morally innocent and robustly predictable. Rather than being infinitely open to intervention and optimization, however, the neurostructural self is imagined as fixed and immutable, resistant to the medical intervention and presumption of infinite flexibility inherent within neurochemical selfhood. This chapter draws on a two-year ethnographic study of autism spectrum disorders in North America, investigating the ways in which circulating discourses about medicine, culture, and identity are shaping the emergence, development and use of autism spectrum diagnoses in contexts of daily practice. In this chapter, I explore why individuals with the autism spectrum disorder known as Asperger's syndrome are particularly effective examplars, consumers, and producers of this neurostructural selfhood.

This chapter compares interdisciplinary research that engages genomic science from economics, political science, and sociology. It describes, compares, and evaluates concepts and research findings from new and rapidly developing research fields, and develops a conceptual taxonomy of the social environment.

A selection of programmatic and empirical articles, published mostly since 2008 in leading economics, political science, and sociology journals, were analyzed according to (a) the relationship they pose between their discipline and genomic science, (b) the specific empirical contributions they make to disciplinary research questions, and (c) their conceptualization of the “social environment” as it informs the central problematique of current inquiry: gene-environment interaction.

While all three of the social science disciplines reviewed engage genomic science, economics and political science tend to engage genomics on its own terms, and develop genomic explanations of economic and political behavior. In contrast, sociologists develop arguments that for genomic science to advance, the “environment” in gene-environment interaction needs better theorization and measurement. We develop an approach to the environment that treats it as a set of measurable institutional (rule-like) arrangements, which take the forms of neighborhoods, families, schools, nations, states, and cultures.

Interdisciplinary research that combines insights from the social sciences and genomic science should develop and apply a richer array of concepts and measures if gene-environment research – including epigenetics – is to advance.

This chapter provides a critical review and redirection of three rapidly developing areas of interdisciplinary research on gene-environment interaction and epigenetics.

This paper examines the development of an antecedent model of social partnership, the social “accord” employed by the Labor Government in Australia during the period 1983‐1996. The specific focus of the paper is upon the implementation of the Training Reform Agenda (TRA) in Australian manufacturing. The TRA was designed to provide for the upskilling of existing employees and the enhanced vocational preparation of new employees. This was a joint objective of government, business and union policy and one designed to encourage the growth of high‐wage, high‐skill industries. The achievement of this objective was, however, limited. Social partnership, in the case of the TRA, proved to be a way of legitimating a work change process which delivered greater gains to employers than it did to unions and employees. The partnerships formed under the aegis of the TRA had a limited lifespan and represented a contingent form of relationship between the partners, rather than a seachange in relations.

The Royal Commission appointed “to inquire into the relation of human and animal tuberculosis” has issued its final report, just ten years after it commenced its work.