The feminist theories have a strong role in the arguments for paid parental leave. Although liberal feminism has been identified as a strong foundation for women's rights, it has limitations in analysing paid parental leave policies because of the disregard of biological differences. If paid leave had been designed in line with this theory, it would have been enacted by the Fairwork Act 2009 and provided up to two years of unpaid leave for both men and women on the birth or adoption of a child. Childbirth, recovery from childbirth and breastfeeding are biological realities that separate parents who adopt from those who do not. On the contrary, cultural feminism, which appreciates women's unique qualities, champions women's rights by celebrating the differences that liberal feminism chooses to ignore. An illustration of cultural feminism is the enactment of the Paid Parental Leave Act 2010, granting women 18 weeks of paid parental leave on the birth or adoption of a child. On the face of it, this arrangement appears to benefit women and is consistent with the most up-to-date ILO Maternity Protection Convention No. 183 and Maternity Protection Recommendation No. 191. However, it falls short of meeting the ‘best interests of the child’ obligations set out by the CRC since it does not meet the 26-week minimum leave duration recommended by the WHO for optimal maternal and child health. Further, the minimum leave duration warrants women to choose between returning to work early or taking unpaid leave or even exiting the workforce to care for their infant for the recommended 26 weeks. Consequently, taking leave or exiting workplace might contribute to the discrimination against women because of family or carer responsibilities, as pointed out by the Law Council of Australia in their submission on the Fairer Paid Parental Leave Bill. Since the 18-week statutory paid parental leave is exclusive to women, an assumption is made through the lens of cultural feminism that women are full-time caregivers and incapable of being long-term family providers. Meanwhile, reconstructive feminism follows the premise that women need equality and argues that equality is achieved by stripping down social, often masculine norms that put women at a disadvantage.

Introduction

Some types of harm inflicted by human beings upon each other are dealt with either informally, such as insults, bad manners and sexual infidelity, or via civil law generally pursued by the individual or organisation harmed, but under state supervision of via the mechanisms of the legal system. Others are more likely to respond in institutionalised ways, such as assault, fraud, theft, sexual abuse and murder, whether as individuals or as collective entities such as organisations or states. The response to each of these types of harm is associated with corresponding doctrines, procedures and courts for dealing with them: civil wrongs and criminal wrongs pursued by the state. The distinction is not rigid: the state also initiates actions in the general interest in civil law, many civil sanctions bear strong resemblances to criminal penalties (Mann 1992), and civil law is still ultimately backed by the sanctions of criminal law. Its boundaries also shift over time, so that one can observe over time a gradual expansion of the kinds of harms covered by criminal law.

The state's assumption of responsibility for the imposition of the sanctions of the criminal justice system, its infliction of punishment and direct constraint of individual liberties and rights, in the name of society as a whole, is also central to the selfunderstanding of modern sovereignty, as the first Chief Justice of Australian High Court, Sir Samuel Griffith, stated in 1915:

A Paid Parental Leave Scheme

Despite public pressure and several attempts by private entities to introduce paid parental leave, it was not introduced in Australia until 2010. Since its introduction, paid parental leave arrangements have been limited, and current arrangements fall significantly below international standards.

1 History of Paid Parental Leave

In 2009, the Productivity Commission was tasked by the Australian Government to undertake a public inquiry regarding paid maternity, paternity and parental leave. At the time of the inquiry, there was a substantial disparity across the Australian workforce regarding access to paid parental leave provisions. Almost one out of two female employees did not have access to paid maternity leave. However, public servants had some form of paid parental leave available to them.

At the conclusion of the inquiry, the Productivity Commission outlined its recommendations in its report entitled: ‘Paid Parental Leave: Support for Parents with Newborn Children’ (‘Report’). The main recommendation of the Report was the introduction of a statutory paid parental leave scheme in Australia. Recommendation 2.1 provided that the paid parental leave scheme should be for a total of 18 weeks, which could be shared by eligible parents, with an additional two weeks of paternity leave reserved for the father sharing the same daily primary care of the child; the payments were equivalent to the adult federal minimum wage for each eligible week. Recommendation 2.6 provided that all those employed with a reasonable degree of attachment to the labour force should be eligible, including the self-employed, contractors and casual employees. Recommendation 2.7 noted that a broad range of family types should be eligible, including conventional couples, lone parents, non-familial adoptive parents, same-sex couples and non-parental primary carers in exceptional cases, as long as they met the employment test.

The Report outlined that the proposed scheme would meet a range of commonly agreed objectives. First, it would generate maternal and child health and welfare benefits through the projected increase in time off parents could obtain from work. Through this time off, a considerable number of families would have an increased capacity to provide exclusive parental care for children for six to nine months. Second, the scheme would promote essential, publicly supported goals within society, particularly so that having a child and taking time off for family reasons could be viewed by society as part of the ordinary course of work and life for working parents.

Introduction

Norbert Elias is recognised today as a major contributor to the development of the sociological tradition over the past century. This chapter introduces readers to the broad oeuvre of figurational research on sport and leisure, produced by Elias in collaboration with Eric Dunning in Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Elias and Dunning 2008 [1986]). Matters of the human body and excitement processes were also outlined in Elias's (2009a) work on the sociology of knowledge where he eschewed the dichotomy between ‘body’ and ‘mind’. Here, we examine some of the creative seams in their work that have been taken up by successive generations. As we have noted elsewhere (for example, Liston 2011; Maguire 2005), there is now a 50-year corpus of figurational research on sport and leisure forms throughout the world. This has been ambitious in scope and precise in conceptual development: all the while being open to empirical verification and testing. Taken as a whole, it confirms Elias and Dunning’s (2008) basic contention that these phenomena could not be understood without reference to the overall social standards of conduct and sentiment because knowledge about sport and leisure was knowledge about society. To illustrate this, we outline the main ideas set out by Elias and Dunning on sport, leisure and the quest for excitement/exciting significance (Elias and Dunning 2008; Maguire 1992). This is a necessary precursor to appreciating the contribution of figurational work to understanding violence and sport and the social roots of football hooliganism conducted by the Leicester School. Thereafter we explore matters of identity, embodiment and power relations that are revealed in figurational research on medicine and health, and on gendered and national identities. Initially, we provide an overview of the theory of civilising processes as it applies to sport, leisure and the human body. This is important because ‘sociologist of sport’ is too limiting a descriptor for many of the researchers mentioned here, including Eric Dunning most notably.

Civilising Processes, the Body and the Quest for ‘Exciting Significance’

People do not just have an embodied self, a ‘body’: it is more correct to think of people's ‘bodies’ and ‘bodies of people’ as living formations of people acting out their lives in cultural and structural contexts.

Introduction

Although Norbert Elias's On the Process of Civilisation is by far his most widely known work, his sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences deserves to be regarded as of at least equal significance for sociology and cognate disciplines. Indeed, it has even been argued (Mennell 2022, 24) that On the Process of Civilisation should be seen merely as an early empirical case study illustrating Elias's vision of how sociological knowledge can be pursued.

One reason why Elias's sociology of knowledge is less well-known is that it was developed gradually in tandem with painstaking empirical work, and across an array of books and essays. Its beginnings can be glimpsed in his earliest writings in the 1920s and 1930s (Elias 2006), but its first fuller expression came after he had worked on the empirical–theoretical studies presented in On the Process of Civilisation and The Court Society. This first formal working out came in 1956, in an article in the British Journal of Sociolog y entitled ‘Problems of involvement and detachment’, a title that led to its being commonly misunderstood as yet another essay on ‘objectivity’ in the manner of Max Weber, rather than as an outline of what became a fully-fledged sociological theory of knowledge. The theory was further developed in numerous essays in the last two decades of Elias's life, the 1970s and 1980s.

Where to Find Elias's Theory of Knowledge

Given that these writings are so scattered, it is as well to say where the main components can be found. The original 1956 essay is included in the book Involvement and Detachment (Elias 2007a [1987]), along with an equally important essay entitled ‘The fishermen in the maelstrom’, two fragments ‘On the great evolution’, and a substantial Introduction by Elias. A dozen late essays that appeared in many different books and journals are collected for the first time in Essays on the Sociolog y of Knowledge and the Sciences (Elias 2009a). But besides these, there are two important late books that are highly relevant: An Essay on Time (Elias 2007b [1992], and The Symbol Theory (Elias 2011 [1991]). Finally, Elias left behind a mass of usually unfinished papers, some of which have been published since his death by permission of the Norbert Elias Foundation and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. Two are particularly relevant to the concerns of this chapter.

The main purpose of this chapter is to present Norbert Elias's core contribution to political sociology. During Elias's lifetime, he was famed for his book On the Process of Civilisation and his attempt to develop an alternative to mainstream sociological theory. Although most sociologists would agree that parts of Elias's work would count as political sociology only a very few would characterise him as a ‘political sociologist’ in a narrow sense. Our aim is not to prove that he was more a political sociologist than anything else but to demonstrate that Elias made a significant contribution to political sociology – a contribution which often is overlooked, neglected or forgotten. We also hope to persuade political sociologists to go back and read Elias because his theoretical concepts and analyses are more relevant today than ever. In other words, there is an important Eliasian legacy we need to explore.

Elias was enormously prolific and so we cannot present and discuss his entire political sociology within this chapter. Therefore, we have decided to look into a particular problematique – the problem of state formation, consolidation and decline, and how these processes are closely connected with other processes of violence and warfare – a central turning point in Elias's sociological theory. We will then move on to his key concepts: survival units and figurations. Subsequently, we will present some of Elias's ideas about community, civil society, we-feeling, national habitus, nationalism and the nationstate. The chapter is structured according to key interrelated aspects of European state formation processes:

• 1. Elias and state formation theory

• 2. Survival units and human development: war as a constant

• 3. What is a survival unit?

• 4. European civilising processes, figurational dynamics and competing survival units

• (AD 800–1500)

• 5. National habitus and nation state

• 6. We-feelings and nationalism

• 7. Concluding remarks: from sharp observation to innovative theoretical consistency

1. Elias and State-Formation Theory

In the field of state-formation research, we find a number of competing theories and approaches with different emphases and explanatory factors, embedded in philosophies of science that, in some cases, operate with a range of independent or intermediate variables.

Introduction

In May 2021, one year into – and in large measure prompted by – the Covid-19 pandemic, the New Zealand Government announced a ‘once-in-a-generation reset’ of the country's immigration system (Radio New Zealand 2021). Since then, the New Zealand Productivity Commission (NZPC), which was tasked with establishing how to ‘make immigration fit for the future’, has articulated recommendations for reform (New Zealand Productivity Commission 2021; 2022), and the Labour Government has recently introduced new migration policies. Overall, recommendations and policy changes so far have aimed to ‘rebalance’ migration by reducing the high levels of largely low-skilled temporary migration that characterised the decade leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic and by simultaneously prioritising highly skilled and highly paid migrants for work visas and pathways to residence. While these developments are rapid, and ongoing, in brief, key elements of this shift so far are the newly introduced Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) which includes salary thresholds that determine both eligibility for attaining the visa and rights regarding length of residence, as well as the Green List which offers fast-tracked residence for migrants in occupations that are highly sought after in Aotearoa. Michael Wood, the current Minister for Immigration, said of the policy change: ‘It marked a shift away from a low-cost labour model that had predominated over the last 15 years, to be more focused on needed skills, sustainable workforces and fair treatment of migrant workers’ (Palmer and McCulloch 2022).

Challenging this perception of fairness, this chapter argues that many of the discourses that inform the NZPC's recommendations as well as the policies introduced so far will effectively further entrench the inequities that have been created by a long-standing and increasingly economistic approach to migration. This approach has pro-gressively encouraged ‘permanent temporariness’, especially of workers categorised as low skilled and low income to fill labour market gaps while curtailing their residence rights (Collins 2019). Pathways to residence have become obstructed with selection criteria that require prospective residents to meet a range of qualifications, skills, wealth and/or, increasingly, income requirements. As a result, the security that permanent residence and naturalisation entail are only accessible to those migrants who are deemed ‘valuable’ settlers.

Introduction

The introduction of the 1987 Immigration Act fundamentally shifted the immigration system of Aotearoa/New Zealand. It transformed the system's previous race-based immigration policy into an economic-centric immigration policy and opened its borders to a much wider range of immigrants worldwide. Although strengthening family connections of immigrants was a major feature of the Act (Trlin 1992), a series of Aotearoa/New Zealand family immigration policy changes since then have increasingly restricted immigrants’ ability to reunite with their families from their country of origin. This is particularly true for the reunification between first-generation adult immigrants and their older parents (Bedford and Liu 2013; Ran and Liu 2021).

After more than three decades of embracing this immigration policy change, alongside the rapid increase of immigrants from all over the world – particularly Asian immigrants – a substantial new Chinese immigrant community from the People's Republic of China (PRC) was established in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Liu and Ran 2021b). The practice of building a close-knit multigenerational family is an important feature of family life for this immigrant group (Ran 2020). Often, multiple generations from both the PRC and Aotearoa/New Zealand sustain close ties in highly interdependent relationships across different stages of the members’ migration process (Liu 2018). However, evidence reveals that changes in family immigration policy in Aotearoa/New Zealand have had significant impacts on those families, including reshaping their family maintenance patterns and intergenerational dynamics (Ho and Bedford 2008; Liu and Ran 2021a, 2021b).

The impact of those changes on the well-being and functioning of these families and their individual family members has become an issue of increasing academic interest in recent decades, particularly with those families who adopted new family arrangements involuntarily mainly because of the changing family immigration policy (Bedford and Liu 2013; Brandhorst et al. 2020; Bryceson 2022; Ho and Bedford 2008). Therefore, a research project was created and undertaken by the author to explore the relationship between people's experiences of transnational migration and their multigenerational family dynamics (from 2017 to 2021). The project, which informs this chapter, had a particular focus on identifying the impact of the family immigration policy in Aotearoa/New Zealand on the intergenerational relations of Chinese immigrant families.

Drawing on the major findings of the research project, this chapter discusses the impact of the recent changes to the family immigration policy on Chinese immigrant families in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Introduction

On 19 March 2020, the New Zealand Government announced that the country's international border would be closed to entry of anyone who was not a New Zealand citizen or permanent resident. This unprecedented decision matched that of an increasing number of countries worldwide in an attempt to contain the spread of a new strain of severe acute respiratory coronavirus, now widely known as Covid-19.

At the time New Zealand's border closed, there were over 300,000 people on temporary study, work and visitor visas in the country and at least as many New Zealand citizens and permanent residents temporarily absent overseas. As borders closed and associated travel restrictions were implemented worldwide, international air travel reduced significantly. Getting home quickly became impossible for most of those temporarily in New Zealand or for New Zealanders wanting to return. Governments globally were scrambling to address the dual challenge of containing the virus while also addressing the plight of those whose visa status did not allow them to stay long term in (or return to) the countries where they were temporarily resident.

There is an extensive literature on the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on international migration. For migrant workers, of which there were an estimated 164 million in 2017 (ILO 2018), the Covid-19 pandemic presented challenges to health, livelihoods and mobility. In many countries, migrant workers make up a sizeable share of the workforce ‘on the front lines’, carrying out jobs in essential sectors including health and aged care, transport, construction and agriculture (ILO 2020). States’ measures to control transmission of Covid-19, in the form of border closures, quarantine and travel restrictions, disrupted transport networks and the ability of people to move. For some migrant workers, border closures meant they were unable to enter a destination country for work; for others, travel restrictions meant they were caught in the host country and unable to return home. This had significant implications for workers and their families who relied, to some extent, on incomes earned overseas and remittances to support livelihoods at home (World Bank 2020).

In common with other states worldwide, Pacific Island countries and those on the Pacific Rim, including Australia and New Zealand, responded to the pandemic by restricting entry of non-citizens and implementing requirements to spend time in Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) facilities for persons permitted to enter the country.

This short chapter concludes this book, with a focus on theoretical insights into how societal dynamics and changes in China's recent past can be better understood and what practical inferences may be drawn from this analysis. As noted in Chapter one, this analysis is conducted from the perspective of competitive social repositioning, some features of which need to be further considered. Special attention must also be paid to the political importance of the Three-Represents theory. This theory was initially put forward by Jiang Zemin in early 2000 as the ideological responses of his leadership generation to the new social class structure, societal dynamics and many other changes taking place in post-Mao China. Two decades after it was proposed, the Three-Represents theory is virtually abandoned by the post-Jiang leadership, despite the occasional, and largely ceremonial, mention in some official media reports. However, it remains not only a conclusion drawn by reformist Chinese leaders from the previous reforming decades, but also a set of ideological and political responses to the main hurdles in modern-ising the CCP from a revolutionary party to a ruling party.

The first section of this final chapter summarises the analysis in earlier discussion chapters and offers further explication of the competitive social repositioning perspective, especially its theoretical and analytical usefulness and importance in examining deep-rooted social dynamics and subsequent social changes. The second section con-siders the practical implications of this study, including a brief analysis of the fate of Jiang Zemin's Three-Represents ideas over the past two decades. Suggestions for future research are offered with the objective of promoting the use of a competitive social repositioning lens in future studies.

Perspective Matters

The three and a half decades from 1964 to 2000, which form the subject of this book, were a historical period when China's economy, people's living conditions and political culture deteriorated to a new crisis level and then started climbing upwards. Specifically, during this period, the Chinese people suffered from the famine of the early 1960s and were then dragged into a decade-long Cultural Revolution. The latter led to widespread support for leaders who had different ideas and governing strategies from Mao, driving China onto the reform track from the late 1970s. Throughout the above social process, a high proportion of Chinese people actively participated in continuous and competitive social repositionings, making the whole country both chaotic and dynamic.

The continued expansion of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition for the past two millennia and the flexibility of its expression hinges on the fact that the Rāmāyaṇa—as A. K. Ramanujan reminds us—is “always already” (1991, p. 46). The trouble is not in locating its stories. The trouble comes with trying to negotiate all the different ways the stories coexist—all the ways in which they have “already” existed and will continue to “already” exist. Throughout the course of this study, I have tried to connect some of these stories to each other and to the contexts of their creation to demonstrate just how complex the inner workings of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition really are. We must not take for granted the stories we receive; they have been through a long history of change and it is in the social propulsions behind such change that we locate literature's deeper meanings and its effects on the people who create it, read it, pass it on, and bring it into new avenues of expression.

Since the beginning of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, whenever that may have been, people have evoked the Rāmāyaṇa and the many morals, controversies, truths, and fabrications buried within its stories to bolster any number of social, religious, and political viewpoints. The focus here has been one story that has splintered into numerous modes of narration depending on the needs and intentions of its tellers. As Śambūka's death toll climbs, his narrative tradition gets broader, more complex, and more all-encompassing. Each new iteration carries with it a new message and a fresh perspective on the meaning behind his life and death. Śambūka has died over and over again in a near endless stream of stories, poems, paintings, speeches, dramas, dances, movies, and more. With his story uniquely situated at the intersection of artistic innovation, caste politics, religion, and violence, each expression of his death is poised to comment on a range of social issues and even on the nature of the Rāmāyaṇa itself.

The purpose underlying Śambūka's death has been evolving since the first time his story was penned in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa. By showing some concern for Śambūka's afterlife, Kālidāsa used the story to demonstrate Rāma's graciousness and authority in alignment with the Gupta Empire's religious innovations and political ambitions.

The formalization of the structures of knowledge as the “third arena” of the modern world-system analogous to those of the axial division of labor and the interstate system completes the view of human reality originally offered by Immanuel Wallerstein. This conceptualization accounts for the constitutive structure, secular trends and cyclical rhythms operating in the sociocultural field. It grew out of, indeed was the response to, a series of well-founded critiques of the early outlines of the world-systems perspective. A research proposal drafted for a working group at the Fernand Braudel Center and published in 1977 stated, in the language of the time:

Hence, the need to integrate the study of large-scale sociocultural questions, clearly implicated in any understanding of historical capitalism, with studies dealing more explicitly with economic or political processes was recognized early on.

From Modernization Theory to World-Systems Analysis

Coming of age during the Cold War, Immanuel Wallerstein became intensely interested in world affairs, and especially anticolonial movements. As a young scholar in the 1950s, he soon began to see himself through the lens of what was then called “political sociology” (Wallerstein 2013, 196) and his academic formation was imbedded in the dominant theoretical/methodological approach to world-scale questions, “modernization.”1 This approach focused on the nation-state as the primary unit in a comparative framework and emphasized “field studies of ‘emerging,’ ‘new,’ ‘non-Western’ nations” (Almond 1966, 96). However, it also embraced issues of large-scale inequality, which linked social scientists with policy planners harboring Cold War agendas such as alliance formations.

Criticisms brought to light the shortcomings of the modernization approach as theory and for its Eurocentric and ideological underpinnings. Practitioners posited a developmental hierarchy through which societies passed, a generalized historical trajectory, with contemporary Western social organization typified by capitalism/industrialism and (representative) democracy indicating the direction and end point of the development of all societies, including, then, what was known as the Third World.

Immanuel Wallerstein's grand and sweeping narrative of the modern condition hinges on a central and seemingly slippery, deceptive and allegedly criminal character: namely, liberalism. Indeed, liberalism is the “cement” that, he says, binds the modern world order. It gives it its unity and orchestrates its evolution and development. From its beginnings as an ideological response to the French Revolution in 1789 to its apotheosis in the global hegemony of the United States after the Second World War, to its dissolution in the collapse of Soviet communism, liberalism is the analytical thread that animates Wallerstein's world-systems analysis (WSA). This chapter aims to explicate and engage with his account of modernity and to focus specifically on the role he assigns to liberalism. I focus on three texts in which Wallerstein sets out his account of liberalism and his detailed critique of its role in the globalization of capitalism—the fourth volume of his monumental series The Modern World-System (Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914), After Liberalism and World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction.

It is essential to first briefly set out the idea of WSA, which is the theoretical architecture that supports the narrative of modernity in which liberalism plays such a prominent role. With this background in hand, I will turn to a close examination of liberalism as ideology, emphasizing the very particular and specific meanings Wallerstein assigns to these crucial terms. However, this task cannot be achieved simply by a conceptual analysis of these ideas since it is crucial to the very idea of WSA that such ideas are embedded in their particular historical contexts. Liberalism is the dominant and dominating ideology beginning in the aftermath of 1789, but since its meaning is thoroughly embedded in time and space, its existence and effects have not only a location first in Western Europe and the world as a whole, but also a time—a beginning and an end. The third section examines Wallerstein's surprising and contrary claim that rather than representing the final victory of liberalism, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall signaled the final defeat of liberalism as a world-dominating ideology.

After Brahminism gained a strong footing in post-Mauryan South Asia—a footing typified by the codification of varṇadharma—the next great South Asian empire, the Guptas, crafted their own schematic for an imperial religion. With the Guptas came an imperially sponsored Vaiṣṇavism marked by a burgeoning temple culture that involved elaborate structures and public spaces that provided the public with a new kind of access to religion (Willis, 2009). The Guptas’ presentation of Vaiṣṇavism opened Viṣṇu worship up to an unprecedented level of popularity, which extended to Viṣṇu's various incarnations (avatāras), including Rāma. Naturally, a text that frames Rāma as both divine figure and avatāra of Viṣṇu as well as a hero in his own right was bound to benefit from the momentum of the religious movement spearheaded by the Guptas. The story of the Rāmāyaṇa, then, saw a rejuvenated life in this new era of South Asian history.

The story of Rāma was, at this point, still largely defined by Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa. As interest in the story grew, critical perspectives on this quintessential Rāma text began to emerge. In the world of the VR, it is Rāma's responsibility as king to maintain the prevailing social order by which his kingdom is to be governed and mete out the necessary punishments when that order is violated. The text's Śambūka episode exemplifies both a violation by a member of Ayodhyā's society and the proper response to it, carried out by the king himself. Be that as it may, Rāma's unquestioningly swift action against Śambūka placed him in a role of enforcer that is at odds with the compassionate image of Rāma that pervades a great deal of the epic. The difficulty in reconciling these two seemingly conflicting images of Rāma created a troubling puzzle for later authors who lived in a world where Rāma's divinity and the idealism it represented were becoming increasingly accepted. How could they reframe Rāma's involvement in Śambūka's death to better suit the changing expectations of their audience without abandoning the issue of Rāma upholding Ayodhyā's social structures?