The idea of "transnational business masculinity" is explored in life-history interviews with Australian managers. Their world is male-dominated but has a strong consciousness of change. An intense and stressful labor process creates multiple linkages among managers and subjects them to mutual scrutiny, a force for gender conservatism. In a context of affluence and anxiety, managers tend to treat their life as an enterprise and self-consciously manage bodies and emotions as well as finances. Economic globalization has heightened their insecurity and changed older patterns of business; different modes of participating in transnational business can be identified. Managerial masculinity is still centrally related to power, but changes from older bourgeois masculinity can also be detected: tolerance of diversity and heightened uncertainty about one's place in the world and gender order. Some support is found for the transnational business masculinity hypothesis, but a spectrum of gender patterns must be recognized in an increasingly complex business environment.

Men's health has emerged as an important public concern that may require new kinds of healthcare interventions and increased resources. Considerable uncertainty and confusion surround prevailing understandings of men's health, particularly those generated by media debate and public policy, and health research has often operated on oversimplified assumptions about men and masculinity. A more useful way of understanding men's health is to adopt a gender-relations approach. This means examining health concerns in the context of men's and women's interactions with each other, and their positions in the larger, multidimensional structure of gender relations. Such an approach raises the issue of differences among men, which is a key issue in recent research on masculinity and an important health issue. The gender-relations approach offers new ways of addressing practical issues of healthcare for men in college environments.

The subjective experience of employment insecurity may be more contradictory than discourses of 'fragmentation' and 'flexploitation' suggest. For young people seeking careers in creative occupations, the expectation of insecure employment conditions has become normalised. This may be the combined effect of intergenerational changes in the youth labour market generally, and the nature of employment in creative industries at all career stages. The article draws from 80 life history interviews conducted in Western Sydney, Australia, a region with high concentrations of unemployment and low socio-economic status. Their perspectives problematise the common assumption that young creative workers seek to resist insecure patterns of work or long for the stable jobs of the past. Partly, they have accepted the injunction for 'vocational restlessness' in their industries. Both in their 'day jobs' and in their attempts to get into their chosen part of the creative industry, they feel that not staying in one position too long can be both liberating and adaptive. Union campaigns highlighting the perils of insecurity are unlikely to resonate with them. JEL Code: J63

Sociological theories about intellectuals need to be rethought in relation to globalization. The interplay between intellectual work and globalization is studied via life-history interviews with 18 Australians involved in natural science. Centre–periphery relations are important in their careers, an interactive process not a simple domination. Quasi-globalization rather than full globalization is the main pattern of internationalization of science. The commodification of knowledge, now an important force in natural-science research, follows similar spatial patterns. Personal and institutional connections remain important vehicles of international connection, alongside traditional formats such as journal publication; electronic communications are emerging as an associated pattern rather than as an alternative. Participating from the periphery is structured by metropolitan predominance, with regional satellite centres complicating the pattern. Participation in elite world networks is possible, though tending to reinforce centre–periphery patterns; which in turn create problems for the reproduction of the scientific workforce in the periphery under a neoliberal political regime.

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The sociology of intellectuals, long focused on the metropole, needs to move to a world scale. Study of global connections in the intellectual labour process is the most promising way. In this article, a method is developed for defining the intellectual labour force and studying its international participation. Results are presented from a survey of 500 Australian intellectual workers. Within this workforce, international connections are common and communication technology is extensively used. Several dimensions of international connection form coherent scales. International connection is stronger in the university sector than the corporate sector. Metropolitan primacy is acknowledged but the intellectual workforce is being reproduced in the periphery. Patterns of international involvement differ by generation and by field, but not by gender. A statistical model predicting levels of international practice is developed, which highlights the importance of social recruitment processes and current institutional functioning. The study demonstrates that a national intelligentsia can be analysed in relation to global processes and an empirical approach to the study of intellectuals on a world scale is possible.

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