L Taksa
Biographic Data
| ID | 27194 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Taksa |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Taksa |
| SIGNATURE | TAKSA L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0532-2573 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Excavating the Roots of Modern Slavery and Wage Theft: Uncovering Experiences of and Resistance to the Truck System in Colonial Australia
This article uncovers the roots of what we now refer to as wage theft and modern slavery by focusing on the history of the truck system. Operating over several centuries and traversing numerous industries and occupations in many continents, this system involved non-monetary payment in goods and employer imposed restrictive accommodation, among other exploitative practices, which resulted in indebtedness often referred to as a form of slavery. Fol…
The ‘Healthy Migrant Effect’ and Ageing: Life Expectancy and Healthy Life Expectancy of the Migrant and Native-born Populations in Australia
How health status changes as migrants age and become to their host country remains underexplored. This study investigates two key indicators—life expectancy (LE) and healthy life expectancy (HLE)—among migrants in Australia using nationally representative secondary data, including census-based Estimated Resident Population, 1% Census sample, and mortality statistics. LE refers to the average number of years a person is expected to live, while HLE…
Rail relations: Aboriginal storywork and remaking Australia's settler-colonial infrastructure
Australian railway histories are dominated by narratives of engineering triumphs, colonial expansion into empty land, and bringing civilisation and development through railway infrastructure. These settler-colonial stories can be read back on themselves as histories and geographies of Aboriginal dispossession and colonial possession. Indeed, Aboriginal people, lands, waterways, and cultures have always been implicated in railway infrastructures, …
Inequality in Precarious Work
Women in corporate networks: An introduction
This article is designed as an introduction to the Business History special issue, ‘Women in corporate networks’. To begin, we address the main theoretical and methodological issues. We argue that business historians should engage in greater dialogue with feminist approaches, by which we mean a study of the gendered nature of power relations in business networks. We show that network analysis can be a useful tool for mapping the gendered structur…
Changing impact of Covid-19 on life expectancy 2019–2023 and its decomposition: Findings from 27 countries
The pandemic has caused substantial short-term mortality variations during 2019-2023 in the 27 countries studied. Although most of the 27 countries experienced increased life expectancy after 2022, life expectancy in 22 countries still has not entirely regained its pre-pandemic level by May 2023. Threats of COVID-19 are more prominent for older adults and men, but special attention is needed for women aged 85+ years
Nativity in the healthy migrant effect: Evidence from Australia
Migrant health constitutes an important public health issue; however, variations in the 'healthy migrant effect' among migrants of different nativity are not adequately understood. To fill this gap, this study examines the life expectancy (LE) and healthy life expectancy (HLE) of the Australian-born population and eight major migrant groups in Australia for 2006, 2011 and 2016. The results show that compared with the Australian-born population, t…
Decomposing the differences in healthy life expectancy between migrants and natives: The ‘healthy migrant effect’ and its age variations in Australia
English skills and early labour market integration: Evidence from humanitarian migrants in Australia
This paper uses panel data from the Building a New Life in Australia survey to examine the relationship between proficiency in English and labour market outcomes among humanitarian migrants. We show that having better general or speaking skills in English is associated with a higher propensity for participation in the labour force and success in getting a job. We also find that participating in an English training programme is strongly and positi…
Covid-19 and the shifting industrial landscape
The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has fuelled debate about domestic industry and manufacturing in light of shocks to global supply chains and shortages of medical and personal protective equipment (PPE). Nevertheless, debates have been poorly attuned to geography and history. Calls for reinvigorated domestic manufacturing conceal the degree to which industrial landscapes are already entwined in geometries of power. This is especially so at ports-…
Remembering and Incorporating Migrant Workers in Australian Industrial Heritage
Despite Australia’s long history of immigration, its cultural diversity, and its commitment to multiculturalism since 1973, migrant workers, their work, and their struggles for rights and improved conditions have been marginalized and in some cases entirely overlooked as part of migration heritage and industrial heritage. This article examines how such neglect contributes to a collective forgetting that has implications for understandings of clas…
Work experiences of Australian cancer survivors with lymphoedema: A qualitative study
Our qualitative study addresses a significant gap in the scholarship on return-to-work after cancer by examining the impact of secondary lymphoedema on individuals in paid employment. We undertook an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of interviews with 14 cancer survivors (13 women) with secondary lymphoedema in Sydney, Australia. Our interviewees were engaged in paid employment during and after their lymphoedema diagnosis. In addition to di…
A Reflection on Jillian (Jill) Isobel Roe (1940-2017) and Her Contribution to the Study of Labour History
A Reflection on Jillian (Jill) Isobel Roe (1940-2017) and Her Contribution to the Study of Labour History
Shifts in Intergenerational Mobility of Indian Immigrant Entrepreneurs
The objective of this article is to examine the shift in the intergenerational mobility of Indian immigrant entrepreneurs in Australia. Based on a qualitative methodology, this article reports on the differences in the entrepreneurial attitudes of push and pull and the aptitudes of social and human capital between pre 2000 and post 2000 immigrant entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that the post 2000 Indian migrant entrepreneurs in Australia are …
Cultural capital in business higher education: Reconsidering the Graduate Attributes Movement and the Focus on Employability
This article examines the increased interest being shown by Australian business faculties in the development of students' employability skills. Many universities have demonstrated their commitment to translating such interest into practice by elaborating lists of ‘graduate attributes’ in order to enable the development of generic skills and by encouraging their staff to adopt specific pedagogical tools for such ends. This approach is underpinned …
The impact of gender culture on women's career trajectories: An Australian case study
Purpose The aim of this paper is to examine the influence of gender culture and gender subtext on the career trajectories of women. It examines the organization as an arena in which underlying cultural processes maintain gender distinctions and barriers, thereby limiting the efficacy of policies specifically designed to increase the number of women at senior levels. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on the findings of a qualitative cas…
Farewell
Labor History and Public History in Australia: Allies or Uneasy Bedfellows
This paper reflects on the ways in which public labor history and more populist forms of public history have intersected and/or diverged in Australia since the 1970s. By comparing various labor heritage programs and public history interpretation strategies at four redeveloped industrial heritage sites, it examines how both approaches have conceived and represented workers' history and the relationship between past and present, industrialization a…
The Material Culture of an Industrial Artifact: Interpreting Control, Defiance, and Everyday Resistance at the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops
About as Popular as a Dose of Clap’: Steam, Diesel and Masculinity at the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops
The case of the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops is examined to study the working conditions and everyday lives of their employees. The paper attempts to understand the impact the shift from steam to diesel locomotion by reviewing oral and literary narratives. The author concludes that the steam locomotion defined and confirmed the masculine identify, while the switch to diesel undermined that assumption. It appears that the move to die…
Public History Review Essay
Machines and Ghosts: Politics, Industrial Heritage and the History of Working Life at the Eveleigh Workshops
Sydney's Eveleigh railway workshops operated for just over a century between the 1880s and the late 1980s when their railway operations were terminated. Since then Eveleigh has been recognised as one of Australia's important sites of industrial heritage. This paper examines the political, legal and administrative conditions that have shaped Eveleigh's adaptive re-use and heritage management. In doing so it highlights the processes by which indust…
Places, Protests, and Memorabilia: The Labour Heritage Register of New South Wales
Terry Irving & Lucy Taksa, Places, Protests, and Memorabilia; The Labour Heritage Register of New South Wales, Industrial Relations research Centre, university of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002. pp. xvi + 197. $30 paper; Jeff Sparrow & Jill Sparrow, Radical Melbourne: A Secret History, Vulgar Press, Melbourne, 2001. pp. 220. $44.95 paper
Retooling the Class Factory: Response 3 Family, Childhood and Identities: Working Class History from a Personalised Perspective
Retooling the Class Factory : Response 3 Family, Childhood and Identities: Working Class History from a Personalised Perspective
Pumping the Life-Blood into Politics and Place: Labour Culture and the Eveleigh Railway Workshops
This article examines interconnections between workplace, culture and politics at the New South Wales Government's Eveleigh railway workshops and in the predominantly working class communities that surrounded it between the 1880s and the 1930s. It begins by considering the nature of culture and its political and spatial dimensions. On this basis it identifies the cultural building blocks that existed in the workshops and beyond their boundaries a…
Cultural capital in business higher education: Reconsidering the Graduate Attributes Movement and the Focus on Employability
This article examines the increased interest being shown by Australian business faculties in the development of students' employability skills. Many universities have demonstrated their commitment to translating such interest into practice by elaborating lists of ‘graduate attributes’ in order to enable the development of generic skills and by encouraging their staff to adopt specific pedagogical tools for such ends. This approach is underpinned …
Machines and Ghosts: Politics, Industrial Heritage and the History of Working Life at the Eveleigh Workshops
Sydney's Eveleigh railway workshops operated for just over a century between the 1880s and the late 1980s when their railway operations were terminated. Since then Eveleigh has been recognised as one of Australia's important sites of industrial heritage. This paper examines the political, legal and administrative conditions that have shaped Eveleigh's adaptive re-use and heritage management. In doing so it highlights the processes by which indust…
Like a Bicycle, Forever Teetering between Individualism and Collectivism: Considering Community in Relation to Labour History
Like a Bicycle, Forever Teetering between Individualism and Collectivism: Considering Community in Relation to Labour History
English skills and early labour market integration: Evidence from humanitarian migrants in Australia
This paper uses panel data from the Building a New Life in Australia survey to examine the relationship between proficiency in English and labour market outcomes among humanitarian migrants. We show that having better general or speaking skills in English is associated with a higher propensity for participation in the labour force and success in getting a job. We also find that participating in an English training programme is strongly and positi…
The impact of gender culture on women's career trajectories: An Australian case study
Purpose The aim of this paper is to examine the influence of gender culture and gender subtext on the career trajectories of women. It examines the organization as an arena in which underlying cultural processes maintain gender distinctions and barriers, thereby limiting the efficacy of policies specifically designed to increase the number of women at senior levels. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on the findings of a qualitative cas…
The Material Culture of an Industrial Artifact: Interpreting Control, Defiance, and Everyday Resistance at the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops
Women in corporate networks: An introduction
This article is designed as an introduction to the Business History special issue, ‘Women in corporate networks’. To begin, we address the main theoretical and methodological issues. We argue that business historians should engage in greater dialogue with feminist approaches, by which we mean a study of the gendered nature of power relations in business networks. We show that network analysis can be a useful tool for mapping the gendered structur…
Covid-19 and the shifting industrial landscape
The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has fuelled debate about domestic industry and manufacturing in light of shocks to global supply chains and shortages of medical and personal protective equipment (PPE). Nevertheless, debates have been poorly attuned to geography and history. Calls for reinvigorated domestic manufacturing conceal the degree to which industrial landscapes are already entwined in geometries of power. This is especially so at ports-…
Work experiences of Australian cancer survivors with lymphoedema: A qualitative study
Our qualitative study addresses a significant gap in the scholarship on return-to-work after cancer by examining the impact of secondary lymphoedema on individuals in paid employment. We undertook an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of interviews with 14 cancer survivors (13 women) with secondary lymphoedema in Sydney, Australia. Our interviewees were engaged in paid employment during and after their lymphoedema diagnosis. In addition to di…
Labor History and Public History in Australia: Allies or Uneasy Bedfellows
This paper reflects on the ways in which public labor history and more populist forms of public history have intersected and/or diverged in Australia since the 1970s. By comparing various labor heritage programs and public history interpretation strategies at four redeveloped industrial heritage sites, it examines how both approaches have conceived and represented workers' history and the relationship between past and present, industrialization a…
About as Popular as a Dose of Clap’: Steam, Diesel and Masculinity at the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops
The case of the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops is examined to study the working conditions and everyday lives of their employees. The paper attempts to understand the impact the shift from steam to diesel locomotion by reviewing oral and literary narratives. The author concludes that the steam locomotion defined and confirmed the masculine identify, while the switch to diesel undermined that assumption. It appears that the move to die…
All a matter of timing’: Managerial innovation and workplace culture in the New South Wales railways and tramways prior to 1921∗
All a Matter of Timing' examines how the implementation of scientific management altered spatial arrangements and social interaction in the New South Wales Railways and Tramways Department's workshops during the early decades of the twentieth century. The article argues that the ideology and techniques associated with this managerial innovation were adopted to challenge the collectivist practices and beliefs that characterised the workshops' indu…
Workers' Education in Australia and Canada: A Comparative Approach to Labour's Cultural History
This essay investigates the formal and informal educational pursuits of the labour movements and working-class communities of Australia and Canada. It suggests that worker education in the two countries was conducted by similar institutions, notably by branches of England's Workers Educational Association (WEA) but within very different cultural contexts. By juxtaposing these two national cases we demonstrate that labour's reliance on such commun…
Technology, Work, Gender and Citizenship at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops Precinct: An Historical Interpretation of Landscape, Identity and Mobilisation
Although this report relates to a project that has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), it builds on 16 years of intermittent interest in the Eveleigh railway workshops. My first contact with this site occurred in 1983 because of its association with ihe NSW General Strike of 1917, which was the subject of my Honours thesis. Later, during my PhD research, I focused more attention on Eveleigh because it offered a good case for inv…
Defence Not Defiance: Social Protest and the NSW General Strike of 1917
On 20 July 1917, despite previous assurances that conditions of labour would not be altered during the war, a new costing system was implemented in the workshops of the NSW Department of Railways and Tramways which involved the use of three cards for recording the time taken to perform work. * The nature of the system itself, combined with the refusal by the Railway Commissioners and the government to participate in negotiations regarding its int…
Rail relations: Aboriginal storywork and remaking Australia's settler-colonial infrastructure
Australian railway histories are dominated by narratives of engineering triumphs, colonial expansion into empty land, and bringing civilisation and development through railway infrastructure. These settler-colonial stories can be read back on themselves as histories and geographies of Aboriginal dispossession and colonial possession. Indeed, Aboriginal people, lands, waterways, and cultures have always been implicated in railway infrastructures, …
Decomposing the differences in healthy life expectancy between migrants and natives: The ‘healthy migrant effect’ and its age variations in Australia
Remembering and Incorporating Migrant Workers in Australian Industrial Heritage
Despite Australia’s long history of immigration, its cultural diversity, and its commitment to multiculturalism since 1973, migrant workers, their work, and their struggles for rights and improved conditions have been marginalized and in some cases entirely overlooked as part of migration heritage and industrial heritage. This article examines how such neglect contributes to a collective forgetting that has implications for understandings of clas…
Public History Review Essay
Pumping the Life-Blood into Politics and Place: Labour Culture and the Eveleigh Railway Workshops
This article examines interconnections between workplace, culture and politics at the New South Wales Government's Eveleigh railway workshops and in the predominantly working class communities that surrounded it between the 1880s and the 1930s. It begins by considering the nature of culture and its political and spatial dimensions. On this basis it identifies the cultural building blocks that existed in the workshops and beyond their boundaries a…
The Factory Floor. A Visual and Oral Record 1900-1960
Working Life: Arguments about work in Australian society
Defence Not Defiance: Social Protest and the NSW General Strike of 1917
On 20 July 1917, despite previous assurances that conditions of labour would not be altered during the war, a new costing system was implemented in the workshops of the NSW Department of Railways and Tramways which involved the use of three cards for recording the time taken to perform work. * The nature of the system itself, combined with the refusal by the Railway Commissioners and the government to participate in negotiations regarding its int…
Culture and the Labour Movement: Essays in New Zealand Labour History
The Australian Society for the Study of Labour History: International Links
Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading 1890-1930
Australian Readers Remember. An oral History of Reading 1890-1930
Toil, Struggle and Repose: Oral History and the Exploration of Labour Culture in Australia
Associations between labour and culture have been expressed by workers and their leaders, consciously and unconsciously, overtly and obliquely, from time immemorial. Indeed, the threads connecting these two phenomena have been woven into the language used to represent them during different epochs. Labour was originally assumed in the word 'culture' which was derived from the idea of cultivation and the process of tilling land. Similarly, the unio…
Travail, luttes, loisirs: L'histoire orale et l'exploration de la culture ouvrière en Australie
International and Comparative Labor History', Report on the 16th Annual North American Labor History Conference
'International and Comparative Labor History', Report on the 16th Annual North American Labor History Conference
Labour Heritage Network
Following a year of informal discussions with historians, heritage professionals and labour movement leaders on the need to give labour heritage a stronger profile in the Australian community a Labour Heritage Network was launched on 20 February 1995 by Terry Irving and Lucy Taksa. The rationale for this initiative was the realisation that while a growing interest in labour heritage in other countries had resulted in the creation of national muse…
Workers' Education in Australia and Canada: A Comparative Approach to Labour's Cultural History
This essay investigates the formal and informal educational pursuits of the labour movements and working-class communities of Australia and Canada. It suggests that worker education in the two countries was conducted by similar institutions, notably by branches of England's Workers Educational Association (WEA) but within very different cultural contexts. By juxtaposing these two national cases we demonstrate that labour's reliance on such commun…
All a matter of timing’: Managerial innovation and workplace culture in the New South Wales railways and tramways prior to 1921∗
All a Matter of Timing' examines how the implementation of scientific management altered spatial arrangements and social interaction in the New South Wales Railways and Tramways Department's workshops during the early decades of the twentieth century. The article argues that the ideology and techniques associated with this managerial innovation were adopted to challenge the collectivist practices and beliefs that characterised the workshops' indu…
Technology, Work, Gender and Citizenship at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops Precinct: An Historical Interpretation of Landscape, Identity and Mobilisation
Although this report relates to a project that has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), it builds on 16 years of intermittent interest in the Eveleigh railway workshops. My first contact with this site occurred in 1983 because of its association with ihe NSW General Strike of 1917, which was the subject of my Honours thesis. Later, during my PhD research, I focused more attention on Eveleigh because it offered a good case for inv…
Pumping the Life-Blood into Politics and Place: Labour Culture and the Eveleigh Railway Workshops
This article examines interconnections between workplace, culture and politics at the New South Wales Government's Eveleigh railway workshops and in the predominantly working class communities that surrounded it between the 1880s and the 1930s. It begins by considering the nature of culture and its political and spatial dimensions. On this basis it identifies the cultural building blocks that existed in the workshops and beyond their boundaries a…
Like a Bicycle, Forever Teetering between Individualism and Collectivism: Considering Community in Relation to Labour History
Like a Bicycle, Forever Teetering between Individualism and Collectivism: Considering Community in Relation to Labour History
Retooling the Class Factory: Response 3 Family, Childhood and Identities: Working Class History from a Personalised Perspective
Retooling the Class Factory : Response 3 Family, Childhood and Identities: Working Class History from a Personalised Perspective
Public History Review Essay
Machines and Ghosts: Politics, Industrial Heritage and the History of Working Life at the Eveleigh Workshops
Sydney's Eveleigh railway workshops operated for just over a century between the 1880s and the late 1980s when their railway operations were terminated. Since then Eveleigh has been recognised as one of Australia's important sites of industrial heritage. This paper examines the political, legal and administrative conditions that have shaped Eveleigh's adaptive re-use and heritage management. In doing so it highlights the processes by which indust…
Places, Protests, and Memorabilia: The Labour Heritage Register of New South Wales
Terry Irving & Lucy Taksa, Places, Protests, and Memorabilia; The Labour Heritage Register of New South Wales, Industrial Relations research Centre, university of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002. pp. xvi + 197. $30 paper; Jeff Sparrow & Jill Sparrow, Radical Melbourne: A Secret History, Vulgar Press, Melbourne, 2001. pp. 220. $44.95 paper
The Material Culture of an Industrial Artifact: Interpreting Control, Defiance, and Everyday Resistance at the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops
About as Popular as a Dose of Clap’: Steam, Diesel and Masculinity at the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops
The case of the New South Wales Eveleigh Railway Workshops is examined to study the working conditions and everyday lives of their employees. The paper attempts to understand the impact the shift from steam to diesel locomotion by reviewing oral and literary narratives. The author concludes that the steam locomotion defined and confirmed the masculine identify, while the switch to diesel undermined that assumption. It appears that the move to die…
Labor History and Public History in Australia: Allies or Uneasy Bedfellows
This paper reflects on the ways in which public labor history and more populist forms of public history have intersected and/or diverged in Australia since the 1970s. By comparing various labor heritage programs and public history interpretation strategies at four redeveloped industrial heritage sites, it examines how both approaches have conceived and represented workers' history and the relationship between past and present, industrialization a…
Farewell
The impact of gender culture on women's career trajectories: An Australian case study
Purpose The aim of this paper is to examine the influence of gender culture and gender subtext on the career trajectories of women. It examines the organization as an arena in which underlying cultural processes maintain gender distinctions and barriers, thereby limiting the efficacy of policies specifically designed to increase the number of women at senior levels. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on the findings of a qualitative cas…
Sociology (29 works) · Political science (28 works) · Law (18 works) · Australian History and Society (13 works) · History (13 works) · Project commissioning (12 works) · Publishing (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies (10 works)