Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.6, No.2, 2014 i 
ISSN: 1837-5391; https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/mcs 
CCS Journal is published under the auspices of UTSePress, Sydney, Australia 

Looking Back and Looking Forward 

 
This issue of the journal covers an exciting range of topics related broadly to the concerns of 

cosmopolitan civil societies, as have previous issues, but it also differs from others in that it 

contains a number of articles which reflect back on key concerns of the Cosmopolitan Civil 

Societies Research Centre which publishes the journal, as well as two articles on issues which 

are fundamental to inclusive and just societies.  

 

Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal is now in its sixth year of publication and the editorial 

committee asked researchers in the Centre to consider writing articles which could mark five 

years of successful publication of the journal and in some way record its contribution to the 

development of knowledge in the field or which could present a scholarly commentary on 

some key concept  of significance to CCS’s research agenda or outline and analyse a 

contemporary moment. The five papers which appear here were submitted for peer review in 

the normal way, and the reviews indicated both support for the intellectual agenda for CCS 

and the challenges of making accessible the local issues and concerns of members of a 

research centre to a globalized audience. Andrew Jakubowicz, ,a scholar with over forty years 

of research experience in migration, racism and multiculturalism, draws on his experience of 

the interaction between research, policy and politics to argue that independent research that 

tackles difficult questions can contribute to wider social understanding of complex issues. He 

demonstrates the impact both of the investment in and expansion of research, and the 

contrary contraction and deprivation of resources. In the context of National Disability 

Insurance Scheme which is being progressively rolled out in Australia, Jenny Green and Jane 

Mears review research and reports on the person-centred approach on which the scheme is 

premised. Bronwen Dalton took the opportunity to trace the evolution of the idea of civil 

society to its multiple guises in the present. She discusses prospects for developing agreed 

approaches to the study of civil society, exploring in the process different approaches to 

defining civil society taken by some of the major so-called centres for civil society in 

Australia and internationally. She concludes by reflecting on these definitional challenges as 

it has played out at one particular cross faculty research centre, the University of Technology, 

Sydney’s Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre. Jenny Onyx, similarly, has explored 



ii   Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.6, No.2, 2014 

a concept which is at the heart of much of the work of members of the Cosmopolitan Civil 

Societies Research Centre, the concept of social impact. Using work done by some members 

of Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre, she demonstrates some of the approaches 

which have been developed and which run counter to the all too common so-called objective 

indicators of social impact, framed in terms of monetary cost and benefit. She notes the 

importance of these attempts to measure social impact in social terms rather than from a 

monetized perspective and concludes that exactly what we should be measuring remains 

contested and elusive. Michael Olsson’s paper on information practices in contemporary civil 

society charts some of the concerns with the nature of an information society. He considers 

how the emergence of social constructivist approaches to information research drawing on 

discourse analysis, practice theory and ethnographic theories and methodologies has led to a 

have led researchers to a radically different understanding of central concepts such as: the 

influence of emergent information and communication technologies on contemporary society; 

the relationship between knowledge and power, the nature of expertise and authoritative 

information; as well as a re-thinking of community and consensus; a re-interpretation of 

notions of space and place in information dissemination, sharing and use and a 

reconsideration of the role of the researcher. 

 

The issue also contains two other papers which emphasis key aspects of the research agenda 

of the Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre. Baxter’s paper is concerned with the 

relationship between information access and environmental and ecological justice. He takes 

as his case studies two controversial coastal developments in Aberdeenshire, North-east 

Scotland. Megan Stronach and Daryl Adair describe how an Indigenous methodology known 

as Dadirri, which emphasises deep and respectful listening, guided the development of the 

research design for a study of sport career transition among elite Indigenous Australian 

sportsmen conducted by non-Indigenous researchers. The paper provides a model for non-

Indigenous researchers to conduct qualitative research with Indigenous people. 

 
 

Hilary Yerbury 
August 2014 


	Looking Back and Looking Forward