Breaking organizational barriers for greening Australian

Sustainability is an issue for everyone. For instance, the higher education sector is being asked to take an active part in creating a sustainable future, due to their moral responsibility, social obligation, and their own need to adapt to the changing higher education environment. By either signing declarations or making public statements, many universities are expressing their desire to become role models for enhancing sustainability. However, too often they have not delivered as much as they had intended. This is particularly evident in the lack of physical implementation of sustainable practices in the campus environment. Real projects such as green technologies on campus have the potential to rectify the problem in addition to improving building performance. Despite being relatively recent innovations, Green Roof and Living Wall have been widely recognized because of their substantial benefits, such as runoff water reduction, noise insulation, and the promotion of biodiversity. While they can be found in commercial and residential buildings, they only appear infrequently on campuses as universities have been very slow to implement sustainability innovations. There has been very little research examining the fundamental problems from the organizational perspective. To address this deficiency, the researchers designed and carried out 24 semi-structured interviews to investigate the general organizational environment of Australian universities with the intention to identify organizational obstacles to the delivery of Green Roof and Living Wall projects. This research revealed that the organizational environment of Australian universities still has a lot of room to be improved in order to accommodate sustainability practices. Some of the main organizational barriers to the adoption of sustainable innovations were identified including lack of awareness and knowledge, the absence of strong supportive leadership, a weak sustainability-rooted culture and several management challenges. This led to the development of a set of strategies to help optimize the organizational environment for the purpose of better decision making for Green Roof and Living Wall implementation.

Youth alcohol and drug practice guide 2: Legal and ethical dimensions of practice

This Guide is designed to assist workers better understand the and negotiate the complex interplay of ethical, legal and organisational considerations in their practice. The goal is to provide frontline workers and managers with information, questions and principles which promote good youth AOD practice. Legal information provided relates to Queensland, Australia.

Genetic diversity in three redclaw crayfish (Cherax quadricarinatus, von Martens) lines developed in culture in China

The redclaw crayfish Cherax quadricarinatus (von Martens) accounts for the entire commercial production of freshwater crayfish in Australia. Two forms have been recognized, an 'Eastern' form in northern Queensland and a 'Western' form in the Northern Territory and far northern Western Australia. To date, only the Eastern form has been exported overseas for culture (including to China). The genetic structure of three Chinese redclaw crayfish culture lines from three different geographical locations in China (Xiamen in Fujian Province, Guangzhou in Guangdong Province and Chongming in Shanghai) were investigated for their levels and patterns of genetic diversity using microsatellite markers. Twenty-eight SSR markers were isolated and used to analyse genetic diversity levels in three redclaw crayfish culture lines in China. This study set out to improve the current understanding of the molecular genetic characteristics of imported strains of redclaw crayfish reared in China. Microsatellite analysis revealed moderate allelic and high gene diversity in all three culture lines. Polymorphism information content estimates for polymorphic loci varied between 0.1168 and 0.8040, while pairwise F ST values among culture lines were moderate (0.0020-0.1244). The highest estimate of divergence was evident between the Xiamen and Guangzhou populations.

Reflective practice as a tool for addressing high levels of psychological distress in Australian law schools and the legal profession

This paper discusses: -The need for law schools to use curriculum as a site for positive interventions to support student psychological well-being. -The potential for law school interventions to impact on the psychological well-being of the profession. -Reflective practice as a possible tool for promoting psychological well-being in law school and the profession because it provides a way of coping with ‘indeterminate zones’ of experience.

Legal Institutions and Collective Memories

In recent decades the debate among scholars, lawyers, politicians and others about how societies deal with their past has been constant and intensive. 'Legal Institutions and Collective Memories' situates the processes of transitional justice at the intersection between legal procedures and the production of collective and shared meanings of the past. Building upon the work of Maurice Halbwachs, this collection of essays emphasises the extended role and active involvement of contemporary law and legal institutions in public discourse about the past, and explores their impact on the shape that collective memories take in the course of time. The authors uncover a complex pattern of searching for truth, negotiating the past and cultivating the art of forgetting. Their contributions explore the ambiguous and intricate links between the production of justice, truth and memory. The essays cover a broad range of legal institutions, countries and topics. These include transitional trials as 'monumental spectacles' as well as constitutional courts, and the restitution of property rights in Central and Eastern Europe and Australia. The authors explore the biographies of victims and how their voices were repressed, as in the case of Korean Comfort Women. They explore the role of law and legal institutions in linking individual and collective memories in the transitional period through processes of lustration, and they analyse divided memories about the past and their impact on future reconciliation in South Africa. The collection offers a genuinely comparative approach, allied to cutting-edge theory.

Managing Work, Hedonism and 'the Borderline' Between the Legal and Illegal Markets: Two Case Studies of Recreational Heavy Drug Users

In the context of cultural and/or differential ‘normalisation’ of certain forms of drug use, this article describes two case-studies of heavy recreational drug users. The daily lives of these users blur the line between the legal and the illegal; their drug trading is generally as a consumer and ‘friend of a friend’ small dealer in the low-level market. In the first case, problems with management of employment, time and financial budgeting are described; in the second case, such management is accomplished. Discussion refers to: differences between the two in relation to resources and vulnerability to risks, and to leisure/pleasure cultures of hedonism. The research agenda should pay more attention to users who seek to maintain a legitimate lifestyle but who develop problems managing work and their drug-related leisure. Understanding the consumer demand and dealing activity of such users is important in trying to develop a fuller understanding of drug markets.

Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building

With the rising popularity of anime amongst animation students, audiences and scholars around the world, it has become increasingly important to critically analyse anime as being more than a ‘limited’ form of animation, and thematically as encompassing more than super robots and pocket monsters. Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building charts the development of Japanese animation from its indigenous roots within a native culture, through Japan’s experience of modernity and the impact of the Second World War. This text is the result of a rigorous study that recognises the heterogeneous and polymorphous background of anime. As such, Tze-Yue has adopted an ‘interdisciplinary and transnational’ (p. 7) approach to her enquiry, drawing upon face-to-face interviews, on-site visits and biographical writings of animators. Tze-Yue delineates anime from other forms of animation by linking its visual style to pre-modern Japanese art forms and demonstrating the connection it shares with an indigenous folk system of beliefs. Via the identification of traditional Japanese art forms and their visual connectedness to Japanese animation, Tze-Yue shows that the Japanese were already heavily engaged in what was destined to become anime once technology had enabled its production. Tze-Yue’s efforts to connect traditional Japanese art forms, and their artistic elements, to contemporary anime reveals that the Japanese already had a rich culture of visual storytelling that pre-dates modern animation. She identifies the Japanese form of the magic lantern at the turn of the 19th century, utsushi-e, as the pre-modern ancestor of Japanese animation, describing it as ‘Edo anime’ (p. 43). Along with utsushi-e, the Edo period also saw the woodblock print, ukiyo-e, being produced for the rising middle class (p. 32). Highlighting the ‘resurfacing’ of ‘realist’ approaches to Japanese art in ukiyo-e, Tze-Yue demonstrates the visual connection of ukiyo-e and anime in the …

Safety leaders’ perceptions of safety culture in a large Australasian construction organisation

This paper reports safety leaders’ perceptions of safety culture in one of Australasia’s largest construction organisations. A modified Delphi method was used including two rounds of data collection. The first round involved 41 semi-structured interviews with safety leaders within the organisation. The second round involved an online quantitative perception survey, with the same sample, aimed at confirming the key themes identified in the interviews. Participants included Senior Executives, Corporate Managers, Project Managers, Safety Managers and Site Supervisors. Interview data was analysed using qualitative thematic analysis, and the survey data was analysed using descriptive statistics. Leaders’ definitions and descriptions of safety culture were primarily action-oriented and some confusion was evident due to the sometimes implicit nature of culture in organisations. Leadership was identified as a key factor for positive safety culture in the organisation, and there was an emphasis on leaders demonstrating commitment to safety, and being visible to the project-based workforce. Barriers to safety culture improvement were also identified, including the subcontractor management issues, pace of change, and reporting requirements. The survey data provided a quantitative confirmation of the interview themes, with some minor discrepancies. The findings highlight that safety culture is a complex construct, which is difficult to define, even for experts in the organisation. Findings on the key factors indicated consistency with the current literature; however the perceptions of barriers to safety culture offer a new understanding in to how safety culture operates in practice.

Book review: "English for telecoms and information technology" by T. Ricca and M. Duckworth; "English for legal professionals" by A. Frost; "English for the pharmaceutical industry" by M. Buchler, K. Jaehnig, G. Matzig, and T. Weindler; "English for cabin crews" by S. Ellis and L. Lansford; and "English for negotiating" by C. Lafond, S. Vine, and B. Welch.

This review examines five books in the Oxford Business English Express Series, including "English for telecoms and information technology" by T. Ricca and M. Duckworth; "English for legal professionals" by A. Frost; "English for the pharmaceutical industry" by M. Buchler, K. Jaehnig, G. Matzig, and T. Weindler; "English for cabin crews" by S. Ellis and L. Lansford; and "English for negotiating" by C. Lafond, S. Vine, and B. Welch.