An exploration of The Virtues Project: Ontological, educational and cross-cultural inquiries into a moral education program within a Mongolian school setting

This thesis explores The Virtues Project's ontological, educational and cross-cultural dimensions taking Charles Taylor's philosophical perspective of an anthropological account of the self and a phenomenological account of moral life and engagement. The experience of Mongolian schoolteachers implementing this moral education program is analyzed using a narrative inquiry method. The globally attractive project appears in moral education and virtues ethics research and surveys, yet no critical evaluation has been undertaken. Its conceptual features are appraised from a Taylorean perspective. The Listening Guide analysis of teacher experiences is presented in two narratives. The first is about the teachers' implementation experiences of moral flourishing as selves, in relationships and in community. The second is about their experience of becoming Mongolian in their modern day context. In conclusion, the project is coherent, constructive and potentially suitable cross-culturally.

Cultural factors: Understanding culture to design organisation structures and systems to optimise safety

Safety culture is a term with numerous definitions in the literature. Many authors advocate a prescriptive approach to safety culture in which if an organisation has certain levels of externally prescribed systems and structures in place it has a “good safety culture”. Conversely, other researchers suggest an anthropological approach of exploring deep meanings and understandings present within an organisation’s workforce. In a recent published review, the authors presented an alternative view to safety culture, in which the anthropological aspects of safety culture interact with the structures and systems in place within an organisation to result in behavioural patterns. This can be viewed as a human factors approach to safety culture in which, through understanding the specific interactions between the culture of a workforce and external organisational elements, organisational structures and systems can be optimised in order to shape worker behaviour and improve safety. This paper presents findings from a recent investigation of safety culture in the Australian heavy vehicle (transport) industry. Selected results are discussed to explore how understanding culture can provide direction to the optimisation of organisational structures and systems to match worker culture and thus improve safety. Specifically the value placed on personal experience and stories, as well as on both time and money are discussed, and interventions that are suited to these aspects of the culture are discussed. These findings demonstrate the importance of shifting beyond mere prescriptive and interpretive approaches to safety culture and instead to focus on the interaction between cultural and contextual elements to optimise organisational structures and systems.

The sequence: Inside the race for the human genome

The human genome project was a grand scientific enterprise which attracted both hyperbole and ridicule alike. The project was lauded as “the moon shot of the life sciences”, the “holy grail of man”, “the code of codes”, and “the book of life”. Such rhetoric has also received scorn. President George Bush senior managed to deflate the pretensions of the project with the accidental slip that it was the “human gnome initiative”. In The Sequence, Kevin Davies seeks to go beyond such metaphors, and provide a candid and honest account of the race of the human genome project. The author is indebted to the authoritative book The Gene Wars, which considered the early struggles over the human genome project. Robert Cook-Deegan observes that there was initially much debate over whether there should be a Human Genome Project at all: The debate became one of “big” science versus “small” science. The reliance on systematic technology development and goal-directed gene-mapping efforts presaged a new style for biology, one that elicited excitement from those attracted to whiz-bang technologies but drew gasps of revulsion from those who aspired to cultivate biology on a more modest scale and with decentralized organisation. The battle was, among other things, over whose vision would control the budget and which scientific aesthetic would prevail.

A decision support framework for prioritization of engineering asset management activities under uncertainty

Engineers and asset managers must often make decisions on how to best allocate limited resources amongst different interrelated activities, including repair, renewal, inspection, and procurement of new assets. The presence of project interdependencies and the lack of sufficient information on the true value of an activity often produce complex problems and leave the decision maker guessing about the quality and robustness of their decision. In this paper, a decision support framework for uncertain interrelated activities is presented. The framework employs a methodology for multi-criteria ranking in the presence of uncertainty, detailing the effect that uncertain valuations may have on the priority of a particular activity. The framework employs employing semi-quantitative risk measures that can be tailored to an organisation and enable a transparent and simple-to-use uncertainty specification by the decision maker. The framework is then demonstrated on a real world project set from a major Australian utility provider.

Frameworks for engaging creative practice in bureaucratised project environments

This project examines procurement of creative services in a bureaucratic setting and proposes alternative procedures that better negotiate the tensions between creative and bureaucratised ways of working. The outcome is a project procurement strategy called 'Creative Practice Enabled Procurement' and a prototype industry toolkit 'It's Not Shopping! A Guide to Purchasing Innovation and Creativity'. The research is of benefit to managers and creative practitioners, especially those working in interpretive settings. The goal is to propagate better forms of creative procurement across government and private sectors by providing an evidence-based case for improved, practical alternatives.

Major project managers’ internal and external stakeholder relationships: The development and validation of measurement scales

In this paper, we detail the development of two stakeholder relationships scales. The scales measure major project managers' perceived competence in developing (establishing and maintaining) high quality, effective relationships with stakeholders who are internal and external to their organization. Our sample consists of 373 major project managers from a sub-set of the Australian defense industry. Both the internal stakeholder relationships scale and the external stakeholder relationships scale demonstrated validity and reliability. This research has implications for the interpersonal work relationships literature and the stakeholder management literature. We recommend that researchers test these scales with multiple samples, across different project types and project industries in the future. The stakeholder relationship scales should be versatile enough to be applied to project management generally but are perhaps best suited to major project environments.

The opportunity for implementing Islamic project financing to the Indonesian infrastructure development

Purpose: This chapter discusses the opportunity of Islamic project financing implementation for public infrastructure development in Indonesia. Design/Methodology/Approach: This chapter, firstly, reviewed existing literature on Islamic finance to explore the applicability of Islamic financing in infrastructure development. Interviews were conducted as the first stage of Delphi method approach. This was then followed by reviewing Indonesia’s government policies and regulations in infrastructure industry and Islamic financing. Findings: This chapter enlightens the implementation of Islamic financing on infrastructure project financing in Indonesia. The findings indicate that the government policies and regulations on both infrastructure investment and Islamic financing support the implementation of Islamic project financing, whereas, an improvement is still needed in order to overarch infrastructure business and Islamic financing investment. Research: Financing framework development for Indonesia infrastructure projects. Limitations/Implications: The result reported comprises the preliminary study of Islamic project paper written based on published research papers and interviews. Furthermore, the data collected for the study are limited to the case of Indonesian infrastructure projects. Practical Implication: Islamic financing in Indonesia infrastructure projects development has not been optimally implemented. Therefore, this chapter serves as a catalyst to explore alternative financial scheme such as Islamic financing for infrastructure development. Originality/Value: This chapter highlights possibilities and obstacles in applying Islamic scheme to infrastructure project financing. This provides a framework to analyse the steps to implement Islamic financing successfully in infrastructure development.

Encouraging Generosity:The practice & organisation of fundraising across nations

This presentation outlines the results from over twenty countries to describe and analyse for the first time in some depth the many different fundraising environments around the world that are shaped by different historical, cultural, social, religious, political and economic conditions. The data is organized into a new typology of fundraising regimes, which we argue strengthens understanding of the connection between asking and giving. In the light of the giving-centric nature of much research, we suggest our focus on ‘askers’ is a useful counterbalance, as giving and asking are so intimately related.

Encouraging Generosity: The practice & organisation of fundraising across nations

This paper is drawn from data provided by colleagues around the world who have written chapters for a book entitled ‘Palgrave Research Companion to Global Philanthropy’ (eds. P. Wiepking and F. Handy, forthcoming 2014). Whilst the focus of the book is a c omparative global study of charitable giving, it also contains information on the activity involved in prompting charitable gifts in each country or region. This paper synthesizes, analyses and discusses this data in relation to factors such as: how fundra ising is organized in different geographical domains; the most common methods of fundraising found in different countries; and the extent to which the fundraising industry is professionalized around the world. The paper begins by noting the lack of resear ch on fundraisers and fundraising in contrast to the extensive studies undertaken of donors. It argues that the demand - side of charitable transactions is worthy of greater attention, because giving and asking are two sides of the same coin. This paper seek s to help rectify the situation by drawing out issues related to the practice and organization of fundraising across the world and linking it to the patterns of charitable giving that are described in the book.

New England Youth Speeding Project: A pilot study of young drivers and risky driving: Effective strategies for preventing speeding amongst young Australians aged 16-25 years in the New England Region

Young Australian drivers aged 17 – 25 years are overwhelmingly represented in road fatalities where speed is a factor. In the combined LGAs of Armidale Dumaresq, Guyra, Uralla and Walcha in the 5 years 1999-2003 inclusive, 43% of speeding related casualty crashes involved a young driver aged less than 25 years. This is despite the fact that the 17-25 age group account for only 25% of the driving population in this area. Young male drivers account for the majority of these crashes and also tend to have a higher number of driving offences and accrue more penalties for road traffic offences, especially speeding. By analysing data from questionnaires by male and female participants this research project has been able to evaluate road safety advertisements to determine which ones are most effective to young drivers, what features of these advertisements are effective, how males differ from females in their receptiveness and preferences for road safety advertisements and specifically how to target young people especially young men in conveying road safety messages. Finally this research project has identified factors that are important in the production of media road safety advertisements and has made recommendations for how best to convey effective road safety messages to young Australian drivers in rural areas.

A model to assess the impact of innovation activity on project performance in consulting engineering firms

A holistic consideration of innovation and associated activities is still very new to consulting engineering firms. This research will have benefits for both industry and academia. The final outcome of this research is a prioritised decision making innovation model that can be used by consulting engineering firms to make informed decisions by investing in appropriate innovation activities that positively impact project performance. This helps by using an informed approach towards investing rather than 'hit-and-miss' trialling.

Statistical literacy social media project for the masses

This article examines a social media assignment used to teach and practice statistical literacy with over 400 students each semester in large-lecture traditional, fully online, and flipped sections of an introductory-level statistics course. Following the social media assignment, students completed a survey on how they approached the assignment. Drawing from the authors’ experiences with the project and the survey results, this article offers recommendations for developing social media assignments in large courses that focus on the interplay between the social media tool and the implications of assignment prompts.

Finding within-organisation spatial information on the web

Information available on company websites can help people navigate to the offices of groups and individuals within the company. Automatically retrieving this within-organisation spatial information is a challenging AI problem This paper introduces a novel unsupervised pattern-based method to extract within-organisation spatial information by taking advantage of HTML structure patterns, together with a novel Conditional Random Fields (CRF) based method to identify different categories of within-organisation spatial information. The results show that the proposed method can achieve a high performance in terms of F-Score, indicating that this purely syntactic method based on web search and an analysis of HTML structure is well-suited for retrieving within-organisation spatial information.

Organisational driving safety systems analysis: Fleet safety situational issues and system gaps

The identification of safety hazards and risks and their associated control measures provides the foundation for any safety program and essentially determines the scope, content and complexity of an effective occupational health and safety management system. In the case of work-related road safety (WRRS), there is a gap within current knowledge, research and practice regarding the holistic assessment of WRRS safety systems and practice. In order to mitigate this gap, a multi-level process tool for assessing WRRS safety systems was developed from extensive consultation, practice and informed by theoretical models and frameworks. Data collection for the Organisational Driving Safety Systems Analysis (ODSSA) tool utilised a case study methodology and included multiple information sources: such as documents, archival records, interviews, direct observations, participant observations, and physical artefacts. Previous trials and application of the ODSSA has indicated that the tool is applicable to a wide range of organisational fleet environments and settings. This paper reports on the research results and effectiveness of the ODSSA tool to assess WRRS systems across a large organisation that recently underwent considerable organisational change, including amalgamation of multiple organisations. The outcomes of this project identified considerable differences in the degree by which the organisation addressed WRRS across their vehicle fleet operations and provided guidelines for improving organisations’ WRRS systems. The ODSSA tool was pivotal in determining WRRS system deficiencies and provided a platform to inform mitigation and improvement strategies.