Navigating the social dimension of sustainability decision making of mega-projects

Until recently, sustainable development was perceived as essentially an environmental issue, relating to the integration of environmental concerns into economic decision-making. As a result, environmental considerations have been the primary focus of sustainability decision making during the economic development process for major projects, and the assessment and preservation of social and cultural systems has been arguably too limited. The practice of social impact and sustainability assessment is an established and accepted part of project planning, however, these practices are not aimed at delivering sustainability outcomes for social systems, rather they are designed to minimise ‘unsustainability’ and contribute to project approval. Currently, there exists no widely recognised standard approach for assessing social sustainability and accounting for positive externalities of existing social systems in project decision making. As a result, very different approaches are applied around the world, and even by the same organisations from one project to another. This situation is an impediment not only to generating a shared understanding of the social implications as related to major projects, but more importantly, to identifying common approaches to help improve social sustainability outcomes of proposed activities. This paper discusses the social dimension of sustainability decision making of mega-projects, and argues that to improve accountability and transparency of project outcomes it is important to understand the characteristics that make some communities more vulnerable than others to mega-project development. This paper highlights issues with current operational level approaches to social sustainability assessment at the project level, and asserts that the starting point for project planning and sustainability decision making of mega-projects needs to include the preservation, maintenance, and enhancement of existing social and cultural systems. It draws attention to the need for a scoping mechanism to systematically assess community vulnerability (or sensitivity) to major infrastructure development during the feasibility and planning stages of a project.

‘Doing’ social justice in early childhood : the potential of leadership

Early childhood education has long been connected with objectives related to social justice. Australian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) has its roots in philanthropic and educational reform movements prevalent at the turn of the 20th century. More recently, with the introduction of the National Early Childhood Reform Agenda, early childhood education has once more been linked to the achievement of aims associated with redressing inequality and disadvantage. According to Jean-Marie, Normore and Brooks (2009), educational leaders have a moral and social obligation to foster equitable practices through advocating for traditionally marginalised and poorly served students while creating a new social order “...that subverts the long standing system that has privileged certain students while oppressing or neglecting others” (p.4). Drawing on extant literature, including data from two previously reported Australian studies in which leadership emerged as having a transformational impact on service delivery, this paper examines the potential of early childhood leadership to generate ‘socially just’ educational communities. With reference to critical theory, we argue that critically informed, intentional and strategic organisational leadership can play a pivotal role in creating changed circumstances and opportunities for children and families. Such leadership includes positional and distributed elements, articulation of values and beliefs, and collective action that is mindful and informed.

Disclosures of social value creation : a case study of three global social enterprises

This study seeks to fill in gap in the existing literature by looking at how and whether disclosure of social value creation becomes a part of legitimation strategies of social enterprises. By using legitimacy reasoning, this study informs that three global social organizations, Grameen Bank, Charity Water, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provide evidence of the use of disclosures of social value creation in order to conform with the expectations of the broader community—the community that wants to see poverty and injustice free world.

Amateur Media : Social, Cultural and Legal Perspectives

The rise of Web 2.0 has pushed the amateur to the forefront of public discourse, public policy and media scholarship. Typically non-salaried, non-specialist and untrained in media production, amateur producers are now seen as key drivers of the creative economy. But how do the activities of citizen journalists, fan fiction writers and bedroom musicians connect with longer traditions of extra-institutional media production? This edited collection provides a much-needed interdisciplinary contextualisation of amateur media before and after Web 2.0. Surveying the institutional, economic and legal construction of the amateur media producer via a series of case studies, it features contributions from experts in the fields of law, economics and media studies based in the UK, Europe and Singapore. Each section of the book contains a detailed case study on a selected topic, followed by two further pieces providing additional analysis and commentary. Using an extraordinary array of case studies and examples, from YouTube to online games, from subtitling communities to reality TV, the book is neither a celebration of amateur production nor a denunciation of the demise of professional media industries. Rather, this book presents a critical dialogue across law and the humanities, exploring the dynamic tensions and interdependencies between amateur and professional creative production. This book will appeal to both academics and students of intellectual property and media law, as well as to scholars and students of economics, media, cultural and internet studies.

Optimising employee engagement with internal communication : a social exchange perspective

Drawing on principles of social exchange this thesis employs mediated regression to investigate the relationship between internal communication and employee engagement in the Australian workforce. Findings suggest organisations and supervisors should focus internal communication efforts toward building greater perceptions of support and stronger identification among employees in order to foster optimal engagement. This research contributes to public relations and management scholarship through understanding how perceived support and identification act as mediating mechanisms in the relationship between internal communication and employee engagement at the organisational and supervisory level.

The role of the ethnic enclave in facilitating immigrant business performance and social integration

Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs, known the world over for their successful business practices (Kee, 1994), tend to start businesses within their ethnic enclave. But in a move away from multiculturalism, host countries increasingly fear that immigration and asylum pose a threat to social integration resulting in a lack of social cohesion and a plethora of government programs (Cheong, Edwards, Goulbourne & Solomos, 2007). For many immigrant entrepreneurs, the EE is an integral part of their social and cultural context and the location where ethnic resources reside (Logan, Alba & Stults, 2003). Immigrant entrepreneurs can harness the networks for labor and customers through various ties in their EE (Portes and Zhou, 1996). Yang, Ho and Chang (2010) illustrate in their paper that the Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs (IE) were able to utilize ethnic network resources as their social capital in order to reduce transaction costs and thus enhance business performance. Tilly (1990) explains that immigrants’ reliance on such networks for business or other information minimizes the socioeconomic hardships they would experience in host countries (Raijman & Tienda, 2000). Acquiring jobs in ethnic businesses and establishing businesses within an EE may facilitate migrants’ social integration into the host country (Tian & Shan, 1999). Although an EE has distinct economic advantages for immigrant entrepreneurs, Sequeira and Rasheed (2006: 367) argue that ‘Exclusive reliance on strong ties within the immigrant enclave has a negative effect on growth outside the enclave community.’ Similarly, Drori, Honig and Ginsberg (2010: 20) also propose that ‘The greater the reliance of transnational entrepreneurs on ethnic (versus societal) embedded resources and network structure, the narrower their possibilities of expanding the scope of their business.’ This research asks, ‘What is the role of the ethnic enclave in facilitating immigrant business growth and social integration? This project has the following important aims: A1 To better understand the role of IE, in particular Chinese IE in the Australian economy A2 To investigate the role of the EE in facilitating or inhibiting immigrant business performance A3 To understand how locating their firm inside or outside of the EE will affect the IE’s embeddedness in co-ethnic and nonco-ethnic networks and social integration A4 To understand how an IE’s social network affects business performance and social integration

Can an Australian rap fan be a social actor in the African-American social movements?

I live in the Sydney North Shore suburb of Northbridge. In many ways it is a white middle class enclave, comparable to places like Cabramatta that are identified with a specifically represented ethnic group. Gated primarily by the inflated property prices, it is a location that marks a territory principally for the white middle class. It is not a place of African-American movements. Or is it? Radio, television, film and Internet increasingly constitute a large portion of the sonic and visual landscapes of our suburban lives. In our lounge rooms and in our cars we are presented texts that take us beyond our local environments, into the places of other nations. This paper will explore the position of a fan of rap music, physically located beyond the cultural and political circumstances that drive sustained action for the movements of African-Americans. It will analyze whether such a fandom can indicate membership, as a social actor, in this group and in doing so illuminate the boundaries of movement activity in an information society.

Using communicative ecology theory to scope the emerging role of social media in the evolution of urban food systems

Urban agriculture plays an increasingly vital role in supplying food to urban populations. Changes in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) are already driving widespread change in diverse food-related industries such as retail, hospitality and marketing. It is reasonable to suspect that the fields of ubiquitous technology, urban informatics and social media equally have a lot to offer the evolution of core urban food systems. We use communicative ecology theory to describe emerging innovations in urban food systems according to their technical, discursive and social components. We conclude that social media in particular accentuate fundamental social interconnections normally effaced by conventional industrialised approaches to food production and consumption.

Teaching and assessing ethics and social responsibility in undergraduate science : a position paper

Institutional graduate capabilities and discipline threshold learning outcomes require science students to demonstrate ethical conduct and social responsibility. However, neither the teaching nor the assessment of these concepts is straightforward. Australian chemistry academics participated in a workshop in 2013 to discuss and develop teaching and assessment in these areas and this paper reports on the outcomes of that workshop. Controversial issues discussed included: How broad is the mandate of the teacher, how should the boundaries between personal values and ethics be drawn, and how can ethics be assessed without moral judgement? In this position paper, I argue for a deep engagement with ethics and social justice, achieved through case studies and assessed against criteria that require discussion and debate. Strategies to effectively assess science students’ understanding of ethics and social responsibility are detailed.

PANORAMA : explorations in the aesthetics of social awareness

In this paper we reflect on our experiences in developing PANORAMA, a playful application meant to promote and support social awareness in a work environment, through art-inspired visualisations of social processes and personal contributions. With respect to the design of PANORAMA, we found common notions of visual semiotics helpful in determining the overall composition of the screen layout. More in general, however, the development of PANORAMA proved to be an exercise in interaction aesthetics, which as we will argue in this paper may greatly benefit from common notions in interactive video game play. In this paper we will only briefly discuss technical and deployment issues, since our main contribution here is to establish the relation between the aesthetics of interaction and game play.

Engineering social awareness in work environments

A growing interest is seen for designing intelligent environments that support personally meaningful, sociable and rich everyday experiences. In this paper we describe an intelligent, large screen display called Panorama that is aimed at supporting and enhancing social awareness within an academic work environment. Panorama is not intended to provide instrumental or other productivity related information. Rather, the goal of Panorama is to enhance social awareness by providing interpersonal and rich information related to co-workers and their everyday interactions in the department. A two-phase assessment of Panorama showed to promote curiosity and interest in exploring different activities in the environment.

Being social @ work: designing for playfully mediated social awareness in work environments

Awareness within work environments should not be seen limited to important work-related information, activities and relationships. Mediating somewhat casual and engaging encounters related to non-work issues could also lead to meaningful and pleasurable experiences. This paper explores a design approach to support playfully mediated social awareness within an academic environment. Using ethnographic exploration and understanding the current and aspired practices, we provide details of two broad (and some times overlapping) categories of interaction for supporting and enhancing playfully mediated social awareness amongst staff members: 1) Self-Reflections and 2) Casual Encounters. We implement these two categories of interaction in an intelligent, asynchronous, large screen display called Panorama, for the staff room of our computer science department. Panorama attempts to mediate non-critical, non-work related information about the staff-members in an engaging manner to enhance social awareness within the department. We particularly emphasize on the soft design issues like reflections, belonging, care, pleasure and playfulness utilized in our design approach. The result of a two-phase assessment study suggests that our conceptualization of social awareness and the Panorama application has the potential to be easily incorporated into our academic environment.

Privacy by design for social networks

This research has established a new privacy framework, privacy model, and privacy architecture to create more transparent privacy for social networking users. The architecture is designed into three levels: Business, Data, and Technology, which is based on The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF®). This framework and architecture provides a novel platform for investigating privacy in Social Networks (SNs). This approach mitigates many current SN privacy issues, and leads to a more controlled form of privacy assessment. Ultimately, more privacy will encourage more connections between people across SN services.

Falling behind : business use of social media

Australians are turning onto social media in their droves - nearly 90 per cent of our citizenry are online and more than 50 per cent of the population has a Facebook account.

Faking it : how to kill a business through astroturfing on social media

There is no doubt about it the practice of astroturfing is lazy, misleading and potentially illegal public relations (PR). But on social media, astroturfing is not just lazy and misleading, it can be irresponsible and damaging.