Reluctantly virtual : modelling copyright industry dynamics

During the evolution of the music industry, developments in the media environment have required music firms to adapt in order to survive. Changes in broadcast radio programming during the 1950s; the Compact Cassette during the 1970s; and the deregulation of media ownership during the 1990s are all examples of changes which have heavily affected the music industry. This study explores similar contemporary dynamics, examines how decision makers in the music industry perceive and make sense of the developments, and reveals how they revise their business strategies, based on their mental models of the media environment. A qualitative system dynamics model is developed in order to support the reasoning brought forward by the study. The model is empirically grounded, but is also based on previous music industry research and a theoretical platform constituted by concepts from evolutionary economics and sociology of culture. The empirical data primarily consist of 36 personal interviews with decision makers in the American, British and Swedish music industrial ecosystems. The study argues that the model which is proposed, more effectively explains contemporary music industry dynamics than music industry models presented by previous research initiatives. Supported by the model, the study is able to show how “new” media outlets make old music business models obsolete and challenge the industry’s traditional power structures. It is no longer possible to expose music at one outlet (usually broadcast radio) in the hope that it will lead to sales of the same music at another (e.g. a compact disc). The study shows that many music industry decision makers still have not embraced the new logic, and have not yet challenged their traditional mental models of the media environment. Rather, they remain focused on preserving the pivotal role held by the CD and other physical distribution technologies. Further, the study shows that while many music firms remain attached to the old models, other firms, primarily music publishers, have accepted the transformation, and have reluctantly recognised the realities of a virtualised environment.

Moulding them in the industry's image : journalism education's impact on students' professional views

Long-running debates over the value of university-based journalism education have suffered from a lack of empirical foundation, leading to a wide range of assertions both from those who see journalism education playing a crucial role in moulding future journalists and those who do not. Based on a survey of 320 Australian journalism students from six universities across the country, this study provides an account of the professional views these future journalists hold. Findings show that students hold broadly similar priorities in their role perceptions, albeit to different intensities from working journalists. The results point to a relationship between journalism education and the way in which students' views of journalism's watchdog role and its market orientation change over the course of their degree – to the extent that, once they are near completion of their degree, students have been moulded in the image of industry professionals.

Dino De Laurentiis and Australia: Creating a film industry on the Gold Coast

When Dino De Laurentiis died in October 2010, most media outlets, including Australian based publications and services reported the news and most newspapers carried obituaries. Obituarists described Dino’s many failures in great detail; as film historian David Thomson wrote in The Guardian ‘there were enough bombs from Dino to level a large city’ (Thomson 2010). But Dino was also responsible in no small way for the building of new media cities in Rome, in North Carolina, and in Queensland. In this article, we draw on some of our research for that book to outline in more detail the importance of Dino De Laurentiis’s involvement to the Gold Coast studios and to film and television production in Queensland.

Innovation in the Australian Spatial Information Industry

Business literature reveals the importance of generating innovative products and services, but much of the innovation research has been conducted in large firms and not replicated in small firms. These firms are likely to have different perspectives on innovation, which means that they will probably behave differently to large firms. Our study aims to unpack how firms in Spatial Information perceive and engage in innovation as a part of their business operation. To investigate these questions we conduct 20 in depth interviews of top management team members in Spatial Information firms in Australia. We find that small firms define innovation very broadly and measure innovation by its effect on productivity or market success. Innovation is seen as crucial to survival and success in a competitive environment. Most firms engage in product and/or service innovations, while some also mentioned marketing, process and organisational innovations. Most innovations were more exploitative rather than exploratory with only a few being radical innovations. Innovation barriers include time and money constraints, corporate culture and Government tendering practices. Our study sheds a light on our understanding of innovation in an under-researched sector; that is spatial information industry.

Australia’s film industry owes a debt to Gough Whitlam

Filmmakers and audiences – indeed Australian arts and screen culture more broadly – owe a deep debt of gratitude to Gough Whitlam and the government he led. Although the foundations had been laid by Whitlam’s predecessors John Gorton and Billy McMahon, the Australian film revival of the 1970s only really took shape after Whitlam became Prime Minister in 1972...

The emergent imperatives from a design-led innovation engagement within the mining industry

This research seeks a better and more detailed understanding of the processes of implementing design-led innovation in the mining equipment technology services (METS) sector, in a context where the traditional approach to manufacturing is being challenged. This longitudinal research specifically investigated the barriers to design-led innovation and opportunities that developed throughout this research, to understand how the organisation and culture of a METS company evolved, in order to progress towards design-led change. The significance of these findings is shown in the combined implementation of design imperatives leading towards design-led change at all business levels of an organisational structure.

Queensland's film culture: The challenges of local film distribution and festival exhibition

Organisations at the centre of the state’s industry, such as Screen Queensland, have undergone substantial and ongoing changes in the last five years. Other organisations funded by Screen Queensland, such as QPIX, Queensland’s only film development centre, have recently closed. The Brisbane International Film Festival has been restructured to become the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival as of 2014. In an uncertain industry currently characterised by limited funding and diminishing support structures, local emerging filmmakers require significant initiatives and a sophisticated understanding of how to best utilise fledgling distribution models as part of a tailored strategy for their content. This essay includes interviews with emerging Brisbane filmmakers who have used a combination of traditional and contemporary approaches to exhibition and distribution thus far in their careers. It argues that for these filmmakers, while film festivals do function as crucial platforms for exposure, in the current digital market they cannot be relied upon as the only platform in securing further mainstream or commercial release. They can, however, be incorporated into an alternative distribution model that shows awareness of the contemporary situation in Australia. The research findings are arguably indicative of the challenges faced by filmmakers statewide, and suggest that further support strategies need to be considered to revive Queensland’s film culture and provide immediate support for emerging filmmakers. Queensland’s film sector is currently in the midst of significant change.

Dewatering of microalgal culture for biodiesel production : exploring polymer flocculation and tangential flow filtration

Background: Conventional biodiesel production relies on trans-esterification of lipids extracted from vegetable crops. However, the use of valuable vegetable food stocks as raw material for biodiesel production makes it an unfeasibly expensive process. Used cooking oil is a finite resource and requires extra downstream processing, which affects the amount of biodiesel that can be produced and the economics of the process. Lipids extracted from microalgae are considered an alternative raw material for biodiesel production. This is primarily due to the fast growth rate of these species in a simple aquaculture environment. However, the dilute nature of microalgae culture puts a huge economic burden on the dewatering process especially on an industrial scale. This current study explores the performance and economic viability of chemical flocculation and tangential flow filtration (TFF) for the dewatering of Tetraselmis suecicamicroalgae culture. Results: Results show that TFF concentrates the microalgae feedstock up to 148 times by consuming 2.06 kWh m-3 of energy while flocculation consumes 14.81 kWhm-3 to concentrate the microalgae up to 357 times. Economic evaluation demonstrates that even though TFF has higher initial capital investment than polymer flocculation, the payback period for TFF at the upper extreme ofmicroalgae revenue is ∼1.5 years while that of flocculation is ∼3 years. Conclusion: These results illustrate that improved dewatering levels can be achieved more economically by employing TFF. The performances of these two techniques are also compared with other dewatering techniques.

Reducing workplace safety incidents : bridging the gap between safety culture theory and practice

This thesis explored safety culture in a large Australasian construction and mining organisation, with a view to understanding how theory and practice can be integrated to improve safety culture and related outcomes within the industry. The research comprised three studies that investigated the relationship between safety culture, safety motivation, leadership and safety behaviour, and examined differences in perceptions of safety culture across the organisation. Research methodologies and samples included a modified Delphi method with safety leaders (n=41), a quantitative survey with a cross-section of the organisation (n=2,957), and group interviews with frontline supervisors and workers (n=29).

The influence of organizational culture and climate on entrepreneurial intentions among research scientists

Over the past decades, universities have increasingly become involved in entrepreneurial activities. Despite efforts to embrace their ‘third mission’, universities still demonstrate great heterogeneity in terms of their involvement in academic entrepreneurship. This papers adopts an institutional perspective to understand how organizational characteristics affect research scientists’ entrepreneurial intentions. Specifically, we study the impact of university culture and climate on entrepreneurial intentions, including intentions to spin off a company, to engage in patenting or licensing and to interact with industry through contract research or consulting. Using a sample of 437 research scientists from Swedish and German universities, our results reveal that the extent to which universities articulate entrepreneurship as a fundamental element of their mission fosters research scientists’ intentions to engage in spin-off creation and intellectual property rights, but not industry-science interaction. Furthermore, the presence of university role models positively affects research scientists’ propensity to engage in entrepreneurial activities, both directly and indirectly through entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Finally, research scientists working at universities which explicitly reward people for ‘third mission’ related output show higher levels of spin-off and patenting or licensing intentions. This study has implications for both academics and practitioners, including university managers and policy makers.

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.

Disciplining the screen through education: The Royal Commission into the moving picture industry in Australia

In this article, we investigate the complex relationship between concerns about children and young people’s exposure to cinema in 1920s Australia and the use of film in education. In part, the Royal Commission into the Moving Picture Industry in Australia aimed to ‘ascertain the effect and the extent of the power of film upon juveniles’ and Commissioners spoke to educationalists, psychologists, medical professions, police officers and parents to gain insight into the impacts of movies on children. Numerous issues were canvassed in the Commission hearings such as exposure to sexual content, ‘excesses’ in film content, children’s inability to concentrate at school following cinema attendance and the influence of cinema on youth crime. While the Commission ultimately suggested it was parents’ role to police children’s engagements with cinema, it did make recommendations for restricting children’s access to films with inappropriate themes. Meanwhile, the Commission was very positive about film’s educational role stating that ‘the advantage to be gained by the use of the cinematograph as an adjunct to educational methods should be assisted in every possible way by the Commonwealth’. We draw on the Commission’s minutes of evidence, the Commission report and newspaper articles form the 1920s to the 1940s to argue that the Commission provides valuable insight into the beginnings of the use of screen content in formal schooling, both as a resource across the curriculum and as a specific focus of education through film appreciation and, later, broader forms of media education. The article argues debates about screen entertainment and education rehearsed in the Commission are reflected today as parents, concerned citizens and educators ponder the dangers and potential of new media technologies and media content used by children and young people such as video games, social media and interactive content.

Music industry

The music industry is usually structured into three industry sectors: live music, music licensing, and recorded music. Live music and recorded music are primarily consumer businesses where revenues are generated consumers who buy CDs or concert tickets. The licensing industry on the other hand is a business-to-business industry where companies pay music rights owners for the use of their musics in various contexts, e.g. background music in shops, music in advertising, or music in broadcast radio...

Studying change in popular culture: A "middle-range" approach

"This chapter reviews the capacity of the discipline field to account for the velocity and quality of digitally-driven transformations, while making a case for a "middle range" approach that steers between unbridled optimism ("all-change") and determined scepticism ("Continuity") about the potential of such change. The chapter focuses on online screen distribution as a case study, considering the evidence for, and significance of, change in industry structure and the main payers, how content is produced and by whom, the nature of content, and the degree to which online screen distribution has reached thresholds of mainstream popularity."