Proceedings of the 2004 Australian Software Engineering Conference

Established in 1986, ASWEC is the premier technical meeting for the Australian Software Engineering Community, and attracts a significant number of international participants. The conference is sponsored by both Engineers Australia and the Australian Computer Society. The major goal of the conference is to provide a forum for exchanging experience and new research results in software engineering. The technical program for ASWEC 2004 includes research papers from Australia and across the world. This year we received 79 submissions from 12 countries: 56 from Australia, 6 from New Zealand, 9 from Asia, 4 from Europe, and 4 from North America. All papers were fully refereed by three (two papers by only two) Program Committee members. We accepted 36 papers to be presented at the conference. We are grateful to all authors who contributed to ASWEC 2004. In addition to the technical papers, the conference program also includes two keynote speakers and one panel on Software Engineering accreditation. We are very pleased about being able to attract Philippe Kruchten, University of British Columbia, and Ian Hayes, The University of Queensland, as the keynote speakers for this conference.

The Anglo Cluster: Legacy of the British Empire

The Anglo cluster comprises Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa (White sample), and the United States of America. These countries are all developed nations, predominantly English speaking, and were all once British colonies. Today, they are amongst the wealthiest countries in the world. The GLOBE results show that the Anglo cluster is characterized by an individualistic performance orientation. Further, although they value gender equality, the Anglo cluster countries tend to be male-dominated in practice. Effective leadership in the Anglo cultures is affected by a combination of charismatic inspiration and a articipative style.

Class attainment among British men - A multivariate extension of the CASMIN model of intergenerational class mobility

The CASMIN Project is arguably the most influential contemporary study of class mobility in the world. However, CASMIN results with respect to weak vertical status effects on class mobility have been extensively criticized. Drawing on arguments about how to model vertical mobility, Hout and Hauser (1992) show that class mobility is strongly determined by vertical socioeconomic differences. This paper extends these arguments by estimating the CASMIN model while explicitly controlling for individual determinants of socioeconomic attainment. Using the 1972 Oxford Mobility Data and the 1979 and 1983 British Election Studies, the paper employs mixed legit models to show how individual socioeconomic factors and categorical differences between classes shape intergenerational mobility. The findings highlight the multidimensionality of class mobility and its irreducibility to vertical movement up and down a stratification hierarchy.

Contingent or structural crisis in British agriculture?

The British agricultural sector is either already in or rapidly approaching some sort of crisis. Two features are particularly significant in the political response to the current situation. First, there is an increasingly neoliberal approach to agricultural policy. Sec end, agricultural policy per se is being subsumed with wider rural policies. In this paper we question the rationality of both these trends, both theoretically through 'new wave regulation theory' and by relating the British situation to the recent experiences of the agricultural sectors in Australia and New Zealand.