Rural and regional Australian public accounting firm services : service provision, concerns and tensions

Public accounting firms provide a necessary and important service for rural and regional areas. However, the provision of high-quality services is hindered by a number of factors. This paper reports the findings from a large-scale survey of professional accounting firm practitioners located in rural and regional Australia, identifying factors causing concerns and tensions and quantifying their scope and importance. Prominent concerns and tensions identified include adverse effects arising from the employment market, communications technology developments and legislation such as the Corporate Law Economic Reform Program (Audit Reform and Corporate Disclosure) Act 2004 and the Financial Services Reform Act 2001.

Workplace human rights reporting: a study of Australian garment and retail companies

The opening of the Australian economy in a globalised world has led to Australian garment and retail corporations moving their manufacturing overseas and acquiring goods from overseas providers. This is usually better for the corporations’ bottom-line, as they can purchase goods overseas at a fraction of their local cost, partly due to cheap labour. Australia is one of the many OECD countries not to have a well regulated environment for workplace human rights. This study examines 18 major Australian retail and garment manufacturing corporations and finds that workplace human rights reporting is poor, based on content analysis of their annual reports, corporate social responsibility reports and websites. This is probably due to the failure of the Australian Government to provide adequate oversight by promulgating mandatory reporting standards for both local and overseas operations of Australian companies. This permits corporations to avoid reporting their workplace human rights standards and breaches.

Mechanisms linking affective reactions to competition-related and competition-extraneous concerns in male martial artists

The main aim of this study was to examine affective linkages between competition-related and competition-extraneous concern domains. A secondary purpose was to establish the contributions of pre-competition affects to post-competition performance appraisals, independent of pre-competition performance expectations. Thirty-nine highly skilled male martial artists were assessed at five random times a day for a week and 1 h before a major competition on affective states and sources of concern. They also reported their performance expectations and post-competition performance appraisals. Affective states triggered by competition-related and competition-extraneous concerns persisted in time. Carry-over effects were stronger after reports of competition-related concerns, emphasizing the subjective importance of the competitive event. Although positive (enjoyment and surprise) and negative (sadness and guilt) affective spill-over was observed from competition-extraneous to competition-related concerns, the reverse held true only for disgust. These findings may be due to the athletes' ability to regulate affective reactions within a sporting setting, in particular. Spill-over from competition-extraneous to competition-related concerns is indicative of a lesser degree of control over work/study and family life. Given that average weekly negative affects and anger/disgust were independent predictors of post-competition performance appraisals, the phenomenon of spill-over and other affective linkage mechanisms in sport warrant further investigation.

News judgements: a critical examination of reporting non-convictions for minor crimes

This paper considers issues related to the reporting of non-convictions for minor criminal offences. The entry point for the discussion is a content analysis of press court reporting across the Australian state of Victoria that shows that many newspapers report non-convictions. The paper observes that as the practice of reporting non-convictions has extended into digital space, a person the local court decides should not have a black mark recorded against their name can now be named and shamed before a global audience for an indefinite period. 

Hiding in plain sight: street artists online

Identity and privacy concerns related to social media are the subject of widespread academic enquiry and mass media reporting. Although in most circumstances academic research tends to present identity play and online self-presentation as positive, media reporting in Australia makes much of the risks of identity theft, privacy breaches and online predators. This research explores the phenomenological experience of creating an online persona, focusing particularly on street artists. For street artists, the threat of unwanted exposure has to be balanced with the positive implications of sharing their creative work outside its geographical and temporal constraints. I argue that street artists use complex persona-creation strategies in order to both protect and promote themselves. The two street artists discussed in this article experience their engagement with social media and digital networks in ways that offer new insight into the opportunities and problems associated with the presentation of a persona online.

Exploring distributed leadership for the quality management of online learning environments

Online learning environments (OLEs) are complex information technology (IT) systems that intersect with many areas of university organisation. Distributed models of leadership have been proposed as appropriate for the good governance of OLEs. Based on theoretical and empirical research, a group of Australian universities proposed a framework for the quality management of OLEs, and sought to validate the model via a survey of Australasian university representatives with OLE leadership responsibility. For the framework elements: Planning and Resourcing were rated most important; Organisational structure was rated least important; Technologies were rated low in importance and high in satisfaction; Resourcing and Evaluation were rated low in satisfaction; and Resourcing had the highest rating of importance coupled with low satisfaction. Considering distributed leadership in their institution, respondents reported that the organisational alignments represented by 'official' reporting and peer relationships were significantly more important and more effective than the organisational alignments linking the formal and informal leaders. From a range of desirable characteristics of distributed leadership, 'continuity and sustainability' received the highest rating of importance and a low rating of 'in evidence' - there are concerns about the sustainability of distributed leadership for the governance of OLEs in universities.