Enabling organizational cultural change using systemic strategic human resource management – a longitudinal case study

Researchers report that successful cultural change in an organization is difficult to achieve. This research contends that it is more likely to be successful when a systemic approach to strategic human resource management (SHRM) is used to facilitate the change. The contention was tested in an action research case study and longitudinal assessment of change in a large Australian public sector agency. A clear finding from this research is that the cultural change had been sustained through the systemic application of SHRM.

Exploring the current status of call centre offshoring research : a research agenda and future directions

Call centres have become an important and growing part of the service industry, enabling firms to provide better customer service, extend sales capabilities and manage customer relationships. However, the methods taken by firms around recruitment, training and management of overseas call centre agents have been far more complex, leading to high failure rates with Call Centre Offshoring (CCO) practices. To better understand the current CCO practices, this study reviews a current research status. Through a literature review, we identified a number of themes spanning across disciplines related to CCO. We found that the current literature lacked of understanding of socio-cultural elements such as trust, language, communication, national and organisational culture that positively influenced the stakeholder relationships. We argue that a common link can be established among CCO-related studies across disciplines when approaching the topic from a socio-cultural perspective. Our findings discuss the implications and provide a useful reference for future CCO-related studies.

Journalists, remote Indigenous sources and cultural competence

This is the report of the Australian news media and Indigenous policymaking 1988-2008 Australian Research Council Discovery Project.

Planning research and educational partnerships with Indigenous communities : practice, realities and lessons

Increasingly planning practice and research are having to engage with Indigenous communities in Australia to empower and position their knowledge in planning strategies and arguments. But also to act as articulators of their cultural knowledge, landscape aspirations and responsibilities and the need to ensure that they are directly consulted in projects that impact upon their ‘country’ generally and specifically. This need has changed rapidly over the last 25 years because of land title claim legal precedents, state and Commonwealth legislative changes, and policy shifts to address reconciliation and the consequences of the fore-going precedents and enactments. While planning instruments and their policies have shifted, as well as research grant expectations and obligations, many of these Western protocols do not recognise and sympathetically deal with the cultural and practical realities of Indigenous community management dynamics, consultation practices and procedures, and cultural events much of which are placing considerable strain upon communities who do not have the human and financial resources to manage, respond, co-operate and inform in the same manner expected of non-Indigenous communities in Australia. This paper reviews several planning formal research, contract research and educational engagements and case studies between the authors and various Indigenous communities, and highlights key issues, myths and flaws in the way Western planning and research expectations are imposed upon Indigenous communities that often thwart the quality and uncertainty of planning outcomes for which the clients, research agencies, and government entities were seeking to create.

Communities of memory? The Jewish holocaust museum and research centre, Melbourne

The Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre (JHC), Melbourne, opened in 1984. Through the support of large numbers of Jewish people, it has become an impmiant part of their lives as they age, a place of solace and memorialisation. It is a second home for some, providing networking support within and between the different Jewish ethnic communities. This paper will draw on the JHC's ever growing videotestimony collection as well as oral interviews on the roles played by Melbourne survivor volunteers and others in developing the Centre. The survivors have experienced many different aspects of the Holocaust, have come from all over Europe and elsewhere, and 1 are sometimes culturally very different. It will discuss the role played by the various social and cultural communities in creating and responding to the JHC and the success they have had in establishing 'communities of memory' or, alternatively, representing and 1 contextualising the various social and cultural communities.

Factors affecting capital program performance audit findings

Complex capital programs require specialized management techniques, in order to address the volatility, cost overruns, significant delays in completion, and failures with which such programs are typically associated. The need is greater than ever for careful oversight, especially for programs that expend public monies.

Audit is commonly a statutory or governance requirement on such programs, but traditional performance audit techniques and standards may be insufficient for certain types of programs and industries, providing a mere illusion of oversight adequacy instead of the assurance that is needed. In order to most appropriately define the performance audit scope, phrase the solicitation for services, select the audit team, and provide support to the auditors during the engagement, public and private sector entity auditees need to understand the factors that impact performance audit results and effectiveness. The question becomes one of how performance audit can be improved, and stakeholders satisfied regarding program achievements, accountability for resource use, transparency in operations, and risk management.

The author considered program complexity, governance, project controls, the history and evolution of the audit function, stakeholder expectations, assurance, and obstacles to audit, and used this information in conjunction with data from a large sample of 775 audit reports from complex construction programs, to derive questions and conclusions about performance audit results and effectiveness, and comparisons to expenditure audit results. The ultimate goal was to define key components in the execution of performance audits, based on theconclusions of the analysis, in order to improve performance audit findings and thus their applicability and usefulness.

While this study focused on program performance audit, it was also related to the field of program management. Although the data population was concentrated in the area of construction programs, conclusions from this research may also be applied to other complex, multifaceted or phased activities such as projects and programs in other industries (manufacturing, information technology), and also pursuits such as major event planning, company launch, mergers, and large program implementations or rollouts.

The research results clearly demonstrated that different types of findings were generated by different audit scopes. The author observed that typical audit findings focused on routine procedural, accounting, and controls errors. On average, contract expenditure audits questioned only 2.65% of expenditures, and performance audits of large complex programs questioned only 0.03% of expenditures. The majority (72.56%) of the performance audits in the sample yielded no findings or questioned costs.

There were significant positive correlations between: the number of expenditures tested and the number of qualitative findings, inclusion of construction experts on the audit team and the percentage of expenditures questioned, inclusion of construction experts on the audit team and the number of qualitative findings, broader audit scope and the percentage of expenditures questioned, and broader audit scope and the number of qualitative findings. Of these, auditor expertise and audit scope were the driving factors.

There were significant negative correlations between the application of agreed-upon procedures and the percentage of expenditures questioned, and the application of agreed upon-procedures and the number of qualitative findings. It was determined that the significant negative correlation between the application of audit standards and the number of qualitative findings was due to other factors, such as the application of agreed-upon procedures and the lack of construction experts on the audit team.

Other findings, resulting from review of the data, were unrelated to the research questions yet of considerable importance to industry. An extremely high percentage (81%) of the “performance audits” instead applied a very limited set of agreed-upon-procedures (AUP) in the engagement, According to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs), AUP engagements could not be classified as audits. Thus, it was inappropriate for the accounting firms to apply AUP engagements in lieu of a performance audit, and it was especially egregious for them to state in their report that the engagements were conducted in accordance with audit standards, as AUP engagements and the specific audit standards were by their very nature mutually exclusive.

Elaborative relational structures in the research prose of sociology : an intercultural study

This paper investigates elaborative relational structures utilised by native English speaking and native Polish speaking scholars in sociology research articles written in English. The examined texts have been produced in American, Australian and Polish academic discourse communities. The study utilised the framework of the analysis of the rhetorical structure of tests (FARS) as an analytical tool (Golebiowski 2009, 2011). The following types of elaboration relations are discussed : amplification, extension, reformulation, explanation, instantiation and addition. Elaboration is analysed with respect to its textual function, frequency of employment, hierarchical location, recursiveness, discoursal prominence and explicitness. The elaborative systems in the examined texts are shown to be complex, with pervasive presence of multi-stage recursive structures. It is suggested that elaborativeness may be a general characteristic of the style of writing sociology, which, as a relatively new discipline, requires establishing of wide grounds for the proposed claims, where writers persuade their readers not only of the specific claims of their text, but also of frameworks of thought in which the claims are placed. It is hypothesized that the similarities in the elaborativeness across texts result from the shared stylistic conventions and traditions of the disciplinary research community of sociology, while differences in the mode of employment of elaboration relations are attributed to cultural norms and conventions as well as educational systems prevailing within the discourse communities constituting the social contexts of the studied texts.
Golebiowski, Z. (2011). Scholarly criticism across discourse communities. In Salager-Meyer, Françoise and Lewin, Beverly A. (eds), Crossed words : Criticism in scholarly writing, pp. 203-224, Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, Berlin, Germany.
Golebiowski Z. (2009). The use of contrastive strategies in a sociology research paper: A cross-cultural study. In Suomela-Salmi, Eija and Dervin, Fred (eds), Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives on academic discourse, pp. 165-186, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Philadelphia.

A cultural models approach to osteoporosis prevention and treatment

This article identifies cultural models of osteoporosis, as shared by community-dwelling older women in southeastern Australia, and compares these with cultural knowledge conveyed through social marketing. Cultural models are mental constructs about specific domains in everyday life, such as health and illness, which are shared within a community. We applied domain analyses to data obtained from in-depth interviews and stakeholder-identified print materials. The response domains identified from our case studies made up the shared cultural model “Osteoporosis has low salience,” particularly when ranked against other threats to health. The cultural knowledge reflected in the print materials supported a cultural model of low salience. Cultural cues embedded in social marketing messages on osteoporosis may be internalized and motivating in unintended ways. Identifying and understanding cultural models of osteoporosis within a community may provide valuable insights to inform the development of targeted health messages.

Cultural heritage and development in South East Asia

This chapter discusses research undertaken into the developmental role of museums and heritage sites in Thailand and the Greater Mekong Subregion, a geographical area that also includes Cambodia, Laos PDR and Myanmar. It contextualizes an international project, the Lampang Temples Project, to explore the potential role that museums and heritage sites can play in place-based development work, particularly in an Asian context where sacred places are simultaneously valued by local members of the community and as desinations for religious pilgrims and international tourists. The discussion of the Lampang Temples Project is located within an understanding of the international discourse concerning the roles of museums in development, including those contributions to the discourse that have originated in the Asia-Pacific region. It is also situated within an understanding of the roles of international agencies and local governments in the promotion of programmes and infrastructure for the preservation of Buddhist heritage and the relationship of this development strategy with tourism. Furthermore, due to the participatory and observational experience of the authors in the Lampang Temples Project, the chapter also considers the issues involved in applying cross-cultural pedagogies to the management of cultural tourism sites, including UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The results of the Lampang Temples Project support the contention that colaborative training models and pedagogies can be adapted, provided that differing cultural contexts and suppositions are appropriately articulated and integrated. Further, it suggests that this type of collaborative approach to the management of cultural tourism sites has the potential to play an important role in Buddhist heritage development processes.

Tertiary teaching of international student : a matter of cultural adaptation

When international student start studying in a university in another country, they always take a time of adjustment. Starting a new page in a different country is a matter of adaptation, with some of them facing major lifestyle and cultural impacts. Educa

Bourdieu and educational research: thinking tools, relational thinking, beyond epistemological innocence

The main aim of this chapter is to provide an introduction to the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu, and to outline different ways in which Bourdieu’s work is influential and has been engaged with in education research and to suggest implicitly the usefulness of this work for educational researchers. In order to do this, we draw on a range of Bourdieu’s own writing published singly or with colleagues, emphasising in particular his engagements with education. Part of our treatment also deals with his wider writing that has subsequently been influential for education researchers, and in particular Bourdieu’s anthropological writing and account of practice (Bourdieu 1977, 1990), his approach to social class and cultural issues, his account of the judgement of taste and distinctions (Bourdieu, 1984), and his later politically focused writing (Bourdieu, 1989/1996, 2003, 2004c, 2005a).

Developing intercultural competence in university staff : augmenting internationalisation

The primary aim of this research was to consider the benefit of providing professional development in intercultural competence for general staff at Deakin University. While the question arose from a disparity identified in the University policies, the importance of this consideration was highlighted in an impending audit to be conducted by AUQA, in which internationalisation was a key theme.
In this pilot study, a range of professional staff members across Deakin University was interviewed to identify their strengths, weaknesses, aspirations and expectations on professional development in intercultural competence. Some recommendations were made about how to offer such training.

The role of cultural values and religion on views of body size and eating practices among adolescents from Fiji, Tonga and Australia

Objectives This study investigated cultural values related to body image and eating practices in Western and non-Western societies.

Design and Methods In total, 628 Fijian, 463 Indo-Fijian, 598 Tongan, and 534 Australian adolescents completed measures of cultural values and religious influences in relation to the ideal body and eating practices.

Results Fijian and Tongan adolescents were more likely to value a large body. Religious influences were most strongly associated with eating practices for Fijians, Indo-Fijians, and Tongans.

Conclusions The findings support the role of religion in transmitting cultural values regarding eating practices in Pacific Island communities.

Statement of contribution
What is already known on this subject? Previous research has demonstrated that sociocultural factors shape body image and eating behaviours. Most of this research has been conducted in Western countries.

What does this study add? The current study identifies the role of cultural values and religious influences on body image and eating behaviours in a number of different cultural groups. This is the first study to use the same methodology to explore these relationships across Western and Pacific Island communities.