What women can expect when undertaking expatriate assignments in Australia

Despite a numerical equivalence with men, women in Australia have not experienced parity with males in terms of opportunity. They are continually under-represented among Australia's elite (Higley, Deacon, & Smart, 1979). In general, women employees, particularly those born overseas, face more difficulties in gaining access to, and advancing within, the managerial workforce than are men. Further, obtaining a managerial job in the first place is often the biggest obstacle facing women from a non-English-speaking background (NESS) even when their experience and educational levels are comparable to those of English speaking applicants. This paper sheds light on the experience of women expatriates in Australia and the factors that inhibit and facilitate their entry and advancement into managerial positions. Recommendations for organisations sending women on expatriate assignments to Australia are offered.

Race, identity and education achievements among Arab-Australian students

This paper discusses the challenge of managing cultural diversity in secondary schools, focusing on key structural, ideological, cultural, attitudinal and identity factors affecting the educational experiences and outcomes of Australian students from Arabic-speaking background (ASB). Recent research indicates that there are complex processes at play that hinder the ability of non English-speaking background (NESB) students to access constructive and meaningful education, and that such processes need further systematic investigation. It has also been argued that Australian schools are failing the test of social equity and that the dominant approach to curriculum and pedagogy does not meet the needs of the growing numbers of students from divergent cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. This paper focuses on identifying the social, cultural and attitudinal factors that affect the educational achievements of ASB students within a broad multidimensional approach to multicultural education. By linking thorough empirical research and innovative theory with practical, tested plans of action, this study proposes an in-principled approach to multicultural education that is extendable to a variety of schooling contexts while retaining its core focus on effecting positive learning outcomes. The key objectives of the larger study upon which this paper is based are to (a) address the disadvantages and barriers faced by NESB young people, particularly ASB young people, in achieving positive educational outcomes; (2) increase their chances for better life opportunities and self fulfilment; and (3) develop a good practice model for diversity management in Victorian schools. This latter objective will complement Victorian Government policies on cultural diversity and multicultural education.

Casey: four decades in the making of Australian foreign policy

Richard Casey was involved in shaping Australian foreign policy for over four decades. Casey's attitudes, ideas, policies and actions towards the rest of the world are therefore an important part of a Liberal tradition in Australian foreign policy. To examine Casey's place in the Liberal tradition this article explores Casey's positions on the great international issues of two periods: the 1930s and the 1950s. The conclusion of the article is that three key ideas shaped Casey's foreign policy, and therefore also lie at the centre of the Liberal tradition; firstly, a strong attachment to the idea of the English speaking alliance; secondly, a realist perspective on international affairs; and, thirdly, a consistent strand of anti-communism.

The effect of focus on form in the written work of adult learners of Arabic

One of the key debates within SLA research circles concerns grammar
- whether and hov to include it in second language (L2) instruction. 'Noninterventionist' approaches to language leaching, which centre on focus on meaning (FonM) , have been found to be neither economical nor expedient in terms of use of learners' classtime (Long & Robinson, 1998). This paper is a study of the effects oj direct grammatical instruction within a communicative context (Focus on Form - FonF) on the accuracy rate of the use of noun-adjective agreement in the written work of adult learners of Arabic. Learning the systems oj noun/adjective agreement in Arabic presents problems for beginners since. unlike languages such as English. Arabic needs to be modified for gender, number. definiteness and case. Through teaching material and methods, first-year university English speaking students of Arabic were directly exposed to morpho-syntactic inflections relevant to noun-adjective agreement. In post-tests over an extended period. instructed students showed a higher accuracy rate of some forms than their uninstructed colleagues. suggesting focusing on form is beneficial to the Arabic learner and does not need to interrupt the communicative flow in the classroom (Ellis et al. 2001).

Community language programs in Australian schools: policy at the crossroads

The linguistic situation in Australia today presents an intriguing case for sociolinguistic inquiries. Despite the recent waves of migration from non Anglo-Celtic regions, the majority of Australians today are primarily monolingual with English being the dominant language. More critical, perhaps, is the diminishing appeal of second language learning even among second generation speakers of the large ethnic communities. This is indeed ironic giving that prior to white settlement in Australia, the Aboriginal inhabitants were predominantly multilingual with more than 250 languages (and many of their dialects) spoken by the 300 000 original inhabitants at the time when Captain James Cook's ship reached Botany Bay in Sydney in 1770. Given the size of the post-War migration, it was not until 1987 that the Australian government adopted a formal national policy on languages becoming 'the first English-speaking country to have such a policy and the first in the world to have a multilingual languages policy' (Australian Alliance for Languages 2001: 2). This paper will discuss the historical context for multilingualism in Australia and the current trend in government policy and funding. It will provide insights into community language programs and the challenges of remaining viable and relevant in the current social and political climate. Statistical analyses will be used to highlight emerging trends and future prospects.

German corporate governance in international and European context

The main aim with this book is to provide English speaking readers with a comprehensive overview of the German corporate governance model. The authors introduce the reader to the unique features of the German Business and Enterprise Law. The book deals with the most important company organs, namely the General Meeting, the Management Board and the Supervisory Board. The unique interplay among these organs are also covered and the reader is introduced to the particular dynamics of the German two-tier board structure.Further the authors deal with the dominant role of the "German banks" and new players in the German financial markets, focusing particularly on voting rights of these institutions at companies' general meetings and appointing members to companies' supervisory boards. Accounting is shown as the documentary proof of good corporate governance. The final chapter gives an overview of corporate governance in the European Union, the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance and corporate governance in the US, the UK and Australia.

Ethnocentricity in academic marketing journals: a study of authors, reviewers, editorial boards and editors

Purpose – This paper aims to examine and compare a set of key characteristics of ethnocentricity that influence the policy of academic marketing journals, and hence the provenance, authorship and nature of articles in academic marketing journals.

Design/methodology/approach – The “fundamental” characteristics of three major marketing journals, published in the USA, the UK and New Zealand, were examined for the six-year period from the start of 2000 to the end of 2006. Data were collected from editorials and web homepages. Analysis was conducted of 811 articles, 1,676 authors, three editorial teams and three sets of reviewers

Findings – There is a challenging academic ethnocentricity in the management and implied policy of the three journals. The extent varies, but the inescapable conclusion is that the world-wide research community in marketing is not properly represented by leading journals.

Research limitations/implications – The sample was intentionally small, and unrepresentative of any category except “leading quality”. The findings are intended to add momentum to a debate and point ways forward, not to provide generalisable answers.

Practical implications – The findings suggest that: the editorial boards and reviewing teams should be made more representative geographically; editorships should be organized around the concept of a team of geographically differentiated editors; editorial and review teams should be ethnographically representative of individuals who do research and wish to publish it, particularly beyond the English-speaking world. In general, the world-wide research community in marketing would benefit from less ethnocentricity in academic journals, and these leading examples should strive to reduce it.

Originality/value – The impact of ethnocentricity is underestimated in this context. The issue needs to be discussed, because of paradigmatic influences that it can have on a journal and the profile of its authors, and hence on journal ranking and perceptions of journal quality.

Ischaemic heart disease and Australian immigrants: the influence of birthplace and language skills on treatment and use of health services

Admission rates for ischaemic heart disease (IHD), and the use of invasive cardiovascular procedures, separation mode and length of stay (LOS) were compared between Australians from non-English speaking background (NESB; n=8627) and English speaking background (ESB; n=13162) aged 20 years and over admitted to Victorian urban public hospitals. The study covered the period from 1993 to 1998. It was found that, compared with their ESB counterparts, the incidence of admission for acute myocardial infarction was significantly higher for NESB men and women before and after controlling for confounding factors. The age-adjusted ratios for NESB women compared with their ESB counterparts ranged from 1.23 to 1.89 for cardiac catheterisation, from 0.23 to 0.27 for percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), and from 1.04 to 1.80 for coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG).
Procedure rates were comparable in men for cardiac catheterisation and CABG but higher for PTA rates in NESB men (OR: 1.29, 95%CI: 1.11-1.50) than their ESB counterparts. Both NESB men (β=0.04, 95%CI: 0.01-0.07) and women (β=0.03, 95%CI: 0.02-0.08) experienced significantly longer hospital stays than their ESB counterparts. These findings indicate there may be systematic differences in patients’ treatment and service utilisation in Victorian public hospitals. The extent to which physicians’ bias and
patients’ choice could explain these differences requires further investigation.

Providing health services to migrants and refugees settling in Victoria, Australia: an analysis of the complexity, cost and policy implications for public health

The aim of the research was to identify factors related to the increased costs of providing health services to clients from a non-English speaking background (NESB), using a cross-sectional analysis of the administrative records of clients using community health services in the Northern Metropolitan region of Melbourne for the 2001/2002 financial year. The higher cost of providing services to NESB clients was influenced by four factors: increased consultation time, group attendance to an appointment, increased interpreting costs and the type of service provider. Family members and multilingual staff play a significant role in providing informal interpreting services or low-cost support for NESB consultants, and these activities should receive appropriate support. Additional funding is needed to support interpreting requirements when dealing with the health needs of NESB clients.

Families as carers-information needs in a cultural context

While the important role of family as a carer has been increasingly recognised in healthcare service provision, particularly for patients with acute or chronic illnesses, the carer’s information needs have not been well understood and adequately supported by current health information systems. In order to effectively provide continuous and home-based care for the patient, a family relative as the primary carer needs sufficient access to medical knowledge and patient’s health information. There are two challenges. First, being a family relative, the primary carer is often a non-medical practitioner. Second, in Australia, many primary carers are family relatives of patients from a non-English speaking background. They are often seen as interpreters in clinical consultation sessions. Their roles and responsibilities as an interpreter and a carer are often mixed and blurry.
Therefore, their information needs are often seen as secondary to the patient or neglected. The primary carer’s information needs are currently not yet well understood.

This paper reports finding from a case study which examines an on-line diary of a husband-carer who provided support and care for his wife, who at the time of care was a lung cancer patient. The case study examines an ongoing learning process that the husband went through, identifies information needs by the carer and cultural factors which played an important role in the husband’s interpretation of information, decision making and provision of care. The finding extends a current model of the user’s information needs in the literature and suggests implications for further research into developing health information systems to meet information needs by the family carer.

Income security of international students in Australia

Growth in the number of international students studying in English language countries has slowed in recent years and this development has generated extended debate amongst university managers and policy makers. In these discussions much attention has focussed on whether the slow down is to be explained by currency realignments, visa requirements, the quality of education, or the increasing competitiveness of the international education market. But what has attracted little attention is the fact that when parents and students choose in which country they will purchase a foreign education their choice is commonly influenced by the level of security that is perceived to characterise the range of options. What security means can take many forms and in this paper we focus on income security. Drawing on interview data from 9 Australian universities, we clarify the sources of international student income, the extent to which these students experience income security/insecurity, how they cope with income difficulties and/or ensure finances do not become a serious problem, and whether the nature of the information provided by governments and universities helps explain the extent of income insecurity manifest amongst international students in Australia. We argue that a significant proportion of international students studying in Australia do experience income insecurity and suggest that for both moral and economic reasons the government and the university sector should pay increased attention to this aspect of student need.

A virtual environment for cultural and linguistic inclusivity teaching in a global environment

The Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia) operational policy on 'International and Culturally Inclusive Curricula' states that Deakin will incorporate international/intercultural perspectives and inclusive pedagogies into its courses in order to prepare all students to perform capably, ethically and sensitively in international, multicultural, professional and social contexts.

This paper is about a specific project to internationalise the teacher education curriculum through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This project is scoped in the context of the UNESCO thrust of 'Education for All' in agreeing that inclusive societies begin with inclusive education practices. In our view current strategies have been insufficient to ensure that marginalized and excluded children receive access to their right to education.

The project aims to operationalise part of the UNESCO Dakar Framework for high quality learning environments by responding to ‘…the diverse needs and circumstances of learners and giving appropriate weight to the abilities, skills and knowledge they bring to the teaching and learning process’ by minimising language acquisition barriers that can otherwise impede effective communication and learning.

In addition, we need to be mindful of the marginalisation of people from non-English speaking backgrounds and therefore, in this initiative we use ICT to bridge the 'tyranny of distance' and offer a curriculum that values cultural and linguistic diversity.

In this paper we will discuss how we intend to develop these project principles. In particular we will indicate our plans to use relatively low cost, accessible software to develop a virtual environment where students can enter text in their native language, view foreign language text in their native language, hear text in their own language and automatically encode text into MP3 files and attach the files to messages.

Predicting timely doctoral completions : an institutional case study of 2000-2005 doctoral graduates

Federal government changes to the funding of doctoral students have focussed the attention of university management on their completion rates. The aims are to inform the allocation of institutional resources in a manner that improves the likelihood of timely doctoral completions and to highlight a process that can also be used for analyses of other key indicators of progression and attrition. The analyses and model development used national data readily available to all universities, which is collected in a standard approach through the Graduate Destinations Survey (GDS). The findings show that the most important variable for timely completion was attendance (full‐ versus part‐time), where in terms of full‐time equivalent (FTE) years of study, part‐time students were far more likely to complete quickly than full‐time students. For the full‐time students the key predictors of timely completion were residency, field of study and English‐speaking background (ESB). The timeliness of part‐time students was predicted by field of study and ESB. This study confirms that there is considerable variation by discipline for timely doctoral completions. The pragmatic application and prospective test of the derived models present a variety of opportunities for research student administrators. For example, those full‐time students scoring highly represented a concentration of timely graduates more than 7.5 times higher than the lowest‐scoring group – almost an order of magnitude of difference. In short, university management could gain tremendous value from more widely using the data available.

Cultural racism, language prejudice and discrimination in hospital contexts : an Australian study

This article explores the idea that racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare may be expressive of unacknowledged practices of cultural racism. In conducting this exploration, the researchers identify, describe and discuss the practice of language prejudice and discrimination by health service providers, discovered serendipitously in the context of a broader study exploring cultural safety and cultural competency in an Australian healthcare context. The original study involved individual and focus groups interviews with 145 participants recruited from over 17 different organisational and domestic home sites. Participants included health service managers, ethnic liaison officers, qualified health interpreters, cultural trainers/educators, ethnic welfare organisation staff, registered nurses, allied health professionals, and healthcare consumers. Participants self-identified as being from over 27 different ethnocultural and language backgrounds.

Analysis of the data revealed that English language proficiency, like skin colour, was used as a social marker to classify, categorise, and negatively evaluate people of non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) in the contexts studied. Negative evaluations, in turn, were used to justify the exclusion of NESB people from healthcare relationships and resources. Further data analysis revealed that underpinning the negative attitudes and behaviours in hospital domains concerning people who spoke accented English or who did not speak English proficiently were a dislike of difference, fear of difference, intolerance of difference, fear of competition for scarce healthcare resources, repressed hostility toward difference, and ignorance.

Highlighting the implications of language prejudice for the safety and quality care of NESB people, the researchers call for further internationally comparative research and debate on the subject.

Predictors of timely doctoral student completions by type of attendance: the utility of a pragmatic approach

Federal government changes to the funding of doctoral students have focused the attention of university management on their completion rates. The aims of this paper are to inform the allocation of institutional resources in a manner that improves the likelihood of timely doctoral completions and to highlight a process that can also be used for analyses of other key indicators of progression and attrition. The analyses and model development used national data readily available to all universities, which are collected in a standard approach through the Graduate Destinations Survey (GDS). The findings show that the most important variable for timely completion was attendance (full-time compared with part-time), whereby in terms of full-time equivalent (FTE) years of study, part-time students were far more likely to complete quickly than full-time students. For the full-time students, the key predictors of timely completion were residency, field of study and English-speaking background (ESB). The timeliness of part-time students was predicted by field of study and ESB. This study confirms that there is considerable variation by discipline for timely doctoral completions. The pragmatic application and prospective test of the derived models present a variety of opportunities for research student administrators. For example, those full-time students scoring highly represented a concentration of timely graduates more than 7.5 times higher than the lowest-scoring group - almost an order of magnitude of difference. In short, university management could gain tremendous value from more widely using the data available.