Quick fixes, drug culture and management culture : excellence and ecstasy, BPR and Brown

This paper critiques the prescriptions of management gurus by charting parallels between management culture and drug culture over the last two decades. I argue that the ‘quick fixes’ peddled by gurus mirror the illicit drug fix of choice popularised in the same era. I suggest that, in terms of the specific nature of their promised highs, Excellence mirrored Ecstasy, and Business Process Reengineering mirrored Heroin. By tracing resonance with drug fixes, I introduce another way to understand why particular corporate fixes are found so attractive, locating this in patterns of addiction and in the gurus’ ability to exploit wider shared cultural contexts. The paper ends by suggesting that the comparison with the world of illicit drugs has lessons not only for our understandings of management and management gurus, but also for critical management academics engagement with both the gurus and our wider audiences.

Cultural landscapes : a bridge between culture and nature?

Cultural landscapes are intended to increase awareness that heritage places (sites) are not isolated islands and that there is an interdependence of people, social structures, and the landscape and associated ecological systems. The paper explores whether the recognition of the 1992 World Heritage Cultural Landscape categories, the IUCN Protected Landscapes and the 2005 merging of cultural and natural criteria for World Heritage purposes have been effective in bridging the gap between culture and nature philosophically and in practice. With particular reference to opportunities presented in the Asia-Pacific region, where traditionally culture and nature are not regarded as separate, people are part of nature, the paper will further critically review the nature–culture link and its implications for North American-style national parks where cultural associations may not be seen to be necessary or even desirable. It suggests the imperative of highlighting and respecting in heritage nominations and inscriptions deep cultural associations of traditional communities with natural sites and implications for management to protect cultural and biological diversity and the need for thematic studies.

Leadership to improve mathematics outcomes in low SES schools and school networks

Instructional and transformational leadership is reportedly required to improve the mathematics outcomes of students in low socio-economic status school communities. This study of 43 schools in two networks of schools in rural Victoria explored leadership practices and found evidence to support both these leadership approaches along with distributed leadership practice. School leaders established network and school structures and relationships at various levels of the network and school organisation to enable and support ongoing improvement in teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and teaching practice and to build the leadership capacity of teachers within their schools. The leaders’ knowledge of effective mathematics teaching practice enabled them to mentor teachers in their school or team and to support the practices of professional learning teams within their school.

Hybrid perspectives : defining the relativity of culture and identity through migration experiences

This paper examines how culture and identity can be relatively defined through hybrid perspectives in relation to migration experiences. Addressing and portraying definitions of culture and identity is crucial in understanding how notions of such issues connect and initiate the migrant subject through new experiences, perspectives and ways of being. In enunciating the transitions from home to a new place, and elaborating on the rupture of an inherited culture and grounded identity, I refer to them through self-reflexive perspectives. The search for meaning through appraisals of cultural lineage and linguistic capital through a Diaspora, a post colonial history and lived life experiences from my home country, pre-empts the ambivalent and hybrid status in defining culture(s) and identit(ies). It is crucial to recognise how challenges for adaptation to new culture, language, societal norms, and differences in class, nationality, race and gender play specific roles in the migrant experience. My current experiences of migration to Australia are narrations of encountered difficulties, fears, inhibitions, new aspirations, perceptions and perspectives, which map an ‘identity crisis.’ From this narrative structure, I investigate through my ongoing PhD study, how my artistic expression and representations progress towards experiences, and themes that metaphorically reflect, inspire and enact the hybrid structures of culture(s) and identit(ies). Explored reflexively my representations suggest how the ‘liminal space’ or the ‘third space,’ (Bhabha, 1990) express transitions about the ‘self’ and my artistic expression, which enable further reflection and positions to emerge and extend to metaphorical expressions.

Scar that binds : American culture and the Vietnam War

In The Scar That Binds, Keith Beattie examines the central metaphors of the Vietnam War and their manifestations in American culture and life. Blending history and cultural criticism in a lucid style, this provocative book discusses an ideology of unity that has emerged through widespread rhetorical and cultural references to the war. A critique of this ideology reveals three dominant themes structured in a range of texts: the "wound," "the voice" of the Vietnam veteran, and "home." The analysis of each theme draws on a range of sources, including film, memoir, poetry, written and oral history, journalism, and political speeches.

Language, culture and health

This chapter provides an overview of the impact language and culture background can have on individuals' experience of illness and conceptualization of health. it also discusses cultural competency for health care personnel in the onctext of increasing diverse communities with specific reference to Australia and New Zealand.

The personal wellbeing index : psychometric equivalance for adults and school children

Despite the wealth of accumulated research evaluating subjective wellbeing (SWB) in children and adults, the validity of scores from parallel forms of SWB measures for each age group has yet to be empirically tested. This study examines the psychometric equivalence of the child and adult forms of the personal wellbeing index (PWI) using multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis. The child sample comprised 1,029 Victorian high-school students (aged 11–20) sampled across three independent studies. The adult sample comprised 1,965 Australian adults drawn from the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index. The results demonstrated strict factorial invariance between both versions, suggesting that the PWI measures the same underlying construct in adolescent and adult populations. These findings provide support for quantitative comparisons between adult and adolescent SWB data as valid.

Culture and violence in Iraq : bombing mosques and ethno-sectarian violence, 2006

Since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has suffered an extraordinary era of both heritage destruction and devastating spikes in violence. While cases such as the 2003 attacks on the Iraq National Museum and the Iraq National Library and Archive, as well as the systematic looting of Iraq’s sensitive archaeological sites, understandably caused outrage among scholars of heritage studies across the world, little attention has been paid to the destruction of Iraq’s many significant Islamic sites – particularly during the ethno-religious sectarian violence that raged across the nation in 2006-7. This paper presents the first results of a three year project funded by the Australian Research Council which aims to empirically test the assumption that a significant relationship exists between this spike in violence and the targeting of sites of Islamic heritage (mosques, shrines, etc.). To do this, the paper will compare and contrast the information in the world’s first database of heritage destruction (created by the author) and existing measures of violence in Iraq (such as the Iraq Body Count database). This will set the precedent for studies of both heritage and violence and enable policy formation towards the minimization of heritage destruction and spikes in violence during times of conflict.

How parental and school responses to choice policies reconfigure a rural education market in Victoria, Australia

Market principles now dominate the education and social policies of many Anglophone countries, including Australia, but articulate differentially within specific contexts. Existing historical legacies, local economic and social conditions, and geographical settings interact with federal and state funding and transport policies to shape the nature of regional education markets and the choices families make in a rural school market in Australia. Through two school case studies, this article explores the effects of policy shifts on parental choice and student movement within a regional Victorian community. Informed by policy sociology, the article views the policy as a dynamic, often ad hoc process with contradictory effects. It indicates how an ensemble of federal and state funding and conveyancing policies enable some schools to develop marketing practices that reconstruct the local education market to their advantage through the introduction of transport and flexi-boarding policies. It demonstrates that education markets are not confined to urban settings and that while choice is not a new phenomenon in this rural area, federal and state funding and transport policies have reconfigured local markets and intensified the market work undertaken by schools and parents with, in this instance, unequal effects on the provision of schooling in a rural region.

Real science and school science : endless wonder versus the drive to explore

Science may be simply defined as a way of finding out about how the world works. It is often viewed as objective and being built on a step-wise procedural base. The question arises as to whether school science needs to be different to cutting-edge (‘real’) science since the outcomes have different purposes, one requiring scientific breakthroughs, the other being imitative and simple. The divergence between these two realities of science impacts on the development of science curricula in that relevance for students, rather than purely imitating real science, steers science curricula.