Evaluating the effectiveness of an e-business security methodology using a case study approach

The findings of three case studies resulting from the application of the Australian Small to Medium Enterprise E-business Security Methodology (ASME-EBSM) to each of the SME sectors comprising micro, small and medium businesses are examined. First a comparison of the findings relating to the SME sectors is discussed. The similarities and differences including the challenges experienced by the three sectors concerning the application of e-business security management within their respective e-business operational environments are presented. Second the process of applying the ASME-EBSM is reviewed with reflections upon the development and constituents of the methodology. The paper describes how a number of case studies were undertaken to validate the ASME-EBSM approach.

Flexible delivery in the Australian vocational education and training sector: Barrier to success identified in cases studies of four adult learners

Government policy in Australia is increasingly encouraging training organisations in the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector to adopt flexible delivery approaches, but some researchers are sounding a note of caution. Evidence is emerging that Australian VET learners are not universally ready for flexible delivery, and this is reflected in high attrition rates and low pass rates. The literature on flexible delivery identifies a number of specific factors that can impact on the success of adult learners. However, there seems to be agreement that failure or dropout is not determined by a single factor, but by the interaction of a number of factors that build up over time. To understand these factors, we need to understand the learners - what their participation in education means to them, the context in which they are studying, and the numerous inter-connected factors that contribute to their failure to achieve a successful outcome. This paper discusses four case studies from a research project that followed up a small number of adult learners who enrolled in flexible delivery VET courses but did not achieve a successful outcome.

Multiple criteria sustainability modelling: case study on school buildings

This paper describes development of a computer-based tool for sustainability modelling using multiple criteria, and preliminary conclusions from doctoral research being undertaken into the relationship between key sustainability indicators. The model used in both cases produces a sustainability index with an accept/reject threshold of one that has the potential to completely replace traditional net present value methods. Minimum performance benchmarks are prescribed and must be observed - often by trading off performance across the full criteria set. Sustainability is shown to be capable of objective (numeric)· analysis for new projects, existing facilities, or indeed any product or asset. A combination of investor-centred and community-centred motivations can also be explored in the model. Known as SINDEX, the tool has industry-wide application, both locally and abroad, and represents a paradigm shift in project evaluation techniques. Furthermore, its multi-discipline considerations underscore the importance of a team approach to sustainability modelling and the need for people to work more closely together when dealing with complex problems. The results of twenty case studies of actual high schools constructed and operated in New South Wales (Australia) are also presented and the relationships between the key sustainability indicators are explored and interpreted.

Business ethics in TQM : the qualities and spectrum zones of a case illustration

Purpose - The objective of this research is to introduce and describe a conceptual framework of business ethics in TQM.

Design/methodology/approach - In order to highlight the concepts proffered, a case study in the Swedish retail industry was conducted. The data that underpin the case illustration have been collected as part of a larger research project in the Swedish retail industry. Draws on and reports the findings from one case of the larger research project that has been used in this instance to inform the role of business ethics in TQM. The case illustration is based on a qualitative approach. The data were collected through interviews with leading executives in the corporation,

Findings - Both time and context become crucial parameters to manage the quality and spectrum zones of core values in the marketplace. In fact, the necessary quality management of business operations has to be performed without delay, minimising the damage. Therefore, the importance of business ethics becomes evident in TQM. In the long run, TQM will not succeed in business operations unless business ethics is considered in the core values to support the techniques and tools applied.

Research limitations/implications - The model has only been tested by relating it to one case in the Swedish retail industry.

Practical implications - TQM is dependent on the contextual and evolutionary issues in the marketplace. Therefore, TQM should be interpreted as a continuous process. The importance of continuously monitoring the spectrum zones and qualities of core values in TQM should not be under-estimated. Therefore, business ethics should always be present in TQM. Further research would benefit from other case studies of how business ethics benefits TQM. Therefore, the dynamics of business ethics in TQM should be further explored.

Originality/value - Business ethics needs to be an essential consideration of any TQM process. Examines how an organization can incorporate this task.

Positioning the case to tell the story: developing the narrative or presentational account

This paper is drawn from a doctoral study (in its final stages) about the use and adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enhance the face-to-face teaching by six academic staff, who represent different disciplines and different campus locations, in a large, regional university in Australia. A collective case study was adopted as the framework for the study, and field data comprised semi-structured interviews, curriculum guides, teaching and learning resources, websites, and included results of a Teaching Practices Inventory completed by each of the research participants.

Case study is a popular choice of qualitative researchers. There are numerous examples in the literature of case study as the vehicle for examining issues concerning teachers' use of new technologies in teaching and learning. This paper situates the research study in the qualitative, interpretative research paradigm, and matches the choice of case as the research strategy to accepted characteristics of good case studies. The focus of the paper then moves to the practical, yet difficult problem faced by the researcher of ways of presenting the case, seeking a balance between the demands of prescribed, social scientific writing for an academic audience, and the need to create texts that are interesting, vital and that “make a difference”(Richardson, 2003). Using a sample case from the study, the paper examines approaches to constructing meaning from the field data to create the narrative or presentational account and, ultimately, the research text.

Developing sustainable communities : the case for Port Phillip Heads historic towns, Sorrento and Queenscliff

The Victorian towns of Sorrento and Queenscliff are located either side of Port Phillip Heads. Using these towns as case studies, this paper examines what happens to historic coastal townships caught up in the phenomenon of sea change. Both towns are currently facing huge planning battles and are trying to argue a case for heritage in the rush for expansion and modernisation. Newcomers like to emulate the metropolis in the seaside towns. Planners in the metropolis are asked to make decisions by developers who are thwarted by local municipalities. These towns encapsulate something of the dilemma that comes with a demographic shift from the metropolitan centre to coastal townships and demonstrate that the transition from urban life and built environment does not translate without cost to a fragile coastal environment. It is place itself that has attracted humans to Sorrento and Queenscliff over centuries. The seascape, the landscape, the environment drew the indigenous peoples here centuries ago. It provided abundant food and was inspiring. Europeans came at the very beginning of the 19th century seeking new lands. By the late decades of the 19th century Europeans discovered the seaside and its health giving qualities and built substantial Victorian edifices to house the influx of visitors and holiday-makers who arrived by ferry. However, not until the second half of the twentieth century did development begin to intrude significantly on the landscape. And by the twenty-first century evidence is mounting that development is destroying the sense and character of place, which initially enticed people to come here.

The dual technique model within case study approaches to cross-cultural management research in China

This paper advocates the effectiveness of a dual technique model of interviewing, which combines narrative and depth interview techniques, within the case study method in a cross-cultural management research setting, an Australian MNC operating in China. The case study is acknowledged to be a highly appropriate method for gaining insight into the complicated area of cross-cultural management enquiry in order to generate new theories. In this context, we propose a model which combines the narrative and the depth interview techniques in the interview process, and have illustrated its usefulness with material drawn from the China-Australia cross-cultural research interface.

After establishing the rationale for the model, the discussion focuses on the practicalities of applying it in interviews, in relation to the preparation, warm-up and trust building phases, and in the exercise of personal interviewing skills in cross-cultural research, in this case, the advantage of the interviewer being bilingual.

Matching training needs and opportunities : the case for training brokers in the Australian agricultural sector

Lifelong learning has been linked by policymakers to economic and social wellbeing. This paper introduces the concept of training brokerage as an efficient way of meeting the needs of learners, industry and education and training providers. It presents findings from a study of the features, processes and outcomes of training brokerage arrangements within the Australian agricultural and natural resource management sectors. The purpose of the study was to identify and promote effective brokerage arrangements and models. The study used multi-method, multi-site techniques, comprising a telephone survey, case studies of good broking practice and stakeholder participation through workshops and a reference group. Training brokers act as facilitators or intermediaries in identifying and matching training needs and opportunities. They have close links with industry, and extensive networks that include reputable training providers. Brokers work with others to identify training needs and engage participants, and to identify, negotiate and plan appropriate training. Evaluation and further training are a key part of the process. Effective broking activity is underpinned by a series of ten generic principles. Brokerage has implications for the agricultural sector in developed and developing countries, in terms of improving the match of training provision to training needs, communication, coordination and collaboration across regions and industries. It also has broader implications for facilitating participation in client-driven lifelong learning, particularly for disenfranchised learners.

Folate fortification : a case study of public health policy-making

Introducing Evidence Based Health Policy: Problems and Possibilities, Section 1: What is the Problem?, 1: Competing Rationalities: Evidence based Health Policy, 2: Beyond Two Communities, Section 2: What does Evidence Mean?, 3: Evidence based Medicine - The Medical Profession and Health Policy, 4: Mind The Gap: Assessing the Quality of Evidence for Public Health Problems, 5: Health Policy and Normative Analysis: Ethics, Evidence and Politics, 6: What is New in Health Information? Evidence for Health Consumers and Policy Making, 7: From Evidence based Medicine to Evidence based Public Health, Section 3: Policy Case Studies, 8: The Viagra Affair: Evidence as the Terrain for Competing Partners, 9: Folate Fortification: A Case Study of Public Health Policy-Making in a Food Regulation Setting, 10: The Supply and Safety of Blood and Blood Products - Evidence, Risk and Policy, 11: The Development of Nurse Practitioner Policy, 12: Creating Healthy Public Policy for Oral Health: How was the Evidence Used?, 13: Regulation of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Victoria, 14: The Victorian Primary Health Care Reforms: A Case Study of Evidence-based Policy Making, 15: Evidence-based Practice in the Australian Drug Policy Community, 16: Challenging the Evidence - Women's Health Policy in Australia, 17: Evidence and Aboriginal Health Policy, 18: The Limits to Technical Rationality in the Health Inequalities Policy Process, 19: Evidence-based policy: A Technocratic Wish in a Political World, Section 4: Is the transfer of evidence into policy possible?, 20: The Community Model of Research Transfer, 21: Getting Research Transfer into Policy and Practice in Maternity Care, 22: Improving the Research and Policy Partnership: An Agenda for Research Transfer and Governance, 23: Framing and Taming 'Wicked' Problems

An empirically justified theory of successful indigenous entrepreneurship : a case study of the Osoyoos Indian Band

The Osoyoos Indian Band case study signals the beginning of a PhD research project that will take approximately three years to complete. Taken in isolation, the objectives for the Osoyoos case study are modest. We want to refine our theoretical model and improve the case study protocol before embarking on a set of 5 case studies to explore Indigenous entrepreneurship; what it is, what communities do to succeed and a generalized definition of a successful venture from an Indigenous Canadian perspective.

Improving primary school health education through action research : a case study

Limited research has been conducted concerning the actual practice of health education in Victorian schools. This study investigates the health education curriculum at a large primary school in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. The investigation involves a critical analysis of current practices in health education in the upper school through the development of a ‘small’ action research group. Data were gathered through document collection, questionnaires, interviews, discussions, diary and reflective journal entries. The action research group, consisting of the teacher-researcher and upper school teachers, developed, implemented and reflected upon units of work piloted with upper school students. Alternative approaches to health education were explored. The aim was to accommodate critically informed discourse amongst colleagues to promote self-reflective enquiry and facilitate improvements to existing pedagogic practices. During the course of the investigation, factors limiting and facilitating action research and curriculum change in health education, became evident. These included personal, practical, curriculum and organisational constraints operating externally and internally on the school and classroom environments. Despite these constraints, it was demonstrated in this study, that action research can contribute to the improvement of pedagogic practices in health education. Small ‘authentic’ action research projects may provide alternative internal professional development structures for teachers and consequently improve learning opportunities for students.

Studentship and oppositional behaviour within physical education teacher education : a case study ; and, Between the rings and under the gym mat : a narrative

This thesis represents a part of a program of study that is reaching a closure. The broadest brush that could be applied to my work is that it concerns Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE), that it focuses on aspects of professional socialisation, and that it involves various case studies utilising naturalistic inquiry. Whilst it would be impossible and naive to believe that the reading of these texts will produce the meanings that I encourage, or have internalised, nevertheless the order of reading is at least something that I can argue for. Read in the order I suggest throughout the thesis I am hopeful that my subjectivities, and the learning and understandings I have reached may become clear. The purpose of this two part thesis is an exploration of the interplay or dialectic that exists between PETE students, academic staff and the subject matter within PETE. I have had to come to understand the limitations and advantages of insider research as the work has been completed at my University in the School of Human Movement and Sports Science where I have worked for twenty years. This thesis examines the extent to which studentship and oppositional behaviour underlies the dialectic that exists between the students and the various discourses within the program. I have written the study in two very different formats, one, a collection of stories about PETE and the other, an interpretative case study conducted during 1993 and 1994. Within the case study, studentship and oppositional behaviour were viewed as a measure of the extent to which students react and push against the forces of socialisation within their PETE program that is seen to represent dominant discourses, The following broad research questions were considered to enable the above analysis. 1. What is the nature of studentship and oppositional behaviour in a high status subject within PETE compared to a subject that is seen by students to be of little relevance and of low status? 2. How are studentship and oppositional behaviour related to students subjective warrants? 3. How are the studentship and oppositional behaviours exhibited by students related to the pedagogy and discourses reflected in the knowledge, beliefs and practices within the two sites. The starting point for this research was a study conducted as a totally separate research task (Swan, 1992) that investigated the hierarchies of subject knowledge within a PETE site and investigated the influence of such hierarchies upon student intention. A great deal of meta analysis exists about the manner in which a technocratic rationality pervades PETE but very little case study material of what this means to students and academic staff within such institutions is available. The stories in Between The Rings And Under The Gym Mat, which is the second part of this thesis, represent ‘the data’ differently from the case study, but they speak their own truth. At times the nature of the story is indistinguishable from the reality of the case study. Wexler (1992) undertook an ethnographic study about identity formation in three very different high schools, and published the findings in a book entitled Becoming Somebody. His introductory words about the nature of the social story he tells, are significant to this study and story. Social history is recounted by creative intervention that can only be made from culturally accessible materials. Ethnography is neither an objective realist, nor subjective imaginist account. Rather, it is an historical artefact that is mediated by elaborated distancing of culturally embedded and internally contradictory (but seemingly independent and coherent) concepts that take on a life of their own as theory. So, this is not ‘news from nowhere,’ but a theoretically structured story where both the story and its structure are part of my times. (p.6) The case study before you is organised with an analysis of studentship and oppositional behaviour detailed in chapter one. The following chapter conceptualises studentship and oppositional behaviour in relation to particular themes of professional socialisation, resistance to oppression and youth culture. Chapter three locates the case study to the major paradigmatic debates about the value and nature of the subject matter content within PETE, Chapter four outlines the case site, the research process and the research dilemma’s confronted in this study. The remaining three chapters are the case record as I can best understand it. In Between the Rings and under the Gym Mat (part B) the story most directly concerned with studentship and oppositional behaviour, is called Tale of Two Classes’. It takes on a very different reality to the case study (part A) and much can be said about the reality of lived experience which can be portrayed in narrative form as opposed to a clinical case study. Many of the other stories pose similar images that are contradictory and never quite complete. I have written a separate methodological section for the narrative stories. It is my intention that the case study and the series of stories should be viewed as essentially complementary, but also a discrete representation of a part of PETE. As part of the Ed D program I have undertaken four discrete research tasks as the starting point for this research I have referred to the first one (Hierarchies of Subject knowledge within PETE). I also undertook an action research project about ‘Teaching Poorly by Choice.’ A further piece of research was a somewhat reflective effort to draw together what this has all meant to me from a subjective and reflexive perspective. Such efforts are often seen as being self indulgent, as subjectivity in the form of lived experience sits uneasily in academia. A final paper involved an evaluation of Between the Rings and Under the Gym Mat from a pedagogical perspective by PETE professionals around the world. And that's the way things turned out.

Impact of the extended family on microenterprise growth in Ghana : a case study of Accra

This study examines the extended family's impact on microenterprise growth at the individual level, where microenterprise operators have some control over constraints affecting their operations. Beyond the individual level, microenterprise operators have little control over constraints such as government policies and regulations, competition from import-substitution industries and exploitation by corrupt officials. Therefore, it is at the individual level that the extended family serves as a crucial parameter of microenterprise growth and the success with which MEs graduate from the informal sector into the mainstreams of small business. Within this domain, this author has examined the extended family and found that there is a need for policy makers and MED administrators to adopt a more culturally sensitive approach to microenterprise growth if the extended family is to be engaged as a partner in their efforts to support microenterprises as a source of income and employment generation, A central question posed is why most writers on microenterprise activities in Ghana have neglected the extended family as a factor that should be considered in the design of microenterprise growth strategies and policies? The answer to this question was explored in the process of data gathering for this thesis and the results are presented here, especially in chapter 3 below. Suffice it to note here that this neglect has many roots, not least of which is the proclivity of mainstream economics, modern administration practice and the objectivity of double entry accounting based documentation procedures to focus on measurable growth in the formal sectors of the economy and structural constraints such as the lack of finance, lack of market demand, lack of access to technology and government regulations. Consequently, a noticeable trend among these writers is that they rightly advocate finance be made accessible to microenterprises, however, few question whether the finance is effectively used towards microenterprise growth. This issue is crucial in the face of evidence from this study which shows that finance accessed towards microenterprise growth is often put to other uses that negate growth thus keeping microenterprises within the bounds of the informal sector as against graduating out of the informal sector. As a result, these writers have neglected the intimate relations between the extended family and microenterprises, and most importantly, the constraint that the extended family inflicts on microenterprise growth at the individual level of activity. This study, by targeting the growth of the individual microenterprise in the socio-cultural context in which this growth must be achieved, has highlighted the constraint that the extended family does pose on MED. However, the study also shows that these constraints are important not because there is anything inherently wrong with the extended family, but because the socio-economic and policy environment is not consistent with the positive role that the extended family can and should play in the graduation of microenterprises from the informal to the formal sector of the economy in Ghana.

How deinstitutionalisation and the current public mental health system affects individuals with schizophrenia : four case reports

The professional component of this thesis focuses on how deinstitutionalisation and the current public mental health system have affected individuals with schizophrenia. Chapter one discusses the process of deinstitutionalisation and the research that has examined the impact of this initiative. Chapter two concentrates on schizophrenia, specifically the symptoms, course, etiological theories and treatments of this illness. Four case studies are then provided in order to explore how deinstitutionalisation and the current mental health system have affected individuals with schizophrenia. The names and identifying characteristics of these clients and their families have been modified to ensure anonymity. Chapter three describes a 47 year old woman, AA, who was referred for a neuro-psychological assessment. Chapter four outlines the second case study, a 23 year old male, BB, who was referred for a psychological assessment regarding diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Chapter five describes the third case study, a 54 year old woman, CC, who was referred for therapy and consultation regarding future treatment recommendations. Chapter six discusses the fourth case study, a 21 year old male, DD, who was seen for crisis intervention and treated in the community. Each of these case studies outlines the background history, formulation and treatment approaches. These case reports are used to illustrate how deinstitutionalisation and the present public mental health system affect individuals with schizophrenia. Chapter seven provides an overall discussion and conclusion to these case studies.

Transition of understandings in science and SOSE : a case study

The newly developed Curriculum Standards Framework lacked supporting school documentation to implement an effective program in Science and SOSE. The task was to create it, together with the knowledge and understandings that were required to apply it. The thesis demonstrates the difficulties faced in actively pursuing curriculum change in a primary school.