I'm the slice of pie that's ostracised.... : Foucault's technologies, and personal agency, in the voice of women who are homeless, Adelaide, South Australia

In contrast to the international research (particularly in the United Kingdom and North America), much of the Australian literature regarding homelessness to date omits the perspective of people who are homeless. In contributing to the fledgling Australian literature in the field, the following article adopts a secondary approach to the data analysis of original research. When analysed, the voices of homeless women from an agency in Adelaide, South Australia exhibit elements of both Foucault’s technologies of domination and the self. While the results show that the women do have a powerful sense of the broader external issues exerted on them (reflecting both technologies of domination and the self), the analysis also reveals ambiguities in their responses. Apparent in the voice of homeless women is a sense of personal agency which appears to be absent in Foucault’s technologies. By considering the viewpoints of homeless women, various policy implications can also be drawn. Indeed, this is one of the motivations of the article, namely to inject into policy debate and development the voices of the people most adversely affected by it. The policy implications of the women’s voices centre around the desire to be included rather than remain on the margins, the need for supportive relationships, the necessity to take small steps to independent living, and the need for more affordable, independent housing.

Attempting to hear the excluded : the voice of homeless people and policy implications

Until recently, there have been very few systematic attempts to hear what people who are homeless say about their lives and situations. Yet there are a few exceptions particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom (for example, Snow & Anderson 1993; Hutson & Liddard 1994). The Inquiry which resulted in the Burdekin Report in Australia also held consultations in which people who were homeless submitted evidence (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1989). Other Inquiries have done likewise and some reports have used the accounts of people who are homeless (for example Bartholomew 1999; Fopp 1989; MacKenzie & Chamberlain 2003).

Incorporating domain knowledge with video and voice data analysis in news broadcasts

This paper addresses the area of video annotation, indexing and retrieval, and shows how a set of tools can be employed, along with domain knowledge, to detect narrative structure in broadcast news. The initial structure is detected using low-level audio visual processing in conjunction with domain knowledge. Higher level processing may then utilize the initial structure detected to direct processing to improve and extend the initial classification.

The structure detected breaks a news broadcast into segments, each of which contains a single topic of discussion. Further the segments are labeled as a) anchor person or reporter, b) footage with a voice over or c) sound bite. This labeling may be used to provide a summary, for example by presenting a thumbnail for each reporter present in a section of the video. The inclusion of domain knowledge in computation allows more directed application of high level processing, giving much greater efficiency of effort expended. This allows valid deductions to be made about structure and semantics of the contents of a news video stream, as demonstrated by our experiments on CNN news broadcasts.

The influence of job, team and organizational level resources on employee well-being, engagement, commitment and extra-role performance : test of a model

Purpose – Worker well-being continues to be fundamental to the study of work and a primary consideration for how organizations can achieve competitive advantage and sustainable and ethical work practices (Cartwright and Holmes; Harter, Schmidt and Keyes; Wright and Cropanzano). The science and practice of employee engagement, a key indicator of employee well-being, continues to evolve with ongoing incremental refinements to existing models and measures. This study aims to elaborate the Job Demands-Resources model of work engagement (Bakker and Demerouti) by examining how organizational, team and job level factors interrelate to influence engagement and well-being and downstream outcome variables such as affective commitment and extra-role behaviour.

Design/methodology/approach – Structural equations modelling of survey data obtained from 3,437 employees of a large multi-national mining company was used to test the important direct and indirect influence of organizational focused resources (a culture of fairness and support), team focused resources (team climate) and job level resources (career development, autonomy, supervisor support, and role clarity) on employee well-being, engagement, extra-role behaviour and organizational commitment.

Findings – The fit of the proposed measurement and structural models met criterion levels and the structural model accounted for sizable proportions of the variance in engagement/wellbeing (66 percent), extra-role-behaviour (52 percent) and commitment (69 percent).

Research limitations/implications – Study limitations (e.g. cross-sectional research design) and future opportunities are outlined.

Originality/value – The study demonstrates important extensions to the Job Demands-Resources model and provides researchers and practitioners with a simple but powerful motivational framework, a suite of measures, and a map of their inter-relationships which can be used to help understand, develop and manage employee well-being and engagement and their outcomes.

This voice and notes

This poem plays around with ideas of ‘voice’. The title draws attention, through its use of a demonstrative pronoun, to the instability of voice in lyric poetry. In other words, by calling the poem ‘This Voice’, I hope to make the reader think ‘Which voice is this? The author’s? Mine? A fictional character’s?’

Workers, a neglected voice in environmental decisions

The European Aarhus Convention is the only public law convention devoted to public participation in environmental matters. The Convention has application broadly to Australia as many of the Convention’s provisions are reflected in Australian environmental law. The Convention has an ambitious aim being, to engage civil society in effective public participation at all levels of environmental decision-making. Trade unions and workers as members of civil society are granted rights under the Aarhus Convention to participate in environmental decisions. However in spite of this, the trade union movement has largely ignored the Convention. This article examines the potential rights which the Convention grants to trade unions and workers and explores the broader debate regarding the involvement of unions in environmental matters.

The mediating effect of internal service quality on employee turnover – empirical evidence from Taiwanese nurses

Informed by social exchange theory (SET) this study examines the role of trust in strategic alliances. Interviews were conducted with 17 participants who were strategic alliance managers in their organization. The study finds that trust is important to strategic alliance managers, and without it alliance managers would find it difficult to keep their alliance going. Trust is built over time, and based on the past experiences that the alliance manager has with their partner. The study found that prior networks, timely and appropriate communication and information exchange, fairness preservation and inter-firm adaptation were important in developing trust in the strategic alliance.

Influence of high performance work systems on employee subjective well-being and job burnout: empirical evidence from the Chinese healthcare sector

Over the last two decades, high performance work systems (HPWSs) research has been dominated by examining the effects of these systems on firm performance. Research on the impact of HPWSs on employees has been marginalised. This study examines the impact of HPWSs on two psychological outcomes for employees, namely, subjective well-being (SWB) and workplace burnout, by utilising data collected from 1488 physicians and nurses in 25 Chinese hospitals. It also examines the moderating effects of employees' organisational based self-esteem (OBSE), as an individual intervention and physician–nurse relationships, as an organisational intervention, on the relationship between HPWSs and employee outcomes. HPWS is found to increase employees' SWB and decrease burnout. Such well-being-enhancing and burnout-relieving effects are stronger when employees have high OBSE. The positive effect of HPWS on SWB is also stronger when there is a collaborative relationship among employees in an organisation. The major contribution of this study is to unpack the ‘black box’ of how HPWS influences employee well-being in the Chinese healthcare sector context.