"A lasting gift to his descendants” : family memory and the great war in Australia

This article examines the processes of remembering and transmitting experiences of the Great War within families of Australian veterans now passed on. It focuses on a recent boom in private publishing of ancestors’ personal letters and diaries and argues that these practices continue to reimagine and reshape family memories of the war. In so doing it exposes the range of family members implicated in family remembrance then and now, and so complicates any process by which a war almost beyond living memory is to become entirely understood by its public myths and representations.

Book review : Everyday life in Central Asia past and present

Review of Everyday life in Central Asia past and present, edited by Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007, 401 pp., £14.00/$24.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-253-21904-6

Mapping the ill disciplined? Spatial analyses and historical change in the post-war film industry

As part of a broad disciplinary shift, from a focus on measuring the value and meaning of cultural artefacts to understanding the import of cultural flows, humanities researchers are increasingly turning to other disciplines and disciplinary practices to inform their research. For film scholars, rather than providing a reading of specific media texts and their qualities there is an increasing focus on the contextual events that shape and formulate cinema practice. This chapter is an example of how cross-disciplinary relationships, for example between Cinema Studies, Geospatial Science, Statistics and the Creative Arts can uncover new research questions and test methodologies across uncharted disciplinary terrain. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on some of the key assumptions around collaborative research, through its reorganization of academic spaces and “sites” of knowledge.

Assessment might dictate the curriculum, but what dictates assessment?

Almost all tertiary educators make assessment choices, for example, when they create an assessment task, design a rubric, or write multiple-choice items. Educators potentially have access to a variety of evidence and materials regarding good assessment practice but may not choose to consult them or be successful in translating these into practice. In this article, we propose a new challenge for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: the need to study the disjunction between proposals for assessment “best practice” and assessment in practice by examining the assessment decision-making of teachers. We suggest that assessment decision-making involves almost all university teachers, occurs at multiple levels, and is influenced by expertise, trust, culture, and policy. Assessment may dictate the curriculum from the student’s perspective, and we argue that assessment decision-making dictates assessment.

Opting only in: Contractarians, waiver of liability provisions, and the race to the bottom

This paper will test the core claim of scholars in the nexus of contracts tradition—that private ordering as a process of bargaining creates optimal rules. We do this by analyzing empirical evidence in the context of waiver of liability provisions. These provisions allow companies to eliminate monetary damages for breach of the duty of care through amendments to the articles of incorporation. With all states allowing some form of these provisions, they represent a good laboratory to examine the bargaining process between management and shareholders. The contractarian approach would suggest that shareholders negotiate with management to obtain agreements that are in their best interests. If a process of bargaining is at work as they claim, the opt-in process for waiver of liability provisions ought to generate a variety of approaches. Shareholders wanting a high degree of accountability would presumably not support a waiver of liability. In other instances, shareholders might favor them in order to attract or retain qualified managers. Still others would presumably want a mix, allowing waiver but only in specified circumstances.Our analysis reveals that the diversity predicted by a private ordering model is not borne out by the evidence with waiver of liability provisions for Fortune 100 companies. All states permit such provisions and in the Fortune 100, all but one company has them. Moreover, they are remarkably similar in effect, waiving liability to the fullest extent permitted by law. In other words, one categorical rule was merely replaced by another, dealing a significant blow to the contractarian thesis.

"Ready to acquire": the IT resources required for a growth-by-acquisition business strategy

This article describes the experiences of Danisco (a global food ingredients company) as it followed a growth-by-acquisition business strategy, focusing on how a new CIO built the IT resources to ensure the IT organization was "ready to acquire." We illustrate how these IT capabilities expedited the IT integration following two acquisitions, one of which involved Danisco expanding the scale of its business and the other extending the scope. Based on insights gained from Danisco, we provide lessons for CIOs to realize business benefits when managing post-acquisition IT integration.

NewsLink Indiana : a learning laboratory for the news industry

The broadcast news industry has many questions about convergence and how best to operate in a world of rapidly changing digital technology. Some of the key issues the industry ponders are how to innovate in a climate of increased competition, how best to structure a converged media operation and how to produce quality journalism yet keep costs under control. This paper tracks the introduction of a "learning laboratory" at Ball State University in Indiana designed to answer these and other questions. The paper outlines the theories and concepts behind the development of a converged newsroom staffed by professionals and students in an immersion education program. It uses qualitative methods initially because these are most appropriate for the project at this stage of its development.