Doing Time in the Retail Industry

This paper uses survey data to explore employee satisfaction with working time arrangements within a large supermarket chain in Queensland. The findings confirm those in the literature that employees have a diverse range of working time preferences, and that employees will be more satisfied if those preferences are met by their employer. In general, many full-time employees wanted shorter hours and a sizeable proportion of part-time employees wanted longer working hours. This paper is a preliminary attempt at teasing out the explanations behind working time preferences.

The digital practice ecosystem : supporting change in the construction industry through digital practice

The Digital Practice Ecosystem is a network of professional architectural, engineering and contracting firms, government agencies and professional bodies, academic, educational, and research institutions that have the shared goal of fostering changes in the construction industry through applications of digital practice. Changing the process of designing and constructing buildings using digital models will improve quality and efficiency and reduce costs allowing completion on time and on budget.

From the consciousness industry to the creative industries : consumer-created content, social network markets, & the growth of knowledge

In studies of media industries, too much attention has been paid to providers and firms, too little to consumers and markets. But with user-created content, the question first posed more than a generation ago by the uses & gratifications method and taken up by semiotics and the active audience tradition (‘what do audiences do with media?’), has resurfaced with renewed force. What’s new is that where this question (of what the media industries and audiences did with each other) used to be individualist and functionalist, now, with the advent of social networks using Web 2.0 affordances, it can be re-posed at the level of systems and populations as well.

Competitiveness of the Indonesian construction industry

Indonesia’s construction industry is important to the national economy. However, its competitiveness is considered low due to the lack of success of its development strategy and policy. A new approach known as the cluster approach is being used to make strategy and policy in order to develop a stronger, and more competitive industry. This paper discusses the layout of the Indonesian construction cluster and its competitiveness. The archival analysis research approach was used to identify the construction cluster. The analysis was based on the input-output (I/O) tables of the years 1995 and 2000, which were published by the Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics. The results suggest that the Indonesian construction cluster consists of the industries directly involved in construction as the core, with the other related and supporting industries as the balance. The anatomy of the Indonesian construction cluster permits structural changes to happen within it. These changes depend on policies that regulate the cluster’s constituents

Evaluating equal employment opportunity and its impact on the increased participation of men and women in the transport industry

This paper seeks to identify the approaches undertaken in implementing equal employment opportunity in the transport industry in Australia and the links between these approaches and indicators of increased participation of women. This male dominated industry employs limited numbers of women with fewer numbers of women in management. The study analyses data from a unique set of equal opportunity progress reports from all organisations in the transport industry that are required to provide public reports under Australian legislation. The findings indicate a correlation between some approaches to equal opportunity and increased numbers of women in some areas. The study is equally remarkable for what it does not find. Despite widespread equal opportunity implementation across a broad number of employment measures there are limited measures that predict increases in the numbers of women in management or in non-traditional roles. This study differs from others in that it identifies issues specific to one industry and links organisational approach to equal opportunity with the employment status of both women and men.