An examination of IS conference reviewing practices

There has been considerable interest over the years within the IS research community into how to shape articles for successful publication. Little effort has been made, however, to examine the reviewing criteria that make a difference to publication. We argue that, to provide better guidance to authors, more solid evidence is needed into the factors that contribute to acceptance decisions. This paper examines empirically the outcomes of the reviewing processes of three well-known IS conferences held in 2007. Our analyses reveal four major findings. First, the evaluation criteria that influence the acceptance/rejection decision vary by conference. Second, those differences can be explained in terms of the maturity and breadth of the specific conference of interest. Third, while objective review criteria influence acceptance/rejection decisions, subjective assessment on the part of the program committees may also play a substantial role. Fourth, while high scores on objective criteria are essential for acceptance, they do not guarantee acceptance. On the other hand, low scores on any criterion are likely to result in rejection.

The Equality of Sub-Surface Minerals

Sub-surface minerals are in most cases considered to be the proprietary right of a country should those minerals be found within its borders. PRO169 (Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, International Labour Organization) has recorded instances where the private land of indigenous peoples has been pilfered by a government – often through the sale of a contract to a private company, and without the consent of the people living on that land. Other times, indigenous peoples, the government they find themselves living in, and the company that bought mining rights engage in consultation. But these practices are far from transparent, equitable, or fair as indigenous peoples are often unskilled in contractual law and do not have the same legal resources as the company or government does. This paper argues that the sub-surface minerals found within the territory of indigenous tribes should be legally allocated as theirs.

Critical discourse analysis and political economy of communication : understanding the new corporate order

This article uses critical discourse analysis to analyse material shifts in the political economy of communications. It examines texts of major corporations to describe four key changes in political economy: (1) the separation of ownership from control; (2) the separation of business from industry; (3) the separation of accountability from responsibility; and (4) the subjugation of ‘going concerns’ by overriding concerns. The authors argue that this amounts to a political economic shift from traditional concepts of ‘capitalism’ to a new ‘corporatism’ in which the relationships between public and private, state and individual interests have become redefined and obscured through new discourse strategies. They conclude that the present financial and regulatory ‘crisis’ cannot be adequately resolved without a new analytic framework for examining the relationships between corporation, discourse and political economy.

Men's intimate partner abuse and control : reconciling paradoxical masculinities and social contradictions

Intimate partner abuse and control is one of the most common forms of violence against women, and is considered an international problem of social, political, legal and human rights significance. Yet few studies have attempted to understand this problem from the perspective of male perpetrators. This gap is addressed by conducting in-depth interviews with 16 able-bodied men of white European ancestry born and educated in New Zealand or Australia, who have been physically violent and/or emotionally, intellectually, sexually or financially controlling of a live-in female partner. This thesis extends and deepens the dominant ways of thinking about men’s intimate partner abuse by utilising a new theoretical framework compatible with contemporary feminist scholarship. A synthesis of Connell’s theory of masculinities and Bourdieu’s field theory is utilised for the purpose of exploring more nuanced, complex understandings of manliness and men’s relationships with men, women and social structures. Through such an analysis, this thesis finds that men’s perpetration of power and control over women is driven by a need to avoid the stigma of appearing weak. As a consequence, their desire and ability to show love, care and empathy is suppressed in favour of a presumed honourable manliness, and their female partners are used as weapons in the pursuit of symbolic capital in the form of recognition, prestige and acceptance from real and/or imagined men. This research also uncovers the complex interplay between masculine practices and particular social contexts. For example, the norms of practice encountered from those in authority, such as teachers, sports coaches, police, court judges and workplace management, influences the decision making of the men in this study, to use, or not to use, physical violence, psychological abuse and structural control. The principal conclusion is that there is a repertoire of paradoxical masculinities and contradictory social messages available to the men in this study. But gender policing by other men, complicit women and those in authority provides little room for legitimate complexity in masculine practices. Perpetrators in this study reconcile these conflicts of interest by generally avoiding subordinated masculinity and possible ostracism, and instead practicing more heroic hegemonic masculinities by abusing and controlling women and particular other men. This thesis concludes that for intimate partner abuse and control to cease, changes in power structures have to occur at all levels of society.

Are East Asian companies benefiting from western board practices?

Since the Asian crisis, East Asian nations have strived to introduce corporate governance codes, directing companies how to best improve their corporate governance practices. However, these codes have not been universally accepted by East Asian companies. This study examines the adoption of major board-related corporate governance recommendations by large nonfinancial companies in seven East Asian nations and investigates whether improvements in these board governance mechanisms have been associated with increased operating performance and market value. The results indicate that family-owned companies started with worse board governance and have been least likely to improve their board governance since the crisis. Overall, bigger, faster growing, non-family-owned companies with less concentrated ownership have been more likely to improve their board governance. Splitting of the positions of Chairman and CEO, creation of audit and nomination committees and improvements in overall board governance were found to have a positive relationship with subsequent operating performance and/or market value.

Listening to late discovery adoption and donor offspring stories : adoption, ethics and implications for contemporary donor insemination practices

For most of the 20th Century a ‘closed’ system of adoption was practised throughout Australia and other modern Western societies. This ‘closed’ system was characterised by sealed records; amended birth certificates to conceal the adoption, and prohibited contact with all biological family. Despite claims that these measures protected these children from the taint of illegitimacy the central motivations were far more complex, involving a desire to protect couples from the stigma of infertility and to provide a socially acceptable family structure (Triseliotis, Feast, & Kyle, 2005; Marshall & McDonald, 2001). From the 1960s significant evidence began to emerge that many adopted children and adults were experiencing higher incidences of psychological difficulties, characterised by problems with psychological adjustment, building self-esteem and forming a secure personal identity. These difficulties became grouped under the term ‘genealogical bewilderment’. As a result, new policies and practices were introduced to try to place the best interests of the child at the forefront. These changes reflected new understandings of adoption; as not only an individual process but also as a social and relational process that continues throughout life. Secrecy and the withholding of birth information are now prohibited in the overwhelming majority of all domestic adoptions processed in Australia (Marshall & McDonald, 2001). One little known consequence of this ‘closed’ system of adoption was the significant number of children who were never told of their adoptive status. As a consequence, some have discovered or had this information disclosed to them, as adults. The first study that looked at the late discovery of genetic origins experiences was conducted by the Post Adoption Resource Centre in New South Wales in 1999. This report found that the participants in their study expressed feelings of disbelief, confusion, anger, sorrow and loss. Further, the majority of participants continued to struggle with issues arising from this intentional concealment of their genetic origins (Perl & Markham, 1999). A second and more recent study (Passmore, Feeney & Foulstone, 2007) looked at the issue of secrecy in adoptive families as part of a broader study of 144 adult adoptees. This study found that secrecy and/or lies or misinformation on the part of adoptive parents had negative effects on both personal identity and relationships with others. The authors noted that those adoptees who found out about their adoption as adults were ‘especially likely to feel a sense of betrayal’ (p.4). Over recent years, stories of secrecy and late discovery have also started to emerge from sperm donor conceived adults (Spencer, 2007; Turner & Coyle, 2000). Current research evidence shows that although a majority of couples during the donor assisted conception process indicate that they intend to tell the offspring about their origins, as many as two-thirds or more of couples continue to withhold this information from their children (Akker, 2006; Gottlieb, A. McWhinnie, 2001; Salter-Ling, Hunter, & Glover, 2001). Why do they keep this secret? Infertility involves a range of complex factors that are often left unresolved or poorly understood by those choosing insemination by donor as a form of family building (Schaffer, J. A., & Diamond, R., 1993). These factors may only impact after the child is born, when resemblance talk becomes most pronounced. Resemblance talk is an accepted form of public discourse and a social convention that legitimises the child as part of the family and is part of the process of constructing the child’s identity within the family. Couples tend to become focused on resemblance as this is where they feel most vulnerable, and the lack of resemblance to the parenting father may trigger his sense of loss (Becker, Butler, & Nachtigall, 2005).

What’em with the apology? : the National Apology to the Stolen Generations two years on

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Apology to Australia’s Stolen Generations, delivered on 13 February 2008, is both personal and political to me just as the people who talk about it make it political and personal through their actions. This paper represents my attempt to turn the gaze through articulating some of my thoughts on the Apology, policy statements (Close the Gap) and the inconsistencies within the leadership of the present governments. I have endeavoured to do this through exploring the articulations of others and by sharing examples and personal experiences. In bringing forth some analysis to the literature, examples and experiences, I reveal the relationships between oppression, white race privilege and institutional privilege and the epistemology that maintains them. In moving from the position of being silent on the Apology, and my political experiences, to speaking about them, I am able to move from the position of object to subject and to gain a form of liberated voice (hooks 1989:9). Furthermore, I am hopeful that it will encourage others to examine their own practices within political parties and governments and to challenge the domination that continues to subjugate Indigenous peoples. It is only through people enacting their responsibilities and making changes in their daily lives and through the institutions and organisations to which they belong (the personal and political), can the Apology move beyond symbolic to action.

Resistance : re-imagining innovation in higher education teaching and learning

The call to innovate is ubiquitous across the Australian educational policy context. The claims of innovative practices and environments that occur frequently in university mission statements, strategic plans and marketing literature suggest that this exhortation to innovate appears to have been taken up enthusiastically by the university sector. Throughout the history of universities, a range of reported deficiencies of higher education have worked to produce a notion of crisis. At present, it would seem that innovation is positioned as the solution to the notion of crisis. This thesis is an inquiry into how the insistence on innovation works to both enable and constrain teaching and learning practices in Australian universities. Alongside the interplay between innovation and crisis is the link between resistance and innovation, a link which remains largely unproblematized in the scholarly literature. This thesis works to locate and unsettle understandings of a relationship between innovation and Australian higher education. The aim of this inquiry is to generate new understandings of what counts as innovation within this context and how innovation is enacted. The thesis draws on a number of postmodernist theorists, whose works have informed firstly the research method, and then the analysis and findings. Firstly, there is an assumption that power is capillary and works through discourse to enact power relations which shape certain truths (Foucault, 1990). Secondly, this research scrutinised language practices which frame the capacity for individuals to act, alongside the language practices which encourage an individual to adopt certain attitudes and actions as one’s own (Foucault, 1988). Thirdly, innovation talk is read in this thesis as an example of needs talk, that is, as a medium through which what is considered domestic, political or economic is made and contested (Fraser, 1989). Fourthly, relationships between and within discourses were identified and analysed beyond cause and effect descriptions, and more productively considered to be in a constant state of becoming (Deleuze, 1987). Finally, the use of ironic research methods assisted in producing alternate configurations of innovation talk which are useful and new (Rorty, 1989). The theoretical assumptions which underpin this thesis inform a document analysis methodology, used to examine how certain texts work to shape the ways in which innovation is constructed. The data consisted of three Federal higher education funding policies selected on the rationale that these documents, as opposed to state or locally based policy and legislation, represent the only shared policy context for all Australian universities. The analysis first provided a modernist reading of the three documents, and this was followed by postmodernist readings of these same policy documents. The modernist reading worked to locate and describe the current truths about innovation. The historical context in which the policy was produced as well as the textual features of the document itself were important to this reading. In the first modernist reading, the binaries involved in producing proper and improper notions of innovation were described and analysed. In the process of the modernist analysis and the subsequent location of binary organisation, a number of conceptual collisions were identified, and these sites of struggle were revisited, through the application of a postmodernist reading. By applying the theories of Rorty (1989) and Fraser (1989) it became possible to not treat these sites as contradictory and requiring resolution, but rather as spaces in which binary tensions are necessary and productive. This postmodernist reading constructed new spaces for refusing and resisting dominant discourses of innovation which value only certain kinds of teaching and learning practices. By exploring a number of ironic language practices found within the policies, this thesis proposes an alternative way of thinking about what counts as innovation and how it happens. The new readings of innovation made possible through the work of this thesis were in response to a suite of enduring, inter-related questions – what counts as innovation?, who or what supports innovation?, how does innovation occur?, and who are the innovators?. The truths presented in response to these questions were treated as the language practices which constitute a dominant discourse of innovation talk. The collisions that occur within these truths were the contested sites which were of most interest for the analysis. The thesis concludes by presenting a theoretical blueprint which works to shift the boundaries of what counts as innovation and how it happens in a manner which is productive, inclusive and powerful. This blueprint forms the foundation upon which a number of recommendations are made for both my own professional practice and broader contexts. In keeping with the conceptual tone of this study, these recommendations are a suite of new questions which focus attention on the boundaries of innovation talk as an attempt to re-configure what is valued about teaching and learning at university.

Enablers and barriers to the organizational adoption of sustainable business practices

Individuals, organizations, and governments are increasingly becoming aware of the necessity of sustainability in living, organizing, performing, and managing work. In this context, “green IS” has become an established colloquial term, acknowledging that information technology, corporate information systems, and the surrounding practices are both a contributor to the sustainability challenge and a potential enabler for green and sustainable practices. To date, however, there are few reported studies on the role of information systems for the challenge, and solution, of sustainability. This paper presents results from a case study of a world-wide operating IT software solution provider that is engaged in the development and adoption of sustainable practices. Our study suggests that the adoption of sustainable practices comes along with a number of particularities. We found information technology to be a key enabler of transparency about the progress of sustainability operations. We further found personal, motivator factors as well as organizational factors such as business inclusion, strategy definition, and a dialectic top-management and bottom-up support, to play a role in enabling a company to manage their sustainability. We describe a set of conjectures forthcoming from our case analysis, and detail some implications for further research in this area.

Corruption and political interest : empirical evidence at the micro level

The topic of corruption has recently attracted a great deal of attention, yet there is still a lack of micro level empirical evidence regarding the determinates of corruption. Furthermore, the present literature has not investigated the effects of political interest on corruption despite the interesting potential of this link. We address these deficiencies by analysing a cross-section of individuals, using the World Values Survey. We explore the determinants of corruption through two dependant variables (perceived corruption and the justifiability of corruption). The impact of political interest on corruption is explored through three different proxies presenting empirical evidence at both the cross-country level and the within-country level.The results of the multivariate analysis suggest that political interest has an impact on corruption controlling for a huge number of factors.

Health, endogenous time preference, and inequality : a political economy perspective

We study an overlapping-generations model in which agents' mortality risks, and consequently impatience, are endogenously determined by private and public investment in health care. Revenues allocated for public health care arc determined by a voting process. We find that the degree of substitutability between public and private health expenditures matters for macroeconomic outcomes of the model. Higher substitutability implies a “crowding-out" effect, which in turn impacts adversely on morality risks and impatience leading to lower public expenditures on health care in the political equilibrium. Consequently, higher substitutability is associated with greater polarization in wealth, and long-run distributions that are bimodal.

A political economy perspective on persistent inequality, inflation, and redistribution

In this paper we examine the dynamics of the link between inequality and inflation from a political economy perspective. We consider a simple dynamic general equilibrium model in which agents vote over the desired inflation rate in each period, and inequality is persistent. Inflation in our model is a mechanism of redistribution, and we find that the link between inequality and inflation within any period or over time depends on institutional and preference related parameters. Furthermore, we find that differences in the initial distributions of wealth can yield a diverse set of patterns for the evolution of the inflation and inequality link. Relative to existing literature, our model leads to more precise predictions about the inflation-inequality correlation. To that end, results in the extant empirical literature on the inflation and inequality link need to be interpreted with caution.

Political theory and theoretical physics

This paper explains, somewhat along a Simmelian line, that political theory may produce practical and universal theories like those developed in theoretical physics. The reasoning behind this paper is to show that the Element of Democracy Theory may be true by way of comparing it to Einstein’s Special Relativity – specifically concerning the parameters of symmetry, unification, simplicity, and utility. These parameters are what make a theory in physics as meeting them not only fits with current knowledge, but also produces paths towards testing (application). As the Element of Democracy Theory meets these same parameters, it could settle the debate concerning the definition of democracy. This will be shown firstly by discussing why no one has yet achieved a universal definition of democracy; secondly by explaining the parameters chosen (as in why these and not others confirm or scuttle theories); and thirdly by comparing how Special Relativity and the Element of Democracy match the parameters.

Practising public relations in the global community of the 21st century : a comparison of business practices and culture in three world regions

Non-Western practitioners across the globe instinctively attempt to implement Western-based public relations models and theories, often unsuccessfully, regardless of their surrounding environment. This paper reviews business practices and reveals that in Europe, company interests are a main priority, while in Asia, the line between business and personal relationships is extremely blurred. Cultural dimensions and topois were even more varied between the three regions. Implications for the adoption of Western models of public relations practice are discussed.

How Australia’s Indigenous people are positioned within health service sites by our presence and by our absence

De Certeau (1984) constructs the notion of belonging as a sentiment which develops over time through the everyday activities. He explains that simple everyday activities are part of the process of appropriation and territorialisation and suggests that over time belonging and attachment are established and built on memory, knowledge and the experiences of everyday activities. Based on the work of de Certeau, non-Indigenous Australians have developed attachment and belonging to places based on the dispossession of Aboriginal people and on their everyday practices over the past two hundred years. During this time non-Indigenous people have marked their appropriation and territorialisation with signs, symbols, representations and images. In marking their attachment, they also define how they position Australia’s Indigenous people by both our presence and our absence. This paper will explore signs and symbols within spaces and places in health services and showcase how they reflect the historical, political, cultural, social and economic values, and power relations of broader society. It will draw on the voices of Aboriginal women to demonstrate their everyday experiences of such sites. It will conclude by highlighting how Aboriginal people assert their identities and un-ceded sovereignty within such health sites and actively resist on-going white epistemological notions of us and the logic of patriarchal white sovereignty.