The association between the investment opportunity set and corporate financing and dividend decisions: some Australian evidence

Summarizes previous research on the investment opportunity set (IOS) using price-based and investment-based proxies and variance measures; and develops hypotheses on the relationship between IOS, debt/equity ratios and dividend policies. Tests them on 1990-1998 data from listed Australian companies and explains the methodology, which builds on Gover and Gover (1993) by including more recent proxy variables. Finds no significant results from low growth firms, although some high growth firms show lower debt/equity ratios and dividends. Questions the robustness of existing IOS proxies in the Australian context and calls for further research.

Factors that influence employer decisions in hiring and retaining an employee with a disability

This paper is based on results of a national study in Australia. Questionnaires were completed by 643 employers, each of whom had employed a person with a disability between 1996--1998. Employers rated the importance of several factors relevant to decisions to hire and retain a person with a disability. Individual factors were rated most important, with grooming/hygiene and work-performance factors rated highest. Management factors and cost factors were rated moderately important. Social factors were rated least important. Analyses of variance were conducted, identifying several employer differences in ratings. The paper discusses employer values as well as the need to include employers in a partnership approach.

Predicting IHRM strategy and practice decisions : development of the IHRM orientation typology

International human resource management (IHRM) is becoming increasingly fundamental to organisational success, as globalisation forces demand organisations to design and implement a global strategy. One of the most critical choices faced by IHRM practitioners is whether and when an organisation should adapt its human resource policies and practices to the local context (localisation). A typology of International Human Resource Management Orientations (IHRMO) that clarifies what IHRMO’s are and what they entail is developed from a review of the literature on localisation and globalisation, convergence and divergence and Perlmutter’s management typology. Additionally, two theoretical models are developed that predict which IHRM orientation identified in the typology should be adopted. The article takes a step towards elucidating effective IHRM strategy and practice decision-making by showing that culture and institutional pressures, amongst other tings, do make a difference.

Application of the fair-value concept : evidence from Australian legal decisions

The concept of "fair value" is increasingly being incorporated into Australian and international accounting standards and pronouncements. The fair-value concept has also been established and developed in Australian legal cases, and an examination of pertinent court decisions is of interest to accountants. By examining and analysing relevant cases, the paper highlights some of the principles and difficulties involved in operationalising the fair-value concept for accounting and legal purposes, particularly in situations where the asset being valued is subject to imperfect or incomplete markets.

A new interlink decision making index for making multi-criteria decisions

In this paper a mechanism that is the brain child of the authors, has been proposed to overcome the potential manipulation of results as a direct consequence of the applied weightings. It is known as the Interlink Decision Making Index

Individual and organisational factors influencing academics` decisions to pursue the scholarship and teaching of ICT

This paper focuses on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) academics' perceptions of factors that promote and inhibit their pursuit of scholarship in their teaching work. It identifies critical factors that influence academics' attitudes, orientations and behaviours in respect to the scholarship of teaching, and from these builds a framework for understanding the interaction between these factors. We have named this framework the Scholarship of Teaching Support Framework.

During 2001 and 2002 a national project investigated teaching and learning initiatives in the major discipline of lCT in Australia's universities. As part of this project a mini-conference program was devised to elicit academics' perceptions of the factors influencing their teaching work and their participation in scholarly activities around this work. In total 83 ICT teachers from 29 universities participated in the mini-conference program. Attendees included staff members from a range of academic levels.

In discussions of aspects of the scholarship of teaching at the mini-conference participants referred to both attributes and responses of both university teachers and the university institutions. We have categorized these factors into those that relate to the individual academic (Individual domain) and those that relate to the tertiary institutional system (Organisational domain). Many contributions highlighted the interaction between these two domains.

Within the Individual domain, two key factors described by participants as affecting the pursuit of the scholarship of teaching were teachers' motivation towards, and their capabilities in, scholarly activities surrounding their teaching. Within the organizational domain two influential factors also emerged. These were the organizational support provided through allocation of resources and symbolic support reflected in an institution's systems, policies and processes.

Our findings indicate that both the Individual and Organizational domains contribute to university teachers' decisions to pursue (or not to pursue) the scholarship of teaching.

These two domains were seen by participants to interact within university environments to influence whether a particular environment is supportive or unsupportive in terms of the pursuit of the scholarship of teaching. Factors both from and within the individual and the organizational domains were seen to interact with each other forming a web of interrelated factors that appear to influence individuals' decisions to pursue, or not to pursue, the scholarship of teaching. From this complexity four theoretical extremes emerged providing the dimensions and components of the Scholarship of Teaching Support Framework.

We argue that responsive and innovative approaches to university teaching are best supported by academics undertaking scholarly activities around their teaching work, yet this article presents a picture of a university work environment where scholarly activities that focus on teaching and learning are seen as generally unsupported and unrewarded. This perception was identified as commonalities across a university system. Although some exceptions were noted, participants generally agreed that the organisational domain of Australian universities was largely unsupportive of the pursuit of the scholarship of teaching. Similarly, in general, university ICT teachers were not thought to have the backgrounds and capabilities necessary for pursuing the scholarship of teaching, such as familiarity with literature on teaching and learning and skills in educational evaluation. However, despite perceived inhibitors in universities' organisational culture and allocation of resources, and a perceived lack in individuals' skills, participants agreed that scholarly activities and innovation in university teaching and learning do take place, These are largely driven by the intrinsic motivation of individuals. It was recognised that further work is necessary to explore how motivation can be engendered and encouraged.

The Scholarship of Teaching Support Framework is a useful tool for examining how conducive a given university teaching context is to the scholarship of teaching and, therefore, can be used for review purposes within both research and policy contexts. Such tools will become increasingly important as policy changes begin to affect practices in how university teaching work is managed, supported and encouraged.

The effects of specific educational preparation on emergency nurses` clinical decisions regarding supplemental oxygen administration

Abstract The use of supplemental oxygen by emergency nurses has important implications for patient outcomes, yet there is significant variability in oxygen administration practises. Specific education related to oxygen administration increases factual knowledge in this domain; however, the impact of knowledge acquisition on nurses' clinical decisions is poorly understood. This study aimed to examine the effect of educational preparation on 20 emergency nurses' decisions regarding the assessment of oxygenation and the use of supplemental oxygen. A pre-test/post-test, quasi-experimental design was used. The intervention was a written, self-directed learning package. The major effects of the completion of the learning package included no change in the number or types of parameters used by nurses to assess oxygenation, a significant decrease in the selection of simple masks, a significant increase in the selection of air entrainment masks, fewer hypothetical outcomes of unresolved respiratory distress and more hypothetical outcomes of decreased respiratory distress. As many nursing education programs are aimed at increasing factual knowledge, while experience remains relatively constant, a greater understanding of the relationship between factual knowledge and clinical decisions is needed if educational interventions are to improve patient outcomes.

Transparent Provenance Derivation for User Decisions

It is rare for data's history to include computational processes alone. Even when software generates data, users ultimately decide to execute software procedures, choose their configuration and inputs, reconfigure, halt and restart processes, and so on. Understanding the provenance of data thus involves understanding the reasoning of users behind these decisions, but demanding that users explicitly document decisions could be intrusive if implemented naively, and impractical in some cases. In this paper, therefore, we explore an approach to transparently deriving the provenance of user decisions at query time. The user reasoning is simulated, and if the result of the simulation matches the documented decision, the simulation is taken to approximate the actual reasoning. The plausibility of this approach requires that the simulation mirror human decision -making, so we adopt an automated process explicitly modelled on human psychology. The provenance of the decision is modelled in OPM, allowing it to be queried as part of a larger provenance graph, and an OPM profile is provided to allow consistent querying of provenance across user decisions.

Making decisions: nursing practices in critical care

This article reports the types and complexity level of decisions made in everyday clinical practice by critical care nurses. It also reports factors that influence the complexity of those decisions. A combination of methods were chosen for the two phase study. In the first phase, 12 qualified critical care nurses documented decisions (over a 2 hour period) on a clinical decision recording form designed by the researcher. In the second phase, participants attended a semi-structured focus group.

From the analysis, five types of decisions were identified; assessment, intervention, organisation, communication and education. In addition to these documented decisions, three factors that influenced decision complexity were identified from a thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews; communication, patient related and properties of the decision. Nurses reported that communication decisions were the most difficult to make. However, the concept of nurses knowing the patient reduced the level of decision complexity. It is suggested that this has important implications for decision making practices of nurses working in the area of critical care and potentially for patient outcomes.

Clinical decisions using the National Triage Scale: how important is postgraduate education?

Triage is the formal nursing assessment of all patients who present to an Emergency Department (ED). The National Triage Scale (NTS) is used in most Australian EDs. Triage decision making involves the allocation of every patient presenting to an ED to one of the five NTS categories. The NTS directly relates a triage category to illness or injury severity and need for emergency care. Triage nurses’ decisions not only have the potential to impact on the health outcomes of ED patients, they are also used, in part, to evaluate ED performance and allocate components of ED funding. This study was a correlational study that used survey methods. Triage decisions were classified as ‘expected triage’, ‘overtriage’ or ‘undertriage’ decisions. Participant’s qualifications were allocated to five categories: ‘nil’; ‘emergency nursing’; ‘critical care nursing’; ‘midwifery’; and ‘tertiary’ qualifications. There was no correlation between triage decisions and length of experience in emergency nursing or triage. ‘Expected triage’ decisions were more common when the predicted triage category was Category 3 (P< 0.001) and ‘overtriage’ decisions were less common when the predicted triage category was Category 2 (P< 0.0010). The frequency of ‘undertriage’ decisions decreased significantly when the predicted triage category was Category 3 (P< 0.001) or Category 4 (P< 0.001). There was no correlation between triage decisions and qualifications in the ‘nil’, ‘emergency nursing’ or ‘critical care nursing’ categories. A midwifery qualification demonstrated a positive correlation with ‘expected triage’ decisions (P = 0.048) and a negative correlation with ‘undertriage’ decisions (P = 0.012). There was also a positive correlation between a tertiary qualification and ‘expected triage’ decisions (P = 0.012).

A theoretical application of exchange theory to online purchase decisions

Recent discussion within the marketing literature has accentuated the overlap and interrelationships between relationship marketing and e-commerce. However, as discussion is yet to focus on relationship marketing’s theoretical antecedent of exchange theory, this paper considers the evolution of e-commerce in terms of the exchange continuum. It is proposed that insight can be derived from the application of the concepts of extrinsic and intrinsic value (Houston and Gassenheimer, 1987) to online exchange. A theoretical model of extrinsic and intrinsic evaluation is developed, based on online consumers’ valuation of the object of exchange (i.e., the product). Possible empirical measures, to test the model, are suggested, derived from the relationship and services marketing literature.

Using an IDMI methodology to make multi-criteria decisions

Multi-criteria decisions usually require measurement or evaluation of performance in different units and their mix by application of weighting factors. This approach leads to potential manipulation of the results as a direct consequence of the applied weightings. In this paper a mechanism has been proposed to overcome this problem. It is known as the : Interlink Decision Making Index (IDMI) and has all the desired features: simple, interlink (all criteria) and automatically and quantified influence of critical criteria (i.e. no human weighting needed). The IDMI is capable of reflecting the total merits of a particular option once the normal decision making criteria and (up to two) critical criteria (CC) have been chosen. Then, without arbitrarily weighting criteria, comparison and selection of the best possible option can be made. Simple software has been developed to do this numerical transfer and graphic presentation. Two hypothetical examples are presented in the paper to demonstrate the application of the IDMI concept and its advantages over the traditional "tabular and weighting method" in the decision making process.