Strengthening Australia's schools through corporate federalism?

The federal policy document, 'Strengthening Australia's Schools' (SAS), signified a new approach to commonwealth-state relations in schooling policy making--corporate federalism. Corporate federalism extended the application of neocorporatist strategies for managing and responding to crisis (here, in particular, Australia's worsening national and international economic situation) from the private to the public sector. The paper documents and evaluates the rationale for corporate federalism in SAS. Some possible future developments within federalism and schooling policy are also considered.

Waterfall : Nature and Culture

Many people take pleasure in visiting waterfalls and much has been written on the subject. Numerous accounts of Niagara Falls were published after Hennepin's late seventeenth-centure descriptions, particularly from the early nineteenth century, but is was only later that other waterfalls became the subject of books. George Holley's Niagara and Other Famous Cataracts of the World, published in 1883, and John Gibson's Great Waterfalls, Cataracts and Geysers, published in 1887, are early examples of global accounts of major falls. Most books about waterfalls are guides to the falls of a particular country, state or region. Apart from a few slim illustrated volumes, few books have been puslished on the world's waterfalls since Edward Rashleigh's Among the Waterfalls (1935). Most of these are slim pictorial volumes, some aimed at the children's market. Geologist Richard Maxwell Pearl published a series of waterfall articles in his journal Earth Science between 1973 and 1975, apparently with the intention of turning them into a book, but this never materialized. My book, the culmination of more than a decade of waterfalls research, is comprehensive in its approach, but is not intended to describe as many of the world's waterfalls as possible. This is far from my aim, and readers may be disappointed at my omission of falls they feel deserved mention. What I have attempted to do is celebrate the delights of these beautiful wonders of nature by considering them from many points of view, emphasizing the roles that they play in the human experience. To be as representative as possible, I draw on examples of waterfalls from all over the world, some famous, many not. North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania and, with recent global warming, the Earth's polar regions, all feature in the discussion. Even though there are already enough books and articles about Niagara Falls to fill a large library, it has been impossible to avoid making frequent reference to this great cataract, which has been so important in the history of travel and tourism, power generation, urban development and art. Amoung the issues that I consider is the human impact on waterfalls, particularly the effects of hydropower schemes and tourism development. Also considered are artificial waterfalls, which have long been features of the designed landscape. Their contemporay role is poignantly exemplified in the design of the National September 11 Memorial, in which the footprints of the Twin Towers are traced by walls of waterfalls. A geographer and urban and regional planner by training, I have ventured into many other fields of knowledge that are outside my areas of expertise. I apologize for any errors that I may have made in my book and invite correction.

Corporate social responsibility and the parameters of dialogue with vulnerable others

This article presents a case study of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others. Dialogue with marginalized external groups is increasingly presented in the business literature as the key to making corporate social responsibility possible in particular through corporate learning. Corporate public communications at the same time promote community engagement as a core aspect of corporate social responsibility. This article examines the possibilities for and conditions underpinning corporate dialogue with marginalized stakeholders as occurred around the unexpected and sudden closure in January 2009 of the AU$2.2 billion BHP Billiton Ravensthorpe Nickel mine in rural Western Australia. In doing so we draw on John Roberts’ notion of dialogue with vulnerable others, and apply a discourse analysis approach to data spanning corporate public communications and interviews with residents affected by the decision to close the mine. In presenting this case study we contribute to the as yet limited organizational research concerned directly with marginalized stakeholders and argue that corporate social responsibility discourse and vulnerable other dialogue not only affirms the primacy of business interests but also co-opts vulnerable others in the pursuit of these interests. In conclusion we consider case study implications for critical understandings of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others.

Culture, technology and the city

The 21st century has been described as the “century of cities”. By 2030, 70 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities, with the most rapid urbanization occurring in the developing world. This paper will draw up geographer Ed Soja’s concept of the “spatial turn” in social theory to consider how the culture of cities can act as a catalyst to innovation and the development of new technologies. In doing so, the paper will develop a three-layered approach to culture as: the arts; the way of life of people and communities; and the embedded structure underpinning socio-economic relations. It will also consider technology at a three-layered element, including devices, practices and ‘logics’ of technology, or what the Greeks termed techne. The paper will consider recent approaches to urban cultural policy, including cluster development and creative cities, and suggest some alternatives, noting that a problem with current approaches is that they focus excessively upon production (clusters) or consumption (creative cities). It will also consider the development of digital creative industries such as games, and the strategies of different cities to develop an innovation culture.

Experimental evaluation of the culture performance of three exotic and a ‘local’ Giant Freshwater Prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii, De Man 1879) culture strain in Fiji

Giant freshwater prawn (GFP; Macrobrachium rosenbergii) aquaculture has expanded rapidly since 1990. Most local culture industries, however, have developed in an unsystematic way. Fiji has a small culture industry producing the ‘Anuenue’ strain; however, performance of this strain has never been systematically evaluated. Recently, some Fijian farmers have reported declines in stock productivity. The current project evaluated the relative performance of three exotic strains with different genetic backgrounds from Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam, against the ‘local’ strain in Fiji in a 4 × 3 replicated pond trial experiment. A total of 5827 prawns were harvested after 143 days growout. Individual growth rate and relative survival of the Fiji strain were not statistically different from any of the introduced strains, but Vietnam strain was superior to that of the Malaysia strain. Genetic diversity showed significant differences in variability among strains, with the Malaysian strain displaying the lowest genetic diversity. Indonesia strain showed that females were reaching maturation earlier than other strains and were smaller in size. This study suggests that Malaysian and Indonesian strains would constitute a poor choice for Fiji, whereas the Vietnam strain consistently performed well on all criteria measured. High variation among replicate ponds within strains unfortunately confounded among-strain variation.

Fashion meets journalism : mapping and evaluating Australian fashion media

This study demonstrates how to study fashion journalism from the point of view, that it is its own field of journalism, akin to other journalism beats such as politics, sports and health. There is scope here for comment on the co-evolution of fashion and journalism, leading to ‘fashion journalism’ developing as a distinct field of study in its own right. This research contributes more generally to the field of media and cultural studies, by developing the threepart producer/text/reader model, which is the standard ‘media studies’ analytical framework. The study of fashion media from a cultural studies perspective acknowledges that cultural studies has pioneered the formal study of both journalism and fashion, for instance in studies of women’s magazines; but it has not brought the two areas together sufficiently. What little work has been done, however, has allowed theorists to explore how magazines promote feminism and form culture, which acts as a step in concreting fashion’s importance theoretically. This thesis has contributed to cultural studies by showing the relationship between the corporate industry, of both fashion and media (producer), and the active audience (reader) can be rethought and brought up to date for the more interactive era of the 21st century.

Project 27 : insights into a production-centred study on art direction and love

This paper offers insight into the development of a PhD in advertising art direction. For over half a century art directors within the advertising industry have been adapting to the changes occurring in media, culture and the corporate sector, toward enhancing professional performance and competitiveness. These professionals seldom offer explicit justification about the role images play in effective communication. It is uncertain how this situation affects advertising performance, because advertising has, nevertheless, evolved in parallel to this as an industry able to fabricate new opportunities for itself. However, uncertainties in the formalization of art direction knowledge restrict the possibilities of knowledge transfer in higher education. The theoretical knowledge supporting advertising art direction has been adapted spontaneously from disciplines that rarely focus on specific aspects related to the production of advertising content, like, for example: marketing communication, design, visual communication, or visual art. Meanwhile, in scholarly research, vast empirical knowledge has been generated about advertising images, but often with limited insight into production expertise. Because art direction is understood as an industry practice and not as an academic discipline, an art direction perspective in scholarly contributions is rare. Scholarly research that is relevant to art direction seldom offers viewpoints to help understand how it is that research outputs may specifically contribute to art direction practices. There is a need to formally understanding the knowledge underlying art direction and using it to explore models for visual analysis and knowledge transfer in higher education. This paper provides insight into the development of a thesis that explored this need. The PhD thesis to which this paper refers is Strategic Aesthetics in Advertising Campaigns: Implications for Art Direction Education.

Re-made in Asia : transformation across Asian markets and popular culture

The thesis is an examination of how Japanese popular culture products are remade (rimeiku). Adaptation of manga, anime and television drama, from one format to another, frequently occurs within Japan. The rights to these stories and texts are traded in South Korea and Taiwan. The ‘spin-off’ products form part of the Japanese content industry. When products are distributed and remade across geographical boundaries, they have a multi-dimensional aspect and potentially contribute to an evolving cultural re-engagement between Japan and East Asia. The case studies are the television dramas Akai Giwaku and Winter Sonata and two manga, Hana yori Dango and Janguru Taitei. Except for the television drama Winter Sonata these texts originated in Japan. Each study shows how remaking occurs across geographical borders. The study argues that Japan has been slow to recognise the value of its popular culture through regional and international media trade. Japan is now taking steps to remedy this strategic shortfall to enable the long-term viability of the Japanese content industry. The study includes an examination of how remaking raises legal issues in the appropriation of media content. Unauthorised copying and piracy contributes to loss of financial value. To place the three Japanese cultural products into a historical context, the thesis includes an overview of Japanese copying culture from its early origins through to the present day. The thesis also discusses the Meiji restoration and the post-World War II restructuring that resulted in Japan becoming a regional media powerhouse. The localisation of Japanese media content in South Korea and Taiwan also brings with it significant cultural influences, which may be regarded as contributing to a better understanding of East Asian society in line with the idea of regional ‘harmony’. The study argues that the commercial success of Japanese products beyond Japan is governed by perceptions of the quality of the story and by the cultural frames of the target audience. The thesis draws on audience research to illustrate the loss or reinforcement of national identity as a consequence of cross-cultural trade. The thesis also examines the contribution to Japanese ‘soft power’ (Nye, 2004, p. x). The study concludes with recommendations for the sustainability of the Japanese media industry.

TESOL in the corporate university

This article is an invited response to discuss the role of theory in the field of teaching of English as a Second Language and the place of TESOL in the contemporary university. It makes the case that TESOL is both an academic field in search of theoretical grounds but that its future is more dependent on its status as a social/institutional field, in Bourdieu's sense, within the corporate, performative university.

Improvising a future in the performing arts : a new strategy to help performance studies students successfully shift between academic culture, professional culture, industry and career?

If there is one thing performance studies graduates should be good at, it is improvising – play and improvisation are central to the contemporary and cultural performance practices we teach and the methods by which we teach them. Objective, offer, acceptance, advancing, reversing, character, status, manipulation, impression management, relationship management – whether we know them from Keith Johnson’s theatre theories or Erving Goffman’s theatre theories, the processes by which we play out a story, scenario or social situation to our own benefit are familiar. We understand that identity, action, interaction and its personal, aesthetic, professional or political outcomes are unpredictable, and that we need to adapt to changeable and uncertain circumstances to achieve our aims. Intriguingly, though, in a Higher Education environment that increasingly emphasises employability, skills in play, improvisation and self-performance are never cited as critical graduate attributes. Is the ability to play, improve and produce spontaneous new self-performances learned in the academy worth articulating into an ability to play, improvise and product spontaneous new self-performances after graduates leave the academy and move into the role of a performing arts professional in industry? A study of the career paths of our performance studies graduates over the past decade suggests that addressing the challenges they face in moving between academic culture, professional culture, industry and career in terms of improvisation and play principles may be very productive. In articles on performing arts careers, graduates are typically advised to find a market for their work, and develop career self-management, management and marketing skills, together with an ability to find, make and maintain relationships and opportunities for themselves. Transitioning to career is cast as a challenging process, requiring these skills, because performing arts careers do not offer the security, status and stability of other careers. Our data confirms this. In our study, though, we found that strategies commonly used to build the resilience, self-reliance and persistence graduates require – talking about portfolio careers, parallel careers, and portable, transferable or translatable skills, for example – can engender panic as easily as they engender confidence. In this paper, I consider what happens when we re-articulate some of the skills scholars and industry stakeholders argue are critical in allowing graduates to shift successfully from academy to industry in terms of skills like improvisation, play and self-performance that are already familiar, meaningful and much-practiced amongst performance studies graduates.

The Cyndi Lauper affect : bodies, girlhood and popular culture [Abstract]

Using a collective biography method informed by a Deleuzian theoretical approach (Davies & Gannon, 2009), this paper analyses embodied memories of girlhood becomings through affective engagements with resonating images in media and popular culture. In this approach to analysis we move beyond an impasse in some feminist cultural studies where studies of popular culture have been understood through theories of representation and reception that retain a sense of discrete subjectivity and linear effects. In these approaches, analysis focuses respectively on decoding and deciphering images in terms of their normative and ideological baggage, and, particularly with moving images, on psychological readings (Coleman, 2011; Driscoll, 2002). Understanding bodies and popular culture through Deleuzian notions of ‘becoming’ and ‘assemblage’ opens possibilities for feminist researchers to consider the ways in which bodies are not separate to images but rather, are known, felt, materialised and mobilised with/through images (Coleman, 2008, 2009, 2011). We tease out the implications of this new approach to media affects through two memories of girls’ engagements with media images, reconceived as moments of embodied being within affective flows of popular culture that might momentarily extend upon the ways of being and doing girlhood.

Australian literature : culture, identity and English teaching

The development of the Australian Curriculum has reignited a debate about the role of Australian literature in the contexts of curricula and classrooms. A review of the mechanisms for promoting Australian literature including literary prizes, databases, surveys and texts included for study in senior English classrooms in New South Wales and Victoria provides a background for considering the purpose of Australian texts and the role of literature teachers in shaping students’ engagement with literature.

Analyzing the literature for the link between the conservative Islamic culture of Saudi Arabia and the design of sustainable housing

Saudi Arabia experiences housing shortage for mid and low-income families, which is caused by rapid population growth. This condition is worsened by the fact that the current housing supply has problems in meeting both sustainable requirements and cultural needs of those families. This paper aims to investigate the link between the unique conservative Saudi culture and the design of sustainable housing, while keeping the housing cost affordable for mid and low-income families. The paper is based on a review of literatures on the issues of the Islamic culture and how can they be integrated into the design process of a Saudi house. Findings from literature reveiw suggest several design requirements for accommodating the conservative Saudi Culture in low cost sustainable houses. Such requirements include the implementation of proper usage of windows, and house orientation with a courtyard inside rather than facing the main street will provide natural ventilation while maintaining privacy. The main contribution to the body of knowledge is that this is a new approach to sustainable housing in Saudi Arabia considering not only energy use and architectural design issues but also socio-cultural issues as an essential part of sustainability.

Corporate fraud and misconduct : investigative and regulatory priorities

This article investigates the profile of the companies that have been investigated for corporate fraud and misconduct. Our definition of fraud includes financial statement fraud, market misconduct fraud such as insider trading or false disclosures, and managerial fraud. The particular evidence presented relates to those instances of corporate fraud and misconduct investigated by the Australian corporate regulatory, Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), and relates to sanctions for fraud, misconduct or compliance breaches. Using data compiled from the public announcements in the ASIC reports over the period 2004-2008, we categorise the type of fraud and misconduct breaches ASIC chooses to report and investigate.