Ethical decision-making of accounting students : evidence from an Australian setting

This study investigates accounting students’ ethical decision-making judgments and behavioral intentions. The Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES) was used to measure the extent to which a hypothetical behavior was consistent with three moral criteria (Moral Equity, Relativism and Contractualism). The study specifically tests the differences in ethical decision-making between students who have been exposed to a dedicated ethics unit of study compared with students who have not studied ethics. The influences of culture and gender on students’ ethical decision-making are also addressed in the study. Ethical decision-making was assessed via three case studies describing moral dilemmas that an individual, business or professional person might face. The results provide support for the MES and the value added from incorporating a dedicated ethical decision-making unit in the accounting curriculum. The results also support prior evidence of gender bias and the impact of cultural differences on ethical decision-making.

Turning off the tap : sustainability imperatives, historic watering regimes, and historic landscape futures

This paper surveys the dilemma faced by the heritage-registered Adelaide Park Lands in terms of changing watering regimes, Agenda 21 sustainability policy objectives, climate change realities, tree senescence, biodiversity health, and raises some topical questions as to how to care for a significant cultural landscape when water, climate change and tree senescence will become key dilemmas.

The multifaith movement : global risks and cosmopolitan solutions

This book documents the ultramodern rise of the multifaith movement, as mulitfaith initiatives have been increasingly deployed as cosmopolitan solutions to counter global risks such as terrorism and climate change at the turn of the 21st century. These projects aim to enhance common security, particularly in Western societies following the events of September 11, 2001 and the July 2005 London bombings, where multifaith engagement has been promoted as a strategy to counter violent extremism. The author draws on interviews with 56 leading figures in the field of multifaith relations, including Paul Knitter, Eboo Patel, Marcus Braybrooke, Katherine Marshall, John Voll and Krista Tippett.
Identifying the principle aims of the multifaith movement, the analysis explores the benefits—and challenges—of multifaith engagement, as well as the effectiveness of multifaith initiatives in countering the process of radicalization. Building on notions of cosmopolitanism, the work proposes a new theoretical framework termed ‘Netpeace’, which recognizes the interconnectedness of global problems and their solutions. In doing so, it acknowledges the capacity of multi-actor peacebuilding networks, including religious and state actors, to address the pressing dilemmas of our times. The primary intention of the book is to assist in the formation of new models of activism and governance, founded on a ‘politics of understanding’ modeled by the multifaith movement.

Cultural regionalism and environmental planning and design : charting regionalism in deference to globalism

The last 400 years has witnessed Western colonialism spread across the Asian communities and landscape transforming and re-defining their identity, culture, landscape patterns and meanings, as well as their land ethic. Whilst independence has brought forth robust attempts at nationalism it has been at the deference of regionalism and cultural identity. Instead, modernism, economic regeneration and growth, and attempts to define a nationalist image out of the newly created nations that are often a patchwork quilt of pre-colonial empires, are signalling the demise of critical regionalism and Indigenous knowledge systems. This paper considers the changes and cultural transformations over the last 400 years pointing to key dilemmas in regionalist growth, deterioration and stabilisation that are causing a loss of environmental and cultural values, morals and codes. These are the cultural and planning ‘rules’ that originally structured and guided the sustainable life and spirit of community, land and culture as an integrated whole. Particular attention will be drawn to the Indigenous communities of Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia that are struggling to maintain identity and environmental ethic in the shadow of major disjointed and multi-objectival national and international economic growth and digital transformation advances. Several possible answers or mediated strategies are offered, through a cultural heritage and planning lens, that could afford a respect and creative integration of these Indigenous knowledge systems to better inform regional growth and land management strategies so that it was regionally relevant.

Celebrity and the media

Celebrity and the Media introduces the reader to the key terms, concepts, dilemmas and issues that are central to the study and critical understanding of celebrity. In this insightful text Redmond explores the impacts of celebrity culture on the modern media and everyday life, drawing attention to the ways in which people experience celebrity culture and how celebrities are able to communicate through spectacle, ritual, the confession and the close-up. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies from the worlds of film, music, television, and sports, and featuring topical, current and popular celebrity examples, the book stands as a pertinent examination of the influence that celebrity has on the way people place themselves in the modern world.

Narratives of judgement: representations of 'privileged' Jews in Holocaust documentaries

Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s highly influential essay, “The Grey Zone”, explores the taboo issue of “privileged” Jews, those prisoners who were forced to cooperate with their Nazi captors in order to prolong their lives or the lives of their families. Levi argues that moral evaluations of privileged Jews should be suspended; however, judgements of these liminal figures have permeated representations of victims’ experiences. Taking Levi’s reflections on the “grey zone” as a point of departure, I analyse the ways in which a number of Holocaust documentary narratives construct problematic judgements of privileged Jews; nonetheless, it will be shown that some films engage with the issue in a nuanced manner. While Levi singles out the medium of film as particularly predisposed to simplistic judgements, I argue that documentary film has considerable potential to offer a complex representation of the extreme ethical dilemmas that privileged Jews faced.

The gendered newsroom: how journalists experience the changing world of media

The Gendered Newsroom is a vivid exploration of the gendered production of news--and in particular the experiences of women--in the Australian print news media. The book engages with the question of how gender shapes newsroom culture and in so doing is concerned with production practices and cultural processes. It considers the dilemmas, constraints, negotiations and compromises which shape journalists’ day-to-day routines.

Global perspectives on the politics of multiculturalism in the 21st century: a case study analysis

Multiculturalism is now seen by many of its critics as the source of intercultural and social tensions, fostering communal segregation and social conflicts. While the cultural diversity of contemporary societies has to be acknowledged as an empirical and demographic fact, whether multiculturalism as a policy offers an optimal conduit for intercultural understanding and social harmony has become increasingly a matter of polarised public debate.
This book examines the contested philosophical foundations of multiculturalism and its, often controversial, applications in the context of migrant societies. It also explores the current theoretical debates about the extent to which multiculturalism, and related conceptual constructs, can account for the various ethical challenges and policy dilemmas surrounding the management of cultural diversity in our contemporary societies. The authors consider common conceptual and empirical features from a transnational perspective through analysis of the case studies of Australia, Canada, Columbia, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Uruguay.

Gendered experiences of industry change and the effects of neoliberalism

In a time of dramatic and rapid change in the global media industry and when technological advances and media concentration are shaping the way news is produced and consumed, little research has focused on how the producers of news are affected by such change. This paper explores narratives of confidence and cynicism as told to me by Australian print news media journalists. I am interested in journalists’ memories and experiences of personal change that arise from an intensified workplace and how neoliberal discourses affect newsroom culture. How do the journalists I interview experience and speak of changes in the newsroom? In what ways is being a journalist different now to when they entered the industry? In effect, how have journalists changed as a result of journalism's changes? The interviews with 17 print media journalists contain rich narratives with which to explore how participants remember and make sense of industry changes. This paper finds that the intensification of work practices, ethical constraints and gender bias, underpinned by neoliberalism, have aided in creating a cynicism among many of the journalists interviewed. Nevertheless, the majority of interviewees suggest that a career in journalism has increased their personal and/or professional confidence. There are, however, gendered differences in this experience.

Queer contingencies: bifurcation and the sexuality of schooling

This article critiques the contemporary focus on same-sex attracted youth, “antihomophobia,” and “safe schools,” as well as the ways these foci structure the logics of the prevailing policy approach. The author examines how contemporary antihomophobic reform in education is sustained by a series of false dilemmas: that the political demands and  investments of straights and nonstraights can be easily distinguished one from another; that the expression of homophobia is anathema to queer educative work; and that everything that is at stake in the messy confluence of sexuality, gender, and schooling can be made sense of by figuring the problem as a matter of being safe. Gesturing toward a queer social policy for schooling, this article critiques the “zero-tolerance” approach of antihomophobia education, arguing that it falsely bifurcates the social world of the school into homophobic/antihomophobic iterations, unsafe/safe versions, and straight/homosexual interest.

Ethics of teaching with social media

This paper goes beyond the commonly held concerns of Internet safety, such as cyberbullying. Instead, it explores the ethical dilemmas we face as teachers when using social media, in particular social networks, in the classroom. We believe old ideas of respect and culture of care for children and young people need to be reconstructed around new media. This paper draws on the authors’ experience in teaching with, and researching students’ use of, social media in the classroom. In this paper we explore the ethical issues of consent, traceability, and public/private boundaries. We tackle the complex issue of the rights around virtual identities of the students followed by a discussion on the ethics of engaging students in public performance of curriculum and their lives. Finally we discuss the ethical dilemma involved in recognising and responding to illicit activity. While we reflect on our own response to these dilemmas and propose a dialogic process as the way forward, we also return to the argument that the e ethical choices are dilemmas in which most, if not all, options are unpalatable or impracticable.

Developing and using an S3R model to analyze reasoning in web-based cross-national exchanges on sustainability

Within the increasing body of research that examines students' reasoning on socioscientific issues, we consider in particular student reasoning concerning acute, open-ended questions that bring out the complexities and uncertainties embedded in ill-structured problems. In this paper, we propose a socioscientific sustainability reasoning (S3R) model to analyze students' reasoning exchanges on environmental socially acute questions (ESAQs). The paper describes the development of an epistemological analysis of how sustainability perspectives can be integrated into socioscientific reasoning, which emphasizes the need for S3R to be both grounded in context and collective. We argue the complexity of ESAQs requires a consideration of multiple dimensions that form the basis of our S3R analysis model: problematization, interactions, knowledge, uncertainties, values, and governance. For each dimension, in the model we have identified indicators of four levels of complexity. We investigated the usefulness of the model in identifying improvements in reasoning that flow from cross-national web-based exchanges between groups of French and Australian students, concerning a local and a global ESAQ. The S3R model successfully captured the nature of reasoning about socioscientific sustainability issues, with the collective negotiation of multiple forms of knowledge as a key characteristic in improving reasoning levels. The paper provides examples of collaborative argumentation in collective texts (wikis) to illustrate the various levels of reasoning in each dimension, and diagrammatic representation of the evolution of collective reflections. We observe that a staged process of construction and confrontation, involving groups representing to some extent different cultural and contextual stances, is powerful in eliciting reasoned argument of enhanced quality. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Assessment policies, curricular directives, and teacher agency: quandaries of EFL teachers in Inner Mongolia

In the debate over English language teaching approaches and methods, the influence of examinations on classroom pedagogy and the nature of these examinations are critical considerations for teachers. In the Inner Mongolian context, as for all China, examinations reflect traditional conceptions of teaching and learning, classroom teaching conditions such as class sizes, and the English-as-a-foreign language setting. In this situation, decisions about classroom pedagogy and objectives and whether teaching focuses on test-taking rather than on the learning of language go to the core of teacher agency. In this paper we foreground the struggles and dilemmas experienced by English language teachers in Inner Mongolia in attempts to exercise agency amidst the instructional demands of an exam-oriented community, and a misalignment created by an exam remaining centered on discrete skills rather than students' proficiency in applying ranging uses of the language they are learning. These conditions are now located within New English Syllabus expectations are that teachers will implement their knowledge of educational theories and of current English teaching methodology to create opportunities for more broadly based learning and proficiency. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

Changes, challenges, and successes facing secondary pre-service teacher education in Australia

In December 2008, the Australian Government was presented with a report from a Review of Australian HigherEducation known as the ‘Bradley Review’. The report clearly articulates many challenges that lie ahead; it questions thestructure, organisation and financial position of Australia to effectively compete in the global economy. This paperprovides a succinct discussion of some of the challenges and dilemmas encountered at a metropolitan Australianuniversity in Melbourne within the Faculty of Arts and Education in the School of Education. The courses will bereaccredited in 2016 and has to comply with the new Australian Qualification Framework (AQF), the AustralianTeaching Standards Framework (AITSL) and the Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT). By employing narrative inquiry,reflective practice and document analysis as methodology, I discuss the Bachelor of Teaching (Secondary)/Bachelor ofArts course (degree), the largest secondary pre-service teacher education course at a university in Melbourne presentingsome strategies and inviting international dialogue in relation to some of the challenges faced regarding increasednumbers of students and lower entrance scores. Limitations of the current course are acknowledged and generalizationscannot be made to other education courses at universities across Australia. However, some new initiatives in the facultyare offered.

Critically impaired infants and end of life decision making : resource allocation and difficult decisions

Decisions to withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment are contentious, and offer difficult moral dilemmas to both medical practitioners and the judiciary. This issue is exacerbated when the patient is unable to exercise autonomy and is entirely dependent on the will of others.This book focuses on the legal and ethical complexities surrounding end of life decisions for critically impaired and extremely premature infants. Neera Bhatia explores decisions to withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment from critically impaired infants and addresses the controversial question, which lives are too expensive to treat? Bringing to bear such key issues as clinical guidance, public awareness, and resource allocation, the book provides a rational approach to end of life decision making, where decisions to withdraw or withhold treatment may trump other competing interests.The book will be of great interest and use to scholars and students of bioethics, medical law, and medical practitioners.