An Aboriginal obligation to Country: challenging the status quo

Australian Aboriginal Traditional Owner ancestral responsibilities to Country involves listening and exercising vested responsibilities and duties of care, passed down from generation to generation through clan and familial connections. Traditional Owners is a term used to describe today’s descendants of the original Aboriginal inhabitants and have ongoing cultural and spiritual connections to land and water where their ancestors lived. The incorporation of Traditional Owner relationships to Country and the need to engage with Traditional Owners in Western planning regimes are often expressed positively; that Aboriginal needs and aspirations need to be recognized in the urban landscape. However in practice, decisions involving the address of Aboriginal aspirations are usually made in a generic context rather than a Country and knowledge specific context. This can have adverse effects on obligations to Country stewardship, and Custodial perceptions are being ignored and negated. Improving our understanding of how Traditional ancestral obligations to Country are expressed and embodied within the context of generic Western planning instruments, is critical as cities expand and increase the pressures and threats on Traditional Owners Country, their resources, their cultural heritage, their knowledge and their histories. This paper contributes to this understanding by focusing upon Traditional Owner communities in the Brisbane metropolitan region who are attempting to address their responsibility to Country through Western State and local planning instruments. This paper draws on empirical data collected through interviews and observations between 2013-2015 with the Quandamooka communities and a content analysis of current planning instruments. The paper reports on their obligations of and to Country and the consequences that engagement within Western planning instruments has had upon their Traditional Ownership well-being and landscape health. Lessons learned from this case study are discussed to offer future planning policy initiatives that could better meet the needs of Traditional Owners in Australian cities.

SAP-Related Education - Status-Quo and Experience

Integrating Enterprise Systems solutions in the curriculum of not only universities but all types of institutes of higher learning has been a major challenge for nearly ten years. Enterprise Systems education is surprisingly well documented in a number of papers on Information Systems education. However, most publications in this area report on the individual experiences of an institution or an academic. This paper focuses on the most popular Enterprise System - SAP - and summarizes the outcomes of a global survey on the status quo of SAP-related education. Based on feedback of 305 lecturers and more than 700 students, it reports on the main factors of Enterprise Systems education including, critical success factors, alternative hosting models, and students’ perceptions. The results show among others an overall increasing interest in advanced SAP solutions and international collaboration, and a high satisfaction with the concept of using Application Hosting Centers.

Employability and job status as moderators of the effects of job insecurity on work outcomes

Despite greater use of temporary employment contracts, little is known about how employees react to job length uncertainty. Individual careers within the safety of one or two primary organisations are no longer the norm. This study investigates the effects of job insecurity and employment status (temporary/permanent) on work outcomes. Three hundred and ninety-one employees (122 temporary and 269 permanent) in low to medium level non-academic positions from two Australian universities completed a survey. The results show that a belief that comparable employment is easily available did not alleviate the negative effects of job insecurity. Work attitudes for temporaries and permanents though were differentially influenced by employee perceptions of their own employability.

Evolutions of an Online Generation: Education, Industry and IMC

This paper traces the evolutions of a new generation of students who are predominantly the ‘online generation’; explores the emerging impact of this generation on industry; identifies the changing role of education from traditional classroom to an online environment; and explores the contribution related to integrated marketing communications (IMC). Educational requirements from a business perspective must incorporate global business demands; virtual learning environments progress the online generation towards a post-modern learning state. The central proposition of this paper is that the emergence of IMC in evolving industry practices is influenced by student generations who are producing a new paradigm of alignment between education and industry. This is purely a conceptual exploration using limited examples to provide some context and illustrate the questions raised for consideration.