Traditional Australian media organisations adoption of the World Wide Web

The aim of this paper is it to identify whether Australian media companies moved online with a clear business model in mind or in an ad-hoc manner. In-depth interviews were conducted with four Interact media managers from two large Australian media organisations. All four had been involved in Web publishing from its early stages and had extensive knowledge of the development of Web publishing in the industry. The interviews focused on the period around the mid 1990's when the early development of the organisations' websites took place. We also review an analytical approach of examining narratives from research interviews developed by Davidson (Davidson 1997) and Mishler (Mishler1986a, 1986b).

The role of human resource management in moderating the relationship between organisational culture and TQM adoption

Culture has been considered as one of the factors that influences the TQM adoption process of organisations. Based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, we suggest that individualist organisations would find difficulties in adopting TQM, which tends to reflect a more collectivist than individualist culture. We, however, believe that individualist organisations can overcome this problem by establishing collectivist HRM policies by creating collectivistic TQM environment. This paper thus fills the gap between literature on culture, HRM and TQM. Notably, based upon the examination of the impact individualist versus collectivist culture have on HRM policies and TQM adoption, this paper proposes collectivist HRM policies as the significant moderating variable on the relationship between the culturally diverse members and the TQM adoption within the organisational context. Based upon the theoretical framework developed in this paper, implications for future research are outlined.

Future research on structural and institutional forms of HIV discrimination

There is scant research into HIV discrimination, particularly structural and institutional forms of it. This appears, in part, to arise from a prevailing view that the solutions to HIV discrimination are known a priori and in the absence of additional data. The six country studies into HIV discrimination presented in this AIDS Care supplement suggest that this is not the case. There needs to be an acceptance that if the issue of HIV discrimination is to be tackled successfully and based on evidence, then incremental and effortful steps need to be taken to develop that evidence base. This is discussed.

Focusing on university student engagement at the institutional level

In Australia, there has been a tendency to rely on quantitative indicators of university teaching quality. This has occurred partly because the indicators are perceived as objective and reliable and partly because they are relatively simple to gather and collate. A national project currently underway is based on the assumptions that teaching quality is multidimensional and that the identification and use of relevant indicators of teaching quality are dependent on the institutional environment. With a focus on student engagement, this paper outlines the research-based approach to developing indicators of teaching quality being taken by one Australian university participating in the national project.

International marketing journals : a preliminary regional and institutional examination of research productivity

Contributions to marketing knowledge are becoming more global (Stremersch and Verhoef, 2005). This paper explores the issue of regional contribution to the international marketing area, which could be expected to be more global than other areas. Publications within four leading international marketing journals were reviewed over a five-year period (1999-2003). Findings suggested that approximately 50 percent of the works were authored by academics outside North America.

Predicting timely doctoral completions : an institutional case study of 2000-2005 doctoral graduates

Federal government changes to the funding of doctoral students have focussed the attention of university management on their completion rates. The aims are to inform the allocation of institutional resources in a manner that improves the likelihood of timely doctoral completions and to highlight a process that can also be used for analyses of other key indicators of progression and attrition. The analyses and model development used national data readily available to all universities, which is collected in a standard approach through the Graduate Destinations Survey (GDS). The findings show that the most important variable for timely completion was attendance (full‐ versus part‐time), where in terms of full‐time equivalent (FTE) years of study, part‐time students were far more likely to complete quickly than full‐time students. For the full‐time students the key predictors of timely completion were residency, field of study and English‐speaking background (ESB). The timeliness of part‐time students was predicted by field of study and ESB. This study confirms that there is considerable variation by discipline for timely doctoral completions. The pragmatic application and prospective test of the derived models present a variety of opportunities for research student administrators. For example, those full‐time students scoring highly represented a concentration of timely graduates more than 7.5 times higher than the lowest‐scoring group – almost an order of magnitude of difference. In short, university management could gain tremendous value from more widely using the data available.