Stakeholder and gender characteristics of mining and energy IPO boards of directors

The mining and energy sectors are particularly publicly sensitive sectors and subject to a high degree of public scrutiny. Evan and Freeman (1993) suggest that such public scrutiny needs may be better met by having direct public stakeholder representation on the board of directors. Similarly, Bilimoria (2000) argues a strong commercial case for engaging women on boards. This paper investigates the number and proportion of non equity holding public stakeholder directors and the number and proportion of women directors on the boards of Australian mining and energy company initial public offerings (IPOs) and reports a paucity of public stakeholder directors and also a low proportional female representation on such IPO boards.

The importance of IS stakeholder perspectives and perceptions to requirements negotiation

Project managers and developers need to acknowledge the influence of IS stakeholders’ perspectives and perceptions on the outcome of requirements negotiation - the essential component of requirements elicitation. This paper describes a conceptual study, which demonstrates such an influence and asserts that stakeholder perspectives, goals and issues are the key to negotiators’ perceptions of the system requirements. Analysis of two seminal IS case studies further supports this assertion and indicates that goals, perspectives and prior experience with negotiation techniques can guide stakeholders bargaining behaviour during requirements negotiation. Our findings also show that to achieve consensus on requirements, stakeholder perspectives must be aligned or accepted by negotiating parties. Achieving alignment of perspectives, however, is quite difficult because during requirements elicitation stakeholders’ goals continually alter due to their acquisition of technical and business knowledge, development of inter-personal relationships and creation of new perceptions of issues relevant to requirements negotiation.

The 10th Greek Festival of Sydney : a stakeholder analysis

In response to the demand for the adoption of a corporate culture by not-for-profit festivals, festival organizations increasingly identify strategic planning process and stakeholder management as crucial components for successful events. The purpose of this article is to present a framework developed for categorizing ethnic festivals stakeholders from a functional role (i.e., marketing, administration, and production) and an ethnic origin (i.e., Greek, Greek-Australian, and non-Greek origin) orientated perspective. The proposed framework was developed and applied to the 20th Greek Festival of Sydney (GFS), which was held in 2002, by identifying, categorizing, and examining the role of its stakeholders in the management and delivery of the event. The identification of the type of stakeholders, the ways they influence the GFS organization, and the strategic implications that derived from their involvement are addressed. The methodology utilized to develop the stakeholder framework was qualitative in nature. It combined triangulated data that derived from a number of interviews with representatives from the GFS administration, participant observations, and content analysis of internal documents and reports. The GFS stakeholder analysis offered an understanding of the several marketing-, administration-, and production-related strategic implications to the organization and running of the festival, such as the impact on its content, participants, and future development. The proposed framework derives from the GFS case study, yet it has the potential to be used for the examination of stakeholders' strategic implications to other ethnic festivals.

Incorporating stakeholder values into regional forest planning : a value function approach

Forest management involves multiple objectives, multiple stakeholders, complex socio-ecological and political interactions. Public involvement in forest decision making is a challenging task that involves controversies. Various participatory tools such as public consultation forums, public comment processes, opinion polls are used to consult and to obtain inputs from communities. All these methods can provide useful information but they fail to quantify the trade-offs systematically and offer little help in minimizing conflicts. The Australian Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) program was implemented in response to the decades of conflicts and debate between various stakeholder groups and government over the use and management of forest resources. So far, it has not been able to minimize conflicts in the forestry sector, partly due to its poor incorporation and integration of stakeholder values. This paper uses the value functions approach in modelling stakeholder values in regional forest planning. The results of the study indicate that this method can help to incorporate value preferences effectively into the decision making process. It can also increase the transparency and credibility of the forest planning exercises such as RFA process.

Studying and working : a national study of student finances and student engagement

A key determinant of the new relationship between students and universities in Australia is the changing nature of higher education funding arrangements and the shift towards “user-pays”. In 2007, the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) completed a commissioned national study, Australian University Student Finances 2006: Final Report of a National Survey of Students in Public Universities. Drawing on the project report, this article discusses selected findings relating to student expectations and engagement to present a worrying picture of financial duress and involvement in paid work and examines the possible effects on the quality of higher education.

Patient engagement and coaching for health: the PEACH study- a cluster randomised controlled trial using the telephone to coach people with type 2 diabetes to engage with their GPs to improve diabetes care: a study protocol.

Background
The PEACH study is based on an innovative 'telephone coaching' program that has been used effectively in a post cardiac event trial. This intervention will be tested in a General Practice setting in a pragmatic trial using existing Practice Nurses (PN) as coaches for people with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Actual clinical care often fails to achieve standards, that are based on evidence that self-management interventions (educational and psychological) and intensive pharmacotherapy improve diabetes control. Telephone coaching in our study focuses on both. This paper describes our study protocol, which aims to test whether goal focused telephone coaching in T2D can improve diabetes control and reduce the treatment gap between guideline based standards and actual clinical practice.
Methods/design
In a cluster randomised controlled trial, general practices employing Practice Nurses (PNs) are randomly allocated to an intervention or control group. We aim to recruit 546 patients with poorly controlled T2D (HbA1c >7.5%) from 42 General Practices that employ PNs in Melbourne, Australia. PNs from General Practices allocated to the intervention group will be trained in diabetes telephone coaching focusing on biochemical targets addressing both patient self-management and engaging patients to work with their General Practitioners (GPs) to intensify pharmacological treatment according to the study clinical protocol. Patients of intervention group practices will receive 8 telephone coaching sessions and one face-to-face coaching session from existing PNs over 18 months plus usual care and outcomes will be compared to the control group, who will only receive only usual care from their GPs. The primary outcome is HbA1c levels and secondary outcomes include cardiovascular disease risk factors, behavioral risk factors and process of care measures.
Discussion
Understanding how to achieve comprehensive treatment of T2D in a General Practice setting is the focus of the PEACH study. This study explores the potential role for PNs to help reduce the treatment and outcomes gap in people with T2D by using telephone coaching. The intervention, if found to be effective, has potential to be sustained and embedded within real world General Practice.

The stakeholder debate and directors' fiduciary duties

It is usually said that a company is a legal entity separate from its management and shareholders and that the business and affairs of a company must be managed by or under the direction of its board. This implies various duties and responsibilities for directors.<br>Directors' duties traditionally include onerous fiduciary duties and obligations of care, skill and diligence in terms of the common law, various statutory provisions in the Companies Act 61 of 1973 requiring certain things of directors or preventing them from doing certain things (see, eg, ss 221-227 and 234-246 of the Act), and possible duties imposed by the articles of association or even separate agreements between directors and their companies.

Chaos theory and assessment of forest stakeholder attitudes towards Australian forest policy

The Regional Forest Agreement process has dominated Australian forest policy for the past decade. The RFA process set in place a mechanism by which benchmark conservation values were established for forest  ecosystems, whilst addressing the needs of the timber industry. The outcomes of a number of RFA's have been fraught with controversy. Key stakeholder groups have shown disagreement with processes and  outcomes of methods employed by government both in establishing conservation reserves and areas allocated to timber harvesting. This research uses non-linear techniques to examine the dynamical behavior in stakeholder responses and to identify patterns of behavior that may lead to prediction of stakeholder responses. The method developed in this research provides a bridge between social sciences and Chaos theory.¹

Corporate brand identity and image congruence in the leisure services sector : a stakeholder perspective

This paper aims to contribute to current leisure services and branding literature by conceptualising the relationship between brand identity, brand image and whether a congruent relationship between the two influences customer satisfaction and loyalty. A conceptual model is developed in the context of zoological operations, central constructs and subsequent research propositions are discussed.

Enabling successful web-based information technology support for enterprise customers: a service provider perspective of stakeholder-based issues

An understanding by support organisations of the key factors enabling successful enterprise after-sales customer support provision when using Web-based Selfservice Systems (WSSs) is essential to making  improvements in such systems. This paper reports key stakeholder-oriented findings from an interpretive study of critical success factors (CSFs) for the transfer of after-sales support-oriented knowledge from an information technology (IT) service provider to enterprise customers when a WSS is used. The findings suggest that researchers and practitioners should consider WSSs within a complex network of service providers, business partners and customer firms. The paper also clearly points to a need for support organisations to engage in greater collaboration and integration of WSSs with enterprise customers and business partners.

Attachments between directors and auditors: do they affect engagement tenure?

Auditors and directors may develop personal attachments over time based on trust and familiarity, and these personal ties seem important for the maintenance of long-term auditor-client relationships. This study examines the tenure of the audit engagement in the presence of these links, which is expected to be longer than auditor-client relationships not so linked. Results indicate director-auditor links are positively associated with auditor tenure and the retention of auditors beyond the critical four-year period identified by Levinthal and Fichman (1988).

The use of analytic hierarchy process to incorporate stakeholder preferences into regional forest planning

Forest management decisions are often characterised by complexity, irreversibility and uncertainty. Much of the complexity arises from the multiple-use nature of forest goods and services, difficulty in monetary valuation of ecological services and the involvement of numerous stakeholders. Under these circumstances, conventional methods such as cost-benefit analysis are ill-suited to evaluate forest decisions. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), can be useful in regional forest planing as it can accommodate conflictual, multidimensional, incommensurable and incomparable set of objectives. The objective of this paper is to examine the scope and feasibility of the AHP in incorporating stakeholder preferences into regional forest planning. The Australian Regional Forest Agreement Programme is taken as an illustrative case for the analysis. The results show that the AHP can formalize public participation in decision making and increase the transparency and the credibility of the process.