Digital scholarship and pedagogy, the next step : cultural science.

There are two aspects to the problem of digital scholarship and pedagogy. One is to do with scholarship; the other with pedagogy. In scholarship, the association of knowledge with its printed form remains dominant. In pedagogy, the desire to abandon print for ‘new’ media is urgent, at least in some parts of the academy. Film and media studies are thus at the intersection of opposing forces – pulling the field ‘back’ to print and ‘forward’ to digital media. These tensions may be especially painful in a field whose own object of study is another form of communication, neither print nor digital but broadcast. Although print has been overtaken in the popular marketplace by audio-visual forms, this was never achieved in the domain of scholarship. Even when it is digitally distributed, the output of research is still a ‘paper.’ But meanwhile, in the realm of teaching, production- and practice-based pedagogy has become firmly established. Nevertheless a disjunction remains, between high-end scholarship in research universities and vocational training in teaching institutions; but neither is well equipped to deal with the digital challenge.

Cross-cultural consumer/consumption research : dealing with issues emerging from globalization and fragmentation

To understand the effects of globalization and fragmentation, macromarketing scholars need insights about links between individual consumer behavior and societal outcomes. The challenge in this regard is to create a program of macrooriented cross-cultural research. This article offers a crosscultural consumer behavior research framework for this purpose. The framework encompasses four key areas of consumer behavior that are related to the forces of globalization and fragmentation, including the environment, identity, wellbeing,and market structure and policy. A discussion of these substantive areas is followed by a suggested macro-microoriented research agenda and a call for paradigm plurality in pursuing this agenda.

Respecting local, cultural contexts for assessment practice in an era of globalization

Dissatisfaction, internationally, with existing educational practices and outcomes since the early 1990s has led to increased educational reform. At the same time, there has also been a worldwide shift in control of education away from teachers toward the state for the purposes of restructuring economies. More bureaucratic forms of curriculum and assessment have resulted, with a return to the use of more techno-rational discourse in assessment and evaluation for purposes of efficiency, accountability, impact, and performance management. There has also been an increase in the use of economic and productivity models to study educational outcomes. These models fail to account for the range of outcomes achieved and fail to identify the factors responsible for such diversity in performance.

Doing cultural heritage using the torque game engine: supporting indigenous storytelling in a 3D virtual environment

Digital Songlines (DSL) is an Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) project that is developing protocols, methodologies and toolkits to facilitate the collection, education and sharing of indigenous cultural heritage knowledge. This paper outlines the goals achieved over the last three years in the development of the Digital Songlines game engine (DSE) toolkit that is used for Australian Indigenous storytelling. The project explores the sharing of indigenous Australian Aboriginal storytelling in a sensitive manner using a game engine. The use of the game engine in the field of Cultural Heritage is expanding. They are an important tool for the recording and re-presentation of historically, culturally, and sociologically significant places, infrastructure, and artefacts, as well as the stories that are associated with them. The DSL implementation of a game engine to share storytelling provides an educational interface. Where the DSL implementation of a game engine in a CH application differs from others is in the nature of the game environment itself. It is modelled on the 'country' (the 'place' of their heritage which is so important to the clients' collective identity) and authentic fauna and flora that provides a highly contextualised setting for the stories to be told. This paper provides an overview on the development of the DSL game engine.

Application of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in multi-criteria analysis of the selection of intelligent building systems

The availability of innumerable intelligent building (IB) products, and the current dearth of inclusive building component selection methods suggest that decision makers might be confronted with the quandary of forming a particular combination of components to suit the needs of a specific IB project. Despite this problem, few empirical studies have so far been undertaken to analyse the selection of the IB systems, and to identify key selection criteria for major IB systems. This study is designed to fill these research gaps. Two surveys: a general survey and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) survey are proposed to achieve these objectives. The first general survey aims to collect general views from IB experts and practitioners to identify the perceived critical selection criteria, while the AHP survey was conducted to prioritize and assign the important weightings for the perceived criteria in the general survey. Results generally suggest that each IB system was determined by a disparate set of selection criteria with different weightings. ‘Work efficiency’ is perceived to be most important core selection criterion for various IB systems, while ‘user comfort’, ‘safety’ and ‘cost effectiveness’ are also considered to be significant. Two sub-criteria, ‘reliability’ and ‘operating and maintenance costs’, are regarded as prime factors to be considered in selecting IB systems. The current study contributes to the industry and IB research in at least two aspects. First, it widens the understanding of the selection criteria, as well as their degree of importance, of the IB systems. It also adopts a multi-criteria AHP approach which is a new method to analyse and select the building systems in IB. Further research would investigate the inter-relationship amongst the selection criteria.

Health a focus at international conference

The 2009 Native American and Indigenous Studies Conference recently held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America attracted over 600 scholars. The Conference was scholarly and interdisciplinary and was intended for Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars who work in American Indian/ Native American/ First Nations/ Aboriginal/ Indigenous Studies. Scholars came from USA, Canada, Hawaii, Central and South America, New Zealand, Switzerland, England and Australia. The aim of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Conference is to offer a chance to scholars working in the field of Indigenous Studies to present scholarly work. The 2009 witnessed a selection of papers from the discipline of Health. This article gives an overview of the Conference and some of the health papers.

Capital Works Procurement: The Selection of a Building Procurement Method

The determination of the most appropriate procurement method for capital works projects is a challenging task for the Department of Housing and Works (DHW) and other Western Australian State Government Agencies because of the array of assessment criteria that are considered and the procurement methods that are available. A number of different procurement systems can be used to deliver capital works projects such a traditional, design and construct and management. Sub-classifications of these systems have proliferated and continue to emerge in response to market demands. The selection of an inappropriate procurement method may lead to undesirable project outcomes. To facilitate DHW in selecting an appropriate procurement method for its capital works projects, a six step procurement method selection process is presented. The characteristics of the most common forms of procurement method used in Australia are presented. Case studies where procurement methods have been used for specific types of capital works in Western Australia are offered to provide a reference point and learning opportunity for procurement method selection.

Trust and strong ties in the selection and evaluation of business advisors by small firms

Principal Topic A small firm is unlikely to possess internally the full range of knowledge and skills that it requires or could benefit from for the development of its business. The ability to acquire suitable external expertise - defined as knowledge or competence that is rare in the firm and acquired from the outside - when needed thus becomes a competitive factor in itself. Access to external expertise enables the firm to focus on its core competencies and removes the necessity to internalize every skill and competence. However, research on how small firms access external expertise is still scarce. The present study contributes to this under-developed discussion by analysing the role of trust and strong ties in the small firm's selection and evaluation of sources of external expertise (henceforth referred to as the 'business advisor' or 'advisor'). Granovetter (1973, 1361) defines the strength of a network tie as 'a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding) and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie'. Strong ties in the context of the present investigation refer to sources of external expertise who are well known to the owner-manager, and who may be either informal (e.g., family, friends) or professional advisors (e.g., consultants, enterprise support officers, accountants or solicitors). Previous research has suggested that strong and weak ties have different fortes and the choice of business advisors could thus be critical to business performance) While previous research results suggest that small businesses favour previously well known business advisors, prior studies have also pointed out that an excessive reliance on a network of well known actors might hamper business development, as the range of expertise available through strong ties is limited. But are owner-managers of small businesses aware of this limitation and does it matter to them? Or does working with a well-known advisor compensate for it? Hence, our research model first examines the impact of the strength of tie on the business advisor's perceived performance. Next, we ask what encourages a small business owner-manager to seek advice from a strong tie. A recent exploratory study by Welter and Kautonen (2005) drew attention to the central role of trust in this context. However, while their study found support for the general proposition that trust plays an important role in the choice of advisors, how trust and its different dimensions actually affect this choice remained ambiguous. The present paper develops this discussion by considering the impact of the different dimensions of perceived trustworthiness, defined as benevolence, integrity and ability, on the strength of tie. Further, we suggest that the dimensions of perceived trustworthiness relevant in the choice of a strong tie vary between professional and informal advisors. Methodology/Key Propositions Our propositions are examined empirically based on survey data comprising 153 Finnish small businesses. The data are analysed utilizing the partial least squares (PLS) approach to structural equation modelling with SmartPLS 2.0. Being non-parametric, the PLS algorithm is particularly well-suited to analysing small datasets with non-normally distributed variables. Results and Implications The path model shows that the stronger the tie, the more positively the advisor's performance is perceived. Hypothesis 1, that strong ties will be associated with higher perceptions of performance is clearly supported. Benevolence is clearly the most significant predictor of the choice of a strong tie for external expertise. While ability also reaches a moderate level of statistical significance, integrity does not have a statistically significant impact on the choice of a strong tie. Hence, we found support for two out of three independent variables included in Hypothesis 2. Path coefficients differed between the professional and informal advisor subsamples. The results of the exploratory group comparison show that Hypothesis 3a regarding ability being associated with strong ties more pronouncedly when choosing a professional advisor was not supported. Hypothesis 3b arguing that benevolence is more strongly associated with strong ties in the context of choosing an informal advisor received some support because the path coefficient in the informal advisor subsample was much larger than in the professional advisor subsample. Hypothesis 3c postulating that integrity would be more strongly associated with strong ties in the choice of a professional advisor was supported. Integrity is the most important dimension of trustworthiness in this context. However, integrity is of no concern, or even negative, when using strong ties to choose an informal advisor. The findings of this study have practical relevance to the enterprise support community. First of all, given that the strength of tie has a significant positive impact on the advisor's perceived performance, this implies that small business owners appreciate working with advisors in long-term relationships. Therefore, advisors are well advised to invest into relationship building and maintenance in their work with small firms. Secondly, the results show that, especially in the context of professional advisors, the advisor's perceived integrity and benevolence weigh more than ability. This again emphasizes the need to invest time and effort into building a personal relationship with the owner-manager, rather than merely maintaining a professional image and credentials. Finally, this study demonstrates that the dimensions of perceived trustworthiness are orthogonal with different effects on the strength of tie and ultimately perceived performance. This means that entrepreneurs and advisors should consider the specific dimensions of ability, benevolence and integrity, rather than rely on general perceptions of trustworthiness in their advice relationships.

Procurement selection in the public sector : a tale of two states.

The decision as to which procurement system to adopt is a complex and challenging task for clients of construction projects. Despite a plethora of tools and techniques available for selecting a procurement method, clients are still uncertain about what method to adopt for a given construction project to achieve success. This paper examines ‘how and why’ procurement methods are selected by public sector clients in Queensland (QLD) and Western Australia (WA). Findings from workshops with senior managers in procurement selection revealed that traditional lump sum methods (TLS) are preferred even though alternative forms could be better suited for a given project. Participants of the workshops agreed that alternative procurement forms should be considered for projects but an embedded culture of uncertainty avoidance meant the selection of TLS methods. It was perceived that only a limited number of contractors operating in the marketplace have the resources and experience to deliver projects using the non-traditional methods.