Employment Relations in Australia, 2nd Edition

The relationship between employers and employees has been one of the most hotly debated issues in Australia in recent times. Recent legislation such as the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 and the subsequent Fair Work Act 2009 provides stark evidence of this. The impact of these significant developments is explored and analysed in detail in the new edition of this popular text, complete with a balanced coverage of the often contrasting viewpoints of all stakeholders - from governments, unions and employer associations, through to individual employers and employees. The text outlines different approaches to understanding the nature of the employment relationship, with a contextual background as to how this relationship has changed and developed throughout our nation's history.

Object-centric process models and the design of flexible processes

Mainstream business process modelling techniques promote a design paradigm wherein the activities to be performed within a case, together with their usual execution order, form the backbone of a process model, on top of which other aspects are anchored. This paradigm, while eective in standardised and production-oriented domains, shows some limitations when confronted with processes where case-by-case variations and exceptions are the norm. In this thesis we develop the idea that the eective design of exible process models calls for an alternative modelling paradigm, one in which process models are modularised along key business objects, rather than along activity decompositions. The research follows a design science method, starting from the formulation of a research problem expressed in terms of requirements, and culminating in a set of artifacts that have been devised to satisfy these requirements. The main contributions of the thesis are: (i) a meta-model for object-centric process modelling incorporating constructs for capturing exible processes; (ii) a transformation from this meta-model to an existing activity-centric process modelling language, namely YAWL, showing the relation between object-centric and activity-centric process modelling approaches; and (iii) a Coloured Petri Net that captures the semantics of the proposed meta-model. The meta-model has been evaluated using a framework consisting of a set of work ow patterns. Moreover, the meta-model has been embodied in a modelling tool that has been used to capture two industrial scenarios.

Just Relations : Indigenous families in Australian lifestyle media

This paper argues that the increasing visibility of Indigenous families in the mainstream Australian media over the past ten years has produced new opportunities for addressing national injustices of the Stolen Generations. It shows how, as certain celebrities like Ernie Dingo, Nova Peris and Cathy Freeman, have become popular household names, a concurrent public interest in their family backgrounds has grown. Descriptive accounts of relationships and shared histories – propelled by the expansion of the lifestyle television genre in this context – has enabled some stories of the ‘Stolen Generations’ to be seen as ‘ordinary’, and part of a broader sense of everyday Australian life for the first time. With the aid of recent sexual citizenship research, the article illustrates that such middle-class representations give voice to new embodiments of citizenship in the post-apology era, making Indigenous justice more subjectively interconnected with life in the white Australian public sphere.

Revisiting Industrial Relations

In 1999 I convened Industrial Relations, the annual ADSA Conference hosted by QUT in Brisbane. This event was promoted as ‘a conference exploring the links between theatre scholarship and professional theatre practice’. As well as academics, there was to be substantial representation by ‘industry professionals’, although interest from the latter category turned out to be modest. One day of the conference was designated a special ‘Links with Industry’ day, during which the Association launched its now defunct ADSAIL (ADSA Industry Links) initiative. Keynote speaker Wesley Enoch commented on ‘the very strong resistance in “the industry” to acknowledging any role of academics’. ‘What is the practical role of having them?’ he asked the ‘them’ gathered before him. In a letter declining our invitation to speak (he later changed his mind), David Williamson remarked that he always felt ‘uneasy at such conferences’: My view of my work is that I’ve successfully filled theatres for 30 years now, something dramatists are supposed to do. I suppose there’s part of me that hopes this will be celebrated. It often is, but rarely in academic drama departments …. Perhaps in fifty years time someone in academe will realise that I wasn’t just reinforcing the attitudes of the Anglo Celtic ruling class. Several years on it seems timely to revisit Industrial Relations; to look again at the extent to which problems of intercultural communication between industry and academy are being addressed. And what are the implications of this for the ADSA History project, which seeks to investigate ADSA’s contribution to the development of theatre / performance studies in Australasia? What are the ‘external’ impacts of ADSA’s ongoing conference enterprise, and how might these be measured? Reflections from delegates on these and other questions will be warmly encouraged.

Industrial Relations: Proceedings from the 1999 Australasian Drama Studies Association Conference

These papers were presented at “Industrial Relations”, the Australasian Drama Studies Association conference hosted by Theatre & Teaching Studies in the Academy of the Arts, Queensland University of Technology, from the 5th to the 9th of July, 1999. Conference delegates included scholars and artists from across the tertiary education and professional theatre sectors, including, of course, many individuals who work across and between both those worlds. More than a hundred delegates from Australia, New Zealand, England, Belgium and Canada attended the week’s events, which included: • Over sixty conference papers covering a variety of topics from project reports to academy/industry partnerships, theatre history, audience reception studies, health & safety, cultural policy, performance theory, theatre technology and more; • Performances ranging from drama to dance, music and cabaret; • Workshops, panel discussions, forums and interviews; • Keynote addresses from Wesley Enoch, Josette Feral and Keith Johnstone; and • A special “Links with Industry” day, which included the launch of ADSA’s “Links with Industry” brochure, an interview between Mark Radvan and David Williamson, and a panel session featuring Jules Holledge, Zane Trow, Katharine Brisbane, John Kotzas, Gay McAuley and David Watt.

Abandoned object detection using multi-layer motion detection

Abandoned object detection (AOD) systems are required to run in high traffic situations, with high levels of occlusion. Systems rely on background segmentation techniques to locate abandoned objects, by detecting areas of motion that have stopped. This is often achieved by using a medium term motion detection routine to detect long term changes in the background. When AOD systems are integrated into person tracking system, this often results in two separate motion detectors being used to handle the different requirements. We propose a motion detection system that is capable of detecting medium term motion as well as regular motion. Multiple layers of medium term (static) motion can be detected and segmented. We demonstrate the performance of this motion detection system and as part of an abandoned object detection system.

Object tracking using multiple motion modalities

This paper presents an object tracking system that utilises a hybrid multi-layer motion segmentation and optical flow algorithm. While many tracking systems seek to combine multiple modalities such as motion and depth or multiple inputs within a fusion system to improve tracking robustness, current systems have avoided the combination of motion and optical flow. This combination allows the use of multiple modes within the object detection stage. Consequently, different categories of objects, within motion or stationary, can be effectively detected utilising either optical flow, static foreground or active foreground information. The proposed system is evaluated using the ETISEO database and evaluation metrics and compared to a baseline system utilising a single mode foreground segmentation technique. Results demonstrate a significant improvement in tracking results can be made through the incorporation of the additional motion information.

Dynamic Performance Measures for Object Tracking Systems

Performance evaluation of object tracking systems is typically performed after the data has been processed, by comparing tracking results to ground truth. Whilst this approach is fine when performing offline testing, it does not allow for real-time analysis of the systems performance, which may be of use for live systems to either automatically tune the system or report reliability. In this paper, we propose three metrics that can be used to dynamically asses the performance of an object tracking system. Outputs and results from various stages in the tracking system are used to obtain measures that indicate the performance of motion segmentation, object detection and object matching. The proposed dynamic metrics are shown to accurately indicate tracking errors when visually comparing metric results to tracking output, and are shown to display similar trends to the ETISEO metrics when comparing different tracking configurations.

Improved simultaneous computation of motion detection and optical flow for object tracking

Object tracking systems require accurate segmentation of the objects from the background for effective tracking. Motion segmentation or optical flow can be used to segment incoming images. Whilst optical flow allows multiple moving targets to be separated based on their individual velocities, optical flow techniques are prone to errors caused by changing lighting and occlusions, both common in a surveillance environment. Motion segmentation techniques are more robust to fluctuating lighting and occlusions, but don't provide information on the direction of the motion. In this paper we propose a combined motion segmentation/optical flow algorithm for use in object tracking. The proposed algorithm uses the motion segmentation results to inform the optical flow calculations and ensure that optical flow is only calculated in regions of motion, and improve the performance of the optical flow around the edge of moving objects. Optical flow is calculated at pixel resolution and tracking of flow vectors is employed to improve performance and detect discontinuities, which can indicate the location of overlaps between objects. The algorithm is evaluated by attempting to extract a moving target within the flow images, given expected horizontal and vertical movement (i.e. the algorithms intended use for object tracking). Results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other widely used optical flow techniques for this surveillance application.

Navigating iScapes : Australian youth constructing identities and social relations in a network society

This paper extends Appadurai’s notion of “scapes” to delineate what we see as “iScapes”. We contend that iScapes captures the way online technologies shape interactions that invariably filter into offline contexts, giving shape and meaning to human actions and motivations. By drawing on research on high school students’ online activities we examine the flow of iScapes they inhabit in the process of constructing identities and forming social relations.

Using Ownership to Reason About Inherent Parallelism in Object-Oriented Programs

With the emergence of multi-cores into the mainstream, there is a growing need for systems to allow programmers and automated systems to reason about data dependencies and inherent parallelismin imperative object-oriented languages. In this paper we exploit the structure of object-oriented programs to abstract computational side-effects. We capture and validate these effects using a static type system. We use these as the basis of sufficient conditions for several different data and task parallelism patterns. We compliment our static type system with a lightweight runtime system to allow for parallelization in the presence of complex data flows. We have a functioning compiler and worked examples to demonstrate the practicality of our solution.

The experience of emotional expression in the context of social relations for people diagnosed with schizophrenia : a phenomenological explication

The experience of emotional expression in the context of social relations is not well understood for people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Early phenomenological research on the experience of people diagnosed with schizophrenia traditionally focussed on self experience in isolation from others, with later research explicating isolated aspects of self experience in relation to others. The current research aimed to focus on the progressive experience of emotional expression of people diagnosed with schizophrenia in relation to others over 12 months, in order to gain a broad spectrum of experience. This study involved unstructured interviews with 7 participants, an average of 4 times each, over a period of 12 months. Due to the unstructured nature of the interviews, a great breadth of experience was explicated. From the interviews there emerged 6 themes grouped together as a transition into, and 5 themes grouped together as a recovery from, symptoms associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Special significance was given to the theme of relational confusion as an experience that provides an understanding of the relationship between social stressors and personal characteristics with responses that are associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It was suggested that participants experienced themselves, including their distancing and isolating responses, as a part of a social system. The breadth of experiences that emerged afforded a framework of experiences within which prior phenomenological research findings on static moments of experience have been located. A more meaningful understanding of the transitioning into and recovery from the experiences associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia will afford advances in mental health practice.

Gender

The OED informs us that “gender” has at its root the Latin genus, meaning “race, kind,” and emerges as early as the fifth century as a term for differentiating between types of (especially) people and words. In the following 1500 years, gender appears in linguistic and biological contexts to distinguish types of words and bodies from one another, as when words in Indo-European languages were identified as masculine, feminine, or neuter, and humans were identified as male or female. It is telling that gender has historically (whether overtly or covertly) been a tool of negotiation between our understandings of bodies, and meanings derived from and attributed to them. Within the field of children’s literature studies, as in other disciplines, gender in and of itself is rarely the object of critique. Rather, specific constructions of gender structure understandings of subjectivity; allow or disallow certain behaviors or experiences on the basis of biological sex; and dictate a specific vision of social relations and organization. Critical approaches to gender in children’s literature have included linguistic analysis (Turner-Bowker; Sunderland); analysis of visual representations (Bradford; Moebius); cultural images of females (Grauerholz and Pescosolido); consideration of gender and genre (Christian-Smith; Stephens); ideological (Nodelman and Reimer); psychoanalytic (Coats); discourse analysis (Stephens); and masculinity studies (Nodelman) among others. In the adjacent fields of education and literacy studies, gender has been a sustained point of investigation, often deriving from perceived gendering of pedagogical practices (Lehr) or of reading preferences and competencies, and in recent years, perceptions of boys as “reluctant readers” (Moss). The ideology of patriarchy has primarily come under critical scrutiny 2 because it has been used to locate characters and readers within the specific binary logic of gender relations that historically subordinated the feminine to the masculine. Just as feminism might be broadly defined as resistance to existing power structures, a gendered reading might be broadly defined as a “resistant reading” in that it most often reveals or contests that which a text assumes to be the norm.

Positioning public relations as an academic discipline in Australia

Academic public relations in Australia appears to be entering a new phase in its relatively short history. The early model, in which tertiary courses were confined to teaching – focused institutions and conducted largely by teacher-practitioners, is being supplanted by one in which the discipline is now offered in most Australian universities, is increasingly embracing research, and is being taught by staff following more traditional academic career paths. Despite the formal association with the communication discipline through Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, public relations academics have increasingly asserted the independence of their discipline and in reality have very little dialogue with the other strands of the communication discipline. These developments call into question the most appropriate knowledge base for public relations as an academic discipline in Australia and its proper relation to the profession (and the Public Relations Institute of Australia as the professional body). One danger associated with the assertion of disciplinary independence lies in the risk of excessive reliance on a relatively narrow body of work emanating from the more established United States public relations academy, in the process ignoring much richer work in surrounding disciplines such as social theory, rhetoric, organisation communication, and business and society. The emphasis on disciplinary demarcation also seems curious during a time of growing ‘interdisciplinarity’ in the humanities and the social sciences. This paper critically reviews the construction of public relations as an academic discipline in Australia, drawing on some of the literature on academic disciplinarity to propose a repositioning of the discipline, one that is less focused on asserting difference than on finding connections with other bodies of knowledge while maintaining close links with professional practice.

Practising public relations in the global community of the 21st century : a comparison of business practices and culture in three world regions

Non-Western practitioners across the globe instinctively attempt to implement Western-based public relations models and theories, often unsuccessfully, regardless of their surrounding environment. This paper reviews business practices and reveals that in Europe, company interests are a main priority, while in Asia, the line between business and personal relationships is extremely blurred. Cultural dimensions and topois were even more varied between the three regions. Implications for the adoption of Western models of public relations practice are discussed.