Digital Commons Network^™

Sydney Siege, December 2014: A Visualisation Of A Semantic Social Media Sentiment Analysis, Jan Wendland, Christian Ehnis, Rodney J. Clarke, Deborah Bunker

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Sentiment Analyses are widely used approaches to understand and identify emotions, feelings, and opinion on social media platforms. Most sentiment analysis systems measure the presumed emotional polarity of texts. While this is sufficient for some applications, these approaches are very limiting when it comes to understanding how social media users actually use language resources to make sense of extreme events. In this paper, the authors apply a Sentiment Analysis based on the Appraisal System from the theory of communication called Systemic Functional Linguistics to understand the sentiment of event-driven social media communication. A prototype was developed to code and visualise …

A Narrative Approach To Coaching Multiple Selves, Paul Lawrence

Sydney Business School - Papers

According to many philosophers and psychologists, we are each not one, but many. The origins of multiplicity theories are briefly outlined before several contemporary theories are described in more detail. In this conceptual paper, it is argued that a multiplicity perspective of self, challenges us to think differently about coaching. Six specific implications are considered, and a pragmatic link between multiplicity theory and post-modernist principles explored. It is argued that a narrative approach to coaching may be particularly useful for the coach interested in experimenting with multiplicity theory, and some initial approaches to applying multiplicity theory in practice are suggested.

Accommodating Student Diversity And Different Learning Backgrounds, Ann M. Rogerson, Louise C. Rossetto

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Student mobility presents both challenges and opportunities in higher education due to language, cultural and learning background differences among students. Effective integration of 'real world' group situations into class and assessment activities assists students to develop skills in accommodating cross-cultural language differences in line with convergent principles of communication accommodation theory. This case study reports on a cross-cultural post-graduate Management subject in a regional Australian university, demonstrating how explicit teaching results in improved learning outcomes by integrating experiences with theory, while better preparing students to participate in a globalised workforce.

Hard To Reach: Examining The National Disability Insurance Scheme Experience - A Case Study In Wollongong, Freda C. Hui, Corinne L. Cortese, Mona Nikidehaghani, Sandra H. Chapple, Kellie M. Mccombie

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

We report on interviews conducted to examine the effectiveness of the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Our aims were to assess the effectiveness of the NDIS in communicating with people with disabilities who are socio‐economically disadvantaged, to consider the types of assistance required, and to provide recommendations to improve the NDIS. Our interviewees are characterised as ‘hard to reach’, a cohort that is missing out on benefits they might receive under the NDIS because of the socioeconomic disadvantage that compounds their disability hardship. Some of our key findings were that many of our interviewees were unaware of the NDIS, …

Disclosing Volunteers As 'Human Capital': Analysing Annual Reports Of Australian Emergency Services Organisations, Yoke J. Berry, Michael L. Jones

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Annual reports of 11 volunteer-based emergency services organisations were analysed to determine how volunteers are valued in terms of human capital. A simple method was designed to enable comparison between agencies on nine categories of human capital being volunteer numbers, gender, age, length of service, diversity (three types), training and awards. The results were compared to the disclosure of the same categories pertaining to paid staff. Results showed that narratives of annual reports gave recognition and praise to volunteers but human resources sections reported primarily on paid staff. Data on volunteer numbers and diversity are poorly reported in many annual …

The Psychological Contract Of International Volunteers: An Exploratory Study, Mary Barrett, Anne N. Cox, Blake Woodward

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the psychological contracts (PCs) of international volunteers (IVs) in international aid and development organizations (IADS). Specifically, it explores four questions: how IVs form PCs; what the content of these PCs is; how IVs' PCs are maintained; and how they are fulfilled or breached.

Design/methodology/approach - The study used an inductive analysis of qualitative data: interviews with 27 IVs from a range of IADS.

Findings - The findings take the form of research propositions: RP1: IVs' PCs, like those of domestic volunteers, include relational, transactional and, especially, values-based elements, but the …

Affordance Theory And E-Books: Evaluating The E-Reading Experience Using Netnography, John D'Ambra, Concepcion S. Wilson, Shahriar Akter

Sydney Business School - Papers

E-books have changed the business of book publishing and the reading experience of the general public. Dedicated e-readers and other smart devices are integral to e-books offering affordances to overcome the physical limitations of print book and to provide the functionality of information technology. Using netnography, comments by online readers to articles in The New York Times and Scientific American were analysed and coded by themes identified in the literature of e-books versus print books. An Affordance Theory approach was used to provide insights into the readers' perceptions of real and actual affordances and the value delivered by these affordances. …

Big Data And Disaster Management: A Systematic Review And Agenda For Future Research, Shahriar Akter, Samuel Fosso Wamba

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

The era of big data and analytics is opening up new possibilities for disaster management (DM). Due to its ability to visualize, analyze and predict disasters, big data is changing the humanitarian operations and crisis management dramatically. Yet, the relevant literature is diverse and fragmented, which calls for its review in order to ascertain its development. A number of publications have dealt with the subject of big data and its applications for minimizing disasters. Based on a systematic literature review, this study examines big data in DM to present main contributions, gaps, challenges and future research agenda. The study presents …

Students' Perception On Use Of Technology In The Classroom At Higher Education Institutions In Philippines, Virginia Carbonilla Gorra, Shyam S. Bhati

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Issue of unintended consequences of use of technology in class room is important because unintended consequences can cause disruption in class room and negate the institutional policies regarding strategic direction and intervention in teaching and learning process. Current literature on the use of e-learning for teaching focuses on factors which increases the effectiveness of e-learning but there is very little research on unintended consequences of e-learning, particularly in regard to developing countries. The present research seeks to fill in this gap in the research. This research investigates the consequences of the use of technology during classroom activities in higher education …

Ethnic Diversity And Trust: New Evidence From Australian Data, Silvia Mendolia, Alex Tosh, Oleg Yerokhin

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

This paper investigates the relationship between neighbourhood ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity and individuals' local and generalised trust. A wide literature across economics and sociology has recognised the importance of trust in facilitating economic growth and development. We use fixed effects and instrumental variable regression and control for a wide set of individual and local area characteristics. Our results show that a 1 standard deviation increase in ethnic and linguistic fractionalisation is associated with a decrease in local trust of about 0.12 standard deviations, while we do not find any significant relationship between heterogeneity and generalised trust.

Employer Perceptions Of Migrant Candidates' Suitability: The Influence Of Decision-Maker And Organisational Characteristics, Mario Fernando, Shamika Almeida, Shyamali Dharmage

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

This paper reports on how decision-makers' personal characteristics and organisational characteristics can influence the screening of immigrant professionals during the recruitment and selection process. The sample consisted of 220 decision-makers in the engineering industry working in New South Wales, Australia. The results show White/Anglo Australian decision-makers had more suitability concerns of ethnic migrant candidates during the recruitment and selection process than decision-makers of other ethnicities. However, this was moderated by organisational characteristics of size and clientele. Decision-makers in larger organisations and a diverse ethnic client base showed less suitability concerns of migrant candidates during the recruitment and selection process.

Reflections On A Bilingual Peer Assisted Learning Program, Jin Cui, Tairan Huang, Corinne L. Cortese, Matthew P. Pepper

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to identify and evaluate faculty and academic staff perceptions, experiences and expectations with respect to a voluntary, bilingual peer assisted learning (PAL) program, which operates for the benefit of students studying in the Faculty of Business at a regional Australian University.

Design/methodology/approach - A survey instrument and semi-structured interviews were used to faculty executive and academic staff in order to collect information about the perceived benefits of the program and identify opportunities for improvement.

Findings - Based on an analysis of student results, the bilingual PAL program is shown to have a …

Tourism Marketing Communications On A Chinese Social Media Platform, Jing Ge

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Social media have become important communicative platforms for tourism marketers but it is not clear if and how the communicative language of marketerto- consumer is different from consumer-to-consumer. Given the enormous growth of both tourism and social media in China, this paper focuses on patterns in language use by the Chinese tourism marketers on Weibo. Using systemic semiotic approach, it selects and investigates two corpora of communication on Weibo - tourism to consumer and consumer to consumer. This study expects to provide the firm understanding and categorize the patterns in the language used by Chinese social media marketers so that …

Financial Accounting Reform: The Need For A 'Back To Basics' Approach For Profit Measurement And Wealth Measurement, John Ryan

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

By recognising the dual purposes of financial accounting, and developing distinct theories to guide the preparation of financial reports, the apparent internal contradictions in accounting theory can be resolved. Property rights and measurement theory provide the basis for explaining transaction-based profit measurement and funds commitment, and for a statement of wealth measured using market prices. Property rights are recognised in The New Institutional Economics. Going beyond accepted accounting conventions, property rights provide the qualitative, empirical property giving meaning to accounting practice for profit measurement through the 1940s to 1960s. Examples of profit and of wealth measurement are included.

Social Media Semantics: Analysing Meanings In Multimodal Online Conversations, Michael Ibrahim Mehmet, Rodney J. Clarke, Karlheinz Kautz

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

There is a growing need to comprehensively understand how messages and online conversations construct and convey meanings especially when they are likely to be distributed across multiple social media platforms. This paper introduces a framework to address this need, the Social Semiotic Multimodal (SSMM) framework based on multimodal extensions to Systemic Functional Linguistics, a semiotic theory of language. The framework uses a set of expansion resources, to reveal how the meanings of social media messages are chained together to form online conversations. These meanings are frequently distributed across more than one social media platform. This semantic approach is exemplified using …

Re-Organizing Australian Public Sector Work: Conditions For Innovating-In-Practice, Mary C. Johnsson, Oriana Price, Marie Manidis

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Public sector organizations continue to re-organize in response to reform imperatives but are they more innovative when they transform to market or customer orientations? This paper examines what we call innovating-in-practice in a hospital emergency department, a local government council and a corrections centre by analyzing how work organization dualities are negotiated using a practice theory lens. In public sector work, work dualities and tensions are often created when reform initiatives are introduced, requiring existing work practices to be challenged and changed. Our empirical illustrations expose the messiness and enmeshing of various practitioner interests, relations, materialities and purposes of practice …

A New Model For Ranking Suppliers In The Presence Of Both Undesirable And Non-Discretionary Outputs, Abdollah Noorizadeh, Reza Farzipoor Saen, Mahdi Mahdiloo

Sydney Business School - Papers

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) can be used for supplier selection problem due to its multiple criteria nature. In suppliers' evaluation, there might be some factors, which are beyond the control of their management, that are needed to be modelled in an appropriate way. Also, there are some situations in which some factors are undesirable and they are favourable to be decreased. The aim of this paper is to propose a model for evaluation of suppliers' performance in the presence of both undesirable and non-discretionary outputs. This model can rank efficient suppliers by a super-efficiency DEA model. A numerical example has …

What's In A User Story: Is Development Methods As Communication, Rodney J. Clarke, Karlheinz Kautz

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

This paper challenges claims made by Scrum proponents when characterising the communicative nature of user stories: including being more 'authentic' because they comprise spoken language and that they are stories. We argue and decisively demonstrate that neither can be upheld. By incorrectly characterising user stories, we miss opportunities to understand what they are and how they work during development. User stories are better understood by applying a functional theory of communication that emphasises how language is used. By selecting systemic functional linguistics, we can analyse user stories, and have developed a method for factoring unwanted epics into usable user stories.

Re-Viewing Student Teamwork: Preparation For The 'Real World' Or Bundles Of Situated Social Practices?, Christopher Sykes, Lee Moerman, Belinda Kathlyn Gibbons-Parrish, Bonnie Cord

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Research in Australian business education continues to emphasise the importance of students learning teamwork as an integral part of the undergraduate curriculum. However, entrenched conceptual and practical confusion as to what the term 'teamwork' means and how it ought to be enacted remains a vexed issue capable of distorting and diminishing teamwork, learning and related pedagogy. In this paper, we critically re-examine the view that developing teamwork in an undergraduate business degree equips students for work in the real world. By focusing on the 'real world' metaphor-in-use in a cross-disciplinary business capstone subject, we interrogate the spatio-temporal dimensions of teamwork …

Back Translation: An Emerging Sophisticated Cyber Strategy To Subvert Advances In 'Digital Age' Plagiarism Detection And Prevention, Michael Jones, Lynnaire Sheridan

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Advances have been made in detecting and deterring the student plagiarism that has accompanied the uptake and development of the internet. Many authors from the late 1990s onwards grappled with plagiarism in the digital age, presenting articles that were provoking and established the foundation for strategies to address cyber plagiarism, including software such as Turnitin. In the spirit of its predecessors, this article presents a new, less-detectable method of cyber-facilitated plagiarism known as 'back translation', where students are running text through language translation software to disguise the original source. This paper discusses how this plagiarism strategy attempts to subvert academic …

Social Implications Of Wearable Computing And Augmediated Reality In Every Day Life (Ieee Symposium On Technology And Society, Istas13), Katina Michael

Associate Professor Katina Michael

It was in July 2012 that Steve Mann and I corresponded on the possibility of hosting a conference on wearable computing in Toronto, Canada. Steve had just returned home from a family holiday to France and publicly blogged about an unfortunate incident that had happened to him while away. On 17th July 2012 he posted: “Physical assault by McDonald’s for wearing Digital Eye Glass”. We both knew the timing was right for such an event that was not just a technical engineering or applied orientation on the theme of smart worlds, but an event that would grapple with the dichotomies …

Mental Models: A Robust Definition, Laura L. Rook

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Purpose: The concept of a mental model has been described by theorists from diverse disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to offer a robust definition of an individual mental model for use in organisational management. Design/methodology/approach: The approach adopted involves an interdisciplinary literature review of disciplines, including system dynamics, psychology, cognitive science and organisational learning. Findings: Critical reflection on the published individual mental model definitions revealed similarities and shortcomings. It is argued that here the literature presents some consensus in the concept being internally held and having the capacity to affect how a person acts. The proposed definition of …

The Influence Of National Culture On Business Students' Career Attitudes - An Analysis Of Eight Countries | Der Einfluss Nationaler Kulturen Auf Die Karriere-Einstellungen Von Wirtschaftsstudenten - Eine Analyse Aus Acht Landern, Marjaana Gunkel, Christopher Schlagel, Ian M. Langella, Joy V. Peluchette, Elena Reshetnyak

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Despite the fact that career attitudes and their influence on career outcomes is widely researched in the field of occupations and careers, little is known about the influence of cultural norms and values on career attitudes. We propose that national cultural dimensions influence students' career planning, career adaptability, career optimism, and career-related knowledge. We test these relations using an eight country sample with more than 1,800 students. The results show that national culture has significant effect on all four career attitudes and in particular on career planning and career optimism. We discuss theoretical and practical implications and provide future research …

A Practice-Based Approach To Student Reflection In The Workplace During A Work-Integrated Learning Placement, Christopher Sykes, Bonnie Amelia Dean

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

In the Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) curriculum, reflection on workplace activities is widely used to support student learning. Recent critiques have demonstrated the limitations of current approaches to support students' reflective learning of workplace practices. By employing a practice-based approach, we seek to refocus WIL reflection on workplace practices, emphasising the 'embedded (social), engaged (practice) and embodied (material) aspects' of students' reflective practices in the workplace. We argue that reflection-in-the-midst-of-action includes an often-overlooked phenomenological contribution that shifts attention from cognition to action. This study uses a case study of one typical WIL student to illustrate the importance of reflection-in-the-midst-of-action and the …

Enhancing The Educational Subject: Cognitive Capitalism, Positive Psychology And Well-Being Training In Schools, James Reveley

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Positive psychology is influencing educational policy and practice in Britain and North America. This article reveals how this psychological discourse and its offshoot school-based training programs, which stress happiness, self-improvement and well-being, align with an emergent socioeconomic formation: cognitive capitalism. Three key points are made. First, there is an elective affinity between cognitive capitalism and positive psychology, whose advocates promote 'mindfulness','curiosity' and 'psychological flexibility' as the means to personal fulfilment. Second, an array of technologies of the self spring from the positive psychology discourse; mindfulness practice is one of these. Currently being trialled in British and North American schools, this …

Modelling Real-Time Online Information Needs: A New Research Approach For Complex Consumer Behaviour, Robert G. Grant, Rodney J. Clarke, Elias Kyriazis

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

A major challenge for online vendor website operations is serving information that meets visitor needs at a given point in their purchase process. The problem arises from the complexity of human behaviour as well as changing needs with the evolution of consumer knowledge and skills through the purchase process. The most difficult element however is determining the effects of information provided on the site as well as from other sources that the consumer may access and anticipating resulting consumer needs. This paper discusses the contributions and limitations of current modelling techniques and utility studies of online consumer information to model …

Exploring Hegemonic Change In China: A Case Of Accounting Evolution, Lina Xu, Corinne Cortese, Eagle Zhang

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Purpose - This paper provides an understanding of how accounting systems have changed across four distinct periods of hegemonic leadership in China.

Design/methodology/approach - Using Gramsci's concept of hegemony, periods of leadership and accounting change throughout Chinese history are examined, including the Confucian tradition, the rise of the socialist system followed by the Cultural Revolution under the Maoist era, and the move towards the socialist-market system in the Dengist era.

Findings - This paper shows how political leaders in these different time periods effectively achieved leadership by destroying an existing hegemony, creating a new ideology, and implanting this into people's …

Brand Orientation And The Voices From Within, Jessica Baxter, Gregory M. Kerr, Rodney J. Clarke

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

This work adds to the brand orientation literature by showing that while brand strategies may sometimes be aspirational, multiple identities exist which may either challenge or support a brand. In this place branding study, in-depth interviews of local residents reveal the existence of multiple place identities as well as how these identities relate to a place brand strategy. A framework is provided which illustrates how longitudinal identity studies can be a useful way to assess changes to place identities and the internal effectiveness of brand implementation. It is proposed that the functional communication-based research approach together with the novel framework …

Novel Aspects Of A Training Program For Research Supervision, Rodney J. Clarke, Grace Mccarthy

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Introduction

- much of the cutting edge research developed in universities is conducted by Higher Degree Research (HDR) students

- but institutional responses have been dominated by compliance-based metrics like timely completions that are used as imperfect measures of quality of the research supervision practice (Cullen et al 1994)

- it is in the interests of both universities and government to increase the quantity and quality of research supervision (Latona and Browne 2001)- therefore careful training of supervisors and attention to supervisory practices is paramount

Newspaper Coverage Of Water Issues In Australia, Anna Hurlimann, Sara Dolnicar

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

The media has been found to have an impact on public debate, public opinion, and public policy agendas. Public debate, and public opinion about water conservation and water supply management projects matter because they can influence specific outcomes. For example, public opinion can potentially lead to positive behaviour, like increased water conservation, or potentially negative behaviours such as public opposition to developments such as dams or water recycling plants, which may be necessary under changing climatic conditions. It is therefore critical to understand how the media reports on water-related topics. Results from a content analysis of 1253 newspaper articles published …