Business Commons^™

Financial Sustainability And Accountability: A Model For Nonprofit Organisations, Anne Abraham

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Financial sustainability and accountability are ever-present issues for nonprofit organisations (NPOs) as they seek to balance their mission with financial responsibility. Both issues arise as a result external demands and internal needs.

The mission of an NPO is usually expressed as the role it plays in the segment of society within which it serves. Once its mission is defined, an NPO often finds that it is unable to withdraw. This may be due to external exit barriers placed on the organisation by local community groups, ethnic or religious groups, or by other organisations which are convinced that the maintenance of …

The Role Of Interpersonal Communication In The Development Of Client Trust And Closeness In A Sme Professional Services Context, Les Kirchmajer, Paul Patterson

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This study develops and tests a model of effective interpersonal communication as an antecedent to client trust and closeness amongst small to medium enterprise (SJ\1E) professional services providerspersonal fmancial planners. A new multidimensional scale for interpersonal communications is developed and tested, resulting in the identification of three dimensions : Communications clarity (5 items),Social communications (4 items), and Information provision (7 items). Client trust is investigated also as a multidimensional construct with credibility trust and benevolence trust being the two dimensions used. Closeness is investigated as a unidimensional construct. The results suggest that there is a positive relationship between communications clarity …

The Politics Of Human Resource Management In Implementing Process Innovation, Michael Zanko, Richard Badham, Maren Schubert

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper analyses a longitudinal case study of organizational and human resource management (HRM) dimensions in the implementation of an approach to product development (concurrent engineering (CE)) in a multinational firm engaged in defence electronics. Most aspects of managing product development in CE are linked to people management. Yet in this case, other than project team structure, prescriptive HRM dimensions of CE received little attention in the implementation process. This failure to address the 'formal' prescribed HRM issues is explained by a multilayer analysis of the play of power and political lobbying among 'stakeholders' over time: the HRM function, key …

The Use Of The Internet In The Personal Sales Function For Building Materials B2b Firms: Adding Value With Technology, Robert G. Grant

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper seeks to explore the potential of the internet for adding value to members of a highly standardised and largely commodity priced industry. The focus is on the largely interpersonal area of personal sales to give an understanding of the need to look at processes underlying functions to get an appropriate evaluation of the potential benefits derived from the use of such technology. Beyond this, the paper deals with the analysis required to evaluate the potential impact of the adoption of technology based systems by such organisations to illustrate the complexity involved in such adoption. There are conclusions which …

Engendering Healthy Organisational Communication - Evidence From Australian Female Managers And Business People, Mary Barrett

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Keeping 'good' communication in organisations is one of the most frequently prescribed recipes for organisational well being. Training programs for employees in assertiveness, improved communication, career development, and managing oneself and others, have often called attention to the specifics of verbal interactions between managers, employees and others in the organisation. Such training programs generally suppose that direct, open approaches to communication are best. Yet it has often been asserted in sociolinguistic research that men and women communicate differently, including at work. Despite this, precepts for 'good' communication that are recommended for both genders in communication training are usually consistent with …

Projecting The Fiscal Impact Of Population Ageing On The Hospital System: A Distributional Analysis, Linc Thurecht, Agnes Walker, Ann Harding, Edwin J. Pearse

Sydney Business School - Papers

This study examines the socioeconomic status of NSW hospital patients in 1999-00 and projects likely hospital costs to 2009-10. It draws upon unique patient based datasets from NSW public and private hospitals that include hospital admissions, as well as the associated treatment costs in each of the four years to 1999-00. Using a novel method, we impute socioeconomic status to each patient, accounting for age, sex, family income, family size and the geographic area of the patient’s residence at the Census Collector District level. First, we use the 1999-00 dataset to examine whether patients of similar age had similar per …

Creating Connections - Health, Community And Residential Care Assessments, Kathy Eagar

Sydney Business School - Papers

Health - multiple program and service types. - primary, secondary, tertiary and super-speciality levels Community Care - multiple programs and service types -including extended aged care in the home packages Residential Care -residential programs with various levels of care

Website Usability In Context: An Activity Theory Based Usability Testing Method, Lejla Vrazalic

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Traditional laboratory based usability testing methodologies are plagued with shortcomings which affect the results of the testing process and their validity. The results of a preliminary study of this type of usability testing with 34 users indicate two categories of key shortcomings. A new summative website usability testing methodology based on the notion of distributed usability and Activity Theory is presented as a means of overcoming these problems. This paper describes the theoretical foundations and development of the methodology which is currently being evaluated and refined.

A Framework For Case-Based Reasoning Integration On Knowledge Management Systems, Seung Hwan Kang, Sim K. Lau

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

To support the sharing and reusing of well-defined knowledge among knowledge management systems, it is useful to use standardised formalisation. It is also common effort to difficulty of knowledge acquisition known as knowledge acquisition bottleneck. In this paper investigates the feasibility of using techniques in case-based reasoning of artificial intelligence for the knowledge acquisition phase in knowledge management systems. The need of an ontological approach of the semantic web for well-defined set of domain knowledge is proposed in order to avoid knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Our viewpoint of this approach is that the ontology-driven mechanism allows us to provide standardised structured …

Behavioural Market Segments Among Surf Tourists - Investigating Past Destination Choice, Sara Dolnicar, M. Fluker

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Surf tourism is of major importance to the tourism industry. Nevertheless, very few investigations of the surf tourism market exist. This paper extends the work by Fluker (2003) and Dolnicar and Fluker (2003) by investigating surf tourists from a behavioural perspective with the main aim of the study being to gain an insight into the travel patterns of the surf tourism market. This is achieved in an empirical way by using unsupervised neural networks to partition a group of surfers into homogeneous segments based on their past surf destination choice. This binary information was gathered by means of an online …

Learning By Simulation-Computer Simulations For Strategic Management Decision Support In Tourism, C. Buchta, Sara Dolnicar

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper describes the use of corporate decision and strategy simulations as a decision-support instrument under varying market conditions in the tourism industry. It goes on to illustrate this use of simulations with an experiment which investigates how successful different market segmentation approaches are in destination management. The experiment assumes a competitive environment and various cycle-length conditions with regard to budget and strategic planning. Computer simulations prove to be a useful management tool, allowing customized experiments which provide insight into the functioning of the market and therefore represent an interesting tool for managerial decision support. The main drawback is the …

From Integration To Transformation, J. Skillen, B. James, Alisa Percy, H. Tootell, H. J. Irvine

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

The integration of instruction about academic skills into subject curricula has become widely recognised as an effective means of teaching students about discipline-specific academic skills; however, integration can achieve much more than this. It can involve the learning developers and discipline teaching team in collaborations that lead to such things as a rethinking of assessment types and assignment tasks, staging of assignment tasks, revision of assignment questions, redevelopment of marking criteria, provision of marking workshops for the teaching team, the development of staff marking handbooks and more specific instruction focussed on learning strategies. When integration involves this amount of redevelopment, …

Using Cluster Analysis For Market Segmentation - Typical Misconceptions, Established Methodological Weaknesses And Some Recommendations For Improvement, Sara Dolnicar

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Despite the wide variety of techniques available for grouping individuals into market segments on the basis of multivariate survey information, clustering remains the most popular and most widely applied method. Nevertheless, a review of the application of such data-driven partitioning techniques reveals that questionable standards have emerged. For instance, the exploratory nature of partitioning techniques is typically not accounted for, crucial parameters of the algorithms used are ignored, thus leading to a dangerous black-box approach, where the reasons for particular results are not fully understood, pre-processing techniques are applied uncritically leading to segmentation solutions in an unnecessarily transformed data space, …

The Use Of Personality Typing In Organizational Change: Discourse, Emotions & The Reflexive Subject, Karin Garrety, R Badham, V. Morrigan, W. Rifkin, M. Zanko

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This article is based on a study of an organizational change program that sought to alter employees’ self-perceptions, emotions and behavior through the use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a popular personality-typing tool. The program affords an opportunity to explore the various ways in which discourses advocating personal and organizational change work through employees’ subjectivity.We argue that theoretical approaches that view the targets of such programs as passive – as either ‘colonized’ or constructed by discourses – fail to capture the complex and contradictory nature of organizational control, and subjects’ changing positions within it. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, we argue …

Designer Deviance: Enterprise And Deviance In Cultural Change Programs, R Badham, Karin Garrety, V. Morrigan, M. Zanko, Patrick Dawson

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This article explores the value of investigating cultural change programmes as exercises in engineering deviance. It does so through a case study of an organizational development cultural change programme at Sprogwheels, a large Australian corporation. Drawing on and extending the classic work of Becker (1966), the article details how the programme combined a moral crusade against what it sought to have labelled as the ‘deviant conservatism’ of the existing organizational culture with social support for ‘deviant radicalism’, in the form of a counter-cultural, self-enterprising set of middle managers promoting corporate change. The article explores the complex and contradictory ideas of …

Are Part-Time Workers Poor?, Joan R. Rodgers

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

The proportion of Australian workers who are employed on a part-time basis has almost trebled in the last thirty years to reach its current level of 28 percent. Part-time work is one type of ‘non-standard’ employment that is viewed with concern for it is alleged that parttime jobs provide a low standard of living for those employed in them. This paper focuses upon an extreme version of that concern: the incidence of poverty among part-time workers. Unit-record data are used to compare the poverty rates of part-time workers with those of full-time workers, the unemployed and people not in the …

Who’S Riding The Wave? An Investigation Into Demographic And Psychographic Characteristics Of Surf Tourists, Sara Dolnicar, M. Fluker

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Surfing has grown from its beginnings as a western civilisation sport in the early 1900’s to a stage where it is now an industry worth an estimated $8 billion dollars and involves surfers travelling to both domestic and international destinations as surf tourists. However, there is a dearth of empirical academic research that has been conducted into this segment of the sports tourism market. This study makes a contribution towards understanding surf tourism behaviour by analysing the demographic and psychographic characteristics of 430 surf tourists. The most lucrative segments of the five identified, from the tour operators perspective, are the …

Evaluating Geographical Target Markets – An Aggregated Portfolio Approach For Improved Managerial Decision- Making, Sara Dolnicar, K. Grabler

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Lower Austria is one of nine Austrian provinces. It is therefore responsible for the selection of the geographical target markets in tourism. This task seems simple at first, but turns out to be quite complex due to enormous uncertainties, as earlier publications demonstrated (Mazanec, 1986a and b). This article (1) proposes a practical solution for the theoretical problems of defining markets and choosing the time period, and (2) provides an analytical basis for the RTO (regional tourism organisation) of Lower Austria in focusing on particular geographical target markets.

Which Hotel Attributes Matter? A Review Of Previous And A Framework For Future Research, Sara Dolnicar, T. Otter

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

A lot of effort has been made in the last decades to reveal, which hotel attributes guest care about. Due to the high costs that are typically involved with investments in the hotel industry, it makes a lot of sense to study, which product components the travellers appreciate. This study reveals that hotel attribute research turns out to be a wide and extremely heterogeneous field of research. The authors review empirical studies investigating the importance of hotel attributes, provide attribute rankings and suggest a framework for past and future research projects in the field, based on the dimensions “focus of …

A Multifaceted Approach To Distributed Communities Of Learning And Practice, Helen Hasan, Kate Crawford

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

In the electronic age, locally-driven regeneration of the concept of community could be enabled by a flexible, multifaceted model where new information and communication technologies are the catalyst. However technology, no matter how advanced, is far from providing the complete answer and it is essential to take an integrated socio-technical approach to this issue. This paper reports on two cases that are part of ongoing research into distributed communities, framing them as phases of an activity system in expansive learning cycles in the context of a program of innoyatiye learning. This research d!monstrates that such communities are viable. with a …

Cracks In The Egg: Improving Performance Measures In Business Incubator Research, Barbara Cornelius, Rekha Bhabra-Remedios

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Early research into business incubators focused on describing how they were operated and what activities were undertaken to assist in the survival of tenant firms. The only measures of effective operation were based upon the economic agenda of those sponsoring the incubators, that is, whether jobs were created and firms successfully developed beyond the protected incubator environment. The theoretical considerations used by researchers were, as a consequence, limited largely to either economic or fmancial models of performance. Much can be learned, however, from the management literature, which examines performance through organisational theory. It is suggested that further research into incubator …

Visual Creativity In Advertising: A Functional Typology, John R. Rossiter, Tobias Langner, Lawrence Ang

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

There are many ways in which the visuals of an advertisement can be made "creative." In this article, we propose a new typology of visual creative ideas. The typology is functlonal in that the first type, literal product or user visuals, which are "noncreative" in the usual sense gain selective attention, by a product category-involved audience. The other three types, in contrast, are "creative" and can force reflexive attention among low-involved audiences. These are called pure attention getters, including the innate erotic, baby, and direct-gaze schemas, and the learned shock, celebrity, and culture-icon and subculture-icon schemas; distortional attention getters, including …

Government Business Process Analysis With Activity Theory, Peter A. J Larkin

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Activity Theory tells us that a motivated person or group performs an activity directed at an object in order to transform the object into desired outcomes to fulfil a need. It also tells us that instruments and the community mediate human activity. The New South Wales state parliament in Australia performs the activity of creating Acts and those Acts prescribe within them the objects of the Act and the desired outcomes. To achieve the desired outcomes, the Act will establish or constitute the necessary instruments. This paper describes an application of Yrjo Engestrom's Activity Theory model, or structure of human …

Increasing Acceptance Of Managers For The Use Of Marketing Decision Support Systems, Danielle Stern

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

There have been many investigations into decision support systems and the range of benefits they can provide to an organisation. Despite the increased use of these systems in professional practice, there remains a lack of acceptance towards marketing decision models, with many managers resisting their full implementation. This paper presents results of a task designed to explore the extent to which decision models are understood. Although findings show low levels of understanding, it appears that relevant ability and skill can be learned. Educational programs could use the task to raise awareness of problems related to human misjudgment and to demonstrate …

Living In The Blender Of Change: The Carnival Of Control In A Culture Of Culture, R. Badham, Karin Garrety

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Traditional structural-functional approaches to organisational change, as well as critics of those approaches , often offer overly structured and rationalised views of how change occurs. This paper attempts to build upon processual studies of change and critiques of overly hegemonic views of managerial control by seeking to capture the complex, emotive and fluid character of organisational ‘changing’. In pursuit of this aim, the paper documents these characteristics of change through a personalised ethnography of a micro-incident – a critical change meeting – in an Australian steelmaking plant undergoing cultural change. In conclusion, it is argued that even the more sophisticated …

Market Research In Austrian Nto And Rtos: Is The Research Homework Done Before Spending Marketing Millions?, Sara Dolnicar, C. M. Schoesser

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

In times of an increasingly competitive tourism marketplace and when experienced tourists are both capable and motivated to find the offer that best matches their personal vacation needs, market research becomes one of the fundamental building blocks of success, not only for the tourism industry, but also for a destination. The aim of this empirical study that follows the tradition of the studies by Yaman & Shaw (1998) and Ryan & Simmons (1999) is to explore both the importance of market research as perceived by the Austrian National Tourism Organisation (NTO) and the nine Regional Tourism Organisations (RTOs) and the …

Accounting For Intellectual Assets And Liabilities, Indra Abeysekera

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper is an addition to the current debate on how to measure and recognise intellectual assets and liabilities. A conceptual approach has been proposed so that intellectual assets and liabilities can be recognised in the financial statements using market value as a reference point acknowledging that intellectual assets and liability items cannot be measured accurately to recognise them individually. It was constructed using the common ground between financial reporting and intellectual assets and liability management. It has used an intellectual assets definition, an intellectual assets indicator at an organizational level, the Australian conceptual framework in accounting and recently published …

Perceptions Of Responsibility For Clinical Risk Management – Evidence From Orthopaedics Practitioners, Practice Managers And Patients In An Australian Capital City, S. Andrew, M. Barrett

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

The paper describes a study of three groups: patients, orthopaedic surgeons and the surgeons’ practice managers, concerning three types of legal risk associated with duty of care: failure to follow up, failure to warn and failure to diagnose. The study found there is cause for concern about doctors’ follow-up and documentation of patient care. Doctors may be unaware of the Australian courts’ propensity to emphasise practitioner responsibility rather than patient autonomy. A further important result is the considerable disparity between doctors’ views and the views of their practice managers. The paper draws implications for improved risk awareness and further research.

Corporate Governance And The Family Business: Managing The Paradoxes, M. Barrett, K. Moore

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

When we did the primary research for our book Learning Family Business: Paradoxes and Pathways*, we talked to many owners of family businesses at different stages of the business life cycle. In the course of talking to them, we noticed that family business owners would say that their business was "just like any other business". But then they would always follow this with the word "except…" and then go on to describe something which suggests that family businesses are very unlike other businesses. This is not altogether surprising. After all, a family and a business are both systems that do …

Telling Tales: Authoring Narratives Of Organizational Change, Patrick M. Dawson, David Buchanan

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

The aim of this paper is to explore the challenges of authoring case study narratives of organizational change in a processual perspective. Most theoretical and managerial accounts of change are narrative-based. They tend to begin with a problem period, then describe interventions, and end with an assessment of outcomes and 'lessons'. However, in the construction of coherent and credible narratives, the voices of competing accounts of change may be silenced. Evidence suggests that accounts of change compete on at least four dimensions, concerning assessments, interpretations, facts, and audiences. The framework developed by Deetz (1996) is used to illustrate how narratives …