Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

'The Closet Of The Third Person'; Susan Sontag, Sexual Dissidence, And Celebrity, Guy R. Davidson

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In this essay I argue that the tension between Susan Sontag's status as a postmodern celebrity and her devotion to the modernist cult of impersonality may be productively related to her sexuality. Beginning with her famous essay ‘Notes of Camp’ (1964), Sontag aligned herself (somewhat uneasily) with metropolitan gay culture. On the other hand, Sontag was one of the most famous undeclared lesbians in recent history. While she largely eschewed life writing, her fiction, essays, and interviews have often been read by critics for their autobiographical resonances. I extend this critical tendency by attending to the articulation and elision of …

"She Ensample Was By Good Techynge": Hermiene Ulrich And Chaucer Under Capricorn, Louise D'Arcens

Louise D'Arcens

Hermiene Frederica Ulrich (later Parnell) is a significant but now largely forgotten figure in early Australian academic history, who is especially notable for her brief but vital contribution to the tradition of early female readership of Chaucer in Australia. Despite her exclusion from university teaching after a promising and vital early career, Ulrich/Parnell continued to figure in her contribution as a public medievalist. This essay argues that Ulrich/Parnell's contribution as an early woman reader of Chaucer has been overlooked because of three-fold feminization in which her gender, teaching career, and colonial status have all rendered her the antithesis of the …

'The Last Thing One Might Expect': The Mediaeval Court At The 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition, Louise D'Arcens

Louise D'Arcens

In his preface to the Guide to the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866, the exhibition's commissioner John George Knight concludes by underlining the event's principal significance as a showcase for colonial commercial and industrial achievement: The great aim of an Exhibition is to give the fullest possible notoriety to new manufactures and processes, and bring the manufacturer and inventor more closely into contact with the merchant, speculator, and capitalist; and, by this most practical method of advertising, to enlarge the basis of trade.1 Given this avowedly mercantile and progressivist vision—a vision borne out by the numerous displays of colonial manufacture—it might …

Iraq, The Prequel(S): Historicising Military Occupation And Withdrawal In Kingdom Of Heaven And 300, Louise D'Arcens

Louise D'Arcens

As well as being historical films, Zack Snyder’s 300 and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven both reflect on the value and the danger of historical commemoration and amnesia. The films’ opposing stances on the ‘righteous’ use of history directly link to their differing uses of historical East-West clashes (Thermopylae and the Crusades) as allegorical commentaries on current East-West tensions, specifically the Western occupation of Iraq. Examining these films together, however, illuminates the cross-historical heroic idiom they both share, and thus exposes the drawbacks of the historical periodisation that persists in current approaches to film in medieval and classical studies.

Cross-Sector Research Collaboration In Australia: The Cooperative Research Centres Program At The Crossroads, Tim Turpin, Samuel Garrett-Jones, Richard Woolley

Samuel Garrett-Jones

In this article we trace changes in the institutional and social dynamics that have steered cross-sector R&D collaboration in Australia. Public policy provided the initial push toward cross-sector collaboration. The Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) Program is Australia's most longstanding national arrangement for industry-university-government research collaboration. Over the past two decades the program has grown to become the dominant model for cross-sector R&D cooperation in the country. Because of the size of the program in the Australian innovation system it has also become a major focus for debate about science policy. Universities have now institutionalised this imperative in all sorts of …

Disarming Japan’S Cannons With Hollywood’S Cameras: Cinema In Korea Under U.S. Occupation, 1945-1948, Brian M. Yecies, Ae-Gyung Shim

Dr Brian Yecies

Reorienting the southern half of the Korean Peninsula away from the former Japanese colonial government's anti-democratic, anti-American and militaristic ideology while establishing orderly government was among the goals of the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK, 1945-1948). To help achieve this aim on a wide front and as quickly as possible, USAMGIK’s Motion Picture Section in the Department of Public Information arranged the exhibition of hundreds of Hollywood films to promote themes of democracy, capitalism, gender equality and popular American culture and values. While U.S. troops in the field enjoyed the increased availability and calibre of American feature films, …

Transnational (Il)Literacies: Reading The "New Chinese Literature In Australia" In China, Wenche Ommundsen

Wenche Ommundsen

THE TRANSNATIONAL "TURN" IN AUSTRALIAN LITERARY studies was the subject of lively critical debate at the time my colleagues Alison Broinowski, Paul Sharrad and I in 2008 embarked on the ARC-supported project "Globalising Australian literature: Asian Australian writing, Asian perspectives on Australian literature." Robert Dixon's 2007 essay "Australian Literature - International Contexts" charted the development of Australian literary studies from the cultural nationalist phase of the early years through to "the inter- or trans-national perspectives that have emerged in a number of humanities disciplines since the 1990s", and outlined his proposal of a research agenda for "a transnational practice of …

Thought Policing Or The Protection Of Youth? Debate In Japan Over The "Non-Existent Youth Bill", Mark J. Mclelland

Mark McLelland

In early 2010 Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintarō, supported by international child welfare organisations and a range of conservative Japanese politicians and commentators, sought to extend the range of material caught by a ‘Healthy Youth Development Ordinance’ that prohibited the sale of publications deemed ‘harmful’ to those under 18 in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Material featuring pornography or strong violence was already prohibited from sale to minors, however, the proposed extension would have included publications featuring ‘non-existent youth’ -- that is, purely fictional or imaginary characters who were, looked like or sounded like they were under the age of 18 and …

Marketing Measurement Revolution: The C-Oar-Se Method And Why It Must Replace Psychometrics, John R. Rossiter

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Purpose – New measures in marketing are invariably created by using a psychometric approach based on Churchill’s “scale development” procedure. This paper aims to compare and contrast Churchill’s procedure with Rossiter’s content-validity approach to measurement, called C-OAR-SE.
Design/methodology approach – The comparison of the two procedures is by rational argument and forms the theoretical first half of the paper. In the applied second half of the paper, three recent articles from the Journal of Marketing (JM) that introduce new constructs and measures are criticized and corrected from the C-OAR-SE perspective.
Findings – The C-OAR-SE method differs from Churchill’s method by …

Self-Congruity And Volunteering : A Multi-Organisation Comparison, Melanie Randle, Sara Dolnicar

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

1. Purpose: To examine: (1) if individuals who prefer different volunteering organisations have different self-concepts; (2) if individuals perceive their preferred volunteering organisation as more similar to their self-concept than other volunteering organisations; and (3) if self-congruity theory correctly predicts consumer (volunteer) behaviour differences across organisations and organisational missions.
2. Design/methodology/approach: We collected data on people’s preferred volunteering organisation, their self-concept and their perceived image from eight volunteering organisations using an online self-completion survey. We then used chi-square tests and paired-sample t-tests to identify significant differences between groups.
3. Findings: Individuals who prefer different volunteering organisations differ significantly in their self-concept. For the …

The Role Of The Government In Financial Sector Development, Arusha Cooray

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This study examines the impact of two dimensions of the government, namely, size and quality, on two dimensions of the financial sector, size and efficiency, in a cross section of 71 economies. The study finds that increased quality of the government as measured by governance and legal origin positively influences both financial sector size and efficiency. The size of the government proxied by government expenditure and the government ownership of banks has a negative effect on financial sector efficiency, and a positive impact on financial sector size, particularly in the low income economies.

Political Connection And Managerial Entrenchment: Evidence From Ceo Turnovers In China, Jerry Cao, Xiaofei Pan, Meijun Qian, Gary G. Tian

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Firms seek political connection by hiring politicians and ex-bureaucrats as top executives in China, especially in privately controlled firms. One unintended consequence of establishing political connection is management entrenchment. Political connected CEOs have smaller equity holding than CEOs without political background. Political connection significantly lowers the CEO turnover probability and turnover-performance sensitivity. Firm performance improves after political connected CEOs are replaced, particularly if replaced by new ones not politically connected. Overall, our findings suggest that political connection in association with management entrenchment destroys shareholder value, harms firm performance, and exacerbates corporate governance in emerging economies.

Investigating Chinese And Australian Student's Awareness And Interpretation Of Csr, And The Influence Of Studying 'Socially Innovative Commerce' Over Time, Zhengfeng Li, Alan A. Pomering, Gary I. Noble

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This study compares Chinese students studying in Australia and Australian domestic students on awareness and interpretation of, and attitude and behavioural intention towards the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and the influence on both of studying within an environment termed "socially innovative commerce". While previous research has found that age, gender, and study major of students may influence perceptions of CSR, this rsearch found these variables are not as significant as cultural background. These findings are presented and discussed along with future research directions.

Reflections On Interpretive Supply Chain Research, Tillmann Boehme, Paul Childerhouse, Eric Deakins, Denis Towill

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

A key purpose of this paper is to stimulate researchers into utilising a more balanced portfolio of research methods when generating supply chain theory. The supply chain/logistics literature overwhelmingly exhibits objectivist/positivist philosophical assumptions, indicating that this is what researchers believe constitutes valid discipline knowledge. In contrast, this paper demonstrates that an interpretive perspective is capable of yielding a comprehensive picture of the relationship between the supply chain and the ‘messy’ environment within which it is embedded (contingency theory). By reflecting on lessons learned through many years of practical researcher experience with such a methodology, this paper serves to motivate the …

The Effect Of Corporate Governance, Corporate Financing Decision And Ownership Structure On Firm Performance: A Panel Data Approach From Kuwait Stock Exchange, Helen M. Hasan, Mohammad Al Mutairi

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

The aim of this paper is to examine the effect of corporate governance, corporate financing decision, and ownership structure on firm performance. The study uses panel based regression approach; the analysis is based on a sample of 80 listed Kuwait Stock Exchange Market firms, over a period of 9 years, from 2000 to 2008. Findings suggest that there is no association between ownership structure (identity, types or mix) and firm performance, using both measures of firm performance, ROA and Tobin’s Q. This study also finds that government ownership is insignificantly positively related to ROA using pool data; the result for …

Radical Uncertainty: Judith Butler And A Theory Of Character, Shady E. Cosgrove

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper will develop a theory of character based on Judith Butler's ideas of subjectivity and gender construction. It will summarise Butler's position and explore the practicalities of reading realist characters as performative repetitions. Then, it will discuss Butler's notion of agency and the subversive repetition, and how realist characters can demonstrate the radical uncertainty inherent in Butler's notion of agency s specifically when texts are rewritten in such a way that characters `question' their `original' depictions. The example of interest here will be Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea in relation to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, with particular attention paid …

Unreal Estate, Lucas M. Ihlein

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

[extract] ZINNY: Can you tell us a bit about the real estate beauties you have advertised? What impact does it have on the city, these buildings being left empty for so long? DIEGO: SquatSpace has concerned itself with the polincs of space from the start, and in some ways the topic is what defines the group's trajectory. UnReal Estate is yet another playful look at the loop holes: buildings are left abandoned for speculation purposes, creating focus areas for urban renewals, while at the same time denying living possibilities.

An Opportunistic Scheduler For Dense Wlans, Kwan-Wu Chin

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The demand for bandwidth by multimedia applications remains unabated. This is particular critical given the growing number of devices with WiFi capability, and the ubiquity of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). These trends have spurred researchers to develop low-cost and backward compatible solutions to increase the capacity of WLANs. One approach is to deploy additional Access Points (APs), and strategies to manage channel, user, and transmit power. As a result, stations are likely to be near one or more APs, and therefore are more likely to experience high data rates. In this paper, we take advantage of this fact to …

Thought Policing Or The Protection Of Youth? Debate In Japan Over The "Non-Existent Youth Bill", Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In early 2010 Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintarō, supported by international child welfare organisations and a range of conservative Japanese politicians and commentators, sought to extend the range of material caught by a ‘Healthy Youth Development Ordinance’ that prohibited the sale of publications deemed ‘harmful’ to those under 18 in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Material featuring pornography or strong violence was already prohibited from sale to minors, however, the proposed extension would have included publications featuring ‘non-existent youth’ -- that is, purely fictional or imaginary characters who were, looked like or sounded like they were under the age of 18 and …

Transnational (Il)Literacies: Reading The "New Chinese Literature In Australia" In China, Wenche Ommundsen

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

THE TRANSNATIONAL "TURN" IN AUSTRALIAN LITERARY studies was the subject of lively critical debate at the time my colleagues Alison Broinowski, Paul Sharrad and I in 2008 embarked on the ARC-supported project "Globalising Australian literature: Asian Australian writing, Asian perspectives on Australian literature." Robert Dixon's 2007 essay "Australian Literature - International Contexts" charted the development of Australian literary studies from the cultural nationalist phase of the early years through to "the inter- or trans-national perspectives that have emerged in a number of humanities disciplines since the 1990s", and outlined his proposal of a research agenda for "a transnational practice of …

Australia's "Child Abuse Material' Legislation, Internet Regulation And The Juridification Of The Imagination, Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article investigates the implications of Australia’s prohibition of ‘child-abuse material’ (including cartoons, animation, drawings and text) for Australian fan communities of animation, comics and gaming (ACG) and slash fiction. It is argued that current legislation is out of synch with the new communicative environment brought about by the internet since a large portion of the fans producing and trading in these images are themselves minors and young people. Habermas’s analysis of the conflict between instrumental and communicative rationality is deployed to demonstrate that legislators have misrecognized the nature of the communicative practices that take place within the ‘lifeworlds’ of …

"Almost A Sense Of Property": Henry James's The Turn Of The Screw, Modernism, And Commodity Culture, Guy R. Davidson

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

[extract] Metaphorical, if not literal, homelessness has seemed to many to be a defining condition of the life and work of Henry James. His friend Edmund Gosse, for instance, wrote that James was a "homeless man in a peculiar sense," one who was never truly settled either in England, his adopted country, or the United States, his country of origin.More recently, John Carlos Rowe has related James's deracination to cosmopolitanism, outlining how the concerns of his fiction foreshadow recent efforts within the humanities to renovate the cosmopolitan ideal of respect for international and intranational differences.And John Landau has argued that …

Halliday's Model Of Register Revisited And Explored, Annabelle Lukin, Alison R. Moore, Maria Herke, Rebekah Wegener, Canzhong Wu

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Halliday’s description of register as ‘a variety of language, corresponding to a variety of situation’, with situation interpreted ‘by means of a conceptual framework using the terms “field”, “tenor” and “mode”’ (Halliday, 1985/89: 29, 38) is revisited to reflect on the theoretical work the term ‘register’ does within the SFL paradigm. In doing so, we recognize that the concepts of a linguistic theory are ‘ineffable’ (Halliday, 2002 [1988]); i.e. that ‘providing definitions of a theoretical term ... requires that it be posi- tioned vis-à-vis other concepts in the theory’ (Hasan, 2004: 16). It follows that chang- ing the position of …

The Impact Of Corporate Financing Decision On Corporate Performance In The Absence Of Taxes: Panel Data From Kuwait Stock Market, Helen M. Hasan, Mohammad Al Mutairi, Elizabeth A. Risik

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This study examines the relationship between financing decisions such as capital structure, capital budgeting techniques and dividend policy along with the firm’s attributes. We examined the impact of industrial sectors and financial performance using the panel data of 80 listed companies in Kuwait. The results of this study suggest that, contrary to the Trade-off Theory of capital structure, there is a negative association between the level of debt and financial performance. This can be attributed to the high cost of borrowing and the underdeveloped nature of the debt market in Kuwait. Given the unique tax environment in Kuwait, using debt …

Reverse Perspective: Bernard Smith's Worldview And The Cosmopolitan Imagination, Ian A. Mclean

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

Living and working in Australia, and being the first Australian-born professional art historian to work in the academy, is probably enough of an explanation for why Bernard Smith developed a global perspective on European art and an acute awareness of its relationship to imperialism. However Bernard Smith’s world-consciousness is grounded in an earlier era that has little relevance to the current intensification of globalization and the challenges it poses to the discipline. This essay discusses Smith’s approach to globalization within the context of the discipline’s changing world-consciousness since its emergence in the eighteenth century.

Fairness And Fair Shares, Keith J. Horton

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Some moral principles require agents to do more than their fair share of a common task, if others won't do their fair share - each agent's fair share being what she would be required to do if all contributed as they should. This seems to provide a strong basis for objecting to such principles. For it seems unfair to require agents who have already done their fair share to do more, just because other agents won't do their fair share. The philosopher who has written most about this issue, however, Liam Murphy, argues that it is not unfair to do …

Is For Government Climate Change Adaptation Activities: An Exploratory Case Study, Stephen Smith, Donald Winchester, Helen M. Hasan, Patrick Finnegan

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper reports a case study of climate change adaptation activities of the New South Wales Government’s Climate Change Working Group where ten agencies have responsibility for thirty-five long-term activities. A concurrent Data-Centre Consolidation project has highlighted the mammoth amount of data held by different agencies that must be integrated into information to adequately support these adaptation activities. Our analysis of data collected from interviews and documents reveals the potential of a retrospective ontology capability, and a unique citizen record in enabling this integration. Adaptation activities require resolution of differences in the perspectives of government agencies and citizens and changes …

The Crisis Of Petro-Market Civilization: The Past As Prologue?, Timothy Dimuzio

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Summary Current patterns of high-energy intensive development are not sustainable on account of two major challenges that threaten the social reproduction of this civilization: peak oil and global warming. This chapter seeks to probe the dimensions of this looming crisis at the heart of 'petro-market civilization' by foregrounding the links between energy and social reproduction. In doing so, the chapter makes two interrelated arguments. First, I argue not only that the age of fossil fuels is an exceptional one but also that the discovery and use of fossil fuels have been crucial to the deepening and extension of an incipient …

Indigenous Australian-Indonesian Intermarriage: Negotiating Citizenship Rights In Twentieth-Century Australia, Julia T. Martinez

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This story of Indigenous Australian-Indonesian intermarriage is one that shedslight on the changes to citizenship entitlement in Australia and the struggles ofAboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Asian peoples to lead their lives free fromgovernment intervention. Indonesian-Australian contacts remain relativelyunknown in Australian history. Early Macassan relations with the peoples ofNorthern Australia, brought to light by Campbell Macknight, stands out inAustralian history as a significant first contact with Asia. More recently ReginaGanter has continued the Macassan story into the twentieth century exploringencounters with northern communities across Australia. But the story ofwartime disruption faced by the families of Indonesian men and Aboriginal andTorres …

Contemporary Korean Cinema: Challenges And The Transformation Of ‘Planet Hallyuwood’, Brian Yecies, Ae-Gyung Shim

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article examines how the South Korean cinema has undergone a transformation from an ‘antiquated cottage industry’ in the 1980s into a thriving international cinema – albeit with a host of new challenges and tensions – in the ‘post-boom’ years of the 2000s right up to the present. Its analysis of film culture in the 1980s sets the stage for the Korean cinema’s transnational development over the last decade, and points to a longer historical continuum involving the ‘re-emergence’ in the 1980s of a ‘cinema of quality’ that was marked by widespread critical acclaim. Additionally, this article canvasses the key …