Puberty Blues—then and now: diffracting semblances of being girl in Australia

This paper attempts a diffractive analysis that reads Bruce Beresford’s Australian populist film Puberty Blues (1981) through the more recent (2012) Channel 10 eight-part series television of the same title. The purpose of this experimental analysis is to notice ways both of these filmic artefacts re/enact gendered semblances performatively, co-creating binary gender relations through Baradian intra-actions with a virtual audience (in the perpetual present). This paper is not a historical account of the texts and/or a review of the substantial literature connected to either text or television/film production in Australia. It attempts to conduct a non-representational analysis as a reading through of the texts with each other. What is significant is the process of examining “how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter” (Karen Barad 2007, 30) during inter-action with filmic text and viewer. This manoeuvre posits that by re/turning events as iterative interactions visibility of materiality in the making may be rendered visible. By understanding intra-active processes educators may be able to frustrate delimiting accounts of girlhood as just the way it is and rather utilise these texts to open up other imaginaries of affirmative difference.     

Service Coproduction with Information Stickiness and Incomplete Contracts: Implications for Consulting Services Design

Drawing from three theoretical bases—“information stickiness” from the knowledge management literature, “service coproduction” from the service operations management literature, and “incomplete contract theory” from the transaction cost economics literature—we discuss a theoretical framework and develop models to study the efficiency of the service coproduction process in a knowledge‐intensive consulting environment. We apply, refine, and interpret these theories to determine how work should be allocated between the consultant and the client and the corresponding pricing under different contractual relationships that occur in this industry. We find that, with a pricing schedule that relates the fee adjustment to the self‐service level and one party's ownership of the residual right to specify the workload allocation, the client underinvests her efforts in the service coproduction process, whereas the consultant overinvests his efforts, resulting in an inefficient process. In addition, to improve overall process efficiency, we show that the more productive party should own the residual right to respecify the self‐service level when the final service need emerges. Our results, as well as interview data from experienced consultants, provide insights into the causes of inefficient service delivery processes and offer direction for achieving better efficiency through contract design and pricing schedules.     

Facilitating commitment, consensus, credibility, and visibility through collaborative foreign assistance project evaluations

The four key organizations involved in foreign assistance projects—those of the donor, technical advisors, host country counterparts, and beneficiaries—hold systematically different stakes in the project implementation process. As a result, each tends to reject or mistrust the goals of the other participants and resists collaborating with them during the project evaluation process. Yet, several potentially beneficial outcomes of collaboration for each of these organizations can be demonstrated, including enhanced commitment, consensus, credibility, and visibility. The evaluator plays a key role as facilitator of such a mutually beneficial process of collaboration by convincing each stakeholder that collaboration will provide the forum to promote rather than to sabotage individual stakes. In some cases, however, modified collaborative approaches may be necessary in order to bring to bear the issues and concerns of all stakeholders.     

Non-Sexist “Marital” Therapy*

Certain factors limit marital therapists in dealing with individuals conflicted over and disenchanted about “traditional” marriage: 1) the therapist's gender, 2) the presence of sex-role stereotyped behaviors and expectations, and 3) the therapists own marital experience. Specific helpful experiences (working with a co-therapist of the opposite sex, examining attitudes and biases toward divorce) and therapeutic techniques (working out a schedule for sharing household tasks and childcare, restructuring the marital contract, and dealing with open companionship) are discussed. The general therapeutic goal is working toward an equal sharing of overt power, with social, economic, and political considerations and intrapsychic forces given comparable consideration.     

Exploring domestic partnership benefits policies in corporate America

This article examines the domestic partner benefits (DP benefits) movement in corporate America, among Fortune 500 companies. An unprecedented number of Fortune 500 corporations started to extend equal benefits to their employees in the late 1990s. One-third of Fortune 500 companies now extend DP benefits to their gay employees despite national refusal to legally recognize same-sex unions. We provide a macro analysis of the 2002 Fortune 500 companies to explore the characteristics of the corporations that offer the benefits and the impetus for adopting these new gay friendly policies. Findings are that top ranked Fortune 500 and industry leaders act as benchmarkers for the corporate community. Region of the corporate headquarters and commitment to diversity issues also inform these organizational changes. Isomorphisic processes offer viable explanations for the transformation of the corporate climate that touts DP benefit policies as "the right thing to do" and considers these policies as good business sense in order to compete for employees. The DP benefits movement reflects corporate America trying to enhance their reputational capital by including gay issues as part of their diversity programs and policies.     

Female Clerical Workers in Academic Settings: An Empirical Test of the Gender Model

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of an empirical study designed to test the gender model of work on a sample of 374 female clerical workers in academic settings. In the gender model of work, personal/family variables are given primacy in terms of explaining work attitudes and behavior. Independent variables selected for study were sex role orientation, education, having a blue-collar husband, and having three or more children. Dependent variables were perceived occupational stress, occupational satisfaction, perceived power, thwarted mobility, and work aspirations. Six hypotheses were tested; three were confirmed. The authors conclude that non-traditional sex role orientation is positively related to perceived powerlessness, low occupational satisfaction, and high work aspirations. Low Pearson's r for each confirmed hypothesis suggests the inadequacy of the gender model for this particular population.     

Sources,sinks, and fluxes of nutrients (N + P) in a small highly modified urban estuary in southern California

Our objective was to begin to investigate sources, sinks, and flux rates of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in Famosa Slough, a small (12 ha) highly modified urban estuary in San Diego, California, U.S.A. The hydrology of Famosa Slough has been modified by culverts that dampen tidal influence and seasonal runoff from two urban watersheds, each of which has been implicated as a nutrient source that generates nuisance algal blooms. In 1995 and 1996, the ranges of nutrients measured in the water column were extremely wide; upper values exceeded those in other estuaries identified as eutrophic. Average dissolved inorganic nitrogen ranged from 2 to 250 M, while dissolved inorganic phosphorus ranged from <1 to 15 M. Nutrient content of the water changed rapidly both spatially and temporally depending on the tides and rainfall. While tidal water dominated this system, especially in the dry season, our results indicate that Famosa Slough's small watershed, not the larger watershed of the San Diego River, was the major source of nutrients during rainfall. Sediment nutrients were also high (3 mg N g dry wt^–1 and 0.600 mg P g dry wt^–1). Short-term flux studies suggest that the large accumulations of opportunistic green macroalgae commonly found in this estuary, and possibly the sediments, may act as a large and rapid sink for nutrients during times of high nutrient supply. We suggest that small, shallow estuaries in urban settings may have more complex and rapid nutrient dynamics than those found in larger systems.