Perspectives of Aboriginal issues among non‐Aboriginal residents of rural Victorian communities

Racism, in various forms, remains a dominant feature in Australian society. Aboriginal Australians are commonly targets of racial discrimination. However, understanding racism is difficult given that racial attitudes vary towards particular groups of people, across place and time and are difficult to measure. This paper presents responses of residents across four rural shires in Victoria to questions about attitudes towards Aboriginal people/issues. Responses indicated that attitudes towards Aboriginal people were diverse and that individuals varied in their attitudes on specific items. There were subtle differences between the four sites and association between demographic characteristics and some items in particular sites. This suggests that respondents are inconsistent in their attitudes relating to Aboriginal people/issues and that there are place‐based influences on these attitudes. We conclude that the many varied understandings of racism and Aboriginal Australians allow the discourses of exclusion, disempowerment and othering to be maintained.     

Emotional labour,collectivism and strain: a comparison of Turkish and U.S. service employees

ABSTRACT

Global growth in service employment highlights the need to understand how cross-cultural differences impact emotional labour processes for service employees. The current study investigates these differences by examining the impact of national and individual level collectivistic values on emotional labour strategies and employee strain (emotional strain, turnover intentions, job satisfaction, and organisational commitment). Cross-sectional data was collected from U.S. (n?=?191) and Turkish (n?=?249) customer service employees. Results indicate that collectivism impacts the process model of emotional labour via direct and interaction effects. Collectivism was associated with higher emotional labour engagement and lower employee strains. Surface acting was uncorrelated with Turkish employees’ strain, though moderated regression analyses revealed interaction effects associated with national and individual level collectivism. These results suggest that collectivistic values may serve as a buffer against harmful effects associated with surface acting. This study is the first to directly compare emotional labour processes in U.S. and Turkish service employees and expand the process model of emotional labour to include collectivism. The theoretical implications of this expanded model are discussed, along with future research directions and practical applications of these findings.     

Technology Investment and Management Accounting Practice

Management accounting techniques and information are often accused of having many limitations that are likely to constrain investment in new technology. However, relatively little is known about the actual influence of management accounting practices on investment decisions. The empirical evidence of this research shows that new technology investment decisions are both highly complex and political. These decision attributes give rise to a protracted, circuitous, decision process that is very different from the rational model which dominates the capital budgeting literature. The research also shows that the management accounting system captures only a fraction of the information generated by this process and consequently has a relatively low influence on these investment decisions.     

Seeking safer sexual spaces: queer and trans young people labeled with intellectual disabilities and the paradoxical risks of restriction

Young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people labeled with intellectual disabilities have unique sexual health needs that are not being met. Denial by others of their right to pleasure and the exercise of heightened external control over their sexuality are commonplace. Current research indicates that these youth are at heightened risk for compromised sexual health. This study aimed to explore the ways in which social and environmental conditions influence vulnerability to adverse sexual health outcomes for this population. We used a community-based research approach to conduct qualitative interviews and focus groups with 10 young LGBT people (aged 17-26) labeled with intellectual disabilities. Participants reported multiple limitations on their autonomy that resulted in having sex in places where they did not feel comfortable and were unlikely to practice safer sex. Attempts by authority figures to protect youth through limits on their autonomy may be unintentionally leading to negative sexual health outcomes.     

Domestic violence and women with disabilities: locating the issue on the periphery of social movements

Women with disabilities, like non‐disabled women, are at risk of experiencing abuse perpetrated by those closest to them. This paper reviews what is known about the domestic abuse of disabled women, explores some of the dynamics of that abuse and considers why this issue has not been high on the agenda of either the movement against domestic violence or the disabled people’s movement in the UK, taking into consideration several points that disabled women have raised. In doing so it focuses on the concept of compound oppressions as a potential explanation for the failure of this problem to have widespread recognition as a social issue.     

Performance measurement in industrial R&D

Currently, the need for R&D performance measurements that are both practically useful and theoretically sound seems to be generally acknowledged; indeed, the rising cost of R&D, greater emphasis on value management and a trend towards decentralization are escalating the need for ways of evaluating the contribution of R&D to corporate performance. However, although recent research and writing on the subject shows that the challenge of developing such sound measurements has been taken up by many academics and organizations, it is also clear that there is no generally applicable approach.
In this review, we consider various approaches for measuring the performance in industrial R&D and identify their key characteristics. We also include a brief summary of the 'history' of performance measurement in R&D, which shows that although there are some new ways of looking at the issue there are many examples from the past that can contribute to our current thinking.
The approaches found in the literature and practice are very varied in their application, some being more suitable for the project level, others for the R&D department, and some for the development process or for the organization as a whole. Furthermore, the uses of the approaches tend to be different. For example, some approaches are intended to justify the continuation of investment in R&D to upper management, whilst others are more suited to support learning and self-correction by empowered R&D teams. In this paper these uses, or 'functions', of performance measurement and a taxonomy of typical subjects of measurement in R&D environments are explored.
Finally, we conclude the review with a discussion of some limitations of the growing literature on R&D performance measurement.