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The red meat value chain in Australia is undergoing a rapid change due to globalisation, a highly competitive meat market and increased production efficiency and flexibility. This paper aims to investigate how beef producers can increase supply chain performance (SCP) flexibility by improving supply chain practices. A model was developed and hypotheses were formulated based on the literature review of agri-food supply chains. A survey questionnaire was distributed to beef producers in Australia and the results of stepwise multiple regression analysis revealed that performance flexibility was significantly influenced by the supply chain practices: customer relationships and information quality (IQ). Given these findings, beef producers should focus on customer relationships and IQ in order to achieve enhanced flexibility in their SCP. The paper discusses the implications and current practices in beef cattle farming industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Australia and New Zealand have pursued two different routes of labour market reform. New Zealand opted for a radical experiment in the deregulation of industrial relations and other areas. Australia pursued a co-operative and co-ordinated approach to reform within the centralized arbitral system. Both reform initiatives were designed to stimulate improvements in organizational performance and cost competitiveness. In this paper, we argue that there are three main types of strategies that management can use to reduce labour cost and improve performance: productivity-enhancement, costminimization and work-intensification strategies. We argue that the former is a long-term sustainable strategy whereas the latter two are negative short-term strategies that may have deleterious longer-term effects. This paper reports the results of a cross-national survey in New Zealand and Australia into the extent of adoption of these management strategies. The results are presented by industry, employment size, mode of operation and countries as a whole. The research findings indicate that New Zealand's decentralization has encouraged a higher degree of employer experimentation with both positive and negative workplace change strategies, especially in the private sector. Australia's more centralized system limited the use of cost-minimization strategies but not productivity-enhancing strategies in the public and not-for-profit sector. The research found evidence of work intensification in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the issue of growing tensions in Australian retail planning between centres policy and competition policy. Centres policies, including restrictions on supermarket locations, have long been viewed by many retail planners as key to the maintenance of Main Street viability and vitality. More recently, advocates of competition policy have suggested existing centres policies are anti-competitive, and have argued for a more 'flexible' approach to centres development. Against this backdrop, the broad aim of the paper is to explore how more relaxed controls on supermarket locations might affect Main Street viability and vitality. Two town centres are examined, each associated with different degrees of regulation and characterised by different levels of competition. The effects of these differences on the viability and vitality of the respective centres are explored through analysis of the movement patterns of 148 tracked pedestrians, along with various land use and built form factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Riverina region of New South Wales has a history of co-operative forms of production and consumption. This paper focuses on three Rochdale rural consumer co-operatives in this region. While the paper argues that marketing the co-operatives in terms of their community links and democratic structure was important to their success over many years, it was not sufficient to ensure survival. Co-operatives found it necessary to highlight their competitive prices and the quality of their goods. They were vulnerable to changes in the rural economy that led to a decline in the local population. Their survival also depended on the quality of their management, with poor investment decisions and recruitment practices undermining profitability. Generous credit policies also undermined the co-operatives financially. By comparing the three co-operatives and their communities, this paper aims to develop a more sophisticated approach to explaining the survival and demise of Rochdale consumer co-operatives in rural Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on the changing nature of work and employment by focussing on the commercial and residential segments of the construction industry in one Australian state. Three key drivers of change in work and employment are identified and discussed: a changing competitive environment, technological advances in building methodologies and materials and a series of workforce-related issues. The findings are analysed through a theoretical lens which allows for a characterization of the nature, direction and extent of change in the industry. This combination allows for a characterization of the nature, direction and extent of change in the industry. Using interviews with key industry informants we identify and highlight reconfigurations of work and employment. A key finding of the study is that while technological advances are likely to give rise to some form of job destruction and deskilling, current developments are following an evolutionary rather than discontinuous trajectory of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work discusses the results of a pilot project performed in 2013–14 within the framework of the Asian Leadership Project international comparative study, which continues research of school leadership in Europe and America since years 2006–2008. Alongside with Russia, the pilot project also included Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. After analyzing statistical reports on the Russian Federation as a whole, as well as on Moscow and Krasnoyarsk Krai in particular, we created a profile of an average school principal and identified their specific features across regions (age, sex, years of experience, competencies, etc.). Upon investigation of decision-making styles (A. Rowe's Decision Style Inventory) applied by school principals in Moscow and Krasnoiarsk and by award winners in the School Principal professional competition, we found that contextual factors and personal and professional attitudes of school principals have considerable effects on school leadership style. This paper also discusses changes in school leadership styles over recent decades, managerial methods used by Russian school principals, and similarities and differences between school leadership practices in Russia and Canada. The report describes the concept and design of a future large-scale study of these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Policy analysts have devoted considerable time to examining the problem of the policy implementation gap, with one important strand in the literature following Michael Lipsky's work on street-level bureaucracy and discretion. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the literature concerning shifts in government/third sector organisation contractual arrangements and whether they constitute a significant (post-neoliberal) development in policy implementation. Using a case study of contracted government services in Australia, we revisit the conception of discretion to reflect on the impact of these changes and document their implications for the use of discretion in management and front-line worker practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Australian Trade Practices Act 1965 came into force on 1 September 1967 it was vehemently opposed by business as it threatened to reveal the extent of their anti-competitive arrangements. Yet by the time the Act was replaced by stronger legislation in 1974, most firms had accepted that collusion and price fixing were undesirable and that they had to compete. Using newspapers, parliamentary debates, archival records, and the Secret Register of trade agreements introduced by the 1965 Act, this paper examines the transformation of attitudes to competition in the Australian business community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the current state of economic relations that the United Kingdom has with New Zealand and Australia, in light of the former's decision to leave the European Union.  Although there are prospects for future trade between these countries post-Brexit based on the three countries' current comparative advantages, perhaps the greatest scope is for greater trade in services along with greater investment flows.  Trade in food produce would be affected by changes in trade policy post-Brexit but other goods such as forestry, mineral and manufacturing products would be more affected by changes in general economic conditions and the relative competiveness of the industries in international markets. Already these aspects of trade are important and are expected to grow and develop over time.  Much of the future negotiations between the three countries will take up a range of issues associated with investment and the trade in services and much of the future prospects for growth in trade might depend on the success of these negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before 1980, strong demand existed in Australia for the economics degree. Since then, competition from programs in business and management has increased. Student preferences have shifted from university and secondary economics. Economics enrollments have declined in both sectors. The authors analyze these trends and assess economic education publications by Australian economists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic theory suggests that competitive pressures will impact on organisational efficiency. In recent years, universities in Australia and New Zealand have faced increased competition for students. The aim of this paper is to explore the efficiency of Australian and New Zealand public universities and to investigate the impact of competition for students from overseas on efficiency. Output distance functions are estimated using panel data for the period 1995-2002 for Australia and 1997-2003 for New Zealand. The results show that competition for overseas students has led to increased efficiency in Australian universities. However, competition for overseas students appears to have had no effect on efficiency in New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of ‘scientific’ racism and social Darwinism in white colonial nations in the late nineteenth century ensured that indigenous peoples were regarded as an alien ‘other’ to national identities based on racism and progress. This outlook gradually changed over time with the aid of socio-historical understanding developed by indigenous and non-indigenous revisionist historians, academics and activists, which sought to explain past and present indigenous/settler relations by placing white colonial nation-states within a critical account of colonialism and racial discrimination. As white settler nations gradually began to accommodate a plurality of ethnic cultures and in that sense become more multicultural, politicians sought to construct national identities based on the imagery of ‘harmonious multiculturalism’. In settler societies, such as Canada and Australia, a significant political obstacle to this was the continued disquiet of indigenous populations. The emerging post-colonial challenge for politicians in such societies was to find a way to include indigenous people in the cultural fabric of the nation which would seem fair and appropriate and therefore serve a legitimising function for the settler state. Recently the now popular peacemaking language of ‘reconciliation’ has been the preferred rhetorical device for this endeavour in Canada and most notably in Australia.1 The aim of this paper is to outline why two dominant understandings of reconciliation as an outcome that have emerged from post-conflict reconciliation processes would be inappropriate goals for a process concerned with genuinely legitimising an internal colonial situation.2 It begins with a general introduction to the concept of reconciliation, discusses the context-specific problems with the dominant understandings and concludes by suggesting an approach to reconciliation which would genuinely decolonise an internal colonial situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managing NPD is a difficult balance between committing resources for on-going development of products and screening out potential products that have little to add to the competitiveness of the firm. Food manufacturers require an understanding of the drivers of successful new product development at the program level to ensure that a continuous stream of successful products is available. This paper reports the results of a study designed to uncover various program level factors that drive NPD success in the context of the Australian food manufacturing industry. The results demonstrate that NPD performance is driven by a number of factors including: market orientation, strong cross-functionality, adequate resource allocation, strategic planning, and management support and involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Satisfied customers are vital to creating and maintaining a sustainable advantage in the highly competitive business environment that applies today. Other forms of competitive advantage are easily lost, or copied by competitors. Consequently, customer satisfaction and service quality have been of considerable interest to researchers and practitioners alike over the last two decades, and a substantial body of formal academic work has emerged to address these issues. However, comparatively little work has been done to date in studying what managers of businesses actually do in practice to measure, and consequently manage, their customer satisfaction and service quality, and there has been even less work done on international differences in perceptions of these attributes. This paper reports the results of a comparative study of managers' perceptions of their customers' opinions of service quality in Australia (as an example of a developed country, 318 responses) and Vietnam (as an example of a country in transition from central control, 49 responses). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper makes the case that small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing sector have the potential to benefit from connections with design research units operating within universities. It points out some of the challenges associated with research and development for SMEs, and argues design research units can allow SMEs to better meet these challenges. Additive Manufacturing is used as an exemplary emerging technology that makes explicit the new possibilities and instability of the contemporary manufacturing landscape. A case study is used to articulate the potentials and limitations of industry and university partnerships in design. In conclusion, two alternative models are analysed in order to highlight different ends to which the practitioner-based research can be put. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary understanding of the evolution of the geography of uneven development is dominated by research derived from either the 'new' geographical economics or the new regionalism, typically in the context of either the European Union or North America. By way of contrast, we consider local economic performance in the Australian context. Building on Fingleton's work, we employ a spatial econometric modeling methodology to account for the role of both endogenous technological change and export orientation in determining local competitive advantage. The evidence suggests that competitiveness depends on both the indigenous characteristics of a local economy and its exposure to global competition. Entreprise et competitivite dans le contexte australien: une perspective econometrique spatiale Resume Les connaissances contemporaines sur l'evolution de la geographie de developpements irreguliers sont dominees par la recherche derivee d'une « nouvelle » economie geographique ou du nouveau regionalisme, generalement dans le contexte de l'Union europeenne ou de l'Amerique du Nord. A titre de contraste, nous examinons les performances economiques locales dans le contexte de l'Australie. En nous basant sur Fingleton, nous appliquons une methodologie de modelisation econometrique spatiale pour interpreter le role de variations technologiques endogenes et de l'orientation de l'exportation dans la determination de la competitivite locale. Les resultats des recherches indiquent que la competitivite est tributaire a la fois des caracteristiques indigenes d'une economie locale et de son exposition a la concurrence mondiale. Empresas y la ventaja competitiva en el contexto australiano: una perspectiva econometrica espacial Extracto La comprension contemporanea de la geografia evolutiva del desarrollo desigual esta dominada por investigacion derivada de la 'nueva' economia geografica o del nuevo regionalismo, tipicamente en el contexto de la Union Europea o de Norteamerica. A modo de contraste, consideramos el rendimiento economico local dentro del contexto australiano. Basandonos en Fingleton, empleamos una metodologia de modelacion econometrica espacial para tener en cuenta la funcion del cambio tecnologico endogeno y la orientacion de la exportacion a la hora de determinar la ventaja competitiva local. La evidencia sugiere que la competitividad depende de las caracteristicas indigenas de una economia local y en su exposicion a la competencia global.[image omitted] [image omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Professor Allan Fels blasted his way into popular consciousness by aggressively using the media to promote no-holds-barred enforcement against businesses that breached competition and consumer protection laws. Opinions were sharply divided on the desirability and effectiveness of Allan Fels' media approach during his chairmanship of the ACCC. This article argues that opinions of the 'Fels effect' were based on two opposed, mono-dimensional theories as to how a regulator should behave: one based on conflict and deterrence and the other on cooperation and voluntary compliance. Responsive regulation theory, however, suggests that regulators should be evaluated on multiple dimensions, including whether they are both tough and fair, strategic and sophisticated. This paper reports and analyses survey evidence as to how large businesses do in fact perceive the ACCC across multiple dimensions. We find that Australian businesses may be divided into three groups: those that see the ACCC as threatening; those that see the ACCC as unthreatening; and those that see the ACCC as a professional or responsive regulator. The article goes on to test what impact such differences in opinions have on businesses' compliance attitudes and compliance management behaviours. Seeing the ACCC as a deterrent threat has some influence on compliance management behaviour. However, when businesses see the ACCC as both strong and fair, this improves both compliance management behaviour and attitudes towards compliance. These findings support responsive regulation theory, but only a minority of businesses in fact saw the ACCC as a responsive regulator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalism has transformed markets supplying public goods. Analysis of five real-world Australian markets reveals the eligibility rules for access and ongoing participation, interaction of participants, the role of intermediaries and government, the extent of competition, complex regulatory regimes shaping and controlling these markets, and key market outcomes. Contrary to neoliberalism's free market rhetoric and the view promulgated by mainstream economics, a spectrum of market configurations and governance regimes were found along with participation being highly dependent on technology access and skills, market outcomes inconsistent with policy rhetoric, market interrelationships posing adverse cumulative impacts, and government is strongly interventionist through multiple roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the origin and development of hydraulic power equipment and systems in Great Britain and Australia. It discusses the formation of the Melbourne Hydraulic Power Co., a public utility company, in 1888 and also states its early success and competition faced by the company from electricity distributors. It also states the acquisition of the company through legislation by the Melbourne City Council, a City Corporation. The customer base of the company is also discussed.

Promotional competitions remain underresearched with only limited conceptualization of campaign design (framing) options evident. Our research addresses the following questions: What are the specific framing options available to campaign planners? What framing strategies should decision-makers apply to optimize campaign performance against promotional aims and objectives? We analyze a sample of promotional competition campaigns in the Australian market to identify the range of specific framing options. We present a taxonomy of Action, Entry, and Prize choices, integrating the key promotional aims of economic, informational, and affective influence. Academic and practitioner implications are discussed and a future research agenda is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Australian migration and migration policy. Topics discussed include the changes in global and regional migration patterns, the status of the country's migration, and the comparative advantage of the country despite its struggle in terms of global competition for skilled workers. It also suggests the need for policymakers to ask temporary migrants if they actually want to become Australians.

Alongside its rise, China has intensified its relations with countries on its periphery by adopting a “dual-core” strategy in order to create a “Community of Common Destiny”. In this context, China has upgraded its relationship with Australia from “commercial” to “strategic” levels. China’s “dual-core” strategy and the China–Australia strategic partnership reveal not only China’s desire for intensifying its economic interdependence with countries on its periphery, Australia included, but also China’s strategic intention of creating its own sphere of influence in the form of a “Community of Common Destiny”. China wishes to sustain its economic and social progress by restoring the past glory of “Fuqiang” (wealth and power) as it enhances both its “hard” and “soft” power. The intensified economic interdependence may persuade countries on its periphery to avoid being involved in any attempt by China’s competitors to contain its rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been argued in many Western countries that having a highly skilled workforce is crucial to innovation and national competitiveness. Ensuring the employment of the most highly educated members of a country's population is integral to helping achieve such economic outcomes. Therefore, the objective of this study is to identify the major factors that account for the initial full-time employment of Australian-trained PhD graduates. It draws on a national survey conducted in 2011 (n= 2761) and 2012 (n= 3181) of PhD graduates in Australia across all major disciplines four to six months after conferral of their degree. The findings reveal that previous work experience; attendance at a research-intensive university; completing one's degree off campus; part-time status; the use of certain job search strategies and access to research culture and networking opportunities; as well as certain demographic characteristics influence initial post-graduation job attainment. Implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Indigenous tourism has become an important, albeit niche, part of Australia's tourism industry, supported by Federal, State and Territory governments seeking to leverage tourism as an economic o p p o rtu n ity for indigenous peoples while concomitantly providing a 'product' point of difference for the country. While there have been a number of demand driven studies of indigenous tourism, with few exceptions, little attention has been given to supply side capacity and in particular, the nature, scope and development of indigenous tourism businesses. Indeed, little is known about the factors that drive or inhibit the development of these businesses. Therefore in-depth interviews were undertaken with seven indigenous tourism business operators from Queensland, Australia with the goal to explore indigenous tourism operators' perceptions of what constitutes drivers and inhibitors of their business. The main drivers of indigenous toui ism businesses were found to include training and knowledge, product development and funding. Identifying and understanding these factors will assist business operators to effectively prioritize them and in turn, will be better equip indigenous tourism businesses to develop and operate in an increasingly global and competitive industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Government's Financial System Inquiry is due to release an Interim Report in July. This short article briefly reviews the 270 public submissions it has received so far and offers some observations on their content and the process to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization, uncertain domestic markets and increasing competition are encouraging construction firms to internationalize. Although expatriates are commonly used by many construction companies to establish and manage overseas operations, there has been little research into the challenges of managing these people. Through case studies of five Australian construction firms and semi-structured interviews with 10 human resource managers and 36 expatriates, the question of how construction firms select, deploy, develop and support expatriate managers on overseas projects is explored. The results show that firms tend to adopt a highly pragmatic approach to expatriate recruitment and see the process as a logistical rather than a developmental challenge. Selection processes are often reactive, ad hoc and intuitive and based more on technical knowledge than softer behavioural skills and knowledge. Preparation for expatriate assignments is often outsourced, many expatriates feel unsupported while overseas, repatriation is poorly managed and overseas assignments are often seen as a barrier to career progression rather than an investment. These findings are at odds with contemporary research in international human resource management and are important because a major determinant of international project performance is effective human resource management. The findings also contribute to the design of better expatriate human resource management systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on priority disputes that arise between a supplier of inventory and a lender who supplies working capital to the debtor. It analyzes the challenges that must be addressed when designing the priority rules determining priority competitions in the market. It explains the priority rules in markets of the United States, Australia and Canada.

From the 1890s the sale of Australian wool was organised through a series of regionally based associations of wool selling brokers and wool buyers. They engaged in cartel-type behaviour by price fixing and exclusive dealing. We ask the question whether the wool selling brokers exploited their monopoly power to thefull in setting fees and charges paid by the growers and buyers. Association records provide data on the pricing structure and rationale for changes. We surmise that the existence of the cartel lifted prices above competitive levels. However, the pricing behaviour was moderated to a strong form of limit pricing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Senate Inquiry into 'milk price wars' in 2011, Senator Nick Xenophon accused the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) of being 'less effective than a toothless Chihuahua'. This follows the ACCC's lack of action regarding the reported abuse of market power of Australia's supermarket duopoly, where an extensive inquiry into the competitiveness of retail prices in 2008 found grocery retailing to be 'workably competitive' despite numerous claims to the contrary. How can farmers' submissions to the inquiry that cite market abuse be reconciled with the ACCC's finding that all is well in the food supply chain? Following an in-depth examination of 53 farmer submissions to the inquiry, we conclude that the findings of the ACCC are commensurate with the neoliberal economisation of the political sphere, where commercial entities 'legitimately' govern beyond their corporate boundaries, often using disciplinary measures that were once exclusive to governments. We argue that such clear structural inequalities between farmers and major corporations is reason to re-regulate markets and reinsert a stronger role for government to 'level the playing field'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing policy focus in Australian higher education on quantitative research performance assessment. However, most of the analysis has addressed aggregate performance at the institutional level, an approach inconsistent with recent policy emphasis on diversity among universities and one that ignores performance variations across disciplines. Using averaged and all available data for 2000-2004, cluster analysis is used to classify Australian Commerce Faculties into groups that exhibit similar research performance, measured by publication, PhD completion and secured competitive research grant funding. We also use factor analysis to generate full-multidimensional rankings within the resulting two or three clusters. It is found that in terms of total research output, with the exception of Adelaide all the Group of 8 (Go8) members plus University of Technology, Sydney and Griffith always belong to 'Clusters A'. However, when research performance is expressed in per academic staff terms, an additional 11 universities join this same cluster. Our results additionally show that eight Australian faculties of Commerce not only possess low total research output but their per capita performance is also poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By putting the vocabulary of aspiration in the mouths of criminals, and by situating them in the suburbs, Underbelly suggests that ruthless, murderous competition may not be incompatible with the Australian Dream. Exposing a generation's denial of the criminal elements behind ecstasy's fetishized status, it problematizes celebratory accounts of club culture, and suggests dark externalities for the 'night-time economy' of our inner cities. As well as connecting country, suburb and city in repressed criminality, by virtue of its casting choices at the very least, the series blurs the lines between ordinariness, celebrity and infamy. It is in these unresolved tensions that Underbelly constitutes a televisual history of Australia's present that countervails the official pieties of the ordinary that characterized the Howard years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian governments in recent years have invested substantially in innovation and research commercialisation with the aim of enhancing international economic competitiveness, making research findings more readily available to research users, and supporting economic and social development. Although there have been a number of evaluations of Australia's research commercialisation, judgements about the performance of universities are somewhat contradictory and to date there has been little effort to take account of the views of key staff directly involved in research commercialisation processes. Using data from two separate national surveys, this article reports on the perceptions of technology transfer specialists and science and technology academics who hold industry research funding about both the success of university efforts and the effectiveness of government programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the key strength of the competition state as an explanatory model of the motivations behind state transformation is its acknowledgement of the role of 'non-rational' factors, specifically, the roles of discourse and path-dependence, in shaping state responses to globalisation. The empirical case of state engagement in policy consultancy within the Australian context is explored as one expression of this 'transformationalist' response to the imperatives of globalisation. The findings of this case study suggest that the competition state model attributes a greater degree of strategy and reflexivity on the part of state actors, than is borne out in practice. This is because the competition state model does not account for the role played by 'competitiveness', both as a discourse and as an institutionally-embedded political commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electricity generation contributes some 35 per cent of Australia's total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. So far, these emissions have not been taken into account when generation firms bid their availability into the National Electricity Market. Given the increasing emphasis on GHG emissions, change is required through the use of appropriate generation technologies and/or emissions trading or abatement. An Australian Emissions Trading Scheme is likely to start in 2010. Thus, the electricity generation sector will need to move from what has been an essentially private (i.e. production) cost structure to a social cost approach. This article focuses on appropriate technological choices (e.g. 'cleaner coal', gas, hydro, renewables and nuclear) in electricity generation that would help reduce the sector's GHG emissions. It suggests that: strategies based on appropriate technology selection can give a generation firm a competitive edge through time under market rules in the face of increasing environmental costs; with appropriate technological choices (and generation plant mix), a social cost-credit approach to electricity generation may ultimately lead to electricity costs that are not as markedly different from current private costs as the simple imposition of a carbon cost per tonne on the existing system would suggest; and while nuclear power may be a viable way of containing GHGs in electricity generation, this option remains controversial when social costs such as accidents and the handling of nuclear waste are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the benchmark for the building industry from the 1920s to the early 1970s in North America and Australia. During the 1930s and 1940s, the editors of Fortune ran a series of articles on the subject of the building industry, publishing an early collection as a book and a later group as a special issue in 1946. The following year they summarized their point of view in a catchphrase that caught the temper of the time. House building, they argued, was incidentally corrupt and inherently inefficient. In 1947 the building industry contained innumerable businesses. It was ruthlessly competitive. It consisted of all sorts of enterprises, of all sizes, operating methods and degrees of vertical integration. During the 1920s the achievements of the auto industry caught the popular imagination. The assembly-line production of cars raised productivity and reinforced a virtuous circle of declining costs, growing demand, larger production runs and further improvements in productivity. By the mid-1920s this method had become an ideal and was viewed as the benchmark against which house building was to be judged. Through the 1960s, innumerable discussions made this comparison explicit and in others it was an implied point of reference. This way of thinking has persisted, but from the 1970s has been called into question, first by the expansion of flexible methods in the mass production industries and then by an academic literature that has tried to tease out the logic of these developments.

Examines how the emergence of neo-liberalism in rural policy has affected the Central Wheatbelt of Western Australia. Overview of the foundations and spatial dimensions of neo-liberalism; Increase focus on competition and entrepreneurialism in regional development; Impact of government policies on the spatial pattern of economic planning.

Contemporary public sector reforms in Australia have been dominated by efficiency, productivity and contestability considerations captured in the National Competition Policy (NCP). Both in the reform process in general and in the NCP processes in particular, the lack of priority attributed to non-economic concerns such as co-ordination, equity, representation, political accountability, consultation and distributive outcomes has been a serious omission. The idea of public interest, once central to democratic public administration, has re-emerged to challenge the perceived excesses of economic rationalism as the unifying idea of reform. In this article it is argued that substantive situational manifestations of public interest can be used to complement rather than undermine the efficiency, productivity and contestability objectives of public sector reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The food manufacturing industry in Australia reflects a very competitive marketplace, one in which sales promotion is extensively used. Some would argue that this activity is actually a prerequisite to doing business-just because it is such a competitive environment. Although much is understood about the purpose of promotional activity, less is known about what in reality occurs at an aggregate level, and what the potential implications of promotional behaviour may be in years to come. Indeed, a concern over the potential impact of the overuse of price-based promotions saw the development of a review of marketing practice in the food manufacturing industry. One hundred and fifty-eight senior managers responsible for promotional budgets were surveyed to identify their behaviour and beliefs about sales promotion. Interestingly, after examining their claimed objectives, actual techniques and the measurement tools utilized, a number of discrepancies became evident. Managers frequently use a range of techniques, most commonly product sampling, point of purchase displays, free product and cut prices, with the key objectives of attracting new customers, improving brand awareness and stimulating sales. The techniques and objectives employed supported the claimed role of sales promotion as a tool to enhance brand/market position, although priced-based promotions, which are more associated with competitive retaliation, were also commonly used. Despite claiming to be conscious of the potential damage to brand equity if price-based promotions are used excessively, little research was employed to test this. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Australian supermarket industry has gone through a number of significant structural changes over the past forty years. Most of these changes have been driven by a series of radical innovations, which have dramatically changed the competitive positions of the retailers. At each phase there has usually been one major supermarket chain that has taken the initiative and used innovation as the key driver to secure a competitive advantage. It has been the interplay between innovation and strategy that has shaped the supermarket industry. This interplay explains the past, but equally provides knowledge and insight for those retailers who wish to dominate the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]