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This article compares developments in industrial relations in three Asian socialist-transition countries: China, Vietnam and Laos. Previous comparative studies of China and Vietnam have identified major commonalities between these two labour regimes both before and after the economic reforms undertaken since the 1980s. Some studies have also identified key differences between the two, to the extent that it is said that the two labour regimes are ‘on the road to divergence’. Others have suggested that the reform paths undertaken by China and Vietnam are fundamentally similar. This article argues that Laos shares many of the similarities of China and Vietnam, but that to the extent that China and Vietnam are taking different paths Laos is tending to follow the more conservative Chinese path with some unique characteristics of its own.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce and critique frameworks of communication in Australian bushfire management. Achieving bushfire preparedness is a complex process that centres on meaningful communication and relationships between fire emergency agencies and the residents at risk. However, the practice of bushfire communication in Australia might better be described as bricoleur-like, applying and adapting whatever is at hand from the broader media panoply, rather than involving a more deliberative and comprehensively planned approach to preparedness. Design/methodology/approach This paper builds on different frameworks of communication, beyond the traditional transmission and power models, to establish alternative ways in which communication may take place in bushfire preparedness. It is built from coupling theoretical and social science approaches to communication and through interviews and fieldwork in four states across Australia. The aggregation of these data became the basis to examine how communication was taking place among these constituents. Findings Communication as transmission still remains dominant from the perspective where expertise is marshaled among fire agency specialists and disseminated to the public. Communication as power highlights that the persistence of the transmission process can reinforce power dynamics, diminishing empowerment, participation and capacity-building for change by the community. Recognising the importance for understanding audiences, communication as marketing pays closer attention to attitudes to influence behaviour. Finally, communication as community elaborates the conversational aspects of knowledge flow, through social networks, bringing a particular focus to bear on the greater need for community agency. Originality/value The authors put forward these frameworks as ways to analyse, critique and propose different ways that communication can, and does, occur, resulting in different kinds of interaction and impact. The authors argue that an awareness of such frameworks is significant in assisting the communities and fire authorities in bushfire preparedness.

Communication about wildfire preparedness and wildfire safety is increasingly being seen by many fire agencies in Australia as an important part of day-to-day operations. This communication role is often shared between the main wildfire-fighting service in any given state and other relevant government departments. In this chapter we consider the changing nature of wildfire preparedness and safety communication, focussing in particular on the potential of a socially engaged approach to communication and the importance of recognising and engaging a variety of audiences. Insights from research in social marketing and public communications are used to analyse data collected from interviews with communication professionals working in the area of wildfire safety, in both fire agencies and government departments, across four different Australian States.

In 1956 the first edition of Samuel Noah Kramer’s bestselling History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-nine Firsts in Recorded History appeared, a good place if any to look for the origins of business ethics. The earliest written records acknowledged by historians come from the ruins of ancient Sumer, predating the earliest Chinese and European texts by many centuries.

The late Elmer Antonsen (1929-2008) was one of the few runic scholars ever to attempt to explain his interpretational method formally, and is most important (and influential) for the overtly neo-Bloomfieldian approach that he brought to his analyses of the older runic corpus. An expert in historical Germanic phonology, Antonsen had a manner of assessing early Nordic texts that may be epitomized in his treatment of the inscription on a whetstone from Straum i Hitra, Sor-Trondelag, Norway, which is usually referred to in the runological literature by the Bokmal spelling Strom. The Straum inscription can be dated only broadly to between the second and seventh centuries AD, and is one of the few early runic finds to which Antonsen devoted an entire paper (i.e., Antonsen 1975b; cf. Antonsen 1975a, no. 45; 1986, 335-6; 2002, 155-61). Antonsen interpreted the early runic text on the Straum whetstone, however, without considering the broader archaeological and epigraphic typology of the piece or the metaphorical association of whetstones with authority (later delineated by Stephen Mitchell in Scandinavian Studies in 1985). These suggest that the Straum inscription represents a martial expression, not the record of an agricultural work song that it has long been taken to be.

The bronze figurine from Frøyhov bears a short and difficult early runic text which seems to represent some sort of name. First published in the late nineteenth century, the inscription may most regularly be interpreted as Inga(n)da, a form which features the early Germanic onomastic element *ing‑. Germanic *ingseems best to be etymologised as a reflex of IE *h2neḱ-/h2nenḱ- ‘reach, attain’ and the Frøyhov form taken either to be a maker’s inscription or a theonym, the figurine itself clearly representing a religious expression.

The inscription on the Vimose buckle has been the subject of a long and diverse historiography. Taken in the light of early runic epigraphic typology, however, the inscription appears to preserve an early example of Germanic ritual language. Rather than a product of Romanisation (as archaeologists have assumed for similar votive bog finds), the inscription on the Vimose buckle is better understood in terms of the linguistic anthropology of dedicatory epigraphs. The Vimose text shows clear signs of being a thoroughly native expression, a linguistically archaic inscription which alliterates, features pro-drop, verb-final word order and athematic verbal inflection.

The three Old English terms for “giant”—þyrs, eoten and ent—all have difficult etymologies. Traditionally linked with eat, Scandinavian cognates of eoten suggest that the term formerly inflected as a nasal stem. Þyrs, on the other hand, has an unambiguous etymological connection with “wounding” (comparable to that represented by þorn), while ent seems best explained as reflecting a loanword.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to consider the way in which agency theory has crowded out other approaches to understanding the governance of modern businesses. The paper rescues the meaning and context which informed the American corporate governance reform movement originally and demonstrates how the economically predicated agency approach became dominant in academic considerations of corporate governance.Design/methodology/approach– Both primary and secondary sources were considered in a Foucauldian history of ideas approach.Findings– Other approaches to corporate governance have been pushed out of the mainstream of corporate governance discourse by an economic model which excludes many of the key issues which informed the notion originally.Practical implications– Dominant academic attitudes to corporate governance have occluded other ways in which the governance of corporations can be understood.Originality/value– Previous accounts of corporate governance have ignored the alternative approaches represented before agency theory became dominant.

Historiographically, the main tradition of interpreting the Old Germanic bracteates has been that developed by Karl Hauck in the late 1960s. Much contested by critics, Hauck's bracteate iconology has also influenced the way the runic legends that appear on the golden amulets are understood in much continental scholarship. This paper presents an alternative interpretation of such testimonies of early Nordic language based on a less-ambitious approach to the decoration and associated epigraphy of the controversial migrationperiod finds, grounding its analysis in a more explicitly theorized linguistic and semiotic hermeneutics.

Considerable emphasis has often been placed on cultural factors in explaining the peculiarities of East Asian employment relations. By comparison with workplace relations in the West, East Asian employment relations are characterized by low rates of unionization and collective bargaining, and a relative absence of industrial disputation. A critique of notions of culture found in employment-relations scholarship is presented which draws on long-established conceptualizations developed in historical, post-colonial, anthropological and cultural studies. Most of the peculiarities of East Asian workplace relations can be adequately accounted for through manners other than invoking a grand theory of culture.

The formulaic expression Þorr vigi appears on four rune­stone memorials spread across Denmark and southern Sweden, and another seven inscribed rune­stones from the same area similarly feature hammers - that is, symbols of Þorr. Amulets in the shape of small hammers are also well enough known from other Viking Age contexts, and Þorr's name similarly appears in several runic charms, at least one of which is clearly an apotropaic expression. Þorr and his hammer are also associated with blessings in Gylfaginning and Þrymskviða. But old Norse vig ja has traditionally been assumed to represent a rather different notion of 'consecration' than the manner in which it seems to be reflected in such contexts; the inherited Germanic root *weih­/ weig­ is related to Latin victima 'victim, sacrifice' - its primary meaning is not 'bless'. Although used in later Christian contexts in a similar sense to consecratio, a closer investigation of the old Germanic semantics of blessing and hallowing suggests a rather different understanding of vig ja applied when this action was associated with Þorr and his iconic hammer.

The reference to malrunar or 'speech runes' in Sigrdrifumal suggests a performative aspect to the practice of early Germanic law that transcends the swearing of oaths and the reciting of law codes attested to by literary sources. Indeed early runic texts often feature alliteration, much as do the old Scandinavian legal tracts. This parallelism suggests that early Northern legal language was not stylised merely for mnemonic purposes, but instead reflects an oral-performative praxis similar to that which appears to be reflected in early Irish sources. But the relationship between performance and memorisation has not always been demarcated clearly in recent scholarship. Oralperformative theory is often called upon today without reference to explanations of social action. The privileging of generative performance over pre-literate memory culture seems to represent only an awkward victory of the medievalistic 'anthropological turn' over other key expressions of socio-cultural theory.

In 2009 an early runic inscription was discovered on a triangular projecting area that through subsequent excavation was confirmed to be at the lower part of a funerary monument. Yet such find reports and commentaries as have appeared to date have tended not to assess the Hogganvik inscription prin­ci­pally as a commemorative expression, as an example of a broader memo­rial epigraphic tradition. Rather than as an epigraphic record of the history of emotions, suggestions of magic appear in the main treatments of the remark­able find. After all, lexically irregular sequences found on other early runic memo­rials are often taken as signs they feature a magical aspect. Taking the Hoggan­vik inscription in its broader linguistic and archaeological context, how­ever, suggests a rather different understanding is to be assumed for the early Norwegian memorial. Instead of reflecting magic, the less clear sections of the Hoggan­vik text can more regularly be understood as abbreviated or other­wise obscurely expressed sequences.

A survey of the early Germanic etymological semantics of 'giving' and 'making' is presented in light of the recent reaffirmation that early Nordic *taujan is etymologically related to Old Norse tœja 'grant, bestow, help, assist'. Contextualising the early runic fabricatory and dedicatory inscriptions in terms of sociological, textual and anthropological theory, a new interpretation of early runic pragmatics is developed. The new approach to early runic performance proferred seeks to explain the broader function (and context) of epigraphic production, not merely the most logical reading of individual texts. The early runic pragmatics of 'giving' and 'making' are employed as an analytical frame in which to analyse the socio-cultural as well as linguistic meaning of a series of both functionally and textually related, often significantly stylised Iron Age epigraphs found on a range of early Scandinavian media: runestones, moor finds and migration-era amulets.

No better demonstration of the general opacity of Gaulish exists than the largely undeciphered eleven-line-long inscription on a tile from the Roman-era settlement at Chateaubleau (Seine-et-Marne). This site, perhaps to be identified with the town Riobe from the Peutinger map,1 has been the source of several finds of inscriptions on tiles, but none is so long and difficult as that which was discovered in 1997 in the remains of an enclosed well (F25) in Zone 6 of the Grands Jardins section of the Chateaubleau excavations.

Runology can be a strange business. Recent years have seen the corpus of runic texts expand in a manner unparalleled in any other branch of Old Germanic studies. Yet this growth in evidential terms seems almost perverse—it stands in quite a reverse manner to the impact that the discipline has had on other areas of antiquarian and medievalistic enquiry. It is hard to point to a field (or subdiscipline) where the findings of runologists have had much theoretical or methodological (let alone empirical) influence. Runology remains a rather queer subsection of Germanic antiquarian studies, more a backwater than anything else. Indeed, German runology appears especially to suffer from an atheoretical malaise, one which seems comparable to that noted by critics of German archaeology.1 The Faustian bargain of the German runologists of the 1930s, however, did not lead to a reassessment and recasting of the methods which underpinned their discipline in the postwar years.2 If anything, postwar runology seemed substantially unreformed in Germany. It is hard otherwise to explain the works of a Karl Schneider,3 the man taken by Ray Page as the paragon of what he dismisses as “imaginative” runology.4 Heinz Klingenberg5 was similarly excoriated as Elmer Antonsen’s (magical) straw man in his Runes and Germanic Linguistics6—and similar criticisms might be levelled at other postwar scholars of a comparable Germanophile bent. Yet the “skeptical” reaction against the romantic runology of the 1960s and 1970s represented by the works of Klingenberg and Schneider has hardly seen the discipline advance other than in terms of a renewed focus on empiricism: it is as if Leopold von Ranke has become a key theorist of

… da ward in Norden neuer Mensch gebohren Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit In 1943 a small collection of tales of the Vikings was published as part of the Vol...

In November of 1935, a uniquely puzzling inscription in Etruscoid characters was discovered among the remains of an Iron Age necropolis west of the church at Castaneda in Canton Grisons (Graubünden, Grigione). The inscription is engraved along the spout of a bronze oinochoe (Schnabelkanne), and apart from a solitary chi inscribed on another find from this necropolis, is the only evidence of alphabetism to have been unearthed from the site. Castaneda is a hamlet strategically perched some 780 meters above sea level along the northern slope of the Calanca Valley (Val Calanca) as it opens onto the Misox Valley (Val Mesolcina), an age-old trade and communication artery that leads northward to the Lesser Saint Bernard Pass. The necropolis is, therefore, situated about 11 kilometers (seven miles) northeast of Bellinzona, which lies just across the cantonal border to Ticino (Tessin); see Map 1 and Nagy (2000a, 2000b) for a site history.

This article investigates the concept of Germanentum (Germanicness) in nazi Germany in light of the use of a similar concept, romanità (Romanness) in fascist Italy, and of Hitler’s response to German antiquity enthusiasts. Rather than the dismissive attitude often cited by historians, this article shows that Hitler accepted many aspects of the cult of Germanicness, but in keeping with his early wish to distance the Nazi Party from some sections of the old radical right, as well as his obvious philhellenism, chose to see Germanicness as part of a broader Aryan antiquarian model which had been developed by an antiquarian Grub Street, a model that embraced Graeco-Roman antiquity as part of German culture and history.

Industrial democracy and corporate governance are intertwined discourses. In present-day use, however, the two expressions seem to represent as different perspectives as two related discursive traditions could become. At a time when calls have emerged for the intersection of the two narratives to be revisited, how the separation of these two related discourses occurred historically and what that separation has entailed seems of particular importance. The received corporate governance approach has become so dominant that it appears to have assumed the status of an ideology - an established way of thinking about the governance of corporations that is largely just assumed (rather than argued) in much financial and legal discourse. Seeking to understand why mainstream corporate governance scholarship has failed to engage with the historically key issue of industrial democratisation is the main purpose of this paper.

At the time of the founding of the industry superannuation funds, the Australian retirement-savings market was dominated by insurance mutuals. In the early 1980s, less than half the workforce was covered by occupational superannuation and unions saw the insurance mutuals, created in the nineteenth century, as part of the problem in this widespread market failure. When establishing industry-wide schemes, union leaders largely eschewed the language associated with the "old" mutuals that had become key pillars of the established financial sector. In framing their appeal to members, the trustees and managers of the industry funds appealed instead to new expressions, such as "all profit to members." Industry funds also developed a model of 50/50 employer/employee trusteeship or "equal representation" not as an ideological prescription, but as a pragmatic way of dealing with opposition to the schemes by employers. The trustees and managers of industry superannuation funds contrasted rather than associated themselves with the "old mutuals" which, at the time, were not seen as reflecting the unions' ideal of an industrial partnership. However, with the decline and demutualisation of the largest old insurance mutuals in the 1990s, the industry funds began to appropriate the language of mutualism. This appropriation took place within the context of a perceived need to maintain a collective identity and purpose in the changing superannuation marketplace.

The etymology of the term rune is assessed in light of recent developments in comparative linguistic study. Several proposals for the etymology of rune are not consistent with recent comparative understandings. Rather than magico-religious expressions, runes are better seen primarily as instruments of communication. The term rune has clear cognates in Celtic and Baltic which indicate an underlying meaning .

(1999). The Celts and the Origin of the Runic Script. Studia Neophilologica: Vol. 71, No. 2, pp. 143-155.

This article discusses the contributions of American industrial engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth to management thought. It suggests that the work of the Gilbreths represents a very modernist form of rationalization, of the measuring, categorization, recording, and governing of work, work methods, employees, and processes. The motion studies and uses of psychology stressed by the Gilbreths would seem to represent some of the most pronounced forms of governance of production in the history of management thought. Frederick Taylor’s mental revolution entailed recourse to a ‘science’ of management as the ultimate arbiter of work processes. The committing of processes to writing and film would be Taylorized even more completely under Frank Gilbreth’s motion study, while workers would be enrolled more fully into the new labour process by the equally coercive and ideologized Taylorization of their minds in Lillian Gilbreth’s much more teacherly psychology of management.

This paper examines the influence of Indonesian national and military organisational culture on the adoption and implementation of the Safety Management System (SMS) that is predominantly based on Western concepts of management. The influence of national culture on a military organisational culture, the perception and behaviour of the military members, and how management handles safety issues in the organisation were investigated and identified. To discover and understand the basic assumptions of a culture that drive people to a particular behaviour, a qualitative research design, encompassing multiple case studies, was adopted for this study. Analysis of the findings shows that the Indonesian military culture has been much influenced by its national culture. Moreover, the unique characteristics of the Indonesian national and military culture have significant influences on military SMS. Harmony, politeness, hierarchical systems, authoritarian structures, the military class system and the ‘can-do’ culture are some of the cultural factors that impede the promotion of safety culture as well as the implementation of the SMS within the Indonesian military organisation. In addition to those cultural factors, the lack of safety education and training has created an environment in which individual safety awareness is disregarded. The results of this study demonstrate that cultural factors are one of the crucial factors that must be integrated into the organisation’s system in order to achieve safety.