Business

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 58
  • (2010) Karbouris, Michael
    Thesis

  • (2010) Wilson, Concepción S.; Kennan, Mary Anne; Willard, Patricia; Boell, Sebastian K
    Journal Article
    This paper investigates the academization of library and information science (LIS)educators in Australia from 1959 to 2008. Extensive data document the distribution of these academics in Australian higher education institutions over fifty years: from a slow beginning in the 1960s, to rapid growth in the 1970s, relative stability in the 1980s, and a persistent decline from the 1990s. Results of other characteristics of Australian LIS educators over the fifty-year period are presented including: previous positions held before entering academia, what and where academic qualifications were obtained, academic positions/ranks by gender, mobility within Australian higher education institutions, and years spent as Australian LIS educators. Although there has been a steady decline in the number of Australian LIS educators since the 1990s, the level of academic qualifications and percentage with doctorates have risen, thus conforming to a major requirement of academia; however, the relative decline in junior academic positions is a worrying trend. The analysis of changed characteristics over time helps define who Australian LIS academics are, and additionally provides data that contributes to LIS academic workforce planning.

  • (2010) Boell, Sebastian K; Cecez-Kecmanovic, Dubravka
    Journal Article
    Conducting a literature review is a vital part of any research. Library and information science (LIS) professionals often play a central role in supporting academics in their efforts to locate relevant publications and in teaching novice researchers skills associated with literature reviews. This paper examines literature review processes with the aim to contribute to better understanding of their complexity and uncertainty and to propose a new approach to literature reviews that is capable of dealing with such complexity and uncertainty.

  • (2010) Boell, Sebastian K; Cecez-Kecmanovic, Dubravka
    Conference Paper
    This paper investigates the concept of information. It follows different approaches for defining information before discussing a knowledge-in-action view on information as part of sociomaterial practices. Drawing from Stamper’s (1991) extended semiological framework the paper proposes its reinterpretation to study information as a sociomaterial phenomenon. The paper further argues that rather than focusing on finding general definitions for information, intellectual efforts should concentrate on characteristics and attributes of information. Combining earlier efforts in this direction different attributes of information such as novelty, time dependence, or goal relevance. are introduced. Locating those attributes within Stamper's extended semiological framework helps to identify different aspects of sociomaterial context affecting information. Understanding and paying attention to information through its attributes can, therefore, provide guidance for researching information and possibly help advancing the development of information systems.

  • (2010) Kennan, Mary Anne; Cecez-Kecmanovic, Dubravka; Underwood, Jim
    Journal Article
    This article explores some of the issues associated with giving non-human actors a voice of their own in actor-network theory based research. What issues do we face in doing so? Does doing so increase understanding of the issue to hand, bring to life and make more accessible and interesting the stories of these actors? Or does this anthropomorphism detract from the issues at hand? We discuss these broader issues and then present some findings from an ANT field study which investigated the implementation of institutional repositories and their relations with the spread of open access to scholarly publishing. We experiment with allowing some of the non-human actors to speak for themselves. We conclude with a discussion which opens the debate: does giving voice to non-human actors bring them to life and make them better understood as intimately entangled with each other and human actors in the sociomaterial practices of the everyday? And what are the challenges in doing so?

  • (2010) Robinson, Linda Jane
    Thesis
    Simultaneous achievement of both sales and service performance goals by retail service teams is of critical importance to retail organisations. The success of retail organisations as a whole is essentially reliant on the combined sales and service efforts of frontline service teams where issues of performance management and goal setting central to achieving high performing teams. Yet, with much of the current literature centred on the processes and outcomes of teamwork and team behaviours, little attention has been paid to the psychological foundations of teams that guide team performance. Thus, this study identifies team-level perceptions of ability (team efficacy) and motivation (team goal orientation) as critical components of retail service team performance and three key questions are addressed: (i) what are the antecedents of team efficacy?; (ii) what is the effect of team goal orientation on sales and service performance?; and (iii) how do the constructs of team efficacy and team goal orientation interact to influence the sales and service performance of retail service teams? This research reviews the retail service team context, social cognitive theory and goal theory to construct a conceptual model of retail service team performance. The model was then tested using data gathered from 13 in-depth interviews and the partial least square analysis of a quantitative survey of 319 retail service teams. Results indicate that integrating performance awareness tasks and promoting team connectedness develops strong efficacy beliefs that positively influence sales and service performance. In addition, the results support the argument for a three-dimensional model of team goal orientation through identifying differing effects of the two performance dimensions on team performance. Theoretically, the most significant contribution of this research is that it offers insight into team-level concepts only previously explored at the individual level of analysis, with the study presenting empirical evidence of team efficacy and team goal orientation as drivers of team performance in the retail services context. Managerial contributions of the research include guidance on how to direct resources towards improving team efficacy and managing team goal orientation to most effectively improve both the sales and service performance of retail service teams.

  • (2010) Mun, Xiuyan
    Thesis
    This dissertation is primarily concerned with mixture models for high-dimensional financial data. New flexible mixture models are introduced and implemented with fast and effective optimization routines. The stochastic gradient approach uses random gradients to update the parameters of the mixture model improving the chance of the iterates converging to a higher mode. Chapter 2 provides the details of the stochastic gradient optimization routines used. Chapter 3 suggests two new multivariate density estimators, namely the marginal adaptation mixture of normals and the mixture of normals copula. Their performances are compared with a few recent popular models such as the skewed-t model. Chapter 4 discusses covariance estimation for high dimensional data. The aim of the chapter is to improve the estimation of covariance matrices by using mixture shrinkage priors. This chapter also shows how to apply the priors to the simultaneous estimation of several covariance matrices such as in the case of mixture of normals models. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the estimation or fitting of models to time series data, when the models may experience a small number of structural breaks. Chapter 5 looks at univariate data and Chapter 6 considers multivariate data. In particular, Chapter 6 shows how to estimate a Gaussian vector autoregressive model subject to occasional structural breaks using a mixture of experts framework.

  • (2010) Vidgen, Richard
    Working Paper
    High performing workplaces have variously been defined as ‘high-commitment management’ (Arthur 1994; Pfeffer 1998), ‘high performance work systems’ (e.g. Becker & Huselid 1998) and ‘high-involvement management’ (Guthrie 2001). The ICT review presented here forms part of a larger programme of research investigating high performance workplaces that incorporates a broad set of practices including leadership, culture, industrial relations, HRM practices, organizational structure, and management controls. ICT management and ICT deployment and use are therefore but one part of a complex arrangement of resources and practices through which firms innovate and create value.

  • (2010) Cole, Fletcher; Cox, Shane; Frances, Maude
    Conference Paper
    An opportunity to explore the topic of data usages is presented by the collaborative research being undertaken by a federation of applied science research units affiliated with a number of different Australian research organizations (the Cluster). The research aims to investigate how members of the collaboration understand and work with data in their day-to-day practice.