Guest Editor Introduction: Fakes, Copies and Originals

Ashly Pinnington is Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, where he has taught since 1999. He has worked for over fifteen years as a researcher and lecturer in business and management, employed by Henley Management College, London Business School, Coventry University and the University of Exeter. His first degree was a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from the University of Kent. He has written three books published by McGraw-Hill and Oxford University Press, and a number of chapters in books and articles in academic journals such as Organization Studies and Human Relations. His Charles Handy: The Exemplary Guru appeared in this journal Volume 1 Number 3. His areas of research interest include: strategy as practice, internationalisation of professional firms, transformational leadership and change, technologies for corporate training, and quality management.

Ashly Pinnington and George Lafferty

The Bush Myth: Internationalisation, Tradition and Community in the Australian Context

The Australian bush has many meanings. Notably, the bush is an environment of both nostalgic loss and regeneration, and is a contradictory place capable of signifying homeliness and otherness. This article examines the durability of the myth of the Australian bush as a locale for the internationalisation of capital, employment and environmental management and as a resource for traditional concepts of Australian identity.

Ashly Pinnington

Ashly Pinnington is Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, where he has taught since 1999. He has worked for over fifteen years as a researcher and lecturer in business and management, employed by Henley Management College, London Business School, Coventry University and the University of Exeter. His first degree was a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from the University of Kent. He has written three books published by McGraw-Hill and Oxford University Press, and a number of chapters in books and articles in academic journals such as Organization Studies and Human Relations. His Charles Handy: The Exemplary Guru appeared in this journal Volume 1 Number 3. His areas of research interest include: strategy as practice, internationalisation of professional firms, transformational leadership and change, technologies for corporate training, and quality management.

George Lafferty

George Lafferty is Professor of Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations at Victoria University of Wellington. He previously taught at Griffith University and the University of Queensland. He has published in various journals and books. His areas of research interest include workplace change, industrial relations, organisational restructuring, political theory and tourism policy.

André Spicer

The Philosophy of the Copy and the Art of Colonial Organisation

In this paper I work through an Antipodean phenomenon; the prevalence of copying or mimesis in processes of organising. Rejecting claims for a more authentically Antipodean way of organising, I argue that we need to properly understand the weight of the copy through philosophical inquiry into mimesis. I begin this inquiry with neo-institutional theoretical insights into mimesis. I then sketch out a short history of the emergence of the original and the copy. This Platonic distinction is then elaborated upon to open up the copy with reference to Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, Benjamin’s analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, and Taussig’s analysis of mimesis. I draw these together to argue that processes of copying are singular and in fact central to the continual coming into being of organisation

Andre Spicer

André Spicer was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand. He has studied at the University of Otago, and the University of Melbourne. Recently he has moved to the University of Warwick in England to lecture in Organisation Theory. His interests include globalisation, various practices of resistance, the philosophy of organisation and contemporary art.
 

Maree V Boyle and Amanda Roan

From Working Man’s Paradise to Women in Business: The Contribution of Australian Feminism to the Understanding of Women’s Economic Position within Australian Society

In this paper we discuss how Australian feminism has contributed to a better understanding of women’s economic position within Australian society. Through this analysis we seek to shed some light on the current implementation of the ‘women in business’ policy in Australia. We trace the development of this position from the early beginnings of unionism and wage centralisation through to the social change movements of the 1960s and 1970s. We then examine how the neo-liberal turn of the 1990s manifested itself in a move from a focus on numerical representation of women, through Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action policies and initiatives, to one that concentrated on an individualist approach to women in business. We conclude that feminism has had its most significant impact at the level of public policy. However, recent epistemological turns in Australian feminism appear to have resulted in less attention being paid to materialist concerns, and furthermore have not been able to resolve the sameness/difference divide that continues to haunt feminist philosophy.

Maree Boyle

Maree Boyle is a Senior Lecturer within the Griffith Business School, located in Brisbane, Australia. Her principal research interests include the gendering of organisations and business, emotions in organisational life, and critical perspectives on organisational change.

Amanda Roan

Amanda Roan is a lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. Her primary research interests are gender and employment, workplace training and skills development, industrial relations and training systems. She has published a number of journal articles in the areas of gender and training, industrial relations, organisational change, and women in management.

Lucas Skoufa
Industry Reform in Australia: Privatisation/Corporatisation of the Electricity Supply Industry

The neo-classical economics paradigm postulates a hypothetical model of perfect competition as the ideal environment for business success. Yet the model has great difficulty in apprehending the day-to-day operations of actual business organisations. This paper explores some of the apparent inadequacies of the neo-classical paradigm, drawing on business strategy theory to suggest a potentially more fruitful mode of analysis. It is argued that conventional business strategy theory not only can provide a better framework than neo-classical economics for explaining and informing public policy on utilities, but that it also can provide an additional dimension to critical management theory. The process of public sector ‘reform’ that gained momentum in the late 1970s was driven largely by neo-classical economic assumptions. While there has been a plethora of literature published on the need to ‘reform’ various public enterprises, there has been little analysis of the strategic behaviour of enterprises and industries that have been privatised or targeted for this change. Whereas neo-classical economics has been chiefly concerned with the performance of markets in the allocation and coordination of resources, business strategy is primarily about coordination and resource allocation within the firm. In contrast to neo-classical economics, business strategy theory is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating the social sciences: it is not applied microeconomics.

Lucas Skoufa

Lucas Skoufa is an Associate Lecturer in Strategic Management at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, where he has taught since 1999. Previous to that he worked as an engineer for ten years with the Royal Australian Navy and two years at a coal-fired power station in central Queensland. His first degree was a BE (Mechanical) from the Queensland University of Technology. Currently he is in the final stages of a PhD thesis, which looks at how and why generation companies behave strategically in electricity supply industries. Four case studies have been compiled in the thesis on the UK, Victorian, Queensland, and New South Wales electricity supply industries.

Elizabeth Prior Jonson and Chris Nyland
Paternalism and the Governance of Managers: The Australian Stock Exchange Approach to Improving Corporate Governance
 

Good corporate governance requires that managers promote shareholder interests but it cannot be assumed they will act in this manner. Though this is an observation most managers would acknowledge, many argue they should be free of external regulatory intervention because regulations designed to protect shareholders are necessarily a form of paternalism that take from shareholders decisions that are rightly theirs to make. We question this perspective by showing that regulations founded on paternalist principles are compatible with a liberal economy and social relations. We identify when a paternal approach to decision making is justified and add substance to our argument by responding to claims that the Principles of Good Governance1 promulgated by the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) are an unacceptable infringement on managers’ right to govern their enterprises because they are supposedly paternalist. We reject this argument and suggest that while the current ASX principles are not paternalistic there is a case for ensuring shareholder protection is informed by paternalist principles.

Elizabeth Prior Jonson BSc, BA, PhD (Sydney)

While much of her career has been spent in philosophy, since 1991 Elizabeth Prior Jonson has been continuously involved in teaching ethics and corporate governance within the Faculty of Business and Economics at Monash University. Her research interests centre on ethics and governance in both public and private sector institutions. She is the co-editor (with Gordon Clark) of Management Ethics: Theories, Cases and Practice, Harper Collins 1995 and Accountability and Corruption (Allen and Unwin 1997).

Chris Nyland BA, PhD (Sydney)

Chris Nyland’s primary field of teaching and research is in the field of International Business where his chief interests are trade policy, global business regulation and globalisation and the rights of labour. He has also published extensively in the field of history of ideas and particularly in the areas of management thought and the history of gender analysis. His most recent publication is Robert Dimand and Chris Nyland (eds) The Status of Women in the Classical Economic Thought (Edward Elgar 2004).

Jeremy Aitken

Interdependency Within the Business Corporation: The Three Musketeers or a Prisoner’s Dilemma?

What are the opportunities for the maximum happiness, greatest satisfaction, and fulfilment of all in the business organisation? What quality of life can we have at work?

I operate a training and management consultancy in Sydney, Australia. For twenty years, I have specialised in helping my corporate clients develop the strategies, skills, and behaviours necessary for effective leadership, teamwork, sales-work, negotiation, customer-service, and public speaking. My participants come from many different countries and backgrounds, from all roles and responsibilities within the corporation, and from virtually every industry. Many of my client organisations are household names, both in Australia and beyond. Based on the experience of listening to many participants speaking about their working lives over the years, anecdotally I have to conclude that many people do not feel fully ‘received’ by the corporations for whom they work.1 Instead, many complain of being badly led, under-utilised, demotivated, bored, and generally demoralised by aspects of life in the corporate world....

During 1998, I met and formed an association with a professional film director. Over several coffees and many informal discussions, we came up with the idea that perhaps a video of some kind might represent an opportunity to present my account to a wider corporate audience. We began work on what was to become the first draft of a video script in 1999. Since our financial resources were limited, we began to look around for potential investors and financial partners in this endeavour. Finally, having found a sympathetic investor and completed around twenty rewrites of the script, we released a seventeen-minute video entitled A Culture of Freedom in July 2001....

‘One for All and All for One’ or a Prisoner’s Dilemma?

In scripting A Culture of Freedom, we needed a way of expressing our contention that the potential exists in the group context to collectively serve individual self-interests more powerfully than that same number of people working independently. Either that was the position or we needed to show clearly how individual self-interest may be prejudiced when agents choose actions that do not consider the self-interest of others. In other words, that when agents make choices without any sense of community obligation to other coexisting agents in an organisation or community, choosing egoistically as it were, they actually adversely affect their own self-interest. If one, or both, of these contentions cannot be supported, then why establish an organisation in the first place? We would surely be better off to work as fully independent agents, coming together to trade goods and services only when necessary to do so. If cooperation serves no useful purpose pragmatically, and it does not usefully serve any individual to consider the self-interest of others in his/her choices, apart from reasons of social acceptance, then why bother with it at all?
 

The metaphor of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a device that illustrates how individual self-interest may exist in a collective context.3 A Culture of Freedom begins and ends with a dramatised version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma....

Jeremy Aitken

Jeremy Aitken is Director of the Australian-based management consultancy Tri-Learning Corporation Pty, and the Managing Director of the Culture Collective video production house. Over a twenty-year professional career as a management consultant and facilitator, Jeremy has worked with numerous organisations internationally. He is the author of various manuals and publications on subjects ranging across a number of subjects including leadership skills, customer service delivery, effective selling, negotiating, and corporate cultural evolution. He is known as an outstanding and challenging facilitator who gets excellent results.

Jeremy Aitken is the joint scriptwriter, co-producer, and presenter of A Culture of Freedom and A Culture of Freedom - the practitioner’s guide. He is the originator of the Culture of Freedom philosophy and concept.

A graduate of the University of New England (Australia), he holds a BA in Philosophy and Religion (2001) and and Honours degree in Philosophy (2003). He is also a certified full-time adult educator and trainer (Certificate IV Assessment and Workplace Training - BSZ40198).

Adrian Carr

Management as a Moral Art: Emerging from the Paradigm Debate

In recent years organisational and management discourse has been akin to a battle-ground. Open challenges to the foundations of these fields and competing truth claims have arisen from the plurality of interpretation that is possible from the variety of new paradigms that has emerged. This proliferation of paradigms seems to undermine the possibility of a single unambiguous voice to guide management practice. The variety of competing voices that has produced this discordant chorus is described. The work of Thomas Barr Greenfield offers a useful circuit breaker. What emerges is a discourse not anchored in rationality, as it has in the past, but anchored in values and a morally concerned scepticism.

Adrian Carr

Adrian Carr is an Associate Professor and the Principal Research Fellow in the School of Applied Social and Human Sciences at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Dr Carr is a member of a number of professional associations and editorial boards and is the author of over 200 refereed publications.