With a rapidly evolving business environment due to the process of intense techonological innovations, a new and competitive paradigm in which intellectual capital has become a critical driver of business performance has emerged. This paper conducts an initial characterisation of the...

Adequate, appropriate training of quality managers is essential to the development and implementation of effective quality management systems. This study reports on a survey of 235 Australian quality managers to determine their perceptions of their training and development needs, the extent to...

Governments in Australia increasingly rely on private sector service providers to improve efficiency in public service delivery and have entered into a range of business partnerships with those providers. This article considers the effectiveness of public-private partnership models used in...

A nation that pursues a knowledge-based approach to economic growth might be expected to view its skill base as an important component of this strategy and the rate of accumulation of trade skills as an important part of the skill formation story. Australia, in common with many other countries,...

This article reports on the perceived benefits associated with the adoption of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology by the wine industry. RFID is an emerging innovation that potentially enables the tracking of all items across the supply chain. Wine production is an important global...

Productive Diversity is a government policy that aims to increase Australian businessaccess to, and success in, trading with increasingly diverse domestic and export marketsthrough the productive capacity of Australia's diverse labour market. Since 1992 whenthe policy was formally launched,...

Strategic operations planning can assist companies to improve their competitiveness but the process of planning for manufacturing operations and supply chains requires further improvement. This paper describes our development of a method of strategic operations planning called Strategic...

The interaction between conflict management and ethics in organisations occurs within a complex web of power relations, organisational structure and belief systems. Added to this have been the significant reforms organisations have undertaken in order to remain competitive in increasingly...

Purpose of this paper: To illuminate the managerial significance of life patterns and to assist development of qualitative methodology. Design/methodology/approach: The theoretical proposition of a Manager Quad (MQ) is empirically examined. Interview data from 16 managers are analysed using an...

This paper starts from the premise advanced by Jurgens (2003) that there are discernible national models of production rather than a convergence of production systems. This paper examines the nature and impact of Japanese idea of continuous improvement on 14 automobile components companies in...