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Corporate strategies directed at gaining competitive advantage and satisfying customers′ needs always have human resource implications, and tactics such as job redesign, multi‐skilling, redeployment, training, paying for performance, layoffs and downsizing should be specifically directed at implementing the human resource strategies of organizations. Unfortunately, however, the strategic considerations which should accompany the use of these tactics are often absent. Highlights one of the particularly popular methods, namely downsizing. Addresses its strategic facets. Argues that the objective of downsizing should be to raise productivity per head and that this can be achieved only by proper strategic decision making, planning and implementation, and the subsequent evaluation of the downsizing effort.

This paper proposes that the development of a layoff policy gives an organization a competitive advantage over organizations without such a policy. How an organization communicates concern to employees is often through procedures and policies developed by the human resource department. Survey questionnaires were mailed to 1,400 vice presidents of human resources that held membership and whose names were provided through the Society of Human Resource Management. Over half of the organizations surveyed (57%) did not have layoff policies. By type of organization, healthcare had the greatest number of policies in their organizations with 70% affirming their existence. The study concludes with the following five proposed reasons why layoff policies do not exist: (1) “It can't happen here” syndrome (2) The cover‐up syndrome (3) If you plan for it, people will panic, (4) Managers are trained to focus on growth and to avoid decline, (5) There would be loss of control, and accompanying organizational sabotage, and (6) More policies equal less humane treatment.

The long controversy that has waxed furiously around the implementation of the EEC Directives on the inspection of poultry meat and hygiene standards to be observed in poultry slaughterhouses, cutting‐up premises, &c, appears to be resolved at last. (The Prayer lodged against the Regulations when they were formally laid before Parliament just before the summer recess, which meant they would have to be debated when the House reassembled, could have resulted in some delay to the early operative dates, but little chance of the main proposals being changed.) The controversy began as soon as the EEC draft directive was published and has continued from the Directive of 1971 with 1975 amendments. There has been long and painstaking study of problems by the Ministry with all interested parties; enforcement was not the least of these. The expansion and growth of the poultry meat industry in the past decade has been tremendous and the constitution of what is virtually a new service, within the framework of general food inspection, was inevitable. None will question the need for efficient inspection or improved and higher standards of hygiene, but the extent of the

The deadhead subculture – centered around the band Grateful Dead – has been active for 50+ years. Despite its longevity, academic work is sparse compared to other music subcultures. Given its durability and resilience, this subculture offers an opportunity to explore subcultural development and maintenance. I employ a contemporary, symbolic interactionist approach to trace the development of deadhead subculture and subcultural identity. Although identity is a basic concept in subculture research, it is not well defined: I suggest that the co-creation and maintenance of subcultural identity can be seen as a dialectic between collective identity and symbolic interactionist conceptions of individual role-identity.

This paper aims to compare the costs of deploying different wireless terrestrial broadband technologies in the Andes and Amazon Regions of Peru. These areas are representatives of different and challenging geographic regions throughout the globe that currently are severely underserved or unserved for vital broadband services necessary to bridge the “Digital Divide”.

The broadband technologies studied include Wi-Fi, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), long term evolution (LTE), TVWS and new stratospheric platforms (super-pressure balloons). This study conducts a technical analysis (design and simulation) of wireless broadband networks, and a bottom-up engineering cost analysis to estimate and compare the deployment and operating costs of the networks over a 10-year period. The analysis also identifies potential regulatory barriers to deployment associated with spectrum allocation licenses and overbooking requirements intended to improve quality of service.

Comparison of the capital and operating expenses of these options over a 10-year period finds that LTE and Wi-Fi can be the lowest cost alternatives, though significantly, stratospheric balloons have the lowest initial costs for the first few years and can factor as a low-cost broadband catalyst early in deployment. Finally, the lowest cost technology broadband roadmap for the 10-year period is presented, which includes using stratospheric balloons (carrying micro-LTE base stations) for the first years and deploying complementary terrestrial LTE networks for the rest of the 10-year period.

This study presents detailed technical and engineering cost analysis results of wireless access network deployments, including advanced wireless technologies and new unmanned aerial systems, to expand broadband services to rural areas in mountainous (Andes Region) and rainforest (Amazon Region) geographies to reduce the digital divide in emerging countries. Results aim to aid governments, regulators, internet service providers (incumbents and competitive) and content providers to assess current alternatives to expand broadband service in these rural areas.

Extreme metal originated in North America and Europe in the late-1980s, but Australia’s adoption of the form followed closely. One of the first Australian extreme metal (AEM) acts was Sadistik Exekution from Sydney, formed in 1985. Sadistik Exekution are notable for combining musical intensity with irreverent humour and parody. They introduced global extreme metal to the trope of the Australian larrikin: a once pejorative characterisation that has become a term of endearment in contemporary Australian culture, describing a defiant and jocular personality. This trope is evident in Sadistik Exekution’s work, but it has since proliferated more broadly throughout AEM, exemplified by more recent bands like Blood Duster and King Parrot. Their music, too, is inarguably intense and provocative, but is simultaneously mocking of the solemnity of its scene and lineage. This chapter will examine how bands like Sadistik Exekution, Blood Duster and King Parrot, through their public personas and musical and paramusical texts, have subverted extreme metal coding, thereby uncovering a uniquely Australian trajectory in extreme metal style and history.

This article explores brand positioning and authenticity within the global-local continuum, utilizing the evolution of the Italian rock band, Måneskin, as a case study.

Employing Greimas’s (1987) semiotic framework, I analyze social media and media articles on Måneskin’s success, unveiling consumer perceptions of global, local and intermediate brand positionings and related authenticity dimensions. I particularly uncover a narrative centered on “global” versus “local” brand positioning and their counterparts (i.e. “not global” and “not local”), forming a semiotic square.

In the “global” perception, the band is evaluated in terms of conforming to global standards, while, in the “local” understanding, the emphasis shifts to connections to local roots. In the “glocalization” perspective (global and local), the band’s activities are assessed concerning an integration between global conformity and local connections. The “glalienation” viewpoint (neither global nor local) is related to consistency, in the sense of being unique and avoiding a commitment to either global or local values. The data also highlight issues of inconsistency regarding brand positioning’s contradictions, such as the band’s incoherently merging local and non-local elements.

The proposed structural semiotics approach enriches previous theories by examining authenticity within global-local dynamics, offering insights into various authenticity dimensions and their interplay. It underlines shifts in authenticity perceptions and challenges binary brand positioning, advocating for strategic placement across the global-local continuum. Moreover, it emphasizes leveraging cultural elements and semiotics to effectively communicate authenticity.

In this chapter, the author considers how Melbourne’s grindcore metal scene produces itself as coherent, authentic and masculine through the discursive positioning of Sydney’s scene as lacking, inauthentic and feminine and/or homosexual. The way Melbourne scene-members talk about Sydney in ethnographic interviews and online, indicates how Melbourne’s grindcore scene identity rests on a particular striving towards – and fantasy of – a bounded, comprehensible masculine identity anchored in Symbolic/linguistic signifiers of homophobia. Building on my previous research on Melbourne’s scene, the author utilises a Lacanian perspective to argue that the masculinist talk of Melbournians works as a response to the affective experience of enjoying grindcore music. Here, the author departs from my earlier work, where the author used Deleuzian/Massumian understandings of affect to suggest that affect works to construct community belonging in grindcore scenes (2014). Instead, the author uses Lacan’s approach to affect to suggest that Melbourne grindcore fans construct their identity via furiously producing a fantasy of Sydney fans as ‘Other’. They Symbolically construct Sydney as a ‘cultural wasteland’ populated by ‘poofter[s]’ (Melbourne Grind Syndicate, 2016) who are imagined, and positioned as, inauthentic due to their affective enthusiasm for grindcore. Here, affect works to exclude and Other grindcore fans rather than as a force for collectivity.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

This paper has two purposes. First, I offer a reading of interpretive biography (Denzin, 1989a) as an alternative method for understanding how individual lives are rendered meaningful in postmodern communication processes. Second, given the importance of many rock performers as cultural heroes, I present an interpretive biography of Pete Townshend, chief songwriter and most visible member of the classic rock band the Who. This method of inquiry is grounded in the more general tradition of interpretive interactionism (Denzin, 1989b, 1990a) and has its roots in C. Wright Mills's (1959) concept of the sociological imagination. Its guiding question is this: How is the postmodern self (or stated more accurately, selves) created within and sustained by the mass media? I argue that as postmodern cultural symbols, Townshend and the band (however ambiguously) mirror a collective search for identity on the part of audiences and society-at-large.